Where Immortals Once Walked

But in this era, even cultivators scrambled to secure official posts and salaries. How could ordinary people possibly believe that their ancestors had once stood shoulder to shoulder with gods and demons?

“I understand.” He Lingchuan reached into his robe, took out the red medicine, and carefully dripped five drops into Elder Liang’s empty vial.

Elder Liang glanced at his disciple, who immediately slipped out of the tent.

A quarter of an hour later, the young man returned with a wooden bead.

This was a seabed wood bead, the kind specially refined to house a beast soul.

He Lingchuan took it and probed its aura. It felt like the soul of a giant ape.

Not bad, they didn’t cheap out.

Elder Liang gave him a brief, reserved smile. His expression settled back into its accustomed calm.

Watching the elder’s departing back, He Lingchuan shrugged.

The history spanning nearly three thousand years between the Heavenly Demon and the present was complex. You could not blame everything on the Heavenly Demon’s skill at temptation or on the common people’s forgetfulness. The immortal sects and Daoist lineages had done plenty of unseemly things of their own, actions that had tarnished the great deeds of their forebears and steadily eroded their image in the hearts of the people.

Those parts, Elder Liang had very pointedly left out. However, in the Panlong Dreamscape’s Literature Pavilion, where He Lingchuan had chewed on old books as if they were dry rations, he had read quite a few works that told the other side of the story. He was not about to swallow a single narrative whole.

See? There really were benefits to reading “useless” books.

After that, he wolfed down breakfast, barely tasting it, and went straight into the military encampment to look for someone.

Half an hour later, he changed direction and went to find Ling Guang instead.

The medicine ape had more or less claimed an entire tent for itself, barricading it with the kind of “do not disturb” air that warded off all strangers. Considering how much skill it had demonstrated in emergency treatment, and how much chaos it had caused just last night, the logistics officer had no choice but to turn a blind eye and let it be.

When He Lingchuan stepped into the tent, Ling Guang whipped around with a glare, its mouth already opening to curse. But then it snapped its mouth shut when it saw that it was its master.

He Lingchuan asked, “Well? Did you figure anything out?”

Ling Guang’s shoulders visibly slumped. “It’ll take more time.”

Its two eyes were bloodshot. He could tell it had stayed up all night.

“Even ancient immortals couldn’t fully unravel that secret medicine,” He Lingchuan said. “You planning to crack the whole thing in a single night? Take a break. And lend me your pill furnace while you’re at it.”

The ape tensed immediately. As a medicine ape, the furnace was practically its life. “What do you want it for?”

“I’m going to refine something. I don’t have a suitable furnace on hand, and yours will do nicely. I’ll be quick.”

“If you need medicine or pills, I’ll refine them. You just have to tell me what kind.”

“I’m not refining pills. I’m refining an artifact. Do you know how to do that?” He Lingchuan’s gaze swept the tent, looking for the furnace, but he did not see it.

Ling Guang stared. “Refining an artifact? You?” What kind of lunatic refines artifacts on the front line of a war? Why not go back to Dunyu City and find Master Li Fubo?

“Come on, don’t drag your feet. I won’t break your furnace!” He Lingchuan was growing impatient. “I’m just making a copper man. Simple stuff.”

“Copper man?” Ling Guang was stunned. “My furnace won’t fit something that big.”

“A small one,” He Lingchuan said, making a measuring gesture. “Half the size of my palm.”

Under his repeated prodding, Ling Guang reluctantly fished a palm-sized three-legged furnace from its pocket and set it on the ground. It muttered a few incantations under its breath.[1]

In an instant, the little brass furnace swelled, expanding until it stood nearly two meters tall. Its polished surface gleamed enough to reflect the tent’s interior.

Clearly, the ape took good care of it.

Back in the Panlong Dreamscape, He Lingchuan had already spent days studying the Golden-Armored Copper Man Art, turning every detail over in his mind, rehearsing each step repeatedly. The cost of failure was sky-high. Even he could not afford to waste the materials.

Fortunately, this particular secret art had one saving grace. The hardest part of the copper man art lay in how to control it. The actual forging process was comparatively simpler, needing only four or five distinct steps from start to finish.

For a rookie like him, that was about as friendly as such an advanced technique could get.

With the furnace summoned and a modest flame burning within, He Lingchuan followed the diagrams in the manual and added the ingredients one by one—Wu Metal, refined iron, and other alloys and metals, each in precisely measured portions.

