Where Immortals Once Walked

That growl did not sound like a threat so much as bluster, noise covering weakness.

The creature had clearly heard He Lingchuan and the others closing in, but it did not spare them so much as a glance.

What is it staring at?

He Lingchuan had barely blinked when a sand-colored figure flashed across his vision.

Wait, isn’t that the guardian spirit we saw back at Red Peak Town? It actually came in here as well?

The sand leopard darted to the ferry-crossing ghostspawn’s side and snapped at its ankle. Clearly, even it had judged that the bone armor covering the creature’s body was far too hard and did not want to crack its own teeth.

The sand leopard was unbelievably fast. The ferry-crossing ghostspawn could not dodge the other party’s attack, stumbling as it was yanked off balance.

It immediately hunched down, getting ready to smash the sand leopard with a spike-studded fist when He Lingchuan hurled the Fleeting Life saber over at it.

Back in the dead-end passage, the space had been too cramped, so he had not had any room to throw it. But now, with the distance just right, the saber’s Surestrike Throw ability could finally shine.

The creature jerked its head aside, narrowly dodging the first strike. However, Fleeting Life simply spun in a brilliant arc and carved open a bloody gash across its chest.

He Lingchuan’s hand closed back around the returning saber just as a streak of fire shot past in front of him. The fire shot so fast that it was almost impossible to follow, heat rolling off it in waves.

It plunged straight into the wound on the ghostspawn’s chest that had just been opened up by He Lingchuan’s saber and drove it back three meters, pinning it firmly against the rock wall.

Only then did everyone get a clear look as to what it even was, and it turned out to actually be a standard-issue long spear. There was nothing ornate about it, except that its entire shaft burned with a shimmering flame, pale blue shading toward ghostly white. The color alone indicated its high heat.

The ghostspawn’s wound charred black in an instant, smoke and a sickening roasted stench rising together. It screamed at the top of its lungs, wanting to drag its “mother” out and take a few more bites of her to restore its strength, but the sand leopard had already taken advantage of its distraction to snatch the woman from its back and sprint away in the opposite direction.

The ghostspawn tried to wrench the spear free, but the moment its claws touched the shaft, the heat seared straight through bone and flesh. White smoke sizzled up where it made contact, and it simply could not get a proper grip of the spear.

After that, fresh footsteps sounded from the passage, six or seven people by the sound of it.

Their long-awaited reinforcements had finally arrived. The patrol guards were overjoyed. He Lingchuan, however, froze in place.

A dark red figure walked past him, coming to a stop about three meters away from the pinned monster. It met the ghostspawn’s gaze directly.

That... could it be?

A cold voice echoed within every mind present, “You send your little ghosts to cause trouble in my city, Ferry-Crossing Baisha[1], what is it you intend?”

The creature nailed to the wall only thrashed and roared, showing not the slightest sign of forming words.

The Red General waited for a good dozen breaths. When he saw it still would not answer, he said mildly, “Very well. No matter who sends you, the ones marching to their deaths are your offspring.”

The ghostspawn suddenly let out a long, rising howl. Then, its body began to change, growing stronger and bulkier. A second pair of arms sprouted from its back, and its face twisted into something closer to human.

This was a form close to its adult stage. However, whatever had triggered the transformation was clearly forced and unnatural, warped in all the wrong ways.

It parted its lips to speak, but then there was suddenly a flash of cold light, and the entire cavern lit up in that instant.

The Red General brushed his hands together lightly. “I lost interest in listening.”

Everyone else: “...” The general really is willful.

The next moment, half of the ghostspawn’s head slipped free and dropped to the floor. It bounced twice, rolled in a circle, and came to rest. The cut was perfectly clean.

He Lingchuan’s heart tightened.

Did the Red General draw his blade just now?

But there wasn’t even a sound.

The whole group exhaled together, letting out a long sigh of relief.

This creature that had been such a nightmare for them just earlier. It had practically been an unkillable cockroach from hell. Yet despite the power it had shown earlier, it had been dispatched by the Red General as if it were nothing at all. Sure enough, once the underground palace and the creature were separated from each other, the difficulty of dealing with this ferry-crossing ghostspawn plummeted.

With the crisis truly over, pain and exhaustion surged into awareness all at once. The three of them nearly could not even remain standing.

The Red General flicked his wrist, and his saber moved. He hooked an oval object out from inside the creature’s skull and tucked it away. After that, he turned to face them and said, “Well done. If we’d waited until that ravenous devourer had fully settled its underground palace, tearing this nest apart would have been anything but easy.”

