Rihanna turned and grinned widely at the man walking next to her, casting weird glances her way every now and then. Artreya saw this from behind and gritted his teeth harder, spewing curses at this guy who had really had it easy, just because he had met her once before.
He had met her only once....and she already trusted him so much?! He felt he had an obligation to catch hold of his master later on and teach her the basics of survival in this world. How could she be so naïve and impetuous and take important decisions so casually? Did she still want to live or not?
For the umpteenth time he felt like crying...what had he gotten himself into?!
Ye Luo still remembered waking up from a long daze, and feeling more dazed after seeing the little girl squatting before him. He still remembered, quite vividly, the large hole closing up. He hadn't even been able to catch sight of her hair...or did she not fall in at all?
Moreover....hadn't he followed the team of Sect students and outside cultivators, sent by their Sect to search for the Dimension Space in Ice Fire Desert? And wasn't their group attacked by the Dormions? He recalled the group members falling one by one, killed by the hidden weapons and beasts in the illusion matrix.
.....Then....How did he come to be here?.....And what was this girl doing in the Ice Fire Desert?
Of course Rihanna glossed through most parts of the story, basically telling him that she was going to the Ancient Beast Sect as part of the Commoner's Convoy. She was not sure if he bought her explanation of straying away from the group, getting caught by the Dormions, then escaping with the help of her beasts and the other man during the chaos of the Dormions being attacked from outside.
Rihanna spent a few days at the place where they had initially fallen. Both, her beasts, as well as the two men, needed to recuperate. The antidote too took time, and the poison removal process was very torturous for the body and mind.
She could only sit and watch Ye Luo grunting and pain and passing out repeatedly for more than a day. Even Artreya and Phantasm, who had considerably more resilience towards poison, did not really fare much better.
Not knowing how she could help them, she decided to cook some fresh food. Despite the amount of dry rations and roasted meat she had hoarded into her space ring, there was no alternative to a fresh and steaming home cooked meal. And all of these guys needed the nourishment, and she considered herself to be a benevolent master!
So though her cooking was not anything special, but after days of being tormented by poison, whipped by a crazy woman, and living on water and tasteless meat strips, everyone found this pot of steaming hot soup and the toasted flat breads and freshly stir fried meat with some spirit fruits, herbs and thin slices of Morang bamboo shoots, to be delicacies from heaven!
Currently the entire team had left their previous place of rest, and were making way towards some strange tall pillars they could see even from such a great distance.
This place was nothing like the Ice Fire Desert. For starters, the desert itself had vanished after a few dozen meters, with the sand slowly giving way to rock hard, dry and cracked brown soil. Brown soil was supposed to be the most fertile.....apparently they could also be barren!
There was no vegetation in the desert, and there was not much flora or fauna growing in the cracked earth either. Ever since they left the place where they had been resting, the group was having a hard time searching for shade or rocks. Even in the high heat of the day, they had no other option than draping layers of cloth around every part of their body and averting dehydration, sun-stroke, tanning, heat-rashes, etc., etc.
Artreya suddenly squinted his eyes, then ran ahead of the others. He rushed on till the black line they could see on top of the brown soil. Rihanna had thought that was a horizon line, and would be quite far....unexpectedly Artreya reached it in a few minutes!
"Master...The ground ends here. This is the edge of a cliff."
Both Rihanna and Ye Luo frowned and sprinted towards the black line.
This was indeed the end. The ground dropped down sharply, and Rihanna could make out the sharp and jagged stones and rocks sticking out of the cliff-surface. If one fell, even if they didn't die of the fall, the sharp stones would gravely injure the person!
It looked like a small canyon. A number of cliff ridges were running towards a point far ahead, ad each cliff was dangerously steep.
The strange pillars could be seen ahead. They were very wide, and large bases at the top, as if to support some massive structure on top. However, the structure had long been demolished by time and nature. Large chunks of carved stones could be seen covering the ground of the serpent like paths far below the cliff-ridges.
Rihanna could also make out large and very large bones of different types of creatures, half buried in the ground below. Through time, the bones had absorbed the different elemental energies around them, and formed a variety of stones and ores. Though the shape of the carcass of the beast remained, the inner composition had long changed.
