Chapter 367: The Five Elements Magma Bridge

The colossal stone slabs ground shut behind Du Sha’s group with a muffled, reverberating thud, sealing them into the same subterranean chill that had swallowed Shen Yu earlier.

The corridor stretched downward into the gloom, paved with pitch-black dragon-scale slate and illuminated by the sickly red glow of the embedded glowstones.

Du Sha strode forward with unhurried arrogance, his black serpent tasting the stale air with rapid, rhythmic flicks of its split tongue.

Ou Hu and Ou Ba flanked him closely, their heavy sabers drawn and coated in a venomous sheen that hissed faintly against the petrified stone.

“Keep your senses sharp,” Du Sha muttered, his blackened fingernails tapping against his vambrace.

“The of a tier 5 beast will not be handed over freely.”

The twins nodded silently, their dark eyes scanning the shadowy murals lining the corridor as they pushed deeper into the tomb.

THUD—

Far deeper within the subterranean complex, the heavy vibration of the outer stone doors slamming shut echoed through the vast, hollow tunnels.

Standing balanced on the edge of a jagged, black circular rock, Shen Yu slightly tilted his head, his crimson eyes gleaming in the dim red glow.

‘Someone made it past the outer gate?’ Shen Yu mused inwardly, a cold smirk playing at the corners of his lips.

‘They were certainly fast to gather fresh sacrifices.’

He didn’t bother looking back.

Right now, he was standing at the midpoint of a colossal underground cavern, surrounded by a roaring ocean of incandescent scarlet magma.

Suspended above the boiling abyss were hundreds of disconnected, pitch-black basalt stepping stones, forming a chaotic, fragmented path toward a massive archway on the opposite cliff face.

This was the Second Trial.

The first trial had been a corridor lined with ancient death traps, where a single misstep on the carved floor tiles triggered volleys of shadow-piercing needles and corrosive bone-rotting mist from impossible angles.

With his sharp spirit sense and monstrous reaction speed, Shen Yu had navigated the lethal maze effortlessly, claiming a pristine Tier-3 Crimson Core Grass at the exit chamber before stepping onto this magma bridge.

Here, the subterranean chill had been completely incinerated by the ferocious volcanic heat.

With every stepping stone he leaped across, the ambient temperature skyrocketed exponentially.

The searing air warped the space around him, creating heat distortions that hid invisible gravity arrays embedded within the floating stones.

Hiss—!

Hiss—!

A violent geyser of incandescent liquid fire erupted from the churning abyss below, snapping upward like a dragon’s maw to swallow his silhouette.

Shen Yu didn’t even flinch

With an imperceptible pulse of his dantian, a translucent barrier of refined Qi snapped into existence around his frame.

The boiling spray slammed violently against the spiritual screen, hissing and popping as the molten slag sizzled into dull smoke, utterly incapable of piercing the protective shroud or scorching a single thread of his dark robes.

Channeling the raw momentum into his legs, Shen Yu kicked off the black stone with an explosive crack.

The basalt beneath his soles fractured as he blurred straight through the blistering heat haze, arcing through the air and landing cleanly on the next shifting platform.

To an ordinary cultivator, the ocean of molten rock was a straightforward test of flight or brute-force leaping.

However, the chamber was blanketed by a terrifying Heaven-Locking Restriction that made levitation impossible and crushed spiritual consciousness to a mere three paces.

Stepping blindly onto the floating stones meant instantaneous death.

The trial followed an ancient mechanism: the Five Elements Reverse-Cycle Array.

Among the hundreds of floating basalt pillars, only a single path maintained structural balance.

Each stone rested above a surging magma conduit governed by hidden elemental Qi vents.

If a cultivator landed on a stone supported by a Metal-attribute magma jet, the ambient volcanic heat (Fire) would immediately trigger the destructive cycle, Fire melts Metal, causing the pillar to instantly collapse into the lava sea while triggering a localized gravity burst to drag the intruder down with it.

To traverse the abyss, one had to strictly land on stones supported by Earth-attribute conduits.

Under the elemental cycle, Fire creates Earth, meaning those specific pillars absorbed the lava’s heat, solidifying their base and momentarily dampening the chamber’s crushing gravitational suppression.

Shen Yu had deciphered this logic within ten breaths of entering the cavern.

He didn’t rely on divine sense to find the correct stones.

Instead, he observed the tiny convection currents in the magma beneath each pillar.

An Earth-attribute stone cooled the liquid fire touching its roots, leaving a subtle ring of black, vitrified crust along the waterline.

Furthermore, the trial grew progressively deadlier.

As he neared the halfway mark, the elemental conduits began shifting their positions every thirty-six breaths, following the rhythmic ebb and flow of the volcanic core.

