The Amethyst Mountain Range was shrouded in endless, cold mist. Within a mountain hollow, Dilia sat with her eyes closed in quiet meditation. The days passed peacefully, as they always did.
"Dilia! Bei Bei!"
A voice rang out without warning.
Dilia, deep in cultivation, was startled. She immediately opened her eyes and turned to look. At the same moment, Bei Bei's worried voice came through: "Boss, why'd you stop cultivating? How's your Earth God clone — did it succeed, or…?"
When Dilia looked over, Lin Lei's true body, wearing a sky-blue robe, was already standing.
"How did it go?" Dilia walked over and asked with concern.
Lin Lei felt warmth in his heart and nodded. "Everything's fine. My Earth God clone is on its way back and should arrive shortly. Dilia, Bei Bei — I'm sorry for putting you two through all this worry." He wasn't quite sure whether to laugh or cry about it all.
Was his luck good or bad?
He'd only been experimenting with the Earth Movement Technique, yet he'd run into that purple young mouse. Still, because of the encounter, his strength had taken a tremendous leap forward. Fortune and misfortune were truly hard to predict.
Suddenly, heavy footsteps sounded from the distance. It was Olivia.
"Lin Lei — did you break free? One look at your face and I can tell you succeeded," Olivia said with a hearty laugh.
Lin Lei nodded slightly.
"Boss, you broke free! That's cause for celebration. Sure, we might be stuck here for a long time and have to ration the wine, but for a moment this joyful, we should drink up!" Bei Bei flipped his hand and produced several bottles of fine wine.
Wine was extremely precious in the Amethyst Mountain Range.
Here, a single bottle couldn't be traded for even hundreds of millions of amethyst crystals. Harvesting amethyst in the Amethyst Mountain Range was trivially easy. But wine — once you drank it, it was gone. There were no materials for brewing within the range.
"Haha, drink up today!" Lin Lei laughed heartily. "Even if we drain every last bottle, so be it!"
Bei Bei's eyes went wide. "Boss, even if you're happy, you can't be that wasteful!"
Olivia looked somewhat stunned as well. Dilia gazed at Lin Lei in puzzlement. "Lin Lei, are you planning to quit drinking?"
"Haha…" Lin Lei shook his head with a smile. "No. It's because now I have a way to get us out of the Amethyst Mountain Range."
"Get out of the Amethyst Mountain Range?!" Bei Bei, Dilia, and Olivia were all stunned.
All these years, no one who had entered the Amethyst Mountain Range had ever managed to leave on their own. Olivia and the others had tried before — it was simply impossible. Yet now Lin Lei said this…
Dilia, Bei Bei, and Olivia all knew Lin Lei's character. He wasn't someone who would lie.
But leaving the Amethyst Mountain Range? That was almost too incredible to believe.
"Boss? Are you serious?" Bei Bei asked again, full of doubt.
"Lin Lei, don't get my hopes up for nothing," Olivia said with a smile, though his eyes remained fixed on Lin Lei with a trace of expectation. If anyone else had said it, Olivia probably wouldn't have given it a second thought. But this was Lin Lei.
Lin Lei wasn't the type to lie!
"That tremendous gravity — you've found a way to deal with it, Lin Lei?" Dilia went straight to the heart of the matter. To leave the Amethyst Mountain Range, one first had to overcome that crushing gravitational pull. The range's gravity was so immense that even ordinary Highgods couldn't resist it enough to fly.
"Rest assured. I say we can leave, and we can leave," Lin Lei said with absolute certainty.
Bei Bei, Dilia, and Olivia all showed a flicker of joy on their faces.
"Boss, how do we get out?" Bei Bei pressed.
Lin Lei smiled faintly. "Fine, let me demonstrate — or you won't believe me." His true body could channel his clone's divine power. Immediately, a surge of Earth divine power stirred within Lin Lei, and he began arranging things according to his own comprehension.
Ripple-like geomagnetic forces extended from his feet deep into the earth.
"Hiss, hiss~~"
At the same time, strange fluctuations spread across the ground within a hundred-meter radius. Lin Lei looked at Dilia, Bei Bei, and Olivia with a smile. "How's that?"
"Huh?"
The three were all startled. They discovered with shock that the tremendous gravity of the Amethyst Mountain Range, which had been pressing down on their entire bodies, had been reduced by more than ninety percent. What remained was still considerable, but it was no longer enough to prevent the three from flying.
Dilia, Bei Bei, and Olivia all rose into the air effortlessly.
"Lin Lei — how is this possible?" Olivia found it hard to believe.
"Right," Bei Bei said, his face full of astonishment. "Those two — Jialan and Jiarod — told me that even mastering 'Gravity Space' was useless in the Amethyst Mountain Range. No one's ever been able to cancel out the gravity the way you just did."
While some powerhouses could fly against the gravity through sheer force, that was brute strength — not what Lin Lei had done, using profound mysteries instead.
"Now do you believe me?" Lin Lei didn't elaborate further.
"I believe, I believe," Olivia said. The gloom of years was swept from his face, replaced by pure joy.
"Boss, what about that area with the eerie wind?" Bei Bei asked quickly. It was that chaotic zone that kept the majority of powerhouses trapped.
Lin Lei smiled calmly. "No need to worry about that. When the time comes to leave, I'll handle it." He remembered clearly that the purple young creature Leysin had told him the mysterious wind zone could be crossed using that black stone.
*I need to study this black stone carefully,* Lin Lei thought to himself.
Back in the cave, he'd been too focused on hurrying back to examine it properly. But even his cursory observation had revealed the stone's astonishing nature — particularly the heart-chilling aura it contained, and the way it shifted and transformed soul power. Both drew him in deeply.