The cliffs were spread out over a large width, and were coming from all different directions...like something flowing in towards a point!
'Little Purple....do you think there was a river here at some point? And those half broken pillars....then they must have been support pillars holding a bridge?!'
Little Purple was silent for a long time. Rihanna started feeling perplexed at this sudden silence.
'Maybe....there is something strange about this place. I have been feeling this ever since we entered this place, but the feeling was very faint then. Now, the more we are moving forward, the strangeness is increasing.'
Rihanna looked around, wondering what could be bugging Little Purple. She even sent out strands of her own energy and sensory perception...but she could not sense anything wrong at all!
The end where all the cliffs were merging together was too far. As such none of them could make out what was at the end, but since there seemed to be only one way, the unanimous decision was to walk towards it.
The flat top of the cliff they were on was pretty wide and comfortable, but as they walked closer the point, the path started slimming down till only two people could walk comfortably on the gravel and dirt path.
The large pillars rose from the valleys below, and went to almost double the height above the cliff top. Rihanna wondered how long ago the river might have dried up, for the pillars to have half crumbled away to dust and the bones below to have turned to hard rocks.
She felt like she was taking a trip through pre-historic era! The end seemed like a mirage - the more closer they walked, the further it seemed.
3 days had almost passed by the time the merging point became clearer.
A large platform stretched from one end to the other, the ends almost disappearing from sight. And it was very tall. When they finally arrived at the foot of the platform, Rihanna was surprised by how similar it looked to ancient Mayan and Egyptian architecture!
The platform was almost like a pyramid - the base was very broad, and the top was very small and higher than the pillars from before. Wide stairs went up from the foot to almost the top. Solid stone railings d the staircase on both sides.
Huge blocks of stones, which made the entire platform, were clearly visible on the walls on either side of the staircase, and each block was etched with strange symbols and patterns. The platform itself was divided into four parts. Each part was separated by a wide landing, and the staircase went up three parts of the platform.
The fourth part was at the top and was not clearly visible, but there didn't seem to be anymore stairs connecting it to the rest.
Near the foot of the platform, about five meters in front, was a large circular dais, surrounded by twelve pillars. These pillars were about a meter in width, and were made with circular stone blocks placed one upon the other. Again, each block had patterns engraved on it.
At the top of each pillar was a large stone orb, each different in color. This looked like some kind of an array to Rihanna, but nobody in the group could tell her what was its purpose.
None of them were able to come to a single decision, so they decided to first go around the platform. Unfortunately, the platform was built into small mountains on both sides, and beyond the mountains were steep cliffs.
"Does that mean the only way forward is to go up?"
Artreya was sitting on the ground. Sweat had completely drenched through his clothes. The others were not much better off. Rihanna didn't want Ye Luo to know that she could cultivate...she was indebted to him, yes.....but she still didn't know him well enough to share with him all her secrets. And this was one of her trump cards!
So she too was sweating buckets along with the rest of them. She looked up at the tiny and barely visible platform at the top. Suddenly a visual from some film came to her mind - a group of people praying at the top, lines of slaves being pushed up the staircases, then the slaves at front being sacrificed to the sun God and being beheaded...then a lone head, spilling blood everywhere, rolling down the long flight of stairs and coming to a stop a few meters away on the ground!!
Rihanna shook her head vigorously, to which both Ye Luo and Artreya looked on in confusion. Thankfully they did not have such imaginative references to fall back upon.....
"Up we'll go then. But we should be careful. There might be another strange array up there. Or maybe members of the Dormions group. Hmmm.....I still have some of the aura hiding and invisibility potions with me. Should we all take some of it....just to be safe?"
Ye Luo frowned mildly. He couldn't believe how much this little girl had grown in just a few months. Or did she always know of such things? Was this how she had survived in that dangerous forest all by herself? As he took a swig of the bitter tasting potion, he couldn't help feeling the bitterness entering into his emotions. He had left the girl in the hole to die or survive on her own....now looking at the way she kept helping him again and again, he was having trouble convincing himself that he had done the correct thing then.