Chapter 55: The Underground Ghost City

"That's the huge plaza!"
"The one right in the center of the city~"
"My physical body happened to fall right into that place."
Above their heads, the dark purple basalt pressed down gloomily upon the two,
surrounded by a chilling, boundless darkness.
Galloping across the skeletal remains of a highway once melted by an unknown, intense heat,
Dailong Mei's heart fluttered and pounded incessantly.
"Are you sure about this? Don't go remembering it wrong, Lily!"
Dailong Mei was deeply worried.
Having barely escaped with his life from the attack of the terrifying sand worm,
he should have felt the relief of surviving a catastrophe.
Instead, his heart was filled only with anxiety.
The Astral White Lion cavalry was likely still pursuing them from behind,
while Huer, who had entered the main city alongside them, had vanished without a trace.
The Longzhu and the family guards of Dai Yougeng who came with them had suffered heavy losses,
and could no longer enter the city to provide assistance.
"This time... once again, I can only rely on myself..."
The chasing wind horse galloped rapidly forward,
as if carrying Dailong Mei's thoughts back to the old days.
Back then, in order to pursue his ideal of "living a carefree life as a chivalrous swordsman wandering the realm,"
Dailong Mei had ventured alone through the Three Paths of Tianyu as a bodyguard-escort.
Having left behind the father he loathed and the respected brothers he admired,
Dailong Mei, mere eighteen at the time, had braved the world entirely on his own for several years.
Solitary and alone, facing hardship and danger—
all those various flavors of experience
were so similar to advancing through this dark, immortal city,
as anxieties of yesteryear arose within his heart.
"Meizi?!"
The wind swept past his ears, and Lily's jade-colored pupils once again crossed Dailong Mei's vision.
"What are you thinking about?"
Those jade-colored pupils blinked.
"Could it be that you're scared?"
The corners of Lily's lips could not help but curl upward.
"Yo~ Who would have thought that our fearless General Mei, who dares to shoot sand worms with a bent bow, is actually scared now?"
"Hee hee~ Could it be that you've been frightened out of your wits by the dead people in this main city?"
Lily arched her eyebrows and smacked her lips as she spoke.
Looking into Lily's beautiful yet mischievous and cute eyes,
Dailong Mei's previous worries gradually vanished from his heart.
This time around,
for his own sake, for the sake of those he cared about, and perhaps to carve out a destiny for the entire Tianyu,
he was not the only one fighting his way through.
"Scared of my foot~"
Dailong Mei flicked Lily lightly on the forehead.
"I, Dailong Mei, have never feared anything in heaven or on earth."
"I never feared the wolf tribes of the north~ I never feared the bandits of Tianyu~"
"I never feared the madwoman riding the white lion~ Nor did I ever fear those ghostly soldier sand worms~"
Dailong Mei shouted out loudly, urging his horse onward.
"I don't care what kind of demons and monsters show up in this main city, I'm not afraid of any of them, haha!"
The chasing wind horse, infected by its master's bold momentum,
could not help but accelerate its galloping pace.
"Haha~"
Feeling the wind brush past her face, Lily's spirits were similarly lifted.
"That's right, scared of a bird~"
Lily's fox tail could not help but twitch.
"As long as we find my body, that star-man and those other villains won't be able to do a thing!"
"We'll charge right out of the east gate and return to Tianyu!"
Accompanied by the thunder of galloping hooves,
lights gradually began to illuminate the sides of the dark tunnel.
The illumination came from electric lamps set along the roadside.
These columnar electric lamps were powered by pre-set diesel generators;
although quite a few of them were already damaged,
a considerable number were still operational.
These lamps, emitting a faint and feeble glow, provided a measure of light to the dark tunnel.
"These are the electric lamps set up by the tomb-raiding teams."
An expert like Lily recognized the trick of the trade at a single glance.
"It looks like this year's tomb-raiding team during the ghost-respite period made their way all the way to the vicinity of the west gate."
