He stepped onto the stone dais located at the top of the fourth peak. From a distance, this part of the mountain looked sharp and pointed, but in actuality, it was flat.
It was like a large square, surrounded by nine huge cauldrons, all covered with fissures. In the direct center of it all was a wooden coffin. The coffin was lidless, and was carved, not with magical symbols, but with ancient depictions of auspicious clouds and beasts. There were also mountains and rivers, even a vast starry sky.
At first glance, the carvings seemed very complicated, but after closer inspection one could find simplicity within the complexity.
It gave one an indescribable feeling of both contradiction and harmony.
Meng Hao approached the coffin and, nearing the side of, looked down inside. It was empty. There was no corpse. No remains. Nothing.
There was no host body here.
As of this moment, only eighty breaths of time remained until the opening of the Second Plane. Meng Hao stood next to the coffin and looked down silently at the emptiness. Then he sighed.
It would be impossible for him to say that he wasn’t disappointed. He had abandoned the Inner Sect disciple host body provided by Fang Yu. He had stuck with his own ideas, and the brutal reality made it so that he could only sigh and stand there with complex emotions filling his heart.
Silently, he turned his gaze to the scene below the mountain. There were now only seventy breaths of time left. There was no way he would be able to find another suitable corpse now. On his way here, he found that about halfway up the mountain, there were absolutely no corpses to be seen.
From his vantage point atop the mountain, he could now see that the entire mountain was covered with dense restrictive spells. They were so tightly packed that it almost seemed as if the entire mountain were covered with one gigantic restrictive spell that would prevent anyone from reaching the top.
Any one of the various restrictive spells would have completely destroyed Meng Hao had he even touched them. The sight of the densely packed spells caused Meng Hao to feel somewhat confused.
“How did I actually make it up here?” It was the first time he had considered the question. During the journey up the mountain he hadn’t really paid attention. The four hour trip up from the foot of the mountain had seemed relatively easy.
Now that he looked back down, though, the entire mountain seemed like a forbidden zone that no one could even enter.
He could see that it would take astonishing luck to be able to traverse a path successfully and not trigger even a single restrictive spell.
“Unless there was someone that allowed me to come here….” he thought, his eyes glittering. As of this moment, only thirty breaths of time remained. Meng Hao looked away from the fourth peak toward the temple on top of the distant first peak.
According to what he remembered after waking up, he was now standing in the same position as the man he had seen. He looked off in the distance, his hair and robes fluttering gently in the wind.