mchenry-crisis.org Chapter 164 Underground Caves
Chapter 164 Underground Caves
Song Chen stood in front of the crack and remained silent for a long time.
underground?
A fifth-tier peak beast king that can dig burrows left its spiritual aura underground.
His mental strength had reached its limit, and he could no longer probe further.
Song Chen took a deep breath, drew his Heavenly Blade, and began digging a hole.
Since the exploration distance was insufficient, he decided to go down.
The blade cut into the ground, compressing the blade energy to its limit, shrinking from twenty meters to two meters, with a density so high that it directly vaporized the soil.
Lightning crackled across the blade, each strike slicing through large swathes of earth and rock.
With the stamina of a fourth-tier martial artist combined with an S-grade battle sword, their excavation speed far surpasses that of any engineering machinery.
Ten meters, twenty meters, fifty meters, one hundred meters...
The rock layers became harder and harder, transforming from soil into sedimentary rock, and from sedimentary rock into granite.
The lightning bolts sliced through the granite, sending sparks flying like fireworks in the dark underground passage. The lightning continued to illuminate the narrow space, where oxygen grew increasingly scarce and the temperature rose ever higher.
Two hundred meters, three hundred meters, four hundred meters...
When they dug to a depth of 800 meters, the Heavenly Blade struck again, and this time the sensation of the blade cutting into the rock strata suddenly changed.
Song Chen sheathed his sword, and lightning condensed into a ball in his left hand, illuminating the path ahead.
The rock strata ended, revealing a huge underground cavern.
The cave is about 100 meters high and more than 150 meters wide, and it looks like a naturally formed cave.
At the bottom of the cave is an underground river, about twenty meters wide, with a slow and deep flow.
The river water was glowing, a faint, breathing blue light shining up from the riverbed.
A halo of light spread across the river, gently rippling with the water, turning the entire cave into a dreamy, ethereal blue.
The concentration of psionic energy here is ridiculously high.
Song Chen stood at the edge of the dark river, his Eye of Truth scanning the entire river, and then his chest lit up.
Blue, the same blue as the river water.
Song Chen lowered her head.
Inside the collar, the mysterious blue crystal obtained from the Azure Viper was glowing.
The blue light and the blue light of the dark river beat at the exact same frequency, like two hearts beating in sync in the same body, like something that had been separated for a long time recognizing each other.
Song Chen was shocked. He had never been this shocked in the tens of thousands of kilometers from Yunbo Island to here.
He pulled the blue crystal out of his collar and held it in his palm.
The familiar patterns on the surface of the crystal were changing. Blue light emanated from inside the crystal, traveling along an extremely complex path, outlining one character after another that he did not recognize.
It looks exactly the same as when I first saw it.
Song Chen held the crystal, his Eye of Truth fully activated.
With the scanning precision of an S-class mental ability, the stroke structure of each character is magnified to the extreme.
I still don't understand.
He turned the crystal over, and there were also words on the back. The arrangement was different from the front. The words on the front were arranged around the surface of the crystal, while the words on the back were gathered into a circular pattern, like some kind of array or seal.
The frequency of the blue light pulsed perfectly in sync with the underground river.
Song Chen put away the crystal, gripped the Tianjun Blade with his right hand, and ran his left index finger along the blade.
The S-grade battle blade's sharpness, coupled with his deliberate removal of protective spiritual energy.
The blade easily sliced through the skin, leaving a wound about five centimeters long in the palm of the left hand. Blood seeped out and flowed along the lines of the palm.
He stared at the wound.
The Eye of Truth switches to Life Perception mode to observe the cell activity around the wound. The healing speed, coagulation speed, and tissue regeneration speed are all normal.
The blue crystal glowed, and its inherent healing effect remained unchanged.
Song Chen sheathed his sword, stood at the edge of the cave, looked at the dark blue river below, hesitated for a moment, and then jumped in.
The moment it entered the water, blue light enveloped it from all directions.
He opened his eyes, and the golden patterns of the Eye of Truth shone brightly underwater.
He saw countless tiny blue specks of light suspended in the river, smaller than psionic particles, with a diameter of about one-tenth that of a psionic particle.
They floated evenly in the water, slowly moving with the waves, emitting a faint blue glow.
These points of light were not psionic particles, but something else entirely, a substance he had never seen in any materials before.
Song Chen reached out and made a grasping motion in the water.
Blue light drifted through his fingers, without lingering or clinging.
They do not react with water, do not react with skin, and do not react with his spiritual energy. They simply float in the water, radiating light.
He surfaced, scooped up a handful of water with his left hand, and the blue light went out the instant the water left the river.
It's like someone flipped a switch; once it leaves the underground river, it becomes ordinary groundwater, with the same concentration of psionic energy as any other underground river.
Song Chen poured the water back into the river, and it sank back to the bottom.
The underground river was much deeper than it appeared from above. He dived down along the riverbed, his Eye of Truth penetrating the water and the sediment at the bottom, scanning the depth as he went.
The blue dots become denser as you go deeper.
The concentration of blue light spots is lowest at the river surface and increases as you get closer to the riverbed.
Once on the riverbed, the blue lights were so dense they were almost touching, not floating in the water, but seeping out from the riverbed.
Song Chen landed on the riverbed, and what she stepped on was not silt, but hard material.
The Heavenly Blade was drawn, its tip slicing a gash in the riverbed, clearing away the sediment and revealing what lay beneath.
Those were fragments, countless fragments.
They were all very small, and their material was clearly revealed under the scan of the Eye of Truth, exactly the same as the blue crystal hanging on his chest.
The same crystal structure, the same psionic refractive index, and the same internal texture.
The debris was scattered across the riverbed, covering an area of several hundred meters in radius.
Blue light spots seeped from the surface of these fragments, dissolved in the river water, and rose to the surface with the current, forming the eerie blue glow of the entire underground river.
Song Chen picked up a fragment. The moment it left the river, the blue light on its surface went out, just like when he scooped water on the bank. The fragment turned grayish-white. Although the crystal structure did not collapse, it lost all its luster, like a piece of faded glass.
When placed back in the water, its luster was restored.
He tested more than a dozen fragments of different sizes, and the results were exactly the same: the fragments only emitted blue light when they were in the river.
It becomes ineffective immediately upon leaving the river.
Song Chen surfaced and leaped onto the edge of the cave.
The water on his body evaporated instantly under the temperature of the lightning-type spiritual energy. After the water vapor dissipated, he sat cross-legged on the edge of the cave and closed his Eye of Truth.
Then he noticed something.
In just ten minutes, his Qi and Blood value increased by about 0.02, which was very low. If it weren't for the system panel display, he wouldn't have noticed it.
Song Chen closed his eyes and carefully reviewed every moment from just now.
They quickly concluded that while he was in the water, the blue light entered his body, increasing his maximum blood and energy levels.
The improvement was extremely slight, but it was short-lived.
It only took ten minutes at the bottom of the river for the water level to rise by 0.02 points. The water level can rise by several points in a single day. How terrifying is that?
Although with his current fourth-tier strength, this improvement is almost negligible, and killing a fourth-tier beast would take more than this much time.
But what if it's a beast that's trying to break through to a higher realm?
What if it were a peak fifth-tier beast king that was just one step away from reaching the sixth tier?