The Great Wilderness Realm: The Desolate Key to the Great Marsh

On his first journey far from home, he came across a spring whose clear light seemed to shine through bone. Plants flourished around it, while just a few ridges away, an entire forest was withering and rotting.

Later, he encountered more and more places like this. The Desolate Key Marsh was weathering a storm, and that storm would eventually sweep over everyone.

Northern clans fought over blessed cultivation grounds, western divine academies guarded ancient records they forbade anyone to share, and in the south, people traded the lives of wave after wave of young men for promises of ascension to the Upper Realm. The city markets opened as usual, and the military farms waited to collect their grain. Many people who had lost their land didn't even know where they were supposed to move.

He followed the mountain path out, hoping to discover where those powers had gone, and why the village chief had only allowed him to read the first page of Annotations on the Profound Origin.

But when he returned to Sheng Village with his questions, the gray-robed old man who had taught him cultivation had already prepared the next stretch of his journey.

At the end of the road lay the Twin Lakes.