Desolate Devouring Art - Chapter 1107 - Ancient Human Race
Chapter 1107 – Ancient Human Race
Before the two cultivators could finish speaking, they froze. Their eyes then locked onto the tree where Liu Wuxie was hiding.
“Who’s there? Come out!” one of them snapped.
Liu Wuxie used the Ancient Breath-Concealing Art to suppress his presence, but the spatial laws of the heavenly coffin weakened it, allowing a trace of his aura to slip out.
Exposed, Liu Wuxie stepped calmly from behind the tree.
“Who are you, and why were you hiding?” the man demanded, his eyes narrowing in surprise as he sensed Liu Wuxie’s cultivation.
The two couldn’t hide their disbelief. This world’s internal pressure had nearly crushed them when they first arrived. It had taken days before they could even move freely. Yet the young man, only at the Spirit Profound Realm, was standing there unharmed?
“I was here first. How does that make me the sneaky one?” Liu Wuxie replied, a hint of irritation in his voice.
They had been too absorbed in their chatter to notice him, and they were now accusing him of skulking?
“Don’t waste time, just kill him,” the man on the left snapped. “He’s too weak. Probably a native. Might be useful.”
It wasn’t a wild assumption. Everyone who had entered the coffin so far was at least at the peak of the Spirit Profound Realm. With the boost from the origin force, many had already reached the Earth Profound Realm.
However, Liu Wuxie was only at the eighth level of the Spirit Profound Realm—an understandable mistake.
The two men quickly surrounded him, cutting off all paths of retreat.
The realm weakened everyone’s dao techniques, but Liu Wuxie’s combat strength still far surpassed theirs.
“You sure you want to fight me?” he asked coldly.
“Cut the crap,” snapped the man on the left as he lunged forward with his sword.
Their ability to fight despite suppressed laws confirmed they weren’t ordinary cultivators.
The second man moved to flank, circling in silently and waiting for an opening.
“You’re courting death,” Liu Wuxie growled.
He drew the Heretic Blade and burst forward, unleashing a flurry of deadly, unpredictable strikes.
Even though the realm had limited many of his dao techniques, his blade techniques alone placed him among the elite. Few could match the savagery and precision of his blade.
As soon as he struck, the expression of the first attacker twisted in horror. It was too late to dodge.
Liu Wuxie’s Heretic Blade sliced through the man’s neck in one swift motion, dropping him dead.
The second man froze, his face drained of color. He didn’t hesitate to turn and flee.
“Die,” Liu Wuxie said coldly.
He moved in a blur, and the second attacker collapsed, his body hitting the ground with a thud.
Liu Wuxie stood in silence for a moment, and then he searched their corpses. He took their interspatial rings and found two identity medals.
“Disciples of the Scarlet Dragon Cult,” he muttered with a frown. “How odd that they didn’t recognize me.”
His feud with the Scarlet Dragon Cult was notorious. Under normal conditions, any of their members would’ve recognized him instantly.
He guessed they had only recently emerged from seclusion and weren’t up to date with current events. That wasn’t unusual. Some disciples spent years or decades in secluded cultivation.
When the heavenly coffin appeared, many cultivators at the Heaven Profound Realm sensed it, and the Eternal Spirit Mountain became their immediate destination upon returning to the world.
Liu Wuxie took one final look at the bodies and then turned to continue forward.
He had to understand this internal world, and he had to do it fast.
He didn’t know how long he had been walking, but after pushing through a dense forest, the view ahead opened up.
“Houses?” Liu Wuxie whispered.
Out on the plains stood a cluster of primitive dwellings.
His eyes narrowed. Were there natives living inside this artifact?
He advanced slowly, alert to every sound and movement.
The villagers had built the roofs from compacted algae to insulate and resist the cold.
In an actual world, there would be a full cycle of seasons, weather, light, and dark, similar to Liu Wuxie’s desolate world.
There were smooth stone blocks arranged in front of the houses. Liu Wuxie couldn’t tell what they were used for. A wood-chopping knife rested casually beside one of them.
Just then, a copper-skinned man stepped out from one of the houses.
The man hadn’t noticed Liu Wuxie and strolled directly to the stone bench. He picked up the knife.
Liu Wuxie tensed. The man placed his left hand on the stone as if preparing to cut it off.
Instead of dismemberment, however, a series of snapping sounds followed as he trimmed his nails with practiced ease.
Once he was done, the copper-skinned man stood up and looked around.
Liu Wuxie finally got a clear look at his features.
