Chapter 1353: Deep in the Gray Realm

"Am I hallucinating?"

Chen Ling rubbed his eyes and looked at the sky again.

He saw five dim and distant suns hanging high in the sky. Because their colors were too faint, Chen Ling had almost failed to notice their existence... They were like the shadow of the moon occasionally visible during the day, thin and lusterless.

The Gray Realm could indeed see the sun, and there was undoubtedly only one sun. Although distant, it wouldn't be this faint.

Since when did the sun become five?

"Keep going forward," Chen Ling immediately dismissed the idea of turning back and ordered.

He had a premonition that he was heading in the right direction... There must be something unusual nearby.

To be honest, Chen Ling hadn't held much hope before coming. After all, the sighting of the Silent Angel at the Jiangtian Sect headquarters was many years ago. The probability of the other party staying in the same place for so many years was too small. He had already prepared to return empty-handed this time.

But when he saw the five suns in the sky, he immediately realized that he might have really come to the right place.

Under Chen Ling’s urging, Wu Yi’s speed increased to the limit again. Strangely, no matter how far it moved, the five suns remained at a distance, like stickers in a game, with a hazy sense of unreality.

Just then, the gray-white earth in the distance began to tilt downward, and the further they went, the greater the angle of the tilt.

"Stop."

Chen Ling spoke, and Wu Yi stopped immediately.

Chen Ling stood on Wu Yi’s back and looked around... Their current location was like the edge of a huge meteorite crater. He couldn't see the end of this giant crater to the left or right. The earth sank neatly downward, and not far below, the outlines of something unknown were vaguely sketched out.

Chen Ling couldn't estimate how big this giant crater was, but it was definitely larger than any human domain. Could it be, as he thought, that he had found the hidden Seventh World-Ending territory?

"How is it? Do you sense any dangerous aura?" Chen Ling asked Wu Yi.

Wu Yi’s head swayed gently, as if sensing the situation around them, but finally shook its head.

"Then let's go, let's go down and take a look."

If Chen Ling were alone, he might not have dared to venture deep into here, but now with Wu Yi by his side, they added up to two eighth-rank combat powers... With this lineup, even if they really broke into another Calamity territory, they could retreat unscathed.

As Wu Yi brought Chen Ling gradually closer to the bottom of the giant crater, the vague outlines in the distance finally became clear bit by bit.

Chen Ling’s pupils contracted slightly.

"This is..."

The outlines in the distance were not forests, not rocks, and certainly not a mirage... It was a city.

Or rather, the ruins of a city.

Gray-white substances, like embers, fell from the sky, like a dead and dull snow.

Countless broken walls and ruins were scattered across the desolate earth. High-rise buildings that had once stood tall had sunk into the earth, with only a small portion of their tops exposed. But even just this corner looked incredibly grand, like some landmark building from the past...

The winding asphalt road was already cracked beyond recognition. Occasionally, one could see street lamps buried in the ground by the roadside. The bleak cold wind blew through the dead ruins, making sobbing sounds and causing the small debris on the ground to roll gently.

【Audience Expectation +3】

【Current Expectation: 42%】

The moment the outlines of the ruins appeared in the distance, Chen Ling’s audience expectation, which had already grown over the past few days due to the arrival of Jian Changsheng and the others, broke through 40 again.

"How could there be city ruins in a place like this??" Chen Ling stood on the centipede’s back, frowning.

Chen Ling was certain that humans had never left a domain here.

And as he walked into the ruins, more and more doubts appeared in Chen Ling’s mind...

These buildings didn't look like they had been here originally, because both the density of the high-rises and the planning of the streets were extremely unreasonable.

Four high-rises pierced through each other like knotted threads; some wide roads were only two or three meters long, and the end of the road was a twisted concrete wall; street lamps were stuck between floors; manhole covers were sleeved onto lightning rods...

Everything was as if some force had condensed several cities together, rolled them into a ball, and thrown them here.

That wasn't even the strangest part.

When Chen Ling picked up a road sign already covered in dust, he suddenly discovered that he didn't recognize the characters on it...

The characters here were very similar to Earth’s, but different, like a self-created language generated by AI—familiar, yet with a powerless sense of strangeness.

This was a civilization completely unknown to Chen Ling.

Chen Ling stood blankly among the ruins, his gaze sweeping slowly across the surroundings...

A thought suddenly appeared in his mind.

Could this,

be a former Gray Realm civilization?

Had there once been cities and human civilization in the Gray Realm??

All along, Chen Ling had viewed the Gray Realm as an alien world full of monsters, containing only aggressive creatures and endless gray... Not just Chen Ling, the human domains had always thought so too.

When he was with the Fusion Faction, Teacher Ye had also mentioned some niche theories, such as: since the Gray Realm was viewed as a parallel world, why couldn't there be humans in it? Why couldn't a civilization appear just like on Earth? Even in the early days of the Great Cataclysm, some people specifically tried to venture deep into the Gray Realm to find the original inhabitants... But in the end, none of them returned.

And this theory had gradually been falsified and disappeared from the public eye...

The reason was simple:

If humans existed in the Gray Realm, why hadn't a single human skeleton been seen in hundreds of years?

But when Chen Ling witnessed the city ruins before his eyes, this theory surged into his mind again... If this city was truly a civilization born from the Gray Realm, then 90% of the current research on the Gray Realm by the human domains would have to be overturned.

If a human civilization had truly existed in the Gray Realm, how did they disappear?

Was the Gray Realm originally gray?

Where did the Calamities... come from?

Or going deeper...

What, exactly, was he?

One question after another surged into Chen Ling’s mind. The bright red opera robe stood blankly in the twisted city ruins, like a sculpture.

Ash-like snowflakes fell on his shoulders. The entire ruin seemed to have been pressed on mute, the dead silence making his scalp tingle...

At the same time,

at the end of this city ruin,

a figure with six gray wings on his back opened his eyes silently.