Xuanyuan Hao, with a handful of his most trusted elite warriors, plunged onward. They relied on exceptional bravery and an intimate knowledge of the treacherous cave terrain, navigating a passage now made even more perilous by the relentless, violent tremors. Sharp scree littered the path, and new, fine cracks spiderwebbed across the unsteady ground. What had once been a relatively even trail was now a beast-ravaged battleground. Loose stones rained down intermittently from the shuddering roof, thudding dully against their crude hide armor; the very earth beneath their feet still trembled, new fissures constantly appearing, forcing them to remain ever vigilant lest a misstep send them tumbling into some unseen abyss. The air, thick with choking dust, made each breath a torment, like swallowing sand, a raw burn searing their throats.
"Stay close! Watch your footing, and watch above!" Xuanyuan Hao's voice, though low and strained from the effort of running and shouting, still carried an undeniable, commanding force. His obsidian spearpoint led the way, glinting with a cold, hard light as it caught the faint, wavering glow of the luminescent fungi lining the passage. The warriors following him, though their faces betrayed an ill-concealed dread of this unknown cataclysm, showed more a fierce determination born of desperation, and an absolute trust in their leader. They gripped their stone axes and bone lances tightly, their eyes darting warily across the constantly shifting cave walls, their heavy, ragged breaths echoing in the narrow confines.
The closer they drew to the epicenter of the tremors – the mural chamber – the more acrid the air became. The cloyingly sweet stench of sulfur and decay grew so overpowering it threatened to choke them. More than that, an indescribable chill, a profound sense of oppression emanating from the very soul of the rock, washed over them in invisible waves, causing even these battle-hardened warriors to feel a deep, instinctual unease. For a fleeting moment, the young warrior bringing up the rear rubbed his eyes in disbelief; he could have sworn he saw distorted black shadows, like figments from a nightmare, flicker in a darkened alcove ahead, accompanied by a barely audible, eerie sound, like the collective weeping of a thousand tormented souls. But when he blinked and stared again, there was nothing, and he could only attribute it to a mind overwrought with tension and exhaustion.
Finally, scrambling through the debris-strewn passage, they once again reached the mural chamber, a place that only a short time ago had been filled with a sense of mystery and ancient sanctity. But the scene that now confronted them made even these warriors, men long accustomed to the brutal realities of beast-hunts and savage warfare, suck in a collective, horrified gasp. A coldness, originating from the deepest wellsprings of the soul, a chill capable of freezing the very blood in their veins, seized them like an unseen claw. For a beat, their breath hitched, their hearts hammering against their ribs in a frantic drumbeat of pure terror. Even Xuanyuan Hao, upon taking in the scene, felt his pupils contract to needle points.
The ancient mural chamber, which only that day had sparked their curiosity, their awe, their boundless admiration, was now horrifically transformed into a veritable gateway to some unknown, subterranean hell! The massive rock wall, once smooth and solid, its surface a canvas for the primitive, powerful lines depicting the sacred, primordial creation myths held dearest by all Huaxia ancestors – Pan Gu sundering the heavens and earth, Nüwa molding humans from clay, and the revered ancestor Suiren drilling wood for fire – had been violently rent asunder down its very center. A gaping, abyssal maw, easily as wide as a small hut, was torn into the mountain's heart. Its edges were a glazed, unnatural, dark crimson, as if the rock itself had been melted by unimaginable heat then rapidly cooled—a hideous, bleeding scar upon the living earth.
Hiss… Hiss…
An unnerving sound, like energy eating away at stone, emanated from the rift. Wisps of black smoke, coiling like a thousand abyssal vipers, rose from its unfathomable depths, carrying with them an absolute chill and an aura of unspeakable malevolence. Wheresoever this black smoke drifted, the strange, faintly glowing fungi and mosses on the cavern walls shriveled, blackened, and crumbled into lifeless ash, as if their very life force had been instantly drained, erased. The temperature within the mural chamber plummeted, the cold now sharp and biting.
A wave of nauseating, abyssal cold, a palpable miasma blending the fetid stench of millennial tomb-rot, the poisonous exhalations of abyssal mires, and something akin to a nightmarish charnel house of scorched flesh and corroded metal, now billowed forth from the ever-expanding, blood-red spatial fissure. It was so potent, so vile, that even the seasoned warriors felt a wave of instant suffocation. Those with slightly weaker constitutions, merely inhaling a small amount, were overcome with dizziness, their insides clenching as if gripped by an icy, barbed hand. Their faces turned a sickly shade of purple, and they doubled over, gagging, barely kept upright by their comrades. One young warrior, overcome by the noxious fumes, even began to convulse, his eyes rolling back, a guttural, animalistic sound of agony arising from his throat.
But what truly made their scalps prickle and their courage falter was the sight from within the depths of that writhing, seemingly sentient, ever-widening horror. Several monstrous tentacles, slick with a viscous, foul-smelling, dark-purple ooze, their surfaces covered in fine, scale-like patterns that glinted with a ghostly light, and each wreathed in eerie, black flames like soul-beckoning lanterns from the deepest hells, had already writhed forth. They were like the questing limbs of some colossal, abyssal dragon from an unknown, terrifying dimension, probing, emerging with an air of all-consuming, irresistible menace.
These tentacles were immense; even the portions initially visible were as thick as a grown man's thigh. As they moved, one could almost hear a sickening, internal sound, like fluid sloshing and bones grinding. Their surfaces were a grotesque, dark-purple, a nightmarish fusion of deeply rotted flesh and the gnarled bark of ancient, petrified trees, dripping a clear, highly corrosive slime that sizzled and smoked where it touched the rock floor below. Upon this hideous epidermis were countless tiny, pinprick-like pores, glowing with an unsettling, crimson light, like a myriad of abyssal eyes, peering with greedy, cruel interest at this new, unfamiliar world, a world teeming, in their perception, with fresh, delectable prey.
