Deep underground, in a place where no light had ever reached, the air was thick with the suffocating smell of raw earth.
Compared to the mortal Andy, who had dug his way out of a prison with nothing but a small rock hammer, Lin Mu — a Rank 2 Gu Master armed to the teeth with extraordinary power — was advancing at a speed hundreds, if not thousands of times greater.
Hiss, hiss, hiss —
Of course, such brutal excavation came at an equally brutal cost.
For a Gu Master, nothing was more dangerous than exhausting one's Primeval Essence.
But at this moment, the one thing Lin Mu lacked least was money.
Crack.
The moment he felt the Red Iron Primeval Essence in his Aperture drop below half, Lin Mu didn't even blink.
He reached into the Gourd Gu at his waist and pulled out a large handful of gleaming Primeval Stones, crushing them in his palm.
Pure natural primeval energy surged in through his pores, instantly replenishing what had been spent.
Most of the night slipped away in the monotonous repetition of digging.
By Lin Mu's mental map of the terrain, he had now bored dozens of zhang into the earth.
In terms of lateral distance, he was drawing infinitely close to the position directly beneath Black Blood Stockade's Grand Hall.
Then —
Hum — hum — hum!
The Blood Attraction Gu he had been using for navigation suddenly erupted in violent, rapid vibrations.
The crimson glow on its shell blazed intensely, painting the narrow underground tunnel in a lurid, blood-red light.
The blood-red needle at the compass's center let out a sharp, keening hum — the sound of something that had found what it was destined to find.
"Almost there."
Lin Mu's focus sharpened to a point. A fierce, almost feverish light ignited in his eyes, and his hands moved faster still.
Half an hour later.
CLANG!!
A deep, resonant impact — like something striking an ancient bronze bell — detonated at the end of the narrow tunnel.
The Earth Spike Gu, spinning at full speed to clear the path, shuddered violently. A shower of blinding sparks burst from the point of contact, and the Gu let out a pained shriek from the force of the rebound.
Lin Mu's entire right arm — the one gripping the Earth Spike Gu — went instantly numb and unresponsive.
"What is this?"
Lin Mu pulled his Primeval Essence back quickly and steadied himself. He looked ahead.
What the excavation had exposed was not ordinary rock or mud — it was a wall of deep, unnatural blue-black stone.
The surface was seamless. Not a single crack.
Lin Mu activated the Red Mud Gu.
Sizzle...
The mud slid off the blue-black surface without leaving so much as a white mark. Not the faintest trace of softening.
Faced with this obstacle, Lin Mu felt no discouragement. Instead, an uncontrollable surge of elation broke through his eyes.
"Something buried this deep beneath the Grand Hall — something that the Red Mud Gu cannot corrode by even a fraction — this is no natural formation."
"This is the outer wall of the Black Bone King's first layer of inheritance."
He had found it.
Since brute force could not break through, Lin Mu shifted his approach with cold composure.
He put away the Earth Spike Gu and began working along the surface of the blue-black wall, using the Red Mud Gu to strip away the surrounding earth layer by layer, probing outward toward the edges in search of a boundary or a weakness.
He lost track of how long he dug in the dark.
Then the wall ahead gave way to a perfectly regular indentation.
Lin Mu cleared the earth away faster.
Moments later, an enormously heavy stone door appeared before him — blue-black, covered in ancient and cryptic formation patterns — and at its center, where a keyhole might have been, was a strangely shaped recess emitting a faint red glow.
Lin Mu looked down at the Blood Attraction Gu in his hand — that blood-red miniature compass — then looked at the shape of the recess.
A perfect match.
"As expected. The Blood Attraction Gu is the only key to this door."
Lin Mu drew a slow breath and steadied the violent beating of his heart.
He stepped forward without hesitation and pressed the Rank 2 Blood Attraction Gu — still glowing red — precisely into the recess.
Click.
A crisp, clean sound of a mechanism engaging.
The Blood Attraction Gu and the recess locked together perfectly, as though they had always been one.
"Open."
A sharp light flashed in Lin Mu's eyes.
He slammed both palms against the stone door and drove every ounce of strength he had into it, flooding his Red Iron Primeval Essence into the door in a torrent — pouring it in like a broken dam.
But the instant his Primeval Essence made contact with the stone —
BOOM.
A monstrous, black-hole-like suction force erupted from within the slab.
Lin Mu's expression changed.
The Red Iron Primeval Essence in his Aperture — already not at full capacity — vanished like a river swallowed by a bottomless abyss. One third of it was drained in a single instant.
The pull was absolute. It gave him no opportunity to sever the connection.
His Primeval Essence poured out like water into sand, disappearing without a trace — yet the massive stone door showed no reaction whatsoever.
Not a tremor. Only the faintest flicker of light along the formation patterns on its surface.
"Damn. This is a threshold test — a gate that demands a minimum level of cultivation from whoever tries to open it."
Lin Mu understood the trap the Black Bone King had set in an instant.
The first layer of the inheritance required the Blood Attraction Gu as a key — but if the one opening it lacked sufficient Primeval Essence reserves, they couldn't even feed the door's formation array to saturation.
No wonder Demonic Path inheritances in the original work so often came with staggering death tolls.
"You want to drain me dry?"
At the edge of life and death, a cold ruthlessness flashed through Lin Mu's eyes. Rather than trying to break free from the terrifying suction, he slapped the Gourd Gu at his waist with reckless force.
