“Since we firmly believe that the entire abyss under our feet is an illusion, it doesn’t make any difference whether we step on the stepping stones accurately or not.”


  Meng Chao turned his head and said to Ice Storm, “If we step on the stepping stones cautiously throughout the entire journey, it means that we are still afraid. We don’t absolutely believe in our own judgment.

  “I think that this is probably not ‘courage’ that the ancestral spirits hope their descendants will have.”


  As he spoke, he took another heavy step toward the second piece of void.

  He crossed the void and stepped onto the cliff that represented the end.

  Ice Storm suddenly came to a realization.

  She followed Meng Chao, stepped into the void, crossed the abyss, and reached the end.

  In that instant, she only saw a blur.

  It was like dark clouds rolling and turbid waves surging into the sky.

  It was an endless dark abyss accompanied by howling winds.

  Then, they all disappeared.

  Behind them was only a room that was no more than thirty steps in length and width.

  The floor was engraved with dense cuneiform characters, forming many mysterious and complicated talisman arrays.

  All the talisman arrays were flowing with colorful lights, jumping around like flames.

  From the looks of it, they must have stepped through the gaps between the rune arrays.

  For some reason, they managed to walk hundreds of steps out of a room that was twenty to thirty steps long.

  Ice Storm paid special attention to the ground beneath her feet.

  In the last two steps, there were three rune arrays that were emitting scarlet light.

  Meng Chao was “traveling in the void” and stepping on the empty space between the three rune arrays.

  If they kept walking on the “stepping stones,” they would definitely step on the three rune arrays that were faintly emitting a dangerous aura.

  In that case, Ice Storm did not know what would happen.

  Fortunately…


  Ice Storm exhaled and looked at the end of the room. To her surprise and delight, she discovered that as long as she passed through a dark empty space, there would be stone pillars that were shimmering faintly in front of her.

  More than ten stone pillars that were known as “totem pillars” surrounded the altar that was used to worship the ancestral spirits and divine weapons!

  “I’ve finally found it!”


  Ice Storm was just about to move forward when Meng Chao grabbed her.

  “Don’t you think that the distance from here to the altar is too far?”


  Meng Chao said, “Such a long distance and there’s nothing at all. It really doesn’t make sense!”


  Back when they were exploring Ruins No. 1, the people of Earth had paid the price of blood.

  It was such a painful truth that they knew that the place that seemed to be safe was the most dangerous, and the moment that seemed to be a victory was also the moment that they were most likely to fail or even die.

  Meng Chao blinked quickly. Under the condensation of spirit energy, rings of light appeared around his two pupils.

  He used his extraordinary vision and the keen senses of a sensitive person to carefully scan the space in front of him.

  Then, he bit his fingertip and squeezed out a few drops of blood.

  Aiming at the center of the space, he shot out more than ten drops of blood.

  Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

  Just as the more than ten drops of blood formed a vague human figure and rapidly passed through the seemingly harmless space.

  Suddenly, the blood drop seemed to have hit an invisible net. Hundreds and thousands of dazzling rays of light suddenly flashed in the space, splitting the entire space into pieces. The moment Meng Chao’s blood touched the rays of light, all of it evaporated and became completely annihilated.

  Ice Storm sucked in a breath of cold air.

  If Meng Chao had not stopped her in time and she had directly charged through, even with the protection of the totem battle armor, there would have been dozens of transparent holes on her body. Even her flesh and blood would have been like Meng Chao’s blood drops, vaporized in an instant and completely annihilated!

  “Not every mechanism has to be deployed behind the bronze gate.”


  Meng Chao muttered, “Not all problems can be solved with indomitable courage—perhaps, this is the reason the ancestral spirits want to tell their descendants?”


  “They can clearly tell their descendants the reason, but they have to use this method to let their descendants comprehend it on their own. The Turan people… Our ancestors are really… strange!” Ice Storm said with a bitter smile.

  “The truth that is instilled into our brains by others, how can there be a truth that we can comprehend on our own?”


  Meng Chao paused for a moment, but he really wanted to continue. “Moreover, the attitude of the Turan ancestral spirits toward their descendants isn’t just ‘weird,’ right?

  “Using the strong artificial intelligence contained in the totem armor, we have turned our descendants into war machines that are addicted to killing each other. We have basically locked down the possibility of our civilization continuing to advance. From the ‘ancestral spirits’ that can create a glorious civilization, we have become the ‘orcs’ of today’s clan era!

  “This isn’t just weird. It’s simply filled with deep malice!”


  Of course, Meng Chao still forcefully swallowed the second half of his sentence because he did not know why the ancient Turan people did this.

  Why did they develop things like the mandrake tree and the totem armors to make their descendants more and more… primitive, ignorant, bloodthirsty, and warlike?

  Was it an unintentional mistake, or was there a deeper secret?

  If there was a chance, Meng Chao really wanted to crack this secret in order to prevent the destruction of the Turan civilization and the Dragon City civilization.