While studying the refinement recipe in the Panlong Dreamscape, he had noticed something surprising. Out of the seven or eight crucial materials required to make a copper man, he already had six in his possession.

They were the leftover scraps from repairing the Fleeting Life treasured saber. He had never had time to clean out his storage ring, and now, those neglected fragments had become ready-made resources. Wu Metal and refined iron were the most important. Without them, the copper man was just a lump of copper without any structure or strength.

As for the remaining one or two materials that he lacked, they would primarily affect the toughness of the outer shell and the agility of the joints. In the secret tome, the original author had noted that later refiners could add supplemental ingredients of their own to create custom upgrades, crafting personally “flavored” golden-armored copper men.

At present, He Lingchuan did not need any such special features. He just wanted a copper man that could take a hit, throw a punch, and help him survive.

He could feel Ling Guang’s shocked gaze, but last night’s dreamscape entry had only sharpened his sense of urgency. Wen Daolun’s cryptic warning about deep, lingering misfortune had prodded him hard. The danger wrapped around his fate was not going to resolve itself. He had to act.

There was no such thing as perfect preparation. The tool that could be made now was the best tool.

He urged Ling Guang to keep increasing the furnace’s temperature. Without enough heat, the Wu Metal would never melt. Thankfully, the medicine ape’s treasured furnace was not an ordinary pill furnace. Some special pills required powdered metals and high-melting-point hardwoods; ordinary furnaces could only reach four or five hundred degrees, far too low to melt iron. This one was different; its upper limit was much higher.

As the temperature rose, Ling Guang grew more cautious. He had no idea where the furnace’s extreme lay. Molten metal was one thing. Exploding furnaces were another.

At last, the hardest-to-melt Wu Metal began to soften. The ape carefully stabilized the heat. Seeing this, He Lingchuan pulled a small metal mold from his robe.

“Pour it in here.”

Ling Guang cast him a look that clearly said: And where exactly did that come from?

The mold was about two handspans long, with a recessed human-shaped cavity in the center, subdivided into multiple layers and sections. It was a proper metal casting mold.

On a frontline battlefield like this, where had he found such a thing on such short notice?

He grinned. “You remember that fellow who summoned an azure-kerchief laborer to hold down the bull yesterday?”

Ling Guang nodded.

“He had this. It cost me two taels of silver to borrow it, with the condition that I return it when I’m done.” That man did not make golden-armored copper men, but most large humanoid summons shared a similar frame. A generic mold was good enough for a first attempt.

The inside was what mattered. Real men valued inner quality.

The monkey rolled its eyes. What kind of person thought like this at a time like this?

Next came the layered casting. Fortunately, a pill furnace already had internal partitions to keep ingredients separate and avoid mixing medicinal properties. Now they would serve a new purpose. Under He Lingchuan’s direction, Ling Guang poured the different metal mixtures into different sections of the mold. Refined iron, red copper, frost silver, Wu Metal—each alloy corresponded to part of the copper man’s body, namely its foundational bones, its muscles, the equivalent of tendons and ligaments, and finally the active core that allowed movement.

Ling Guang’s hands were steady. He Lingchuan’s incantations were quick and precise. Between the two of them, no major mistakes slipped through.

Once the first layer of bones had set partially but not yet fully hardened, it was time for the most delicate part.

He Lingchuan sliced his wrist and let a small stream of blood drip into the mold. This was the ritual of bonding, a way to inscribe ownership from the very beginning. Using his own blood, he began carving tiny talismanic runes into the metal framework.

Each rune was smaller than a fly’s head and written in the ancient immortal script.

At this point, he could not help but feel grateful to Sun Fuling. Those brutally thorough lessons on the immortal’s language had fortified his foundations. Now, at a moment when every breath counted, he managed to etch the words without a single error.

If even one word was wrong, he would have to scrap the entire copper man and start all over again.

Before the bone layer fully solidified, he finished inscribing the last rune.

The subsequent steps unfolded smoothly, one stage flowing into the next. When all the different metals had cooled and hardened, what lay before him was a complete set of copper man components—limbs, torso, head, each piece shaped for assembly.

It was a DIY Copper Man, in neatly cast parts. He Lingchuan put them together carefully, following the secret tome’s diagrams until a tiny humanoid figure sat in his palm. Its surface was dull and faintly mottled, and it was no taller than half a hand.

