Beneath a multicolored sky, swarms of pterosaur-like creatures flew side by side, trailing line after line of rainbows behind them.
Vibrant green meadows teemed with all kinds of ferns, every one of them thirty to forty meters tall, their fronds crawling with centipede-like insects.
Further off, countless colossal primeval trees blotted out the sky. Instead of leaves, their trunks bore masses of spores that opened and closed as if breathing, puffing out plumes of yellow powdery vapor at regular intervals.
Perched atop the canopy of a tree, Yu Xian gazed at the landscape, so utterly alien to Earth. It took him a good while to recover his senses, and he couldn't help but marvel, "So this is the Abyss? It really is bizarre."
"This isn't the Abyss, merely a world fragment wedged somewhere within it," Zhenwo Changjing corrected him.
Realization dawned on Yu Xian, and he asked, "Like that world where we first met?"
"Similar. That world was already dead, whereas this fragment is still barely clinging to life. It still maintains its own cycles and operations, which is why the creatures here can continue to scrape by," Zhenwo Changjing explained.
"So telling whether a world is alive really just comes down to seeing whether it's still running?" Yu Xian said thoughtfully.
It was like a wristwatch: as long as the hands were still ticking, it wasn't completely broken. Only when it ground to an absolute halt was it truly ruined.
"In most cases, you can look at it that way," Zhenwo Changjing said.
Yu Xian didn't dwell on it further. Even if 'most cases' implied a few exceptions, it was good enough for him. He wasn't a scholar researching worldly anomalies anyway, so there was no need to get bogged down in technicalities.
Down beneath the massive tree, the carcass of a plesiosaur Yu Xian had killed earlier finally lured in a brown, two-headed giant dragon.
Spotting the two-headed beast gorging itself below, Yu Xian immediately leapt down from the branches. The Great Thick Earth Guiyao Heavy Mountain Saber flashed into his hand, lengthening in an instant as it pierced through the dragon's neck.
The creature had a combat power of roughly 0.008 and possessed formidable vitality; even with a blade run straight through its neck, it thrashed with wild desperation.
The moment Yu Xian hit the ground, he seized control of its blood, draining it rapidly through the wound. In the blink of an eye, the giant dragon shriveled into a desiccated corpse.
"Something's not right."
After absorbing the two-headed dragon's blood, Yu Xian knitted his brows and muttered to himself.
His body held the energy stored from basking in the sun for over a year, allowing him to refine ordinary bloodlines in a heartbeat. Yet having just drained this dragon, he discovered its blood seemed to contain the traits of multiple species.
At the very least, having also drained the plesiosaur earlier, he was certain both bloodlines traced back to the exact same origin.
Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath through his nose. In an instant, countless flashes of imagery flooded his mind.
The two-headed dragon's mother had actually been an herbivorous scaled dragon. Tracing back further, its ancestor was a bird-headed giant pterosaur, and going even deeper, an ever-stranger assortment of dragons emerged.
The dragons of this world had no reproductive isolation whatsoever, and their reproduction didn't even rely on standard mating, occurring instead through all sorts of bizarre mechanisms.
For instance, there was a creature called the butt-chin dragon whose chin emitted a fine powder; any draconic species that caught a whiff of this dust would end up carrying its offspring.
And because dragons were oviparous, not even the parents knew what might hatch from their eggs.
Herbivorous dragons could hatch carnivores, while carnivores could just as easily hatch herbivores. With no egg-eating predators around, dragons basically abandoned their clutches as soon as they laid them, leaving the eggs to fend for themselves.
In short, every dragon in this world was born at random and died just as casually.
Yet as Yu Xian traced the lineage to its very end, he glimpsed a pair of golden vertical pupils. The moment he laid eyes on those slitted pupils, he felt as though they were genuinely locking gazes.
That was the progenitor of all dragons in this realm, the absolute sovereign of this land—the Ancient Cosmos Dragon.
It was still alive.
Its power was immense. While he couldn't gauge its full extent, it was unquestionably no weaker than Star Rank.