  As for now, it was better to deal with the third mechanism first!

  After pondering for a moment, Meng Chao divided himself into ten times and shot hundreds of drops of blood into the space in front of him.

  Sure enough, every time the blood spurted out, hundreds and thousands of beams of light containing destructive energy would appear in the seemingly calm space, evaporating the blood instantly.

  It seemed that these beams of light were activated instantly by sensing biological information.

  They could no longer be fooled by holding their breath, locking their heartbeats, and lowering their body temperature.

  Nor could they rely on their courage to charge straight through.

  However, the beam of light flashed ten times in a row, leaving a distinct afterimage on Meng Chao’s retina.

  Meng Chao overlapped all the afterimages and found that the position and angle of the beam of light were fixed every time.

  Moreover, some of the gaps between the beams were larger, and some were smaller. The gaps that could accommodate a human being were always connected to each other.

  It was like a…


  “It’s a maze!”


  Meng Chao’s eyes lit up. “Hundreds and thousands of destructive light beams have formed a maze. As long as you remember the location and angle of the destructive light beams, you can find the safe passage between the maze!”


  After realizing this, the next step was easy.

  It was not difficult for Meng Chao to crack this maze of destructive light.”


  On one hand, it was because his intelligence was slightly higher than that of the advanced orcs in the clan era.

  Although the traps left behind by the ancestral spirit had the intention of making things difficult for the descendants, it wasn’t because they wanted to kill all the descendants who entered the temple for the test.

  Apart from being invisible under normal circumstances and testing one’s memory, this maze of destructive light only had three or four forks, so it was not too difficult.

  More importantly, this labyrinth was originally prepared for the glorious warriors of the Blood Hoof Clan.

  Plus, the members of the Blood Hoof Clan, even the relatively small Minotaurs and wild boar people, were still taller than the Earthlings and the Holy Light humans. They did not even have to wonder about the hippo warriors, rhinoceros warriors, and barbarian elephant warriors.

  Since even the barbarian elephant warriors could pass through the maze, the gap between the destructive light naturally could not be too small.

  Without much trouble, Meng Chao and Ice Storm successfully passed through the maze and arrived at the bottom of the altar.

  The two looked at each other and finally heaved a sigh of relief.

  “There shouldn’t be any more tests, right?”


  Ice Storm sized up the altar and the totem pole before she said, “I remember that Casanova brought me here. When I took off my mask back then, I appeared here directly.”


  “There shouldn’t be any more, right?” Meng Chao asked with uncertainty.

  “If we can’t even finish clearing the three layers of traps, then the ancestral spirits of the Blood Hoof Clan are too torturous!”


  Before he finished speaking, they heard a weak, crisp sound coming from behind the altar.

  It was hard to describe the sound. It could only be said that it was like the sound of a huge block of ice or a piece of crystal shattering, scattering pieces on the ground.

  Then, they heard heavy and slow footsteps.

  It was as if they were wearing steel boots. Bang, bang, bang!

  It was as if they were stepping on their chests, slowly squeezing their hearts.

  Other than that, there were two other heavy objects rubbing against the ground. It was a sharp sound that ravaged their eardrums.

  “It can’t be?”


  Meng Chao widened his eyes. “There’s really more?”


  Well, to be precise, there were only three mechanisms in Blood Skull Temple.

  At this moment, what appeared before Meng Chao and Ice Storm was a huge monster.

  When the sound of the steel boots hitting the ground gradually turned from slow to rapid, the monster, which had seemingly just woken up from hibernation, also jumped from the altar to the totem pole. Then it jumped high up from the totem pole and landed heavily in front of Meng Chao as well as Ice Storm.

  The dark flames on the altar outlined the ferocious outline of the monster.

  Its huge body, which was at least half a body taller than Meng Chao and weighed at least half a ton, was protected by a super heavy armor that looked like a black iron castle.

  However, a large amount of trembling granulation and tumors were squeezed out from the gaps of the armor.

  The deeply sunken abdomen meant that all the internal organs inside had disappeared.

  It was as if the person wearing this super heavy armor did not need the internal organs, which could not be directly used for killing.

  The too narrow waist and the too wide shoulders formed a somewhat deformed inverted triangle.

  The arms that extended from the top two horns of the inverted triangle, under the amplification of the arm armor, expanded into two giant pillars that dragged all the way to the ground.

  At the end of the giant pillars were two giant war hammers that were even bigger than Meng Chao’s head. They were engraved with dense cuneiform characters, and the patterns were stained with blood.

  Since its arms were too thick and the war hammers were too big, the monster walked like a gorilla. It did not even need to use its legs, just the support of its arms, and it could easily cross more than ten steps.

  It was obvious that even the deformed and ugly advanced orcs rarely looked so unique.

  Its deeply sunken abdomen and overly thick arms completely went against the common sense of life science.

  Meng Chao and Ice Storm looked at each other and frowned at the same time. They blurted out a name that represented madness and destruction.

  “Origin Warrior!”