Where Immortals Once Walked

Hah, I wish. Unfortunately, the City of the Dead—no, the Generous Pot—is a hundred times more temperamental than you. It never even makes a peep. If I want to know what it’s thinking, all I can do is make a guess.

This mirror, on the other hand, chatted with him all the time. He Lingchuan was already used to it speaking up out of nowhere, so he simply voiced the question that had been bothering him.

The mirror sounded smug. “Why are you asking around? You should’ve just asked me.”

“Oh?” This thing actually has an answer? Pleasantly surprised, He Lingchuan took the mirror out and held it up, face to face. “Then say it.”

“Actually, I don’t have a definitive conclusion.”

He Lingchuan immediately lost interest. “Then stop wasting my time.”

“This is just me being rigorous!” The “He Lingchuan” inside the mirror looked mildly offended. “Forget me, none of the seniors of the Heavenly Evolution Sect had more than conjecture.”

“Well, a conjecture is still better than nothing. Tell me one.”

“The common explanation is that imperial nectar is an occasional massive surge of heaven-and-earth spirit qi—like volcanoes and earthquakes, it’s something that only erupts after long accumulation. But in the early Middle Era, imperial nectar came one after another. Sometimes it was once every few days, sometimes once every few months. The most outrageous record was three times in three days.”

“Three times in three days?” He Lingchuan sucked in a sharp breath, envy making his molars itch.

Damn, how much cultivation could that be turned into?

“The original explanation was aftershocks,” the mirror went on. “After a major volcanic eruption or earthquake, you often get a string of secondary eruptions and tremors. But there was a senior in the Heavenly Evolution Sect named Tian Shengzi. He spent over a