Where Immortals Once Walked

When the ambushers struck, the Baling garrison inside Wei City flung open the gates and charged out as well, attacking the Gale Army from two sides.

The dim light of the night already made fighting particularly intense, and the situation only made it more so.

Commandant Sun, Xiao Maoliang, and the others were shaken. Baling had hidden more than thirty thousand men out on the plain!

Counting the nearly ten thousand sent to cut off General Nanke, Baling had sent out over forty thousand men this time. They were clearly determined to end it all in one decisive blow.

Baling had never fought this hard and hot before.

Could it all be because of the change in commander?

After a few exchanges, the Gale Army split into two groups, with Commandant Sun and Commandant Liu each leading one to withdraw to the south and north. The enemy was simply too many, and Wei City was now Baling turf. If they did not want to become fish in a barrel, they had to pull out before the encirclement snapped shut.

This was where an army’s quality showed. In a confused night melee, facing ambushers six times their number, and with the retreat order coming on a knife’s edge, the Gale Army still moved fast without panicking, quick without unraveling, and forced their way out through a gap.

The Baling troops, of course, rallied to chase when they saw the Hong banner whipping in the wind, bold as blood and begging for hatred. The Gale Army was Panlong City’s finest; their fame was great, but their headcount was limited. As long as they managed to wipe out these five-odd thousand, Panlong City would bleed strength it could ill afford.

All the more so because the Red General was here!

A latecomer who had risen like a comet, the Red General now stood, by sheer battlefield merit, shoulder to shoulder with Zhong Shengguang as one of Panlong City’s two pillars.

If they could defeat the Red General, would taking all of Panlong City not be just around the corner for Baling?

One side fled, one side chased; dust boiled eastward in rolling clouds.

Silence settled over the field. Among the wreckage, only the wounded murmured and moaned.

With the Gale Army in flight, the Baling garrison of Wei City hurried out to clean the field.

Their logistics corps was called the Dushan Battalion and had its own uniforms. They did not fight; enemy forces rarely targeted them either.

When the battle ended, their job was to collect prisoners and carry off the wounded.

There were not many Panlong prisoners, only twenty or thirty. But because the Gale Army had fired two swift, concentrated volleys just now, more than four hundred ambushers had been hit; seventy or eighty were unable to move, and over thirty were gravely wounded, and this not even counting the dead.

All of them needed to be rushed into the city for treatment.

Fortunately, Wei City was right there. With stretchers on their shoulders and quick runs, the Dushan Battalion men carried more than half the wounded back within a few trips.

In addition to Hua Mucuo’s initial army in Wei City, a portion of the big Baling host that had arrived with the new commander had also folded into the Dushan Battalion to beef up manpower.

The result was a logistics unit suddenly crowded with unfamiliar faces, with many soldiers in the same battalion not knowing one another at all.

A dozen-odd logistics men had just delivered the wounded and captives into the city when they suddenly pulled glazed bottles from their tunics and hurled them, overhand, at the walls!

Set into the inner wall of Wei City were nine enormous copper talismans, mounted a little over three meters above the ground. After taking Wei City, the Baling forces had installed this large defensive array on purpose; they called it, for short, the battle array.

Everyone knew that origin energy could weaken or counter an opponent’s divine technique and, conversely, could be used to reinforce one’s own. If both armies poured origin energy into their own divine techniques to attack each other, a battle would become a snarled web of variables.

The fight had only just ended, so those nine copper talismans were still charged with origin energy. They gave off a faint azure glow, and runes lifted away from the plates to orbit them slowly. The array not only made the walls tougher and harder to batter; it had another clever function:

It broadcast the “Serene Mind Mantra.”

Within a radius of roughly a kilometer and a half centered on the nine talismans, Baling troops could keep their minds clear and not be led astray by ghouls and malevolent spirits.

The Red General had burst onto the scene only three years ago. Baling still did not understand what the Generous Pot could do, nor could they perceive the Three Corpses Worms, but they did understand that their soldiers’ sudden battlefield frenzy and turncoats were the work of enemy mind-muddling spells.

The Serent Mind Mantra was difficult to cast in the first place; inscribing it into an array artifact that worked across a broad area and for long durations required huge talisman plates to maintain the complex array lines.

Baling’s talisman and array masters had put plenty of thought into it. Although the nine copper talisman plates were a set, the array could still function if two or three went missing, though this was a detail that outsiders did not know. After all, on a battlefield, anything could happen; if a few plates were damaged, the rest could still keep the enemy at bay.

But with those dozen-odd logistics men striking in perfect unison, at least six plates were hit.

The glazed bottles shattered, splashing a colorless liquid across the copper. The plates crackled at once, coughing up bluish smoke; the fine array lines started to warp and slump, like candle wax softening under a flame.

The azure glow on the plates dimmed. Nearby Baling soldiers who caught the splash howled, clutching their faces and rolling on the ground.

The logistics man closest to the gate slipped up the wall ladder without a sound. Baling city guards stepped in to block him, yet he somehow blurred past them. He reached an intact talisman plate in the blink of an eye. The guards around him seemed to slow and stick, then either went limp or tumbled off the ladder.

Everyone who saw it sucked in a breath, as if they had glimpsed a ghost in the dark.