Shen Yu stood balanced on a circular stone, counting the pulse of the subterranean magma beneath his boots.

Thirty-four… thirty-five… thirty-six.

Sizzle—!

The black crust beneath his current stone instantly dissolved, turning bright crimson as the underlying vent shifted to Metal.

The stone beneath his feet trembled, beginning to sink under a sudden spike of gravitational weight.

Shen Yu’s blood-red eyes locked onto a small pillar seven paces to his left.

A fresh ring of black, cooled magma had just formed around its base.

BOOM.

He detonated the physical force coiled within his calves, kicking off the sinking stone a split second before it plunged into the lava.

He landed cleanly on the new pillar, his boots settling against the stone with barely a whisper.

The ambient heat here had surged to twice the suffocating intensity of the trial’s entrance, visibly warping the atmosphere into dizzying thermal waves that threatened to scorch his throat and bake his lungs from the inside out.

Yet, rather than expending energy to repel it, Shen Yu actively drew the blistering thermal pressure straight through his pores and into his primary blood pathways.

He leveraged the brutal elemental weight as an external forge, hammering the lingering medicinal vitality of the Blood-Sun Sunflower Seeds deep into the core of his marrow.

It was an alternative, auxiliary method of body tempering, crude and unable to match the profound refinement yielded by the exact stances of the Asura Blood-Forging Sutra, but in the heat of momentum, every scrap of tempered sinew counted.

Glancing toward the far cliff face, he saw the final third of the trial.

There, the floating stones were no longer stationary, they drifted through swirling geysers of white-hot liquid fire.

Worse, the shift interval was dropping from thirty-six breaths to a mere nine.

A cold, razor-sharp smirk tugged at the corner of Shen Yu’s lips as he cracked his neck.

“Nine breaths per shift…” he murmured, a thrill of primal battle-intent igniting in his crimson eyes.

“More than enough time to cross.”

Nine.

Shen Yu’s boots blurred.

He didn’t wait for the shifting currents to settl,; he propelled himself forward like a released arrow, his physical momentum tearing through the distorted thermal waves.

Eight.

He landed on a drifting basalt slab, his weight instantly triggering the subtle black vitrification ring along its waterline.

Before the stone could even register the impact, he ricocheted off its surface, leaping across a twelve-pace chasm toward a narrow spire.

Seven.

HISS——!

A violent geyser of incandescent white magma erupted directly in his flight path. The raw heat blistered the air, hot enough to melt intermediate spirit tools into slag.

Shen Yu didn’t alter his trajectory.

Mid-air, he twisted his torso with monstrous agility, driving the foundational momentum of his body.

With an explosive snap of his arm, he punched straight through the scorching shockwave flanking the geyser, using the kinetic recoil to alter his descent and touch down cleanly on the next safe node.

Five… Four… Three…

The frequency of the elemental vents surged into a chaotic rhythm.

Beneath him, glowing veins of liquid fire thrashed against the basalt roots like enraged dragons.

The gravity array intensified with every step, feeling as though a small mountain had been tethered to his shoulders, desperately trying to drag him down into the molten sea.

Two.

His thighs compressed like coiled steel springs.

One.

CRACK!

The final stepping stone beneath his feet shattered from the violent shift in elemental resonance, plunging straight into the bubbling abyss.

At that exact fraction of a breath, Shen Yu detonated all the physical force coiled within his flesh.

The air detonated beneath his soles, leaving a visible shockwave ring as he launched himself over the final twenty-pace void.

THUD!

His black boots struck the solid obsidian edge of the opposite cliff face.

He skidded three paces, leaving deep gouges in the volcanic dust, before coming to a smooth, effortless halt.

Behind him, the entire network of floating stones shuddered, completely resetting into their chaotic, lethal drift.

Shen Yu straightened his posture, unhooked his wine gourd, and took a deep, burning gulp of fiery brew to wash the sulfur from his throat.

Directly ahead of him, nestled within a hollowed-out alcove of the arched exit, sat a pristine, floating pedestal of ancient red jade.

Resting atop it was the trial’s reward: a dense, fist-sized mineral pulsating with concentrated earthen-fire vitality, a Tier-4 Magma-Heart Spirit Crystal.

“Not a bad harvest,” Shen Yu muttered, casually plucking the glowing crystal and tossing it into his spatial ring.

Just as he turned toward the ascending tunnel leading to the third trial, the faint sound of distant whistling needles and the distinct, panicked shouts of cultivators echoing through the initial death maze reached his ears from far across the complex.

Du Sha and his venomous lackeys had triggered the trap of the first corridor.