The cave smelled of frozen silver and old madness.
Lin Ke stepped through the jagged breach in the continent’s liquid silver crust, his boots crunching over crystal-clear frost that gave off a faint, noxious vapor.
Beside him, Meng Shan held the Adamantine Tower Shield high. It turned aside occasional blast waves of violent spiritual rough churning that tore through the underground cave. Each pulse hit the shield with the dry, hollow crack of an iron maul striking an empty brass bell.
At the center of the cave, suspended within a semi-clear sphere of pale blue frozen stillness light, hung an ancient figure.
He had no body below the lower curve of his ribs.
Where his belly, pelvis, and legs should have been, there was only a chaotic cascade of glowing, flickering hex-code memory addresses. The numbers spilled downward like a waterfall of pale green fire. It dissolved into the frozen liquid silver pool beneath him.
This was Old Ghost Yan.
Once a legendary Tribulation Transcendence patriarch of the Third Epoch—seven million years before the rise of the Celestial Monolith—he had survived three universal collapses by severing his physical meat and anchoring his soul into an uncollected memory stack.