Yu Xian opened his eyes and immediately used a bubble to seal off his aura. Before figuring out the dragon's exact strength, the last thing he wanted was to provoke a confrontation.
Safety first.
What he needed to do right now was build up his strength and piece together the Ancient Cosmos Dragon's bloodline.
Most draconic creatures here had never inherited the progenitor's true power, only its physical gifts, while a rare few carried scraps of its latent abilities.
If Yu Xian wanted to assemble the Ancient Cosmos Dragon's complete bloodline, he would probably have to drain a massive number of draconic beasts.
Fortunately, with his current strength, so long as he avoided opponents of equal or higher rank, he was essentially free to do as he pleased. Numbers meant nothing to him.
Sitting inside his spatial bubble, he flew in a straight line toward a distant forest. Wherever draconic creatures roamed, he condensed his blood into black threads that pierced through their skulls, draining their blood dry in an instant.
The strongest of these dragons were only at the Dragon-rank, utterly helpless before him. Within a few short hours, he had harvested the blood of over ten thousand draconic species.
Unfortunately, these creatures were far too weak, and their materials fell drastically short of the requirements for forging a Star Divine Artifact.
He had originally planned to use Edward's Demon Cross as the raw material to forge his own Star Divine Artifact. But although Edward was dead, the Demon Cross had been depleted of its energy and downgraded.
Edward had effectively wrung out every drop of the material's potential.
It was like burnt-out cinders, completely unfit for crafting a Star Divine Artifact.
Left with no other choice, Yu Xian had disassembled the useless relic into two parts: he returned Marcus's body to Nora, and handed the rest over to Qilin for research.
All told, he still didn't possess a single Star Divine Artifact.
Returning to the task at hand, as he continued his slaughter and left behind fields of mummified draconic corpses, a sudden commotion erupted from further in the distance, followed by swarms of pterosaurs fleeing in panic.
"There's a big one over there!"
Hearing the racket, Yu Xian turned toward the source, his eyes instantly lighting up.
He sped forward in his bubble. Tens of thousands of meters away, he spotted a bizarre, enormous bird furiously pursuing a flock of rainbow-feathered dragons, scooping one up and swallowing it whole with every snap of its beak.
Each rainbow-feathered dragon was roughly the size of an elephant, yet before this colossal bird, they were little more than bite-sized snacks. Despite its gargantuan proportions, the bird wasn't flying; instead, it crouched low to the ground, sprinting on powerful hind legs as it ran down its prey.
"Auntie, what kind of bird is that?"
Yu Xian attempted to inspect the bird's attributes with Appraisal. Seeing nothing, he turned to Zhenwo Changjing.
Any creature born with innate protection against appraisal and prying eyes was bound to possess an extraordinary lineage.
Zhenwo Changjing looked at the bird and replied, "That's a juvenile pure-blood Garuda. Its parents likely dropped it here because of the sheer abundance of dragon-blooded creatures."
"So that's a Garuda," Yu Xian murmured, studying the strangely proportioned bird.
Zhenwo Changjing smiled. "Juvenile and adult Garudas differ drastically in both appearance and strength. See those black rings on its feathers? With each additional ring, its strength multiplies tenfold. Three rings mark its adult form, and six represent a peak Garuda."
"How much combat power does the first ring have?" Yu Xian asked at once.
"The first ring is naturally a one," Zhenwo Changjing replied.
"One ring equals one, two rings make ten, and three rings make a hundred... which means an adult Garuda naturally steps into Star Rank!" Yu Xian exclaimed in astonishment.
Even more terrifying was that a peak Garuda would possess the strength of a peak Li-rank without ever needing to cultivate.
Was this the true worth of a pure-blooded transcendent creature from the Abyss?
It was terrifying.
And yet... so utterly mouthwatering.
Watching the Garuda run down the rainbow-feathered dragons, Yu Xian could practically feel drool pooling at the corners of his mouth.
Chapter 206