Guided by Zhu Rong, Ji Hao didn’t feel anything when diving down. But now, standing in front of this completely sealed divine palace, Ji Hao sensed a dreadful intent of killing from the boundless boiling lava around it.
The lava rolled and boiled around the palace. The lava in here was clear in texture, even transparent like melted glass. Within the lava, cyan, purple, blue, white and black colored flames had been sparkling. The lava was incredibly hot. If Ji Hao was right, the five-colored flame was called five Qi glass flame, ranked top five among all divine flames in the world. Each color of this special type of flame corresponded to a main internal organ of the human body. This type of flame was especially harmful to evil primordial, souls and spirit, and could effectively suppress all kinds of evils and negative powers.
Within the melted-glass-like, transparent lava, countless arm-thick streams of red light had been dazzling around. Looking closer, Ji Hao found that these light streams were shaped like blood dragons, with dragon horns and claws being faintly visible. These light streams were flame spirits generated by nature. Once they matured, they would transform into fire dragons. Ji Hao carefully released his spirit power and slightly touched one flame spirit. Ji Hao’s spirit power was purely positive and came from his seed of Dao of sun, but still, the high surface temperature of that flame spirit caused Ji Hao a slight sting.
At first glance, these flame spirits were only swimming randomly around in the lava. But as Ji Hao carefully observed their moving tracks, he couldn’t help but have his look changed. The moving tracks of these hundreds of flame spirits were not random. Instead, they had been drawing a series of extremely complicated, enormous pre-world divine spell symbols, which eventually formed a million miles wide, tremendous divine magic formation.
Ji Hao roughly analyzed this especially complicated divine magic formation with the knowledge he learned from Yu Yu’s Study of Magus Formation. But soon, he sensed that his primordial spirit power was consumed speedily, which even made him faint. Yet, he didn’t even manage to figure out the basic purpose of this great magic formation.
Zhu Rong raised the wine calabash, poured some wine into his mouth, then glanced at Ji Hao, who was swaying because of the dizziness, and laughed, "This nameless great magic formation is alive. Only Fire God and his successors know how to get in and come out from it…We only know how to go in and come out safely, but don’t know how to break this great formation."
Ji Hao took a few deep breaths. His spirit blood released a strong warm power to replenish the consumed power of the seed of Dao of sun. Pure spirit power was speedily generated by the seed of Dao, while Ji Hao’s primordial spirit quickly regained its power, recovering to the peak state.
Ji Hao was a Divine Magus now. His body was incredibly strong, and every single drop of his blood contained a thriving power and life-force. Therefore, Ji Hao could regain his consumed power much faster than the other Qi cultivators. He dared not to look at the terrifying great formation and the surrounding lava again. Therefore, Ji Hao fixed his eyes on the glowing-red bronze divine palace in front of him.
The divine palace was around ten-thousand meters tall, and was around a hundred miles square. The divine palace was entirely cast from glowing-red bronze, and had an ancient style, looking sturdy and majestic. Probably because it was nourished by the lava and pure earth flame for countless years, countless clear flame patterns had naturally emerged on its surface.
Above the palace, a purple stream of mist poured down. The scorching hot purple mist covered the entire palace, along with the square in front of it. From within the purple mist, fiery thunderbolts struck down from time to time, raising dazzling fire sparkles and roaring flames from the palace. It caused a thunderous noise that made the surrounding lava wave intensely.
Seventy-two altars were built in front of the palace. On each altar were two red bronze columns, with arm-thick chains coiled on them. Raging fire swished out of the chains ceaselessly while the chains squirmed slightly like boas. The end of every single chain had pierced deeply into a muscular body.
Seventy-two strong and muscular men over ten-meter tall, each stood on an altar between two columns, showing their teeth because of the pain. These muscular men looked like metal statues, the body of each of them penetrated by tens of chains. The chains pierced deeply into their bodies, tightly connected with their bones, and even internal organs.
The fiery thunderbolts descended from the purple mist and struck on these columns from time and time. The thunderbolts blasted and sent huge bolts of lightning into the bodies of these men, along with those chains, making fire sparkles dazzling out of their bodies. A loud, rumbling noise was generated from their bodies, that sounded like the ring of an enormous bronze bell.
These muscular men stood on those altars, between columns, letting the thunderbolts strike and the fire burn them, but none of them had been making even the slightest sound.
What surprised Ji Hao was that these men looked eighty to ninety percent similar to human beings, but they were not human beings. Between their stomachs and chests, on their necks, under their crotch, on their elbows, knees, ankles and shoulders, were shells growing out from the skin. These dimly sparkling, metal-like shells were parts of their bodies. These shells had smooth lines, tightly covering their bodies like soft armors. Twisted spell symbols could be faintly seen on these shells, releasing an ancient, fierce sense of power. Each one of these spell symbols seemed as creepy as crawling centipedes and poisonous snakes.
Ji Hao had never seen spell symbols like these, no matter in Southern Wasteland local magics, books collected by the Magi Palace, or the scriptures gave by Yu Yu, or those secret magics he learned from the non-humankind. Not a single type of spell symbol he knew looked similar to these spell symbols on the shells of those muscular men.
These spell symbols seemed to be especially dangerous and aggressive. Ji Hao only took a single glance at them, but he already sensed an evil power approaching through his gaze. A faint golden layer of essence sun fire automatically began burning on Ji Hao’s body, blocking and dispelling that evil power.
Except for those shells, that clearly showed these muscular men were not human beings, they also had sharp horns on their heads. Dark horns with a metal luster were present on their foreheads, that looked a bit like the horns of bulls. The same twisted spell symbols had also been sparkling on their horns. But unlike the spell symbols on their shells, these had been releasing a sharp sense of power, just like blades with trenchant edges, that could even pierce into the sky.
These men were all over ten meters tall, and their horns were around three meters long. Although these horns seemed to be too long and not so convenient, one could easily imagine when these men lowered their heads, fiercely rushing on a battlefield, how terrifying their horns would be.
One of these muscular men, who was tied on the nearest altar from Ji Hao, seemed to sense Ji Hao’s gaze and suddenly opened his eyes. His eyes were purely blood-red, filled with insanely strong intent of killing. Except for the insanity and craziness, Ji Hao couldn’t discover any other emotion from this man’s eyes.
"Human being, kid…I want to bite your head off!" The muscular man laughed loudly. He had layers of sharp teeth in his mouth, that looked like the teeth of a shark. Every single one of those teeth was as sharp as a dagger.
"Suppress the evils forever." Zhu Rong looked at the seventy-eight muscular men and said blandly, "They, and the one in the palace, are the evils that our Zhu Rong Family have been suppressing."
Coughing loudly, Zhu Rong maintained that bland tone and continued, "Follow me, meet that guy!"