Chapter 529 - 360: Temple Ruins, Fragmented Inscription

Chapter 529: Chapter 360: Temple Ruins, Fragmented Inscription

The Buddhist chanting gradually subsided.

Master Jie Nian slowly opened his eyes, his face somewhat pale. It was clear the recent chanting had taken a significant toll on him. Facing the ruins, he bowed once more in respect.

"Everyone, please follow me."

With mixed emotions, the group followed Master Jie Nian and slowly stepped into the forgotten, ancient area.

Before them lay a vast complex of enormous stone structures, heavily eroded by time.

Tall halls had been reduced to crumbling walls. Massive stone pillars lay toppled over, their surfaces carved with faded ancient patterns and images of Buddhas, exuding an indescribable sense of age, mystery, and solemnity.

The faint scent of sandalwood and dust in the air grew stronger, a stark contrast to the foulness of the outside world.

Once inside the ruins, the team, led by Master Jie Nian, found a relatively intact and seemingly safe side hall to use as a temporary resting place.

Everyone found a spot to sit, and a wave of exhaustion washed over them.

Liangzi plopped down on the ground, let out a long sigh, and wiped the cold sweat from his forehead. "My good lord Buddha, I’m finally alive again!"

For someone of his size, moving through the cramped underground passages had been pure torture. Now that he could finally catch his breath, he was naturally overcome with the relief of having survived an ordeal.

Wu Liangchen, however, did not rest. He stood up, his gaze sweeping over the mottled stone walls and collapsed Buddha statues in the hall, then strode toward the exit.

"I’m going to take a look outside."

With that, Wu Liangchen went outside.

The ruins were far larger than he had imagined. Giant stone pillars, like tree trunks snapped by a giant, lay scattered everywhere.

Broken statues of Buddhas, some compassionate, others wrathful, were all covered in a thick layer of dust, emanating a strange solemnity in the darkness.

Wu Liangchen slowed his pace, carefully observing his surroundings. Soon, his attention was drawn to some relatively well-preserved murals and reliefs on the stone walls to either side.

The colors of the murals had long since faded and the lines had blurred, but it was still possible to see that their content was extraordinary.

One depicted figures in strange attire with archaic faces, seemingly performing some grand sacrificial ritual. Another showed bizarre mythical beasts riding clouds and mist, circling a massive palace floating in the sky. Other scenes portrayed incredibly fierce wars, with humans wielding strange weapons fighting against all sorts of hideous monsters, set against a backdrop of a collapsing sky and a burning earth.

These images were ancient and mysterious, filled with an indescribable impact, as if silently telling of a glorious history and earth-shattering secrets completely buried by time. Wu Liangchen stood there for a long time, trying to decipher more information from the fragmented pictures, but there were too few clues to grasp the full story.

He continued deeper into the ruins. After passing through a mostly collapsed corridor, the area ahead suddenly opened up.

An even grander, yet more dilapidated, great hall appeared before him. Its dome was long gone, leaving only a few charred, enormous stone pillars stubbornly supporting the remaining structure, like the skeleton of a colossal beast.

In the center of the hall were several massive, scattered stone steles.

These steles had clearly also endured the erosion and destruction of long ages. Some were broken into several pieces, others were half-buried in rubble, and still others were covered in a web of cracks. The characters on them were even more indistinct, most of them illegible.

Wu Liangchen walked closer, crouched down, and brushed the dust off a relatively intact stele.

The stele was made of a material that was neither metal nor jade, and it was cold and hard to the touch. It was densely engraved with text in an ancient script. The characters were archaic and their strokes complex, exuding a vast, primordial aura.

But when he saw this script, Wu Liangchen’s pupils suddenly contracted.

’Aren’t these familiar strokes the seal script that was once popular in Great Yan?’

Wu Liangchen never would have imagined that he would see such familiar script in these ancient ruins, countless miles from his homeland and buried thousands of meters beneath Zhongjing.

He suppressed the tempest raging in his heart, extended a finger, and carefully brushed away more dust, trying to make out the remaining characters. Many of them were fragmented and incomplete due to the stele’s breakage and erosion.

With great patience, Wu Liangchen pieced together and cross-referenced the fragments of nearby steles, attempting to reconstruct even a few words.

Finally, he saw a name that made his heart stop.

Yan Shu!𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