Walker Of The Worlds

Chapter 2930: Long Lost Ghosts

They delved deeper.

The valley narrowed as they traveled westward, the walls rising on either side like the ribs of some long-dead behemoth. The trees thinned further, yet what remained was worse than lifeless—it was wrong. Twisted trunks split like ruptured scars, and leaves of ashen glass rustled without wind.

Even the soil changed—no longer earth, but something like calcified bone, cracking beneath their feet with each step.

And always, the fog remained, clutching at their robes, coiling like serpents at their ankles, whispering things that could not be remembered once heard.

They encountered more spirits. But these were not like before.

The first emerged from a pool of shadow pooled beneath a crumbling stone arch. It rose without sound—a Warrior of Long Lost times.

Its armor was ceremonial, once majestic, now fused to bone and soul by centuries of hatred. Tall and lean, with limbs too long, it dragged a black halberd etched with inverted talismans. Its helm bore no visor, only a mouth that grinned wide and hollow, and eyes that wept ink.

Daoist Chu stepped forward with a ward, but the knight’s halberd crashed down in an arc of anti-light, severing the air with such force that the talisman screamed and shattered. Daoist Chu barely leapt aside, blood trailing from a split shoulder.

Meng Bai sent a formation forward, only for it to bend around the knight’s form like a net cast into water.

Then came another—A Lamenting Widow.

She drifted above the ground in a bridal robe soaked with spectral ichor, her veil trailing like a funeral banner. Her mouth was stitched shut with chains of soul-iron, but she sang nonetheless—an aria that made Meng Bai vomit blood.

”Don’t listen!” Daoist Chu growled, pressing fingers to his ears.

But Lin Mu had already stepped forward.

He chanted.

”Let thy heart be as the moonlit pond...”

The words cut through the fog like sunlight piercing the depths of a frozen lake. His voice grew stronger, his feet lifting slightly from the ground, the aura of the Calming Heart Sutra blooming once more.

The golden lotus light spread, gentle yet inexorable.

The Warrior staggered, halberd slowing.

The Widow shrieked in defiance, her melody warping into a howl—then her chains snapped, and her form unraveled into white petals.

The Warrior dropped to its knees, helm melting like wax in the warmth of dawn.

Lin Mu whispered.

”Be at peace.”

They vanished.

Ashes returned to silence.

They passed ancient statues of forgotten deities, all with their eyes scratched out. They walked under broken pagodas built of bone and coral, their roofs shingled with fossilized skin.

The next enemy awaited them beside a dried-up spring.

It was a being that could only be called as the Shepherd of Thorns.

A gaunt monk-shaped wraith draped in layers of bloody prayer beads and veils sewn from human hair. It carried a staff crowned with living thorns, each tip bearing an open eye. As it moved, the thorns writhed and blinked, gazing into the souls of those who dared look upon it.

Daoist Chu was struck first. The eyes pierced through his mental defenses and showed him a vision—a life he never lived, but somehow mourned. He dropped to one knee, choking.

Meng Bai’s talismans turned black and burned away in his hand. The spear in his other hand refused to move.

Lin Mu raised his voice again.

This time, he sang the sutra.

It echoed with the force of temple bells and the stillness of monastery halls lost to time. Golden aura coiled around the Shepherd like vines made of mercy.

The eyes wept blood.

The Shepherd screamed, a sound like a thousand monks dying in one breath—and burst into flames of karmic retribution, consumed by the truth it had defied.

But not all fell so swiftly.

The deeper they traveled, the more resistant the enemies became.

From beneath a shattered cliffside emerged a Veiled Hierophant, an ancient priest of unknown path. He hovered above the ground, his robe stitched from skin, and his face wrapped in countless scrolls of inkless scripture.

He wielded no weapon.

Only a voice.

”All is dust,” he chanted.

”All must return to the root.”

The words carried power.

Daoist Chu aged a year in a second, his hair paling. Meng Bai’s qi roiled as though his cultivation were unraveling from the inside.

It was clear that their cultivation was not suitable for this place. They had been getting strained by strong foes whose strenght did not seem to conform to the path of cultivation they knew.

While this was not the first time Daoist Chu was fighting ghosts, he had certainly not met ones this strong.

’No wonder even the Immortal Court takes Ghosts and Ghost cultivators seriously.’ Daoist Chu thought to himself, as a trail of blood leaked down the side of his lips.

Thankfully for him Lin Mu was opposing the foe.

The Calming Heart Sutra rose to meet the ghostly being—but this time, the Hierophant did not burn. His false truths clashed with Lin Mu’s serenity like two mountains colliding.

For the first time, Lin Mu strained.

But he did not falter.

He focused, drawing upon the full depth of the sutra. Not just the chants, but its truth—that peace was not weakness, that stillness was not surrender. That the heart, made whole, was greater than all lies.

A lotus bloomed in full beneath his feet, golden and radiant.

The Hierophant cracked.

His chants faltered.

And when the final verse rang out, the false priest was pulled into the lotus itself, vanishing into silence.

Breathless, bruised, they rested upon a ledge overlooking the deepest hollow of the valley.

Below, the fog pulsed like a living thing.

A great structure lay buried in the gloom—an altar of thorns, vast and cracked, with an eye carved into its heart. Around it floated dozens of spectral monks, spinning endlessly in a dance of madness.

At the center, something pulsed.

Something vast.

Something... waiting.

Lin Mu stared at it, the edge of his robe fluttering in unseen wind.

”The Thorned Eye...” he whispered.

They had found it.

And something was looking back.