This sudden fluctuation made Jiang Chen drop the casual attitude he'd been maintaining. He sensed that this island was far from what it appeared to be on the surface.
There had to be some mystery hidden within this island — he simply hadn't detected it yet.
Despite his careful probing, he still couldn't uncover the island's secrets, which only made Jiang Chen more wary of letting his guard down.
If there truly was some hidden mystery on this island, then it had to be extraordinarily profound. Otherwise, how could it remain so deeply concealed right under his nose?
Jiang Chen sat for a moment, then stood up again. Just as his feet were about to move, that faint — nearly imperceptible — fluctuation appeared once more.
This time it seemed even more subtle. Because he'd stood up, he almost failed to notice it at all. Had he not caught a faint hint of it when he'd been sitting earlier, establishing a mental baseline, he might well have missed it entirely while standing.
"Could this fluctuation have been present the whole time, and I simply couldn't detect it while standing?" The question surfaced in Jiang Chen's mind.
With that thought, he expanded his spiritual sense to its fullest, clearing his mind of all distractions as he stood perfectly still and focused on sensing.
After a good while, the fluctuation appeared once again, right on schedule.
And then again after another interval — still arriving with precise regularity.
Jiang Chen's expression turned grave. "Something is definitely strange about this. The fluctuation is so regular, and it feels as though it's rising from deep underground up to the surface. It's not the kind of explosive burst you'd expect — it's a highly rhythmic, patterned pulse."
If he had to describe it, the closest comparison would be the regularity and rhythm of a heartbeat, except far slower than any human heart.
A human cultivator's heart would beat three or four hundred times before this single fluctuation occurred.
With this discovery, Jiang Chen probed even more carefully.
After a long time, his expression had grown fully serious. He'd pinned down the pattern — the fluctuation truly did occur once for every three or four hundred of his heartbeats. Right on schedule. Perfectly precise.
"Could there really be some secret hidden beneath the ground?" Jiang Chen's curiosity had been thoroughly stoked. There was no denying it — this fluctuation was truly bizarre.
He probed the surroundings once more. When he moved toward the island's perimeter, the fluctuation did grow somewhat weaker. But as he approached the central area, it strengthened slightly — though only enough that someone paying very close attention would notice.
Jiang Chen searched everywhere but found no clues. With a surge of energy, a pair of wings unfurled from his back, and he shot directly toward the sky, deciding to survey the island from above and discover what secret it harbored.
The moment his body surged upward, his heart sank.
He realized that his physical form seemed to be gripped by some invisible, powerful force, preventing him from ascending as freely as he wished.
He could still fly, but his maximum altitude was severely limited. And the energy required to do so was staggering.
This…
Jiang Chen was genuinely alarmed.
This level of gravitational pull was far beyond anything normal. The gravity here had to be at least several hundred times stronger than the outside world.
He hadn't noticed it while moving horizontally. But the moment he tried to move vertically, the bizarre reality made itself immediately apparent.
"Gravity. A hundredfold increase. So this is the secret of the island?" Though shaken, Jiang Chen kept his composure.