"It looks familiar," Yang admitted.
"Are you familiar with primordial script?" Senior Brother Qing An raised an eyebrow.
Yang turned back to the carvings immediately, running his gaze over the letterforms to see if he could identify anything recognizable.
"Is this primordial script?" he asked with a frown.
Senior Brother Fan Xiao's voice came from the other side, where he was examining one of the other statues. "Not our primordial script. Every world has its own. This is the world speak of this world." He did not even look up as he said it.
Yang glanced at Senior Brother Qing An, who was still watching him, and remembered he had not answered his original question. "I won one of the talisman events and the prize included some jade slips written in Primordial Script. I can’t actually read it yet, but I should know enough to recognize some characters"
"Impressive for someone your age. Most cultivators never develop an interest in it at all," Senior Brother Qing An said.
"Do you know it, Senior Brother?" Yang asked.
"Not fluently. Only Master, Senior Brother Xiao Zhan, and Senior Brother Yan Zheng are truly fluent. I can get the general sense of something if there are enough familiar characters." He gestured toward the script-covered base. "Though none of that applies here in any case. This is an entirely different primordial script."
As he said it, he turned back to the statue base and began moving his hands across the air near it, sending technique after technique at the stone in a steady, methodical sweep. Different coloured glows rippled across the surface with each pass, but there mustn’t have been any result as he continued without stopping.
Yang left him to it and looked around at the rest of the area. His other Senior Brothers were similarly occupied, each of them focused on a different section of the carving and statues. Senior Brother Song Weilong was the only one moving rather than standing still, walking slowly away from the area with his crystal pendant suspended in the air before him.
Yang decided to follow him.
Once he had closed the distance, Senior Brother Song Weilong spoke without turning around fully. "Chen Yang. Now would be a good time to practice with the mole puppet. Sand is easier to work with than most surfaces. Practice in the area I have already covered."
Yang felt like a kid being given a task to keep him occupied, but knowing it was a better use of his time, he took out the mole puppet. He held it in his palm and focused his spiritual sense toward it. After the needle practice of the past few days, it was easier to find the right approach, though the puppet was larger and less uniform than the needle and required more effort to properly establish the connection. His first two attempts produced nothing but on the third, he felt it, a small flicker of connection, and the puppet shifted slightly on his palm.
He set the puppet on the sand and directed it downward and stopped walking. He had not yet reached the point where he could control his spiritual sense and move at the same time without one suffering for the other. He stood still and just focused on maintaining the connection with the puppet as it burrowed deeper.
The puppet moved well in sand, likely easier than harder ground would have been. Yang sent it deeper, going further down than he had planned since there was nothing to find and he was here to practice rather than to actually look for something. Light stopped reaching the puppet at some point, but he could still perceive through its senses clearly.
Then the mole struck something hard.
Yang assumed it was a rock and directed the puppet around it, but it was too large to go around. He tried sending the mole beneath it, but that proved impossible as well.
He decided to send the puppet along the surface of whatever it was instead, and as he did, he realized the surface was not smooth. It felt carved. He could sense softened edges rather than the rough irregularity of natural stone, though he could only perceive a small area at a time as the puppet moved across it, the rest obscured by the sand pressing in from every direction.
He started mapping it carefully, directing the puppet in slow passes to gauge the size and shape of what was buried. The puppet had been moving along its surface for some time before Yang began to understand the actual scale of it. It was large, larger than possibly the entire area above ground his Senior Brothers were exploring.
He was also aware that the puppet was approaching the limit of his control range. Losing it this deep underground would be a problem. Retrieval would require his Senior Brothers help and he had no interest in adding to their workload unnecessarily.
He kept the puppet within the safe range and continued tracing the outline as much as he could.
The structure underground was not separate; it surrounded it, running in a perfect perimeter around the base of the formation and its statues. The formation was sitting on top of it. Whatever was buried down here, the formation had been built above it.
Yang recalled the puppet back and picked it up when it surfaced.
"I think I found something," he called out.
"Again," Senior Brother Yuan Shen said, appearing quickly alongside the others.
"The formation above the ground is not the full structure," Yang said, pointing down at the sandstone beneath their feet. "There is a larger structure buried underneath. It surrounds the formation and the statues, going down hundreds of meters. The formation is sitting on top of something much bigger."
"You found that using the little mole puppet?" Senior Brother Zhen Hao said, looking down with a new expression.
The Senior Brothers went quiet, each of them extending their senses downward. After a few seconds, Senior Brother Fan Xiao straightened.
"All of you, onto the formation."
Yang and the others moved back up to the formation platform as Senior Brother Fan Xiao rose into the air above them. He formed a mudra, index and middle finger extended toward the sand below.
Sand started rising in rivulets, thick streams that curled upward like ribbons unwinding from a spool, flickering in the air. Yang watched, completely in awe, unable to look away.
The rivulets thickened as even more of them rose from the sand; it was like watching a desert being emptied as the sand poured out of it. Soon the ground began to drop. Yang watched as stairs appeared extending downward as the sand fell away from the platform's base, revealing carved steps that had not been visible before, then the full height of what turned out to be a structure a lot grander than he ever expected.
Senior Brother Fan Xiao floated higher as he worked, a small figure against the sky, yet it was this small figure unearthing what became, as the sand continued to empty away, a whole ancient city.
The formation, which turned out to be an altar built on a temple, was the only structure still fully intact. Everything else, stretching outward in all directions, was in ruin. Collapsed walls, fallen columns, the outlines of streets and buildings visible in what remained. A city that had once been thriving, preserved only by the sand that had buried it.
The flow of sand slowed and then stopped.
Senior Brother Fan Xiao descended and touched down on the altar platform beside them, his expression no different from usual.
"That was remarkable to watch," Senior Brother Zhen Hao said, with an impressed smile.
The corner of Senior Brother Fan Xiao's mouth twitched. Just slightly. Yang would have missed it if he had not been watching.
Yang looked out at the ruins spreading below them. "Should we go down and look?"
"The temple is the priority," Senior Brother Fan Xiao said. He looked at Senior Brothers Yuan Shen, Zhen Hao, and Yang. "You three may look through the city. I went through it with my spiritual sense while I was above. There are no living things present and no obvious danger."
He turned to Senior Brothers Qing An and Song Weilong. "We will work on the temple. There is no doorway and no visible entrance, so we will continue with the carvings."
"You are sending them into ruins unsupervised?" Senior Brother Qing An looked at him with incredulity.
"There is nothing for them to do here yet, and the city is largely ruins. They will be fine." He turned back to the three of them. "Do not go near the edges of the ruins or out into the desert. I have only scanned the city itself. What lies beyond it I cannot speak to."
Senior Brother Zhen Hao rolled his eyes. "We will be fine. This is not either my or Senior Brother Yuan Shen's first time, and we will keep Yang close." He put an arm around Yang's shoulder as he said it.
Senior Brother Fan Xiao looked at him for a long moment, then nodded once.
Senior Brothers Zhen Hao and Yuan Shen summoned their swords, and Yang took out his carpet. Rather than descend the hundreds of stairs now visible below the altar platform, they stepped off the edge and flew down, landing at the base a few moments later.
Yang felt an unknown excitement from within himself as set foot on the ground and stepped into the ruins.