Chapter 3687: The Green Spot
The woman who defeated the stone guardian left the moment she received the 30 stars. Alex and the rest could only remain standing down below. Instantly, everyone who had registered for the battle had their stars unregister, and their compasses started showing the next closest location.
It didn’t look like the stone guardian was coming back to life to fight the rest of them, so they could only leave for now.
"Who was that?" Helen asked Ronron as they left.
Ronron shrugged. "I don’t know many names from the Hidden Orchid Palace. Their female disciples all wear veils, so even if I did know who they were, I couldn’t tell now."
"She was quite strong, wasn’t she?" Helen asked. "I couldn’t even sense her cultivation base.."
"Immortal Spirit 7th realm," Alex said as they flew.
"Really?" Helen asked. "She still has three more breakthroughs before she can reach the Divine realm."
"It’s not that surprising, is it?" Liz asked. "We knew this was a thing. Hell, I was close to forming my own Divine Qi as well when I was in the Immortal Spirit realm."
The women were more amused than truly surprised, but Battlesage was different. With his lack of ordinary understanding regarding cultivation, he was very much impressed to see an Immortal use an attack that was on par with a Divinity.
"I want to reach the Immortal Spirit realm as soon as I can too," he said. "Once I leave this secret realm, I’m going to enter closed cultivation."
The man was nothing if not determined.
The group arrived at their next location, one which lay within the green region.
The surroundings they came upon looked like an absolute mess, with giant rocks stacked on top of one another to form a large pyramid. Alex wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had destroyed a small hill or cliff just to create this place.
Several people were already gathered there, each one looking around for something specific. As for what that something was, Alex couldn’t tell.
"Where is the next test?" Ronron asked, struggling to find any sort of guardian, maze, trial, or anything else that would mark this place as a proper challenge.
Nothing awaited their arrival but a mound of rubble.
Alex looked down at his compass, but the entire thing glowed green now. It told them that they had arrived at the correct location.
"I think we just have to find it," he said finally, wondering if that might be the case. He turned toward his family. "Do we stay here and try to figure out what the test is, or should we go to some other spot?"
"Let’s stay," Helen said as she looked around. "It might be important to figure out just what is going on here for later tests."
Alex slowly nodded. His spiritual sense scattered through the mound and penetrated deep inside, but he found nothing at all in there.
’As expected,’ he thought with a light sigh. If there was something here, his spiritual sense was not going to help him find it at all.
He looked around for a few moments, going through everything he had experienced throughout the day.
Every single one of the trials had been hidden from his spiritual sense, but none had been hidden from his regular senses once they got close enough. If that was the case, then perhaps the same was true here as well.
’Can my eyes see it already?’ Alex thought as he used his Demon Eyes.
Suddenly, the world became bright with colors as every single place around him filled with aura.
However, the aura was just faint enough that Alex could still see through it. Looking around, he saw specific locations across the mound where there was a faint aura that was different from the rest of the place.
Alex walked toward one of them, floating across the rubble until he arrived above a small piece of rock that was the source of the different aura. He picked up that rock and looked around, trying to see if there were other such auras.
There were around 50 different spots as far as he could tell, all of them holding a similarly different aura right near the top of the mound.
He couldn’t yet tell if there were more inside the rubble itself.
Alex closed his Demon Eyes and tried to understand what exactly was different about this piece of rock compared to the other ones. Was this some sort of key? Or was it being used as a node in a formation?
It looked so obviously mundane, with nothing remarkable about it at all, that Alex feared he may have been led astray by his eyes. However, just in case, he chose to believe in them.
With a light squeeze, he crushed the rock.
The rock was stronger than he had expected it to be. It wasn’t so strong that an Immortal would struggle, but they would definitely be surprised by its durability. Even with Alex’s Divine realm body cultivation, it took him half a second longer than he had expected to destroy it.
The rock was partially crushed into smaller chunks and partially pulverized. And from the broken pieces came something glinting in the sunlight.
A golden star.
Alex held the star in his palm, a slightly surprised look filling his face. He looked up from it, ready to give instructions to his family on what they had to do, only to find several people staring at him with an equal amount of surprise.
Not a single one of them said a word about what they had seen. They simply started crushing every single rock before them.
Alex finally got to relay the situation to his family.
"Use your Demon Eyes," he told them. "You’ll see where the stars are."
As soon as he gave them the information, he used his own Demon Eyes and turned back to look for more stars. Since there were at least 50 such rocks in the mountain of thousands, he had a much higher chance of getting them than the people who had started randomly crushing everything around them.
So, he did it.
