Rustle, rustle.

Shen Yi listened to the wind at his ears, and a drifting scene passed before his eyes.

Savage-faced demons came charging at him and drove their talons through his chest.

Face after face of people he knew filled with terror, torn apart under a chaos of blades, blood flying.

Great demons trailing a heaven-filling scarlet swept across the sky, and the cities beneath them crumbled and broke, the wailing of wronged souls never leaving his ears.

"……"

Shen Yi swept a sleeve lightly, and that illusion, about as false as an illusion could be, shattered on the instant.

He had cultivated spirit-soul methods as far back as Spirit-Transformation, and since Return-to-Void the working-out of a spirit-formation had made the spirit-soul swell again.

An illusion this shallow could hardly have much effect on him any longer.

Shen Yi raised his eyes and looked ahead.

Beyond the transport formation lay a vast pit, its coarse rock walls a thousand zhang high; and every three chi a hollow had been cut, just large enough to hold one person sitting cross-legged.

In every hollow sat a figure.

Cultivators among them, and mortals as well.

Their expressions were numb, their eyes shut, and they looked as steady as bells set on the ground, without a mark of injury on them — yet their life-force was dim, and they had the look of lamps burned dry.

"Hff."

Shen Yi drew his eyes back. There was no reckoning how many people were in those rock walls.

And he understood at last why the Peach Spring Manor should have grown bold enough to turn its designs upon an immortal sect's treasured site.

In a place as beset with danger as Nanhong, apart from a Dao-merging treasured site, there was likely nowhere else that could furnish living beings in numbers appalling enough to fill the walls of an abyss whose edge the eye could not find.

As for the purpose.

That could be roughly reckoned from the illusion that had come seeping in a moment ago.

It did not harm the skin. It tormented only the mind.