Where Immortals Once Walked

“So you’re saying that all we really need is to get rid of this Hong Chenglue problem?”

Zhao Pan nodded. “If you can do so, that would be a huge help to me.”

As he spoke, the hornbill on his shoulder suddenly took off, wings beating as it glided down to the rear, about 330 meters away.

Back there, the warhorses were grazing among the trees. It was late spring now, and tender green shoots had begun to push up along the riverbank, which was exactly the kind of fresh growth they loved. After gnawing on crusted lichen all winter, they were long overdue for a change of taste.

But to He Lingchuan’s eye, the horses were not the only large shapes among the trunks. Something else had mixed into the herd, something with bulkier figures, heavier, and a full size larger than the cavalry mounts.

It was a herd of black bulls.

Each stood at least two meters tall at the shoulder. Every single one of them was glossy with health, and their bodies were corded with thick muscle.

The hornbill swooped down onto the largest, strongest bull in the group.

Its pair of heavy, forward-curving horns was black and polished like cast iron. Straightened, they would run over two meters tip to tip. Anything they gored, man or beast, would likely lose half their life in a single blow.

The hornbill perched right on those horns and let out two harsh cries. The bull lifted its head, glanced over at the humans, twitched an ear, and went back to grazing.

They clustered so tightly together they might as well have been a moving wall, claiming the richest patch of grass and forcing the warhorses to swallow their pride and graze off to the side.

A few of the true giants in that herd were especially eye-catching.

He Chunhua watched them for a long moment, then quietly drew in a breath of cold air. “So that’s the bull monster herd?”

“That’s right. They’re our shock troops. Once they’re armored up and sent charging across the plains, nothing can stand in their way,” Zhao Pan said with a smile. “Most of them are just mutated bulls by birth. Only the biggest ones are bona fide monsters. They lead the whole herd.”

“And the hornbill?”

“That’s their signal officer,” Zhao Pan replied. “Otherwise, once that bunch gets moving, there’s no way for anyone to get close enough to direct them.”

“The bull formation.” He Chunhua clapped his hands. “I’ve heard of that tactic somewhere before.”

Zhao Pan smiled. “General Nanke’s half a book on warfare.”

“Right, right, General Nanke.”

“General Nanke? As in General Nanke of Panlong City?” He Lingchuan had not expected to hear that name here, of all places. His tongue ran ahead of his mind. “He wrote a book on warfare?”

Zhao Pan said offhandedly, “Yeah. His tactics are extremely practical. It’s a shame that he died so young and only managed to write half a book.”

He Lingchuan’s heart skipped a beat. “How did he die?”

That question caught Zhao Pan off guard. He frowned and searched his memory. “I believe he was escorting a merchant caravan when they fell into an ambush. It happened in the Panlong Desert. Governor-General He should know more details than I do.”

He Chunhua nodded. “Yeah. The place was called the Guizhen Stone Forest. The Baling forces partnered with a spider monster that nested in that stone forest and dealt Panlong’s army a devastating blow. General Nanke fell on the field. However, they managed to tie down the enemy’s main force, and the Gale Army was able to use the opportunity to seize Wei City to the north.”

He Lingchuan murmured, “I see...” Inside, though, his thoughts were a crashing tide.

In the Panlong Dreamscape he had walked through, there had been a battle at Guizhen Stone Forest as well. But there, he had managed to blow up Zhu Erniang’s den first, forcing the greater spider monster to abandon the front and rush back to her den. The enemy lying in wait outside the stone forest had never gotten their chance to spring the trap.

Because of that, the Panlong army had preserved most of its strength. They had not been butchered in the bottleneck.

And General Nanke had survived. He had returned safely to Panlong City and even tried later to recruit He Lingchuan into his command.

The same battle, at the same place. And yet with his presence, the outcome in the dreamscape had entirely diverged from the reality he was hearing now.

