The treasure chest on the ancient altar shimmered with a faint glow. Though the orange-red halo was incredibly dim, it still made every Zero Wing member present swallow hard, their eyes unable to look away.
Currently, even the major guilds in the Divine Realm didn't possess many Epic-tier items. The large guilds had slightly more, but their numbers were only in the dozens. For a first-rate guild to have thirty such items would already be considered extraordinary.
Epic-tier items were essentially the holy grail of every player's dreams.
And a Sub-Legendary treasure chest could yield Legendary-tier item fragments—with a very high probability at that.
The value of a single Legendary-tier item fragment might not be entirely clear to the major guilds just yet, but Zero Wing's core leadership understood it all too well. Ke Le, Fire Dance, Bai Qingxue, and Zhao Yueru—who had each already obtained a Legendary-tier item fragment—were particularly well aware.
A single Legendary-tier item fragment could elevate someone to the ranks of the current top-tier experts. It was precisely because of these fragments that the four of them possessed the power to suppress other peak experts. Without them, even if their stats were identical and the four of them fought together, they wouldn't be enough to take down a single top-tier expert.
Otherwise, with Zero Wing's meager foundation, there would be no hope of competing against the superpowers without three to five years of grueling effort.
"A Sub-Legendary treasure chest?" Shi Feng narrowed his eyes slightly as he studied the chest atop the altar, a strange feeling filling his heart.
In his previous life, he had visited the Star Fall Secret Realm dozens of times, yet he had never heard of this altar or this treasure chest. A treasure chest appearing was one thing, but a Sub-Legendary one at that?
He knew that Sub-Legendary treasure chests had only ever appeared aboard the Fallen Ark before—nowhere else. And what was the Fallen Ark? It was the ultimate weapon of the ancient divine war.
For one to appear in the Star Fall Secret Realm was genuinely puzzling.
"Could the Star Fall Secret Realm be hiding some other secret?" Shi Feng couldn't help but fall into deep thought.
In his previous life, aside from the campaign against the Lord of the Fire Meteor, the Star Fall Secret Realm had held no other notable features. Once the Lord of the Fire Meteor was defeated, the entire secret realm had become a dead zone, devoid even of monsters.
Moreover, the divine pressure emanating from the altar was anything but ordinary. It had undoubtedly been constructed by an ancient deity—not by mortals.
"Guild Leader, should we move now?" Watercolor Rose gazed at the Sub-Legendary treasure chest and couldn't help but ask Shi Feng.
Though four or five hundred level-72 and level-73 Lord-tier Lava Hounds lurked beneath the altar, they were nothing more than small fry for the group to deal with. They could be cleared out with ease.
"Wait a moment!" Shi Feng stopped her.
He then activated the Eye of Omniscience and swept it across every single Lava Hound. In the Divine Realm, whenever something appeared that didn't match the expected quality of the treasure, extreme caution was required. A single lapse in judgment could cost you your life—and he meant that quite literally. It meant the player's actual life, a complete restart from the very beginning.
Of course, such situations typically occurred in high-end maps meant for level-150-and-above players. He had never heard of anything like that happening in maps below level 100.
But caution was never a bad thing.
Lava Hound (Clone of Elox) — Elemental Creature, Lord-tier, Level 72, HP: 24,000,000.
"A hidden title?" Shi Feng quickly noticed something odd. Under normal observation skills, these appeared to be ordinary Lava Hounds, but through the Eye of Omniscience, each one bore an additional hidden title. "Clone of Elox? It really is a trap!"
"A trap?" Fire Dance looked at him with a puzzled expression. "But I already scouted the entire area. I didn't find any traps."
Before the team had arrived, she had already scouted the entire altar and its surroundings thoroughly, finding neither magical nor physical traps. Her trap disassembly skill had already reached the Master tier. While she might not be able to disarm Grandmaster-tier traps, she could at least detect them with ease.
"This isn't the kind of trap you can see on the surface," Shi Feng chuckled, then turned to Fire Dance. "Fire Dance, take a squad of Assassins and find a way to lure these Lava Hounds at least a hundred yards away from the altar. Remember—you absolutely cannot kill a single one of them."
It was only now that he was beginning to understand why no one in his previous life had ever spoken of this.
Elox was one of the Four Great Lords of the Purgatory World, known as the Lord of Death.