Where Immortals Once Walked

People were supposed to be the ones coming to him for answers. When had he ever had to suffer this kind of embarrassment?

“My family’s old manuscripts say...” The moment those words left He Lingchuan’s mouth, Dong Rui rolled his eyes so hard they practically clicked. “...that the Red Peak Mine in the northwest of the Chipa Highland was once occupied by an unknown creature. It ate miners, villagers, and even the patrol guards who went in to deal with it. It could fuse the human mother and the mine together into a nest, resulting in the interior structure resembling a human body!”

He Lingchuan then pointed at the tendon-like cords hanging around the platform. “Once the human mother lost consciousness, the ravenous devourer used these tendons to connect her to the cave and reshape it.”

“A nest?” Dong Rui’s brow furrowed even tighter. “And they made it resemble a human body?”

“The ravenous devourer is also a god’s child or divine child,” Zhu Erniang chimed in, her voice low and eerie. “Among the gods, the Ferry-Crossing Mother isn’t considered powerful, but it can give birth to ghostspawn. The strongest and most savage of them is the ravenous devourer, and those sometimes even exceed their mother’s ability. From the moment it’s born, it looks for a place to build its nest. Once the nest is complete, it becomes extremely difficult to defeat it inside.”

He Lingchuan put on a look of sincere astonishment. “How do you know all that?”

“I dealt with them in the Ancient Era,” Zhu Erniang said proudly. “Those so-called... heavenly gods!”

“The Ferry-Crossing Mother’s divine child?” Dong Rui swept his gaze around. “Then where is it now? Where’s the ravenous devourer?”

“It was likely exterminated,” Zhu Erniang said. “When I moved into the Demon Nest, it was already empty.”

He Lingchuan was genuinely baffled. “The Jiana were eaten to their very last members, and the swamp is named after the Demon Nest it built. Who could possibly have exterminated a ravenous devourer?”

“Beijia.”

That answer caught them off guard.

“Back then, the swamp actually wasn’t home to only the Jiana. There were seven to eight tribes in total. And outside the swamp, in the Western Mountain Marshlands, villages and towns were scattered everywhere. People lived there too. After it finished eating the Jiana, the ravenous devourer went outward to hunt. Over a dozen years, it nearly ate every living thing within 150 kilometers. Later, it moved west and wiped out two Beijia border garrison towns as well. With a demonic creature like that devouring those of their territory, Beijia could not just pretend nothing was happening, so they sent powerful fighters to eliminate it.” Zhu Erniang flicked a foreleg dismissively. “Of course, that’s all from what the surviving Jiana descendants told me. I don’t know the finer details.”

So the ravenous devourer here was eliminated by Beijia?

But something still doesn’t add up.

“If the human mother on the platform is disconnected from the cave, the cave should return to normal,” He Lingchuan said, frowning. “There’s no one on the platform anymore, so why does the Demon Nest still look like this? Why didn’t it revert?”

“I don’t know.” Even with Zhu Erniang’s breadth of experience, she could only offer two guesses. “Either she lay here so long that she changed the entire cave, or this ravenous devourer was excessively strong.”

Either way, she did not care.

Dong Rui, on the other hand, was intensely focused. He bent down, studied the tendon-like material, and even used a blade to slice off several strips. “If it’s related to the ferry-crossing spawn, then it has value! It’s worth studying, very much worth studying.”

He Lingchuan wandered around the stone chamber once, then suddenly noticed a pile of broken stones tucked into the deepest corner, as if someone had deliberately buried something.

When he walked over, he saw that a deep pit had been dug beneath the rubble. Inside lay a half-exposed skeleton.

“I moved the stones aside to look,” Zhu Erniang said. The first time she came, the rubble had been neatly piled.

Why’s a skeleton buried here?

In front of the small cairn of stones stood a square slab. It looked like a headstone, except it was blank. There was no writing on it; only a symbol had been drawn on it.

It looked like half a maple leaf, but he was not entirely sure.

The lines were black, like charcoal.

He Lingchuan immediately remembered something from the underground palace at Red Peak. Ever since entering that place, he had occasionally seen little pictures on the rock walls, also drawn in charcoal—flowers, birds, insects, fish, and strange lines he could not interpret at all, like a child’s doodles.

“Who drew this?”

Dong Rui saw the symbol too and answered casually, “Maybe some wild kid wandered in and doodled on the walls.” He glanced at Zhu Erniang and added quickly, “Before monsters such as yourself moved in.”

Zhu Erniang shot that down at once. “When I arrived, the entrance to this place was sealed with sandstone.”

A cold crawl ran up He Lingchuan’s spine.

If no one had entered after the ravenous devourer vanished, then who made the doodles?

Dong Rui did not care about that kind of mystery. He crouched to examine the skeleton. “Hm, female, and based on the bone age, she was probably in her forties.”

Is this the ravenous devourer’s human host or mother? I mean, other than her, what other woman could appear at the very heart of the Demon Nest?

“Was she the ravenous devourer’s human mother?” He Lingchuan pointed back toward the stone platform. “She should’ve been lying there. Who buried her here?”

“Could it have been the people from Beijia who exterminated the ravenous devourer?”

“Maybe.” He Lingchuan kept staring at the blank headstone.

He had fought a ravenous devourer in the dreamscape not long ago. There were even a few claw marks on the ground here that looked like the same kind of damage.

Dong Rui’s point was not unreasonable. After all, burying the dead was the sort of thing humans did.

And yet, in He Lingchuan’s gut, an odd, absurd possibility was forming, one that he did not quite dare to say aloud.

Could it be?

“Alright, I’ve shown you what you wanted. The herbs have arrived. Now go work for me!”

