Jiang Chen's Heavenly Eye Divine Pupil was fully open, and as far as his vision could reach, everything was awash in a fiery glow. The searing heat felt as though it might incinerate the very void.
Those cultivators with weaker cultivation were already struggling to bear it — beads of sweat the size of beans rolled ceaselessly down their foreheads.
"What the hell — is there a massive magma chamber buried beneath this Chensiang Valley?" someone muttered in complaint.
"Master, I can't take much more of this."
"It's so hot, so hot! I feel like I'm going to explode!"
"This godforsaken place feels like some kind of purgatory — and they call this a secret realm?"
Complaints and groans rose endlessly from the crowd.
Jiang Chen drifted along among the group, and he could sense that some of the lower-cultivation cultivators present were already losing their resolve mentally.
He could also clearly feel the Purple Smoke Sect's Grand Ancestor stealing glances at him from the corner of his eye. Jiang Chen knew that the old ancestor's heart had probably developed a hairline crack in his resolve as well. He was sneaking looks at Jiang Chen, hoping to gauge from his reaction whether they should press forward or turn back.
"Zitan, stop looking at me. If you want to advance, then don't be cowardly. If you don't want to advance, you can leave right now," Jiang Chen transmitted via divine sense. "In a place like this, indecision is the deadliest sin. The ones who want to go forward but also want to retreat — they're always the first to die."
This was no empty threat. In dangerous terrain, the truly indecisive and vacillating did indeed die faster, because such people could no longer concentrate their minds to meet a crisis.
The more you feared something, the more likely it was to come for you.
When he glanced back, the direction from which they had entered was shrouded in a thick haze of mist — the way they had come was no longer visible at all.
And just at that moment, ahead in the void, columns of light suddenly erupted skyward. These pillars of light soared upward from deep within the valley like seven-colored rainbows, piercing toward the heavens.
The light was suffused with a tantalizing divine radiance, dazzling beyond measure.
"One… two… there are actually seven of them!"
Within those brilliantly radiant pillars, fine particles of luminescence glimmered — specks of gold, silver, purple, cyan…
The light motes danced and swirled in a dazzling kaleidoscope of color, like a treasure chest filled with countless riches suddenly thrown open, its contents spilling forth an irresistible glow.
"What is that?"
"My word, with divine radiance and treasure-light like that, there must be an incredibly powerful artifact emerging!"
"Do you hear that? What's that sound?"
"There really is a sound!"
At the crowd's ears, majestic sounds rose and fell — vast and stirring, like the crashing of a boundless ocean, like the joyful cries of white cranes, like the chanting of a thousand Buddhas and celestial beings.
The sound was so solemn and sacred that one's very heart could not help but leap and pulsate in rhythm with it.
Jiang Chen's heart tightened. His mental fortitude was far beyond that of an ordinary cultivator. His divine sense would not lose out to any emperor-level cultivator.
Yet this solemn sound, like the chanting of countless Buddhas and deities, carried a strange cadence within its syllables — a rhythm that could tug at one's emotions and make them follow its beat.
"Such powerful spiritual force!" Jiang Chen's mind filled with wariness. Within his sea of consciousness, that chain-like seal shaped like a bead of water had suddenly become bristling with vigilance, like a beast sensing an intruder into its territory.
Every time this chain seal reacted this way, it meant something was very wrong.
"Could it be that this solemn treasure-chant is actually a trap? A trap designed to influence a cultivator's divine sense?"
Jiang Chen stared at those seven pillars of radiant light, his heart filled with suspicion.
He looked around at the crowd. Many of the cultivators had a dazed, almost feverish glaze in their eyes, their faces flushed crimson — clearly their emotions had been swept along by the solemn sound, their spiritual energy driven into a state of extreme exhilaration.
Jiang Chen grew even more alert. When a cultivator's divine sense entered a state of such excitement, it was almost always an extremely polarized situation.
Either it was an exceedingly favorable condition, or it was an exceedingly dangerous one.
For instance, when a cultivator stood on the precipice of a breakthrough in their martial path, their mental state would also become highly exalted, driven by the pull of the new realm, their spiritual energy surging with abnormal fervor.
That kind of exhilaration would serve as a propulsive force.
But the current situation was obviously nothing like that.
The other possibility was an extremely dangerous state — teetering on the brink of crisis, or having one's spiritual energy manipulated, or being influenced by some external factor.
Jiang Chen felt that the situation before him was almost certainly the latter.
Seeing this, Jiang Chen's vigilance deepened further. He had a premonition that the secrets hidden within Chensiang Valley might be more terrifying than any secret realm he had entered before.
He had been to many secret realms — the Labyrinth Autumn Hunt back in the Tiangui Kingdom, the subsequent trial of the Sixteen Kingdoms Alliance, the Phantom Wave Mountain of the Dan Qian Palace, and the Myriad Phenomena Extreme Realm, among others…
Each of these secret realms had been more extraordinary than the last.
Yet none had been as eerie as this one.
Jiang Chen forced his emotions to settle. He simply tuned out the solemn treasure-chant as best he could, letting it pass through one ear and out the other. Fortunately, he had that chain seal as a defense — though the sound still created a degree of interference, it was very difficult for it to sway the fluctuations of his divine sense.
Of course, his current identity was that of a talented disciple of the Purple Smoke Sect. Even if he had detected something amiss, he could not afford to do anything too conspicuous.