The man had a flat head, a jutting jaw, high cheekbones, broad shoulders, and long, muscular arms that hung lower than average. His legs were short but thick.
An explosive physical strength radiated from his frame. Liu Wuxie sensed no true essence within him, yet he knew that if this man trained in martial arts, he could easily surpass the average human in raw power.
He looked seventy percent human, thirty percent beast. An ancient human.
Liu Wuxie recognized the signs. In ancient times, before the invention of weapons, humans relied on their hands and nails to hunt and defend themselves. They had grown thick, durable fingernails for survival, just like this man.
The man was no ordinary person, but he belonged to an ancient human race.
Convinced there was no immediate danger, Liu Wuxie stepped out from behind the tree.
However, the sound of his footfall instantly alerted the copper-skinned man.
He spun around, eyes flaring with beast-like aggression as he glared at Liu Wuxie.
“Rahhh! Rraaahh!” The copper-skinned man let out a guttural roar that echoed through the still air.
The sound triggered an immediate reaction. Ancient humans burst from the surrounding huts—men and women alike—wielding primitive weapons fashioned from sharpened stone.
Despite the passage of countless years, they had yet to develop any form of blacksmithing skills. The likely cause, Liu Wuxie reasoned, was the lack of iron deposits in this internal world. With no iron, forging metal weapons was impossible.
In moments, they surrounded Liu Wuxie, eyes sharp with suspicion. They growled and barked in strange, guttural tones that bore no resemblance to any modern dialect Liu Wuxie recognized.
He frowned slightly. It was a language—crude, primal, passed down through countless isolated generations.
“Are you natives of this world?” Liu Wuxie asked, cycling through five different tongues.
Each question earned only blank stares from the villagers. Not a single one among them understood.
Left with no alternative, Liu Wuxie extended his divine sense and pierced into the soul of the copper-skinned man who had appeared first.
He delved into the man’s memories, seeking any trace of information—images, patterns, impressions that could help decipher their world.
The findings shocked him.
“These people… they’ve lived for eons,” Liu Wuxie muttered. “Does time not flow here?”
He combed through the memories. It was just as he suspected; there were no time laws in this world. Within the heavenly coffin, time had come to a standstill. These beings would live forever so long as the artifact remained intact.
The moment they entered, the passage of time outside ceased to matter. This was a realm entirely removed from natural chronology, a place like the Void Realm. Whether a day passed or ten thousand years, it made no difference here.
If these people had cultivation ability, the internal world of the coffin would be the perfect ground for eternal cultivation.
After assimilating the ancient man’s memories, Liu Wuxie quickly grasped their language. It was a crude tongue, relying on a limited set of vocalizations and primal howls repeated in varying combinations.
“You people have been living your entire lives here?” Liu Wuxie asked in their native language.
The five ancient humans exchanged glances, astonished that he could speak their tongue. A moment later, they nodded dully.
“What’s the farthest place you’ve been?” he asked again.
The man who had emerged first pointed toward the forest in the distance. That forest, he implied, was filled with beasts they hunted for food.
“And your ancestors?” Liu Wuxie continued. “They’ve always lived here, too?”
Again, the humans nodded.
The coffin’s owner had created this world, and it had no connection with the True Martial Continent. The coffin resembled a sealed container, and they were inside it at the moment.
Liu Wuxie soon fell into deep contemplation.
“They must have had their memories erased,” he muttered. “The coffin’s owner likely wiped their minds and planted new memories, convincing them that they had always been living here.”
He tried asking more questions, but their answers proved useless. They knew nothing beyond their immediate environment. With no better option, Liu Wuxie dropped the inquiry until something caught his eye.
A sacred altar.
The villagers gathered before it at regular intervals, performing ritualistic worship. He noticed that every hut contained a miniature version of the altar, carefully crafted from an unfamiliar material. They didn’t know where the altar came from.
Liu Wuxie narrowed his eyes.
There had to be a larger altar somewhere—one that subconsciously drew the villagers to worship it. Even without conscious memory of its origins, they honored it out of pure instinct.
No one had taught them these images or rituals; they had inherited them instinctively. Someone had branded those instincts deep into their souls, deeper than memory itself.
“That altar must be the key,” Liu Wuxie realized. “If I can find it, I might be able to find a way out of this place.”
The altar had been created to collect faith energy for the coffin’s original owner.
If someone could harness that accumulated faith energy, their power would be unimaginable. However, this faith energy felt different from the kind Liu Wuxie stored in his soul sea. One type of faith could instill absolute loyalty, and this one was born from prayer, from worship.
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