"You tomb-raiders seem to have explored this main city inside and out~"
"Oh, we've barely scratched the surface."
Lily looked at the electric lamps receding backward along the roadside and said,
"This city is massive to the extreme; tomb-raiders have been exploring what's inside for hundreds of years."
"Yet they've never managed to fully figure it out..."
As the light grew stronger,
the situation within the tunnel also became clearer.
Those dark, bulky objects drifted into Dailong Mei's field of vision,
and the sight before him caused his heart to shudder once again.
He saw that the battered road leading out of the city
was packed and congested with vehicles of all descriptions.
Some of these were military vehicles that Dailong Mei had seen outside the gates,
but a vast majority were ordinary civilian vehicles.
Like an iron dragon, they were jammed tightly along the exit route,
completely blocking the spacious eight-lane road to impassibility.
"It looks like these metal shells intended to flee outward..."
"I wonder what kind of events transpired in the city back then..."
Deep underground, with massive iron gates at the entrance,
it stood to reason that this city should have been an impregnable fortress.
Yet, judging by the stream of vehicles attempting to flee,
the fortress had been breached from within.
"Who knows? What did the immortals experience back then? How could mortal beings like us possibly know?"
Lily gazed at the steel-dragon-like convoy of vehicles,
gazed at the bizarre automobiles melted by intense heat yet resolutely resolidified into shape,
and gazed at the immortal skeletons that had "survived" the scorching heat only because of the white Qi clinging to their bones.
As a tomb-raider, these sights ought to have been commonplace to her.
Yet today, they stirred doubts within Lily's heart—
especially those ghostly white vapors clinging to the bones of the dead.
"That old man... the Jade God, I wonder what relation he has to the destruction of this main city?"
"Didn't you say that before he... uh, before he became a god, he was some kind of assault squad captain or something in the Dragon Ascent Nation..."
Dailong Mei said casually,
"For all we know, his honorable self might have been living right in this city back then~"
"This city, if it weren't for this ruined state of affairs, living here would actually be—"
Dailong Mei noticed a strange expression flicker across Lily's face.
"Quite nice..."
"Better than those cities of ours in Tianyu."
"Heh~ I wouldn't like living here at all~ The nether-qi is far too heavy~"
Dailong Mei whipped his horse around,
bypassing the abandoned infantry fighting vehicles and tanks littered across the road.
These heavy weapons had also suffered the erosion of high temperatures;
although their tungsten-steel armor had prevented them from being melted and reshaped like the civilian vehicles,
their main bodies were severely damaged by the heat waves.
"These immortal war chariots don't look like much; it seems the tomb-raiding squads coming here didn't deign to take them either."
"Hey, Lily-girl, you said we've been traveling for so long, yet we've just been drilling through caves all this time."
Dailong Mei looked toward the end of the tunnel.
"We haven't even seen the slightest trace of an underground city..."
"When I was following the bodyguard caravans, I saw those few small underground cities in Jinyuan..."
"This doesn't look like them at all..."
Lily was just about to explain when she noticed the number of electric lamps along the roadside gradually decreasing,
while a burst of light appeared at the very end of the tunnel.
"You'll see it in just a moment!"
Though she had stepped foot into this city many times before,
Lily still felt a flicker of excitement.
"Light? Wait, Lily, isn't this city supposed to be underground?"
Lily did not answer Dailong Mei's question,
for the galloping Chasing Wind had already rushed out of the tunnel mouth like a gale-force wind.
"Stop! Stop, you fool!"
The horse's hooves came to a steady halt right at the edge of a melted, collapsed elevated broken bridge.
"Goodness..."
He saw that the eight-lane road extending from the tunnel continued past the broken bridge toward the distance,
and a gigantic cavern burst into Dailong Mei's field of vision, resembling an entirely different realm.
Merely measuring it by eye, the cavern had a diameter of several hundred miles.