She understood that haste made waste, and she was not in a rush. She had waited centuries, so what was another month or two?

On the way back to Dong Rui’s workroom, He Lingchuan’s thoughts were a tangled knot.

He truly had not expected that the last dream would connect to reality like this.

Two demon nests, two ravenous devourers...

Did both of them truly exist?

Is it because the Generous Pot sensed that I was about to drift down the Han River into Demon Nest Swamp that it arranged the Red Peak Mine mission for me in the dreamscape?

Is it trying to help me understand what I would soon face in reality?

He Lingchuan did not think it stopped there.

His missions and choices within the dreamscape always seemed to be guided, subtly but deliberately, whether he noticed it or not.

Who’s doing it? The Generous Pot?

Does the divine artifact have a mind of its own? Could it be conscious?

He Lingchuan’s mind raced. He kept feeling like clues just kept appearing right before his eyes, but then they slipped away every time he got close.

Always so close.

Always just a little short!

The frustration was maddening.

“Hey, we’re here!” Dong Rui stopped ahead and waved a hand in front of He Lingchuan’s face. “Did Zhu Erniang suck your soul out?”

Only if Lady Two were some hot-tempered little sweetheart. He Lingchuan slapped his hand down. “What do you want?”

“Help.” Dong Rui pointed at the corner where the herbs were stacked into a little hill, then pointed at two large square stones bigger than millstones. “Make a stone grinder first. We need to grind all of that into powder!”

“Don’t you have a mortar and pestle?” He Lingchuan, pampered young master that he was, did not love manual labor.

“My pestle is tiny. It can’t handle that volume. I need you to build something bigger than a millstone.” Dong Rui gave him a sidelong look. “I specifically asked for you to be my assistant. If you won’t work, go back to Zhu Erniang.”

Hovering around a man-eating spider monster was not exactly safe. It tended to stimulate appetites. He Lingchuan sighed, drew his saber, and started carving stone.

This was not a job for a saber at all, but they were in the heart of a swamp, so they did not exactly have easy access to tools. Fleeting Life had never suffered such indignity in its life.

He Lingchuan carved carefully, terrified of damaging his treasured saber.

A spider guard stood at the doorway, supervising.

“Flatten it first, then polish it. Yeah, make it flatter. That’ll make it easier for you to use later,” Dong Rui said as he sorted herbs, his mouth never stopping.

Meanwhile, the spider monsters had actually dug up some human tools for them, bringing them axes, chisels, and the like. He Lingchuan casually picked one up and said, “Can you make another like Thirty-Four? Whatever base materials you need, I’ll find a way to catch them.”

Thirty-Four was the strange bird that had carried Dong Rui out of danger again and again. With spiders everywhere around the Demon Nest, they probably needed the sky if they wanted to escape.

“You think I don’t want to?” Dong Rui snapped. “Before modification, Thirty-Four was a broad-nosed bat with a trace of the bloodline of an ancient greater monster. Do you have any idea how many years I searched to find one? You think monster puppets are something I can mass-produce like cheap wooden puppets littering the street? Huh?”

His voice climbed higher and higher. Clearly, he had been holding in that anger. After all, what kind of monster puppet master was he without monster puppets?

He Lingchuan chuckled. “I’ve noticed your monster puppets all obey you completely, so can you...?” With the spider guard at the door, he did not spell it out. He only gestured toward the heart chamber cavern.

If Dong Rui could use body modification to control Zhu Erniang, that would be insane.

Of course, if that ever happened, the first one to run would be He Lingchuan.

“In your dreams,” Dong Rui sighed. “My puppets either get raised from young, or they’re simple-minded, or they’re gravely injured with muddled consciousness. It’s only then that I can scrub their old identity and make them recognize me as master. Zhu Erniang is a greater monster who has survived from the Ancient Era. Her soul is probably tougher than ours by orders of magnitude. If I tried that, I’d be begging to die.”

“Then how confident are you that you can make the drug she wants?”

Dong Rui did not answer.

He took the tendon-like material left behind by the ravenous devourer and cut it into several pieces—one he burned, one he soaked in medicine, and another he ground into powder.

Just as He Lingchuan thought he might keep quiet, Dong Rui finally shook his head and said, “I honestly don’t know. If the red liquid you stole from me were still here, or if I could get a physical sample from a ferry-crossing ghostspawn, then my success rate would jump.”

He Lingchuan blinked. “A ferry-crossing ghostspawn would help too?”

“Obviously!” Dong Rui snapped. “Ferry-crossing ghostspawn are half man, half god—they’re practically the prototype for the ghost beasts! If the gods created ghost beasts, they probably used them as the blueprint!”

He Lingchuan thought about it and had to agree. Ferry-crossing ghostspawn could walk the mortal realm, were nearly immune to origin energy, and possessed powerful, bizarre abilities. The ghost beasts that appeared in the early Middle Era shared those same traits.

“But the ravenous devourer isn’t in the Demon Nest, and all we’ve got left are these tendon-like cords. Tsk, we’ve really got it rough,” Dong Rui muttered, scratching his head. “Now go grind the herbs! And while you’re at it, drag over the weakest spider monster from the corner!”

Five test subjects were already lined up. Zhu Erniang did not care about her offspring, so Dong Rui felt even less burdened about using them.

When the spider monster was delivered, it was tightly bound in ropes. Its coloring even took on a reddish hue, reminding He Lingchuan of the big hairy crabs that showed up every ninth month of the year[1].

Then Dong Rui raised his blade and hacked off all eight of its legs in one swift sequence.

The spider monster shrieked and chittered in agony.

1. This should be referring to Christmas Island red crabs. ☜