This was still considered relatively easy?

Three patrol squads, twenty-six people in all, had entered. Now, only six or seven were still alive, and every one of them was wounded.

However, they had all just been introduced to a new term.

Wait, ravenous devourer?

The Red General seemed to hear their unspoken confusion. For once, he offered an explanation, “The Ferry-Crossing Mother gives birth to many children, but only a few have any chance of becoming a ravenous devourer. Within the first ten days after they’re born, the more people they devour, the stronger they become, and their mastery of divine techniques deepens. Also, they can use a host’s body to build their den or nest, a so-called blood-and-flesh fortress. We were lucky this time. We caught it early, and it chose a sparsely populated place. The number of people it’s eaten is limited.”

After a short pause, he continued, “In the ancient era, there were ravenous devourers that devoured entire cities, claiming tens of thousands of lives at a time. For a short while, their strength could rival that of a true immortal. The blood-and-flesh fortresses they built were ones that even the life-bound artifacts of ordinary immortals could not break. Killing this one is also a massive blow to the Ferry-Crossing Mother.”

The Red General’s gaze came to rest on the three of them. “Are there any other survivors in the mine?”

He Lingchuan opened his mouth to answer, but before he could, Skinny and the others limped out from the rear, calling out as they came, “We need medical attention over here!”

He had Duan Xinyu slung over his back, still unconscious. Xu Chun’s last surviving squadmate staggered along beside him, supporting the guard whose eyes had been injured.

That man was exceptionally lucky to have made it through the battle at the dead-end passage alive. The ravenous devourer must have decided he was no threat, saving him for a midnight snack later.

Two of the Red General’s guards immediately stepped forward to take over.

Before long, more men hurried in from outside the mine, bearing hastily assembled stretchers. The two stabilized wounded were loaded up and carried out.

As for the unconscious woman, a soldier asked the Red General for instructions.

He gave her a single look. “Carry her back to Red Peak Town,” he ordered.

Skinny opened his mouth, closed it, and opened it again. Twice, words rose and died on his tongue.

He stood just behind He Lingchuan. No one else noticed, but the Red General turned his head toward him and said, “Speak.”

Skinny twitched, startled. After a brief hesitation, he said, “General, I think there’s something strange deeper in the mine.”

“Explain.”

“When I dug Duan Xinyu out, I noticed curved pits in the rock wall. When I was coming back, I paid attention on purpose and found more of those same pits, all over the southwestern section of the mine.” He licked his dry lips. “I dug for gold for two years in the Western Woods Mine. Those pits look a lot like the marks left by fire-setting[2].”

This mine had gold?

Fire-setting was a method of traditional mining wherein fires were set against a rock face to heat the stone, which was then doused with cold water, causing the rock to fracture by thermal shock. The heating typically caused the thermal shock itself by producing different degrees of expansion in different parts of the rock. After being doused with cold water, the rock was then picked at with mining picks. This was one of the most common methods used in gold mining.

The Red General actually seemed taken aback for a couple of breaths before he nodded and murmured, “No wonder. Very well, I’ll mark a contribution to your name.”

As soon as he decided, the adjutant at his side began writing it down.

Skinny coughed lightly. “C-could this be treated as an anonymous report?”

The Red General’s tone did not change. “Yes.”

He really did seem easy to reason with, at least on that front.

After that, they all followed the Red General out of the mine. By then, the mountain path had been fully cleared, and carriages and horses waited outside.

On the way back, everyone else let their mounts fall a full horse-length behind the Red General.

The aura around that person said “keep out” more clearly than any signboard. Even the usually fearless Willow, who feared neither heaven nor earth, kept her eyes lowered and her mouth shut, too intimidated to speak. She was even afraid that if she got too close, the frost radiating off him would burn her.

Only He Lingchuan nudged his horse forward until he was level with the Red General. He had too many questions burning in his chest not to ask.

“General, why didn’t you let the ravenous devourer speak just now?”

He had been walking Panlong City’s dreamscape for over half a year. Today, at last, he had seen the true face of the army’s war god.

And he actually turned out to be a “She.”[3]

She looked to be about twenty-six or twenty-seven at most. She had long eyebrows like swept ink, phoenix eyes, an upturned nose, and full lips. Her features matched the old “Three Courts and Five Eyes[4]” standard so perfectly she did not look born so much as crafted. It was as though an immortal beauty from a painting stepped into the world, or a porcelain figure carved with obsessive care by a master artisan.