In truth, the diameter of the entire cavern spanned over three hundred and eighty kilometers.
The sunlight of the Jade Realm shone down from the dark purple cavern ceiling,
Dailong Mei raised his gaze toward the top of the cavern,
only to discover that the sunlight inside this cavern
was filtering down through a layer of amber-like crystalline panels on the ceiling.
Although the refracted sunlight was not as bright as the outside world,
it was more than enough for Dailong Mei to clearly see the massive city resting within the cavern.
This was a reinforced concrete forest arranged in concentric circles, radiating outward from the interior to the exterior.
Thousands of towering buildings utilized reinforced concrete as their branches,
resembling a gray forest
stretching outward from the white giant tower at the center of the city.
These tall structures were scattered from the heart of the city out to the inner and outer four rings of the massive concentric circle.
Due to the passage of countless years, Dailong Mei could no longer discern the original colors of these tall buildings.
No matter how magnificent and beautiful they might have been back then,
now they were all nothing more than towering yet twisted, charred dead trees,
guarding the white high tower at the center of the city like a cluster of gravestones.
"That tower..."
Dailong Mei's gaze was gradually drawn toward that white high tower.
Compared to the twisted gray dead trees,
the high tower had evidently escaped the ravages of the intense heat.
He saw this enormous spire, resembling an even taller version of the Eiffel Tower,
standing proudly at the center of the ruined metropolis,
its white tower body standing out exceptionally prominently amidst the dim main city.
That color and luster reminded Dailong Mei of the void-qi employed by his mentor.
"The area around that tower is terribly dangerous; it's filled with ghost soldiers and ghost war chariots. Even the most formidable tomb-raiders among us have never gone there."
Dailong Mei did not listen closely to Lily's words,
for his gaze had been captured by a bizarre giant sphere hovering above the high tower.
It was a gigantic black sphere.
What made it astonishing was
that this massive black ball seemed to have appeared out of thin air atop the white tower,
its volume nearly rivaling half the size of the main city itself,
composed entirely of basalt formed from the solidification of high-temperature magma.
"Black rock... It seems the genesis of this main city's great black ball is similar to that of the black spikes outside Huining Fortress..."
Lily murmured to herself, then thought once again of the missing Jade God, and could not help but sigh.
Dailong Mei watched as basalt crystals resembling a waterfall "flowed" down from the black sphere,
spreading to every corner of the city.
Aside from the miraculous white tower which remained untouched,
this massive city spanning thousands of square kilometers was almost entirely blanketed by black basalt.
The low-lying houses in the outer rings were completely engulfed by the basalt,
while even the tall, dead-tree-like buildings were stained with a funereal pitch-black.
"Back then... what on earth happened here..."
Dailong Mei sensed the void-qi flickering across that black sphere and the basalt,
a strand of yellow void-qi the likes of which he had never witnessed before.
"It's the power of that fellow... It's so similar, far too similar..."
Lily naturally sensed that familiar yellow void-qi,
and her mind once again recalled the strange man wielding the M1911 pistol.
"That fellow? You mean the evil god you mentioned?"
Regardless of whatever it was that caused the Lily perched upon his shoulder to feel such dread,
Dailong Mei harbored a profound sense of unease in his heart.
He cast another glance at the wreckage of an attack helicopter enveloped and frozen mid-air by the basalt.
"We need to find a way down there quickly."
"Let's use the bridge set up by the tomb-raiders."
He saw that across the fractured elevated highway,
there was a temporary bridge constructed hastily out of wooden planks and sheet iron.
"It looks terribly flimsy."
"Just have Chasing Wind walk across slowly, it'll certainly be fine~"
"Alright, then let's—"
"Tsk tsk tsk~"
A familiar voice drifted from behind the two of them.
"You're leaving just like that?"
Huer appeared before them dressed in a stunning immortal gown,
still maintaining the appearance of Princess Fulin,
with the sole exception that
a pair of fox ears now poked out atop her head.