They thrashed with a chaotic, destructive randomness, lashing out at the surrounding rock walls with a sickening, wet thwack! thwack! thwack! Solid Kunlun rock – a stone so hard it was said even ancient, magically-forged weapons of demigods could scarcely mar it – crumbled like dry, sun-baked clay under their assault, exploding outwards. Each impact sent the entire chamber into another violent tremor, a rain of rock shards flying in all directions, stinging the warriors' exposed skin. The sheer, alien wrongness of their movements defied all worldly reason.
And with every furious lash of those monstrous appendages, the ominous, blood-red fissure tore itself wider. More tentacles, even more grotesque, their tips now hideously differentiating into barbed, bony scourges or enormous, sucker-like maws dripping a foul, acrid saliva, erupted from the abyssal depths like a tide of venomous, supernaturally-spawned fungi. It was a horrifying spectacle, as if some impossibly vast entity from beyond the void was using these hideous limbs as its countless arms, its vanguard, to wrench open this gateway fully. Then, it would pour its foul, misshapen, star-devouring bulk into this world, a world it had coveted for eons, a world ripe with vibrant life.
Not far from this horrifying rift, lay the still, silent form of the outsider, Steven, the one who had, in all likelihood, triggered this abyssal catastrophe. He was a crumpled heap, like a pile of discarded, lifeless rags. His eyes were shut tight, his face a ghastly, bloodless white, his lips tinged with an inauspicious, cyanotic blue. Only the faintest, almost imperceptible rise and fall of his chest gave any indication that he still clung to life. The makeshift covering of broad leaves and vines he wore, a flimsy protection hastily fashioned after his arrival and now tattered from his earlier ordeal and further shredded by the shockwaves of abyssal energy, was caked with thick dust and unknown stains, a jarring, anachronistic sight amidst this scene of primal, gory horror. Xuanyuan Hao, with his keen eyes, even noticed faint, dark, burn-like tracings, as if from black fire, on the skin of Steven's arms exposed by the torn foliage. And the faint, red axe-shaped mark on his brow, under the lurid, crimson glow from the rift, seemed to have deepened in color, taking on a more sinister, almost demonic hue, as if it pulsed with some unholy, disquieting sympathy for the tearing abyss.
"What… what IS that… thing?! A demon from the Nine Nethers?!" cried one of the young elite warriors who had charged in with Xuanyuan Hao, a man known throughout the tribe for his reckless bravery. Now, staring at the hideous, blood-weeping rift and the countless black-fire tentacles whipping through the air, his teeth chattered uncontrollably, a horrifying, staccato rhythm of pure terror. The heavy stone spear, tipped with sharpened bone, that he had gripped so fiercely, clattered from his nerveless fingers onto the rubble-strewn ground. His legs, suddenly as heavy as lead, as weak as a newborn calf's, buckled beneath him, and he nearly collapsed. His eyes were wide with an incredulous, soul-shattering fear, and a vast, despair born of witnessing a horror that so utterly transcended his every known limit of comprehension, of having his most fundamental beliefs about the world violently annihilated. He had never seen, never even conceived of in the tribe's most ancient, terrifying legends, a sight so monstrous, so purely evil. It was beyond anything he could process, a thousand times more terrifying than the mythical man-eating beasts like the Paoxiao or Qiongqi, a vision of absolute, hopeless damnation.
The other warriors, though not so overcome, were also deathly pale, their breath coming in ragged, shallow gasps, the hands gripping their weapons slick with a cold, clammy sweat. They forced themselves to look away from the depths of the rift, for each glance felt as if a myriad of malevolent eyes stared back, seeking to drag their very souls into an endless, suffocating darkness.
Xuanyuan Hao's face was a mask of grim resolve, yet a coldness unlike any he had ever known had settled deep in his heart, a core of ice in the abyss of his stomach. He, too, could not truly identify this horrific fissure or the grotesque, writhing appendages, but he could sense, with a clarity that chilled him to the bone, an aura of pure, unadulterated evil and destructive will emanating from that ever-widening tear in reality – an evil far transcending any beast he had ever faced, an evil that made even the most ferocious primordial horrors of tribal legend seem like mere nuisances. This was no power of the mortal realm. This was… something else. Something that could make even the high gods of myth blanch in terror. Something from beyond the known world, an entity that harbored the deepest, most absolute malice towards all living things in this realm. He could even feel, with each ragged breath, that he was inhaling that icy, malevolent aura, and the very qi, the life force within his veins, seemed to grow sluggish, to falter under its oppressive weight.
"Quickly! With every rock we can find! With the great timbers used to brace the cave! With anything, everything solid! Block that unholy abyss! Seal it shut, now!" Xuanyuan Hao's voice, raw with a desperate urgency, with an unbridled fury, and an unprecedented sense of all-consuming crisis, was hoarse, almost a snarl. He had no time now to ponder how this terrifying spatial tear had formed, no time to consider if the unconscious outsider, Steven, was directly responsible for this sudden, overwhelming catastrophe. The only thing that mattered, the only thing they could possibly do, was to stop that… thing, or those things, from fully emerging from that accursed rift, and to do it at any cost. Otherwise, the entire Feng clan – no, not just the Feng clan, but the whole of the Kunlun Mountain region, perhaps the entire world – would be utterly annihilated, transformed into a barren, lifeless wasteland under the onslaught of this unknown, abyssal horror from beyond the stars.