Then he pressed the newly acquired beast soul into its chest cavity, letting the giant ape’s soul sink into the metal and turn into the copper man’s brain of sorts. After that, he stuffed a small profound crystal into the hollow at its back to serve as an energy source. Now came the truly crucial part, which was establishing mental control.

According to the tome, the very first connection between master and copper man was the key. Whether the construct would later move like an extension of his own body or lumber about like a stubborn mule depended largely on this initial attempt.

He focused his mind and began reciting the control incantation again and again. He did it once, twice, a dozen times. Perhaps it was the repetition, or perhaps the little copper man finally grew impatient, but its head finally turned with a faint click. The tiny metal face rotated toward him, and its hand jerked up to extend its middle finger.

That was the exact gesture he had asked it to make. It had just chosen the wrong finger. He had meant to instruct it to raise its index finger.

“It worked, it worked!” He clapped his hands together, delight bubbling up from somewhere deep inside. The excitement was reminiscent of being seventeen or eighteen and getting his first toy. He was filled with pure, fierce, and unfiltered joy. As for the incorrect finger, that was a minor flaw. More practice and repeated corrections should sort out its motor control. Or maybe the issue came from substituting materials and skipping those last two rare ingredients.[2]

Ling Guang, who had been watching with rapt attention, was sweating from the earlier effort of controlling the furnace’s heat. “How big can it get?”

“At least three meters tall.”

Man and ape locked eyes, and they then said in unison, “Let’s go test it outside!”

Outside the tent, the personal guards stiffened.

What are these two ancestors planning now? Wasn’t last night’s chaos enough for them?

* * *

Baili Qing’s deputy, Fu Xin, led a squad of a dozen personal guards northward, trudging over mountain paths for an entire day before they finally reached Xinqiao Township.

They had barely gotten within sight of the settlement when two men leaped out of the roadside undergrowth.

Fu Xin’s hand flew to his blade, drawing it halfway out before he recognized the faces under the travel-worn helmets.

They were allies.

One of the two men said, “General Hong ordered us to wait here and rendezvous with General Baili.”

Fu Xin’s grip tightened around his saber hilt. “General Baili has already laid down his life. As for the mine... Only we made it out.”

The two soldiers’ faces became filled with utter shock. “A-and the others?”

Fu Xin shook his head.

Their faces twisted with pain. Fu Xin ground his teeth and said hatefully, “You were with Hong Chenglue. Tell me, did you intercept any troops coming from the west?”

The two exchanged a look, then both remained silent.

Which was answer enough.

Fu Xin’s jaw clenched until the muscles in his cheeks jumped. “Lead the way.”

The two soldiers still went through the motions, “Any pursuit behind you?”

“No. We tested them several times,” Fu Xin said curtly. “No one followed. Now move. Quickly.”

The pair led them into the forest, heading northeast through a maze of trees and thickets.

“Hong Chenglue isn’t in Xinqiao Township?” Fu Xin was done with courtesy; he used General Hong’s full name without honorific.

“No,” one of the two men replied. “General Hong chose another location.”

The further they went, the more remote the paths became, but there were always animal trails to follow, and Fu Xin noticed plenty of fresh hoof prints in the mud and patches of frost.

They walked like that for another eight to ten hours, boots crunching on stone and frost, their breath steaming in the cold air. Eventually, they began to climb, the slope steepening until they were halfway up a mountain. It was only then that the guides stopped.

“We’re here?” Fu Xin lifted his head to take a look at where they were. Above them stood a stockade.

Timber palisades, cheval-de-frise, lookout towers, and a suspended gate, all the standard defenses were present. And from the weathering on the wood and stone, this place clearly had not been built yesterday.

He followed the guides through the gate. Everywhere he looked, he saw the marks of axes and blades on the palisades and doorframes, as well as the dark stains of blood that had yet to be fully scrubbed away.

Inside the stockade stood seventeen or eighteen rows of houses. The walls were thick, made of packed earth. The doors were narrow, windows smaller still, and those windows were set high up near the roof. The design was a clear blend of fortress and dwelling.

And this place had certainly been lived in. There were abandoned tools and broken furniture scattered in corners, ashes in the fire pits, and a lingering scent of cooked meat and smoke.

“What was this place originally?”

“A bandits’ den,” the guide replied. “Locally, they call this Gold-and-Silver Mountain. We seized this place last night. General Hong says we’ll be staying here for the time being.”

1. Note that you should probably be visualizing the pill furnace as a sort of alchemical cauldron. ☜

2. Um, I don’t get the analogy about the toy, but that’s what it says. ☜