Chapter 2348 - Mini Star
Lin Hongchen was even more certain that Tianming's main body didn't have any order. He was completely amazed. "So the orders you use all come from your lifebound beasts?"
Tianming, however, didn't hear his voice through the loud storm.
The two of them continued falling toward the hole below. After they entered it, the gravity felt even heavier than before. However, the force wasn't directed downward or upward. Instead, it felt like a force was pressing against them from every direction, with each side of the hexagon being a source of that force. The deeper they went, the more Tianming felt like his organs were being torn apart. He had no choice but to have Ying Huo come out and take some of that pressure with its infernal order. But as it didn't have an order field like Lin Hongchen, the mitigation wasn't nearly as efficient. Ying Huo used his order like a big, unwieldy hammer. Even so, that considerably relieved Tianming.
The six-sided pressure in this hole must be some kind of trial. Lin Hongchen's having a much easier time than me because his body is made up of astrons, which are able to endure far more pressure than my flesh. Plus, he has an order field. I guess it’s some kind of filter designed to only let the stronger among us continue progressing.
It was pretty clear to Tianming that the purpose of every single phase in this ancestral world was meant to filter out the weaker participants. It was almost like raising a lot of crickets but putting them through trials so that only the strongest survived. The Oldgod Domain itself operated on the same principle, save for the fact that participants in the hive were allowed, and sometimes even required, to kill each other in certain cases. The threat of death itself acted as yet another filter for the strong.
He couldn't be sure who the main architect of the hive was, not even whether it could be the queen bee of the hive. All he knew was that he had to keep forging ahead in this land of death, now burdened with the glory of the Lin Clan. Even though he wasn't an astral god and faced more pressure than Lin Hongchen did, he still went ahead, continuing to descend as the pressure from all six sides increased.
"It feels horrible.... I don't expect any other normal gods have gone as deep as I have," Tianming muttered.
"What did you say?!" Lin Hongchen yelled, unable to hear well thanks to the storm.
"I'm your dad!"
"What? You're retarded?"
Tianming grit his teeth and kept on going. "No pain, no gain." Even though they had arrived really late, he figured they had made it past most people, given their rate of progress. Lin Hongchen's specific type of order was quite effective in progressing through the sandstorm.
Tianming used his third eye on his hand to scan around as he descended. "I see some convergence of the holes as we go down. I'm guessing all of them lead to the same place at the end." It was very likely that the destination was the core of the mini-star. He kept sweeping his Sky Plundering Eye around. Had Yin Chen been able to operate here, he wouldn't have had to go through so much trouble. He didn't want to miss a single detail within the storm, so he was fully focused on looking around. Being able to glean information from such details was one of his strengths.
"We should be quite deep now." Tianming had counted around a hundred other holes converging on his path. By now, the downward pathway was close to a hundred times wider than the hole they had entered from. "We should be on the main branch."
They hadn't seen a single other person so far. "Perhaps we're descending too quickly and the others are still following behind."
Both he and Lin Hongchen felt rather uncomfortable from the strength of the pressure and storm. If it wasn’t for the Greenspark Tower's constant healing, his body would have gained countless holes.
"I have to hold on." Lin Hongchen was mainly using his order to offset the pressure and was visibly sweating from the effort. If it weren’t for the primeval source around him, which he used to replenish himself, his order wouldn't have held up.
The two of them continued forging ahead until they spotted something ahead... well, it was more like Tianming's third eye spotted something. He was in front of Lin Hongchen to begin with, so he reacted much faster and greatly increased the speed of his descent. Lin Hongchen had missed his chance by only the slightest moment.
"What’s that?" He saw a black sphere deep in the center of the vortex that was about the size of a human head. It looked like a shrunken version of the black star and was also covered with hexagonal holes. It resembled the order in Lin Hongchen's heart, or at least a physical representation of it. Orders weren’t physical objects, but rather a manifestation of abstract laws of the universe.
Tianming immediately grabbed the ball with his black arm, sticking his fingers into the holes. "Damn, it's heavy!" He was quite surprised to find that it could be taken into his spatial ring, though it made it weigh much more, roughly the weight of ten green skeletons. Still, that was something his left arm could handle.
Does this mean I reached the end point? So was this something like a race? As that thought occurred to him, his body felt light all of a sudden and the pressure from all six sides vanished without warning, much to his relief. He felt incredibly comfortable, yet being so suddenly depressurized had caused some damage to his organs. He almost spat out a mouthful of blood. Lin Hongchen also had the same reaction, judging from his pale face.
Did the race end? I didn't think I'd be the first to arrive even though I was held back for so long by Guchi Xiaoyin. I wonder how many of these mini stars there are.... Perhaps the six-sided gravity inside the hexagonal holes was so powerful that it hindered most people from quickly moving. It was also a sign that he was incredibly powerful even as a tenth-level stellaminor.
While the storm within the hole was still present, the gravity had vanished, allowing Yin Chen to turn into invisible cockroaches and spread out around the pathways.
"The others will quickly catch up now that the pressure’s gone. I have to keep moving." Tianming decided to study the sphere during the descent.
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