At that very moment, the old man felt his heart jolt violently within his chest, as though an invisible hand had squeezed it. The world around him seemed to shudder — the faint tremor of something vast and unfathomable stirring to life. He could not explain the sudden shift in the atmosphere, yet a deep instinct told him it was connected to the mysterious cultivator he had encountered within the shadowed tunnels beneath the earth.
Although uncertainty clouded his thoughts, a strange intuition whispered to him that the middle-aged man he had glimpsed in those depths was the cause of this strange upheaval. It was as if the heavens themselves had responded to that man's presence.