Steel hissed. The logistics man drew his blade and struck the plate in one smooth motion.

By the time he sheathed the knife, a giant “X” was carved across the copper.

That plate’s inscribed array was ruined beyond repair.

He also lopped through the two torches bracketing the plate. Darkness then fell like a curtain.

At the same time, his comrades shot two signal arrows into the sky. The pitch-black night burst with two brilliant blooms—one blue, one red.

The move came so suddenly that the Baling garrison had not even reacted when someone on the inner street was already shouting, “Close the gate! Close the gate, now!”

To ease the comings and goings of the logistics units, Wei City’s gate had been standing wide open.

As the Baling guards rushed to swing it shut, the dozen logistics men and the Panlong City prisoners dashed back to stop them. One of the men snatched a bow from his back and fired three arrows in a rippling burst, dropping four Baling soldiers.

One shaft went through two men.

The torchlight lit his face. It was Hu Min, He Lingchuan’s old acquaintance!

Up by the copper talismans, the logistics man took out a small pot and flipped the lid.

The vessel had twin handles and was exquisitely made, with a ruby set into its belly.

No one else could see them, but hundreds of Three Corpses Worms poured out of the pot and swept toward the nearest Baling soldiers!

* * *

He Lingchuan dropped into the pit and hit spider silk that flung him back up.

It felt like bouncing on a trampoline.

He used the rebound to tumble downward, layer by layer, careful to keep his head and face from brushing the webbing.

Even as the world spun, he could still make out all the discordant shapes against the satin sheen of the silk. Giant spider monsters were bounding after him.

If he had not been rolling so fast, they would have run him down already.

The moment he came in, he realized the den’s interior space was terrifyingly vast.

He managed to brake a bit on the second-to-last layer of webbing, though the mud caked on his hands was scraped nearly clean.

He looked around. Stalactites and stalagmites had met and merged over untold ages into stone pillars thick and true, sturdy enough to hold up the underground world.

There were dozens of these pillars at least—some tall, some short, some still growing, without any tidy pattern, yet possessed of a chiseled, uncanny beauty that gave the cavern real depth.

Above, the pillars framed space like the inside of a honeycomb cake, consisting of interconnected semi-open stone chambers, both large and small. From every ceiling hung dense forests of stalactites; the floor was blanketed with a thick, black layer of decayed humus, piled with dead branches and fallen leaves.

Green and violet mosslike plants grew across the soil in tight mats, as if a heavy carpet had been laid over each chamber.

In short, he was facing a colossal, three-dimensional, awe-inspiring underground maze that was at least thirty or forty levels deep.

Even if there were no spiders snapping at his ass, He Lingchuan doubted he could ever make sense of this maze.

Granted, glowspores glittered everywhere, lighting the spider queen’s massive den as bright as day.

This was why He Lingchuan could see with awful clarity that directly below him, and only directly below him, yawned a terrifying abyss.

This vast cavern was hollow at the very center.

Because there were spores glowing at the bottom, the depths looked as far away as stars on the horizon. By his rough estimate, he was... about a hundred and sixty to two hundred meters above the bottom.

A straight drop like that would pulp him into mince.

Obviously, this was one of the spider queen’s defensive measures. She had made the intruder’s path into the maze anything but easy, especially with spider sentries rushing in from every direction.

From the moment he tumbled in, He Lingchuan had fallen into the web-guard cordon.

They had come so quickly, no doubt still enraged by Sun Jiayuan’s earlier provocation.

On the web beneath his feet, he spotted a severed arm. From the remaining scrap of cloth, he judged it to be Sun Jiayuan’s remains. The man had likely fallen right here. He had not even had time to draw his bow before the spiders swarmed and pinned him.

Looking around, He Lingchuan saw blood-spattered fragments of bodies stuck all over the webbing, clear proof of the blast’s force just now.

Worst of all, the spider guards were coming again.

In this world of webs, there was no way He Lingchuan could outpace spiders. By the time he steadied himself into a half-crouch, every thread leading toward the rock wall was already crowded with spider sentries.

That way’s cut off.

In at most ten breaths, the spiders would be on him.

He could not possibly face down the fury of over a hundred elite monsters. Any ordinary person, confronted with such an eight-legged tide, would have their knees turn to water.

Zhu Erniang’s den... This place really is the damn pits!

He had no time to curse. He bent the bow, nocked, took aim at the biggest, nearest stone chambers, and loosed four shots in a rippling burst.

The cavern, though spacious, did not smell great. It was musty, with a hint of mold.

More precisely, it smelled of fermentation.

At a time like this, He Lingchuan welcomed any accelerant.

All four incendiary arrows hit their marks.

Bang, bang, bang, bang!

Four explosions resounded, and flames roared.

This originally thermostable, quiet, orderly space met its first true pandemonium.

The chambers held both living plants and dry leaves, the type of stuff that caught at the first spark. When the gunpowder on the arrows detonated, fiery shrapnel sprayed outward; wherever the shrapnel fell, flames surged to life.

Four incendiary arrows were enough to set a dozen or more chambers ablaze at once.

There were spiders stationed to mind those rooms, too. Now they were terrified, careening about in blind panic.