She was beautiful, exquisite, and utterly devoid of human warmth.

Her tea-colored[5] eyes were cold and merciless. The look she turned on him cut like wind and steel. The instant it touched him, his heart jolted; he turned his gaze away almost reflexively.

It was the pressure of someone truly, overwhelmingly strong—a presence from on high that made others instinctively lower their heads.

That the Red General was a woman, He Lingchuan had already guessed.

He had simply assumed the one he would see was Zhong Shengguang’s daughter, Zhong Wuhan.

But judging from age, Zhong Wuhan at this time could be at most fifteen or sixteen, which would be ten years younger than the woman before him.

More importantly, He Lingchuan had seen this face before.

In the Mitian Temple within the Panlong Dreamscape, the colossal statue that received the people’s worship bore more than a passing resemblance to her.

So this is the mortal appearance of Lady Mitian herself?

“The ravenous devourer’s intelligence is limited. The one I wanted to speak to was the Ferry-Crossing Mother behind it,” the Red General replied. Her tone remained calm, words precise. “It hesitated for a long time and said nothing. That tells me the Ferry-Crossing Mother doesn’t have the authority to decide on its own. When it was about to open its mouth again just now, that would have been the true controller arriving.”

The phrasing was a little convoluted. It took He Lingchuan a moment to unpack it. The Red General was saying that even the Ferry-Crossing Mother was being ordered around by someone else.

“You didn’t want to talk to the true controller?”

“I already know what they want to say,” she answered coldly. “There’s no need to hear it. Knowing that the Ferry-Crossing Mother itself is a puppet was enough.”

He Lingchuan fell silent, mulling it over.

On the surface, her words were straightforward. The meaning underneath, though, was murky. In the end, he just did not have enough information to piece things together.

However, Dong Rui had mentioned before that the Ferry-Crossing Mother was not very high in the hierarchy of gods. Humans came in ranks, and it was hardly any different for gods.

“Anything else, He Lingchuan?”

He was stunned. “You know who I am?”

“I know every warrior in Panlong City.”

If anyone else had said that, it would have sounded like arrogant nonsense. But from the Red General, it felt different.

She represented the gods. If she said she knew you, then she knew you.

She even added, “Your performance was not bad.”

Oh? Is that an official Panlong City stamp of approval?

He Lingchuan gave a couple of modest, formulaic replies. The Red General did not engage in polite back-and-forth. She simply reached into her robe, took something out, and handed it to him.

“This spoil of war belongs to you.”

He took it and stared at it. It looked exactly like the silkworm pupae[6] snacks he used to eat in his past life. Same color, same pattern: reddish brown with pretty spiral ridges. Just holding it made his fingers itch to crack it open.

Deep-fried in hot oil, sprinkled with a little salt—one bite, crispy and fragrant. Perfect bar snack.

Wait, no, isn’t this what the Red General had fished out of the ravenous devourer’s skull just a moment ago?

“This is?”

“The ravenous devourer’s brain core,” the Red General said evenly. “There’s still a bit of power stored inside. You can trigger it with true energy. It will let you mimic the ravenous devourer’s talent and temporarily erect a blood-and-flesh fortress.”

That’s awesome! He Lingchuan’s eyes lit up. “So I get a fortress skill too?”

The blood-and-flesh fortress had been the youngest ferry-crossing ghostspawn’s trump card. Just on the strength of that home-field advantage alone, it had nearly wiped out three squads of patrol guards.

1. White Sand/Baisha (白沙) has countless meanings that it could be linked to, but it seems to be just the name of the ghostspawn. ☜

2. As per Wikipedia, fire-setting is a method of traditional mining used most commonly from prehistoric times up to the Middle Ages. ☜

3. This is the first mention of this. The author always referred to the Red General with masculine pronouns. ☜

4. I’ve also seen this translated as Three Forehead and Five Eyes, but I personally prefer the more literal translation. The Three Courts part refers to equal courts or vertical proportions of the face, specifically from the hairline to the eyebrows, the eyebrows to the base of the nose or the nostrils, and the nostrils to the chin. On the other hand, the Five Eyes part refers to equal horizontal proportions in the measure of eye-widths. It refers to the eyes themselves, the space between the eyes, and the spaces between the eyes and the ears. ☜

5. If you’re wondering, this is actually brown. ☜

6. These are commonly eaten in some parts of China, and several other Asian nations. ☜