He had always suspected that he would leave footprints in that dreamscape, that his existence would tug at the threads of events, but only now did he fully grasp it. It was his intervention that changed the outcome of that engagement in the Panlong Dreamscape and, with it, the destinies of many people.

In that world, he could accomplish things that mattered.

If I became stronger, if I rose higher in status, could I change Panlong City’s final fate as well?

The question hit him like a spark in dry grass. His heart sped up, thudding hard against his ribs.

“Chuan’er, what’s wrong?” He Chunhua had noticed the distant look in his eyes.

“Nothing, nothing!” He Lingchuan answered automatically, his gaze drifting back to the grazing beasts. “Those bulls are in excellent condition, that’s all.”

He wondered absently what the meat would taste like.

“Their bravery is paid for in their stomachs. The grain you brought must go to them first. Fortunately, we’re past the hungriest stretch of winter. There’s fresh grass along the riverbank now, and they’re not picky—plant or meat, they’ll eat it. If not for that, we couldn’t afford to keep them.”

Zhao Pan led the pair around to see more of the front line. By the time the He father and son had a clear picture of the situation, the moon was already dipping toward the western horizon.

The rock wolf padded silently up to He Lingchuan’s side and said, “The ape’s looking for you.”

* * *

He Lingchuan returned to his own tent. The medicine ape Ling Guang darted over almost at once, eyes bright. “That medicine is fascinating!”

“What medicine?” He Lingchuan’s mind was still tangled up in the battle that took place in the Guizhen Stone Forest.

“The one that Master gave me a few days ago,” Ling Guang said, producing a small glass vial half-filled with red liquid. “The stuff you took off Dong Rui.”

Right, how did I forget about that? “What did you figure out?”

“There are at least ten ingredients in here. I’ve run tests on it for days, but I still can’t figure out which one is the main ingredient. It doesn’t match anything I know,” Ling Guang reported. “A single drop will kill every plant in an area of about six hundred square meters.”

He Lingchuan stared. “Are you serious? It’s actually poison?”

He clearly remembered that when Dong Rui had pulled the vial out, he had intended to save the ghost ape with it.

Were its injuries so bad that he meant to give the beast an easy death?

No. That just doesn’t make any sense.

“I took one drop and divided it into ten parts. I fed some to pigs, some to horses, and every single one of them convulsed twice, then fell over dead. It’s incredibly effective.”

A jaw-cracking yawn broke from He Lingchuan before he could stop it. Disappointment sank into his bones. “So it really is just poison. Blood-contact or ingestion? Could we smear it on weapons?”

“Let me finish,” Ling Guang protested. For a future top-tier apothecary, giving up that easily was unthinkable. “I tried diluting it, a little at a time. In the end, I discovered that when it’s diluted a hundred times—”

It waved him toward the corner of the tent, where a large bucket of water sat, then led the way outside, beyond the camp, to the edge of a clump of trees.

The ape squatted and poked a small hole in the soil, dropped in a smooth, round seed, and covered it with earth again.

The seed was brown, slightly larger than a soybean.

“What plant is that?”

“It’s the seed of a phoenix tree[1].” Ling Guang pointed to the little mound of dirt. “Now water it.”

This ape’s actually ordering me around now? Who’s the master here?

He Lingchuan rolled his eyes, but he hefted the bucket anyway and poured its contents over the fresh seedbed.

A few breaths later, the soil heaved.

Ling Guang immediately dragged him several paces away. Together, they retreated nearly ten meters.

Then, something bright green burst from the earth and immediately shot upward.

He Lingchuan had just recognized it as a tender sprout when it had already grown to a meter, then two meters, then over three meters.

Branches and leaves pushed out in a frenzy, each one seeming to race the others.

From looking down on it, he blinked and found himself looking level. A few heartbeats later, he was craning his neck to see the crown.

In less than half a stick of incense, the sapling had become a giant over sixteen meters tall.

