"Aside from doubled gravity and excessive radiation, there’s basically no other major issue."

Fang Cheng murmured, giving his evaluation.

He then stepped forward, descending the stone steps in front of the altar, following a narrow and dark passage, heading outward.

The military boots echoed on the hard stone slabs, reverberating inside the empty mountain.

After walking about several hundred meters, the darkness at the end of the passage was forcibly torn apart by a dark red glow.

Evidently, that was the exit.

Fang Cheng quickened his pace, heading towards that light.

As he stepped out of the cave opening, scorching hot winds swept toward him.

The view was unobscured now, wide and open.

He was standing at the edge of a cliff, hundreds of meters high.

Fang Cheng stopped, slowly raised his head, surveying this new world.

The sky was a dark reddish color, like congealed blood.

Heavy clouds of black volcanic ash hung low overhead.

Deep within the clouds, thick purple lightning crazily crawled like spider webs, tearing the sky apart.

The air was intensely hot, with visible heat waves causing the distant horizon to appear warped like rippling water.

Yet, what truly shocked Fang Cheng wasn’t the harsh natural environment, but the remnants on the ground.

Looking around, it was a scene of devastation.

No mythical heavenly palaces, nor primeval jungles from a wild era.

The red scorched earth beneath bore thick rusty steel bars thrust haphazardly around.

In the distance were collapsed slabs of concrete load-bearing walls, and skyscraper ruins with nothing but metal skeletons remaining.

The raging wind lifted ash from the ground, passing through the pockmarked remains of modern styled buildings, emitting a mournful whine.

At the edge of sight, several massive active volcanoes were violently erupting.

Billowing smoke mixed with dark red lava shot skyward, dyeing half the sky red like blood.

Here there was no trace of life’s greenery, nor any vivid evidence of human habitation, just like the Avici Hell described in Buddhist Scripture.

Whirlwinds lifted ash from the Abyss below, roaring upward, making his clothes rustle loudly.

Fang Cheng gathered his thoughts, gaze lowered, swiftly scanning the terrain below.

He didn’t search for the buried path back down the mountain, but instead walked a few more steps forward, the heavy edges of his military boots resting on the weathered rock at the cliff’s edge.

Crunch—

A few loose stones couldn’t bear the stress, crumbling and rolling into the Abyss.

The next moment, Fang Cheng’s thigh muscles tightened suddenly, exerting force.

Facing the violent upward airflow, he leapt off the hundreds of meters high cliff.

The wind’s roar became piercingly sharp, rushing into his ears.

The doubled gravity tugged at his body, plummeting at an unimaginable speed.

Fang Cheng remained composed, eyes slightly squinted in the fierce wind.

In the air, his body’s energy blood surged, limbs suddenly extended outward.

His wide sleeves were instantly filled by the strong upward airflow.

Using this wind’s lifting force, he glided like a great predator bird, drawing a gentle arc under the maroon sky, easing most of the fall’s impact.

Bang!

The heavy military boots landed firmly on the red scorched earth, stirring a circle of flying hot dust.

Fang Cheng’s legs sank slightly like hydraulic shock absorbers, then channeled the remaining physical impact through his feet into the ground.

He straightened, casually brushing volcanic ash from his coat.

His gaze extended over the barren plain, towards the gigantic city ruins several kilometers away.

Without hesitation, Fang Cheng took large strides, heading straight for the ruins.

Only dry cracked red soil and scattered stones lay across the desolate field.

The scorching wind swept up ash, traversing the plain unhindered, emitting a low moan.

As he advanced, the massive remnants constructed of steel and concrete gradually enlarged in Fang Cheng’s view.

The collapsed skyscrapers stood like giant black tombstones, silently under the dark red sky.

High-temperature radiation distorted the air, making the city’s outline appear blurred and shaky, with a hint of death.

He walked for roughly half an hour.

Fang Cheng lifted his leg, stepping over a completely broken relic of the city’s ring road overpass, formally entering the ruins of this dead silent city.

The once wide avenues were long buried under thick layers of black ash and cracked rubble, making it impossible to distinguish the original asphalt surface.

On either side were remnants of crumbling buildings.

Thick, rusty steel reinforcements had broken free from the confines of the weathered concrete, like twisted bone spurs of monsters, thrusting unevenly into the soil and the air.

The surroundings were oppressively silent.

No car horns, no hustle of pedestrians.

In the vast space, only the sound of the wind whistling through the corridors could be heard.

Nonetheless, the "crunch" of Fang Cheng’s military boots crushing the rubble echoed in the empty street.

"Snap."

His right foot crushed a piece of thick, rusted steel pipe half buried in the soil.

The special steel, which once could bear several tons, now crumbled into a pile of reddish-brown iron powder just like completely weathered deadwood under Fang Cheng’s boot.

Fang Cheng stopped, glancing down at the steel that had turned to powder.

With the tip of his shoe, he gently brushed away the layer of dust covering it.

The Masked Guest had mentioned before that when he entered the ancient civilization site in West Mountain, it was empty, full of ruins.

Now seeing these shattered skyscrapers with his own eyes, Fang Cheng deeply appreciated their significance.

This so-called "ancient civilization" clearly was a once highly developed modern civilization.

But over the long years, some unknown catastrophe had completely erased it.

Time left the most cruel marks here.

After thousands, tens of thousands of years of erosion, it was enough to turn steel into mud, to reset civilization to zero.

As Fang Cheng crossed a collapsed load-bearing wall.

From the shadows of the ruins ahead, a sound of chitinous rustling suddenly came.

A few multi-legged arthropods, over half a meter long and covered with black scales, were startled by Fang Cheng’s footsteps.

They waved their scythe-like forelimbs, quickly burrowing into a broken underground drainage pipe.

Evidently, the creatures here had long mutated under extreme radiation and gravity.

Compared to those on Earth, each was bizarrely shaped, seemingly not benign.

But perhaps only this way could they survive in such harsh conditions.

This is so-called "survival of the fittest."

Fang Cheng withdrew his gaze, just about to step over the concrete slab underfoot.

From the skeletal structure of the tilted building overhead, a few small stones suddenly fell.

Fang Cheng paused slightly, his peripheral vision instantly locking onto the upper left.

No roars, no warnings.

A massive shadow clung to a snapped load-bearing pillar, hurtling towards him like a projectile.

It was a mutated giant beast nearly three meters long.

Its appearance resembled a skinned hunting dog, its muscles knotted all over, with thick gray-white bony plates covering its back.

The environment of double gravity endowed it with a terrifying initial descent speed.

Four stout claws tore through the air, aiming straight for Fang Cheng’s throat. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Fang Cheng didn’t make the slightest panic-stricken dodging movement.

His legs were firmly rooted in the scorched earth like hydraulic presses.

Then, his waist twisted violently, channeling the ground’s reaction force along his spine.

With his right arm muscles bulging, tendons snapping like bowstrings, he unleashed a ferocious punch at the charging mutated giant beast.

Boom!

Pure physical strength combined with fierce golden True Qi, utterly exploding the moment his fist contacted the beast’s skull.

In double gravity, the surrounding air density was relatively higher.

And this punch compressed an eye-visible semi-transparent air wave in front of the fist.

The hard gray-white bone plates shattered like thin ice in an instant.

The beast didn’t even have time to let out a whimper before its entire upper body exploded into a cloud of blood mist under Fang Cheng’s overwhelming strike.

Its remaining half body flew backward, crashing heavily into a concrete wall more than ten meters away.

The massive kinetic energy directly punched through the remaining wall, kicking up a large cloud of dust.