Beyond the ruins, there was finally no trace of corpses.
In their place lay only a desolate, deathly silent land.
Li Fan had not forgotten his objective. He turned back to conduct another general search of the ruins, but after finding no useful information, he marked the site, picked a direction, and resumed flying low to the ground.
Two days later, Li Fan discovered another set of ruins amidst the sea of mist.
The scale of this ruin was several times larger than Ruin No. 1.
Correspondingly, the sight of countless corpses piled upon one another was even more gruesome.
The vivid expressions frozen on their faces made Li Fan feel almost as if he were standing at the scene of a fresh massacre.
Suppressing the tremor in his heart, Li Fan searched the area as usual.
Although he still found no valuable information, several corpses amidst the sea of the dead caught his attention.
The vast majority of cultivators in Ruin No. 1 and Ruin No. 2 had perished in an instant.
Aside from the terror and despair etched onto their faces, they had left behind no clues.
Yet among so many people, there were still one or two whose cultivation had been relatively stronger.
Before death took them, they had glared in a particular direction with eyes full of resentment and unwillingness, as though the entity that claimed their lives had stood right there.
Even many years after death, they maintained this posture.
For an outsider like Li Fan, this conveniently pointed the way through the white mist.
And so, following the corpses' guidance, Li Fan flew at high speed for a day before finding Ruin No. 3.
Proceeding in like manner, Li Fan followed the culprit's trail of slaughter all the way forward.
No. 4, No. 5, No. 6...
By the time his supplies were down to three days' worth, Li Fan had encountered eleven ruins piled high with corpses.
Just as he was rushing toward the twelfth ruin, something bizarre happened.
Though he had been flying rapidly forward, before long, he unexpectedly ended up right back at Ruin No. 11.
After locating the marker he had left earlier, Li Fan confirmed it was no hallucination.
And so he set out once more.
The result was the same.
After looping around, he returned to the starting point.
Li Fan pondered in silence, remaining calm.
He made a third attempt.
This time, he slowed his pace, constantly sensing the relative bearing of Ruin No. 11 as he flew.
Finally, he understood what was going on.
Upon reaching a certain point along the path, something unknown caused Li Fan's forward trajectory to instantly—and without any perceptible sign—become backward.
On his first two attempts, Li Fan had noticed nothing, assuming he was still flying forward when he had actually turned completely around.
Naturally, before long, he had returned to his starting point.
Now, with a grave expression, Li Fan stood before the area responsible for the change.
Stepping inside, his physical position did not shift at all, yet Ruin No. 11, which he had sensed behind him, seamlessly appeared ahead of him.
Li Fan frowned slightly, turned around, and flew backward in an attempt to distance himself from Ruin No. 11 once more.
Yet before he had flown far, the direction scrambled again.
However, Li Fan now had experience. He constantly adjusted his heading to ensure Ruin No. 11 remained behind him, pushing steadily onward.
Through such painstaking effort, and after spending another two days, he finally arrived at Ruin No. 12.
This ruin was the largest of them all.
Yet along its outer perimeter, not a single corpse could be found.
Abnormalities always heralded danger.
Li Fan braced himself and ventured toward the center of the ruins.
The surroundings were dead silent.
Within this Lost Domain, which formed a realm of its own, even the demonic sound from the Chizha Abyss could not reach.
Aside from the sounds he made himself, Li Fan had not heard any other noise for a very long time.
Yet as Li Fan neared the center of Ruin No. 12, a sudden rustling sound made the hair all over his body stand on end.
Peering through the white mist, which had somehow grown slightly thinner, Li Fan saw a figure on the ground not far ahead.
A cultivator lay facing upward, yet their limbs were bizarrely bent backward toward the ground.
Their hands and feet were broken at irregular angles, and their fingers and toes were twisted together like fried dough twists.
Yet using these chillingly grotesque limbs, the cultivator crawled in slow, arduous circles.
Tireless.
No telling how long this had gone on, and seemingly never to stop.
Seeing the monster before him—which had somehow survived in the white mist for who knew how long—Li Fan felt his scalp tingle and his heart seize.
Holding his breath, he began to retreat slowly.
Yet the inverted monster's senses seemed exceptionally sharp.
It instantly detected the arrival of an unfamiliar visitor.
With a sharp snap, its drooping head flipped backward onto its belly.
Then it rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees, locking its gaze onto Li Fan.
When the inverted monster's face met Li Fan's eyes, his heart lurched.
The creature's facial features were completely inverted and dislocated.
Two pairs of eyes were positioned where its mouth should have been, eerily swimming across its face without pause.
Its nose was sunken deep inside its skull.
Meanwhile, the mouth opened and closed continuously in tandem with the shifting eyes.
Inside, there were no tongue or teeth—only a cluster of bloody, shifting human faces.
Though the inverted monster's body was grotesquely warped, its movements were extraordinarily swift.
Its hands and feet paddled rapidly, and in mere moments, it came rustling across the ground right in front of Li Fan.
The hideous, bloody faces in its mouth seemed poised to slap onto Li Fan's face in the next second.
Li Fan roared, "Die!"
He unleashed a barrage of Great Five Elements Oblivion Swords.
Even as his figure darted violently backward, the Oblivion Swords fired without pause.
Yet to Li Fan's horror, when the black sword light struck the monster, its usual property of annihilating everything proved completely ineffective.
Rattling sounds of bones squeezing and twisting echoed from the monster's body.
The creature seemed not to care in the slightest; the strikes only caused its body to stall for a brief moment before it charged at Li Fan with even greater speed.
Even though Li Fan unleashed over a hundred beams of sword light in a single breath, the monster withstood every single one without showing any sign of injury.
"Dammit!"
Seeing the inverted monster about to pounce, Li Fan cursed internally and prepared to trigger True Reversion.
In the very next second, something caught him completely off guard.
Upon reaching Li Fan's side, the inverted monster did not attack; instead, it bent low and dropped to its knees.
It kowtowed ceaselessly.
As it struck its head against the ground, it emitted whimpering wails of grief.
Tears of blood streamed from its two pairs of wandering eyes.
Its mouth seemed desperate to say something.
Yet inside, there were only shifting, weeping, blood-soaked faces, utterly incapable of expressing its thoughts.
"What is going on?"
Looking at the monster still wailing and kowtowing before him, Li Fan remained shaken.
With the danger temporarily past, he halted the activation of True Reversion.
Still unable to fathom the situation, Li Fan did not act rashly either.
He simply listened patiently, trying to decipher what the inverted monster was whimpering.
"Heavenly..."
"Doctor..."
"?"
Listening closely, Li Fan wondered if it was the lingering effect of being exposed to the abyssal demonic sound for so long, but he once again made out those two words from the monster's mouth.
Suppressing the shock in his heart, Li Fan tentatively asked:
"Heavenly... Doctor?"
The inverted monster let out a harrowing wail of grief and slammed its head violently against the ground.
Chapter 357