Ashes Of Heaven Book 1 : Solar Calamity

"The texts on the walls are both like a shackle and a key.

As you can see, the walls of this spherical arena are filled with the texts. As long as you can decipher a certain part of it, there is a chance to discover a way to leave this stage and progress further in the foggy area. At least, to my knowledge, that's how it works.

I assume that your friend has some rudimentary knowledge regarding how to decipher the texts. I didn't really observe him. But as far as I can tell, he immediately focused on the walls here after entering, as if he knew what to do beforehand. Unlike the rest of us who tried to get a good look at all the texts in the stadium to see if we can find anything familiar, he didn't move from the place he had appeared at the beginning and half an hour later, he wrote down something on the ground he had stood on.

As soon as he had finished writing, a red light appeared around him and your friend disappeared."

The cyan-robed man finished his explanation and fell silent. Han Xuhan didn't know what to make of the information he had just been given. This whole thing sounded a lot more complicated than he had assumed.

"What about the poison that entered our body? Why can't I feel it inside me anymore?" He asked the most important question at the moment.

The man answered after a brief pause.

"The poison is only active when you are outside the balls of light strewn across the foggy area. Inside the arena we are standing in right now, the poison has been suppressed and eliminated. So each orb acts like a lifeline inside the poisonous fog. The longer you stay outside, the more poison your body will absorb and the more twisted your ending would be. Unless you have reached the soul reformation realm, there is no way to counter the poison. But a higher cultivation does guarantee a longer period of survival. If someone can decipher the texts here like your friend, they'll probably be allowed to leave the dangerous, foggy zone and get closer to whatever treasure we're after."

Han Xuhan sighed. Life really wasn't easy when you had a low cultivation. He had to hurry and catch up with Mu Ran. Turning into a zombie didn't sound very tempting...not because he disliked the notion, but mostly because the zombies looked pretty ugly. If there was a way to become a handsome, cool zombie, he'd probably consider shifting into one.

"Where is the place he was standing on?" He finally asked after considering the clues at hand for a few moments.

"There," the cyan-robed man pointed at a corner of the stadium where the number of people observing the texts was particularly high.

"They all think they can glean something from the words your friend wrote down to create his escape path. I've seen it too. It's useless. The words he engraved on the ground bear similar structures to the words on the walls. Both seemed to be the same language. And none of us here know what language it is."

Han Xuhan nodded at the cyan-robed man and walked over to the corner. A conspicuous circle filled with texts had been carved down on the ground in front of him using a sharp tool, probably the spearhead.

Alongside the rest of the observers, Han Xuhan tried his best to understand what was written in there.

He understood nothing.

The engraved words on the walls and the ones written by Mu Ran looked very similar. To Xuhan, the writings looked like complicated calligraphy using countless variations of straight lines, curved strokes, geometrical shapes, and sometimes even three-dimensional helical structures.

Scratching his head in utter confusion, Han Xuhan turned to look at the cyan-robed man and saw him staring at the area of the wall in front of him, evidently still trying to decipher the secrets of this place.

Han Xuhan felt that the whole thing was pointless when he had no idea what language it even was. Feeling slightly anxious, he started going over all the resources and tricks in his hands to see if anything could be applied in this situation.

There was one.

Han Xuhan walked over to one of the less populated sides of the stadium and concentrated on running a qi cycle inside his meridians. He had replenished his qi reserve while waiting outside the fog to see if Mu Ran's soul signature jade revealed any sign of his death. So it didn't take him long to complete the summoning process of Zhanxian.

About ten seconds later, the crimson skeleton popped out from his back like a ghost and landed on the ground lightly. A few cultivators had been observing him warily from a distance. They tensed up immediately before realizing that the skeleton's aura barely surpassed a mortal. Giving Han Xuhan cautious looks, most of them returned to their attempts at deciphering the texts.

"Hey, Zhanxian, examine the texts here and see if you find anything familiar." Han Xuhan prodded the skeleton toward the wall and closely observed its reaction, not that there was much to read from its bony face and empty eye sockets.

After a few seconds, the skeleton said, "I don't."

"Ughhh." Han Xuhan stomped on the ground and started tugging on his hair from frustration.