He Lingchuan found himself unable to take his eyes off it. “You’re calling this a phoenix tree?”

He knew what a phoenix tree looked like. The trunk and the general shape of the branches and leaves did resemble one, but there was one glaring problem.

This one was far too big.

Back in their old residence in Heishui City, there had been a big old phoenix tree in the yard, the trunk straight and green-gray, the canopy spreading only at the top like a parasol.

This thing, by contrast, had branches sprouting from the trunk at every height. The branches themselves swelled thick as trunks, then sprouted more branches from their ends, and the leaves did the same.

Layer by layer, order by order, the whole tree became a tangled mass, like someone had grafted seventeen or eighteen parasol trees together and kneaded them into one.

To make matters worse, the wood’s color shifted as it grew, from fresh green to pale blue, and at the outermost layer to a muddy reddish-brown.

The leaves were worse. Some stayed green, some glowed golden, and some were pure black.

He Lingchuan had never, in his life, seen truly black leaves. Not unless they had already been scorched by lightning or fire.

This tree had no beauty at all. It simply felt... wrong.

He Lingchuan tilted his head back and studied it. The whole thing seemed twisted, contorted, and grotesque.

It was no wonder Ling Guang had insisted they plant it outside the camp. If they had tried this next to his tent, the thing would have flattened the canvas in the space of two deep breaths.

Even here, the commotion was drawing eyes. Soldiers began crowding around, pointing and whispering to each other.

He Lingchuan had to order them back, because while the monstrous tree-ball had slowed, it was still growing upward from sixteen to over twenty meters, then over thirty meters, and outwards as well. It surged and crushed five or six tents beneath its bulk.

The entire crown writhed and squirmed as its limbs pushed and twisted, as if something alive were trapped inside.

There was nothing trapped inside, of course. It was simply growing too fast.

Men tumbled out of their tents, gawking at the spectacle.

He Chunhua and the senior officers, Wu Shaoyi among them, hurried over, drawn by the ruckus.

Across the Han River, the Xun Province camp clearly noticed it too. Torches flared to life in greater numbers, as if they thought the Yuan forces had unleashed some strange new weapon.

He Chunhua pushed through the ring of men and stepped into the clearing. One look at his eldest son, and he sighed inwardly.

Of course, who else would cause such a scene on his first night at the front lines?

“Chuan’er, what’s going on here?”

“Ling Guang and I were testing a new medicine,” He Lingchuan said, scratching his cheek. “The liquid I took off Dong Rui.”

Medicinal liquid from Dong Rui? That was all He Chunhua needed to hear. Well, how could anything brewed by a monster puppet master possibly be normal?

“And how exactly do you plan to tidy this up?”

He Lingchuan glanced at Ling Guang, who then promptly spread both of its hands. “Eek?”

Now you want to play dumb? He Lingchuan said in exasperation, “We can only wait for now. I think the effect is almost spent.”

By then, Zhao Pan had also arrived, frowning as he looked up at the giant phoenix tree. “What in the world is this? Is this something the Xun Province bastards cooked up?”

As a commander, his first instinct was to link any bizarre phenomenon to the enemy across the river. He immediately barked orders to raise the alert.

He Chunhua had just begun to explain when Zhao Pan caught, out of the corner of his eye, a massive shadow shuffling closer to the tree.

It was a bull.

It had been drawn here as well, staring up at the lush canopy. The moment it saw those thick, juicy leaves, instinct took over.

“Stop! Don’t eat that!” Zhao Pan forgot all about dignity and rank. He lunged forward, trying to shove the creature’s head away.

However, it was already too late. The bull had already torn off a mouthful of leaves. Its jaws worked methodically, chewing the leaves to help with digestion.

1. This tree is more commonly known as a Chinese parasol tree. It’s also called a phoenix tree because the mythical bird was said to land only on its branches. This belief led to the tree being considered a symbol of good fortune and auspiciousness. ☜