Crash!
Handful after handful of gleaming Primeval Stones came pouring out.
He didn't bother counting. He seized them in both fists and crushed them — crack, crack, crack — one after another.
With one hand he absorbed the pure energy from the shattering stones, and with the other he fed it without pause into that insatiable stone door — a relentless, grinding exchange of wealth for passage.
Crack, crack, crack...
In the silent darkness of the underground tunnel, the sound of shattering Primeval Stones rang out in an unbroken chain.
Lin Mu worked like a machine stripped of all feeling, using sheer, overwhelming wealth to bridge the vast gap that cultivation alone could not cross.
Until the grey-white powder of spent Primeval Stones had piled up past his ankles.
HUM —
The blue-black slab, glutted at last, seemed finally satisfied.
The ancient, cryptic formation patterns across its surface erupted in a blinding blood-red radiance.
Then came a thunderous boom — like an ancient beast rousing from centuries of sleep, releasing one long, low, reverberating roar.
The formation patterns fractured layer by layer and faded.
The massive blue-black stone door, amid a billowing cloud of dust, slowly ground open to either side.
A wave of ancient air — sealed for hundreds of years, carrying the smell of ages past and dry earth — rolled out from behind the door and washed over him.
Lin Mu was breathing hard. The drain of Primeval Stones had stopped.
His Aperture was nearly empty — but his mind was in a state of extreme, electric alertness.
He held the Earth Spike Gu at the ready and did not rush in.
Instead, he stood at the threshold and observed carefully for a moment. Only after confirming there were no hidden projectiles or poison mists did he step forward, moving with deliberate caution into the underground chamber.
It was not a large space.
The walls on all sides were built entirely from that same hard blue-black stone, without a single unnecessary decoration.
But at the very center of the chamber stood a statue — over a zhang tall, carved from unknown black bone — radiating an overwhelming, domineering presence.
The statue was unmistakably the Black Bone King himself.
He wore battle armor, stood with one foot atop a skull, and pressed both hands down upon a bone sword, looking down from above with an air of absolute supremacy.
Even rendered in stone, the figure radiated the unmistakable aura of a Demonic Path overlord — one who brooked no rivals, who rewarded submission and crushed defiance without hesitation.
Lin Mu did not bow to the statue. He was not overwhelmed by its presence.
He circled the chamber with meticulous care, examining every corner. Once he was satisfied there were no traps, his gaze locked onto the black offering table positioned at the base of the statue.
Resting on the table, perfectly still, were two fist-sized translucent crystals — like the finest imperial topaz jade, glowing faintly from within.
"These are —"
"Amber Gu."
Lin Mu recognized them immediately.
This was an exceptionally rare type of Gu worm used specifically for long-term preservation and dormancy.
Anything sealed within an Amber Gu would have the passage of time slowed to near-stillness inside it — remaining perfectly intact even after hundreds of years.
Through the semi-transparent yellow crystal, Lin Mu could faintly make out that each of the two Amber Gu contained something of considerable importance.
Gulp.
Lin Mu swallowed, forcing down the surge of elation.
He stepped forward, activated the thin thread of Red Iron Primeval Essence that had just begun to recover, and pressed his hand against the first Amber Gu on the left — attempting to stimulate and dissolve it.
But then.
The moment his Primeval Essence made contact and ripples spread across the Amber Gu's surface like water —
Something changed.
Exactly as it had the first time he touched the Pitch-Black Bone Plate — an immense, irresistible suction force descended. Lin Mu's consciousness was forcibly stripped from his body and pulled into a pitch-black void.
"Again?"
Lin Mu's mind went cold and sharp. He braced himself to face the withered old phantom once more.
But when that vast will condensed and took shape in the void —
Lin Mu froze.
The Black Bone King phantom that materialized in his mind's eye was nothing like the decrepit, aged, grief-laden figure he had encountered within the bone plate.
This phantom was powerfully built, with wild black hair and a face carved from iron resolve. Every inch of him radiated an arrogance so immense it seemed capable of punching a hole through the sky itself.
That absolute, unassailable dominance sent a needle-sharp sting through Lin Mu's consciousness.
The contrast was stark.
Lin Mu's mind moved quickly, and the answer came to him in an instant.
"This is a recording. A message left behind."
"This phantom is a pure memory projection — left by the Black Bone King at the height of his power, in the prime of his pursuit of immortality, when he set up this first layer of inheritance with supreme confidence."
"The one in the bone plate was different — that was the despairing final sigh of a man whose Dao heart had shattered on the edge of death."
With that understood, Lin Mu's mind settled.
As expected.
The phantom of the Black Bone King in his prime stood with hands on his hips, looking down from above into the empty void before him.
His voice rang out like a great bell — so loud it seemed to shake the entire phantom space.
"HAHAHAHA!!!!"
"To have refined this king's original Blood Attraction Gu, to have fed this stone door with a flood of Primeval Essence, and to have arrived before this first layer of inheritance..."
The phantom's eyes blazed with unbridled arrogance. His voice was thick with self-satisfaction at the difficulty he had designed.
"Whoever stands here must be at least a Rank 3 cultivator — or a rising talent with exceptional reserves!"
"Good. Very good. This king's inheritance has always been left for the strong. Never for the worthless."