Shaking its head at its boss's weird antics, the skeleton impatiently waited to be summoned back inside the dao tower. It was so much more comfortable and safer in there, not to mention that it grew stronger and stronger when it stayed there and its boss practiced the technique that had summoned it.

But Han Xuhan had no plans to summon Zhanxian back into the dao tower for now. Due to his inexperience, it always took a while to complete the summoning. If things went toward a more... violent direction inside the stadium, Han Xuhan would need all his trump cards primed. After all, not all cultivators were exactly reasonable, honest, and peaceful people like himself.

After aimlessly thinking for a few minutes, Han Xuhan gave up and decided to replenish the qi he had lost while summoning Zhanxian. He had gradually become able to sense qi without the help of formations and gadgets bought from the sect. So he could somewhat slowly absorb qi by himself anywhere. As a cultivator at the second layer of the physique transformation realm, summoning Zhanxian took away nearly one-third of his qi reserve.

Drawing in the qi from his surroundings, Han Xuhan started to channel the flowing substance into his meridians carefully. However, he soon discovered something quite odd.

The qi around him didn't flow in despite the mental connection he established with it after the technique began. Instead, the qi seemed to be repulsed by him and slowly dispersed away, further and further while he tried his best to control the qi.

What the hell is this? Is cultivation prohibited here?

His curiosity spiking up, Han Xuhan followed the traces of the qi using his constantly weakening mental connection and started walking forward.

SMACK!

"Ow, dammit!"

Han Xuhan had forgotten to open his eyes while walking behind the qi. The traces had led him straight to the wall ahead and it had resulted into the collision just now. Opening his eyes properly this time, Han Xuhan observed the walls closely, and found that the more qi he tried to absorb, the more qi entered the walls instead and...gathered inside the grooves created on the walls by the archaic texts engraved on them.

He swiftly began to conduct further experiments. Nearly an hour passed without any rest before he ran out of qi to use. The overall results from his experiment were...interesting.

Xuhan had discovered that the engraved texts worked like his own meridians, able to sustain and channel qi. And something about this entire stadium made it so that once somebody tried to recover or replenish their qi, the majority of it would instead flow to the walls and fill up the grooves of the engraved texts.

After understanding this particular rule, Han Xuhan had searched out one of the least densely written parts of the wall and used his qi replenishing method to fill up a particular jumble of texts that had been engraved far away from the rest of the texts around it, almost like a detached paragraph or a perhaps a sentence.

His line of thought was very simple. Among the many traits of qi known to humans, one of the most important ones was to act like an activator and a reagent. Since the qi was attracted to the texts, there must be an underlying reason behind why such a rule was created inside the stadium by whoever built it. The most obvious answer to what the reason could be was the activation of whatever was written in the texts. Due to the complicated arrangement of most of the texts on the walls, Han Xuhan had tracked down this detached jumble of texts in order to ensure that his qi could fill it up entirely without leaving a single stroke empty.

The moment his qi filled every last millimeter of the grooves, Han Xuhan felt something intangible explode inside his brain.

It felt like his head had been soaked inside a tornado of virtual symbols and complicated shapes that made no sense. Yet those symbols seemed to be slowly occupying every bit of his consciousness as if his brain was trying its best to memorize them.

He felt a splitting sensation in his head for the next few seconds before the hallucinations faded. Focusing his eyes on the wall in front of him, Han Xuhan realized what had just happened.

The jumble of texts in front of him no longer felt foreign to him. It was the most complicated style of written language he had ever seen in his lives. Every stroke, every curve, every shape had different meanings, different subtypes and subtle differences to them. Han Xuhan could only decipher the small jumble of texts he had managed to fill up. It took up barely two square feet on the wall. Yet he could recognize at least twenty different alphabets in it that could be read from up to down, right to left, corner to corner, and vice versa.

Scarily enough, all of those would have the same meaning regardless of how many ways one deciphered the texts. It was almost like a constantly moving circle. This language no longer seemed to consist of dead words on a surface but visible, intangible, moving imprints that could affect the reader's mind and make them perceive what the writer had wanted them to perceive, regardless of how they tried to look at it. It was almost a living thing itself.

Slowly, Han Xuhan managed to read the entire text after getting used to the strange sensation his brain experienced while deciphering the words. It read-

[ No creature below the Soul Reformation Realm shall activate any law fragment of this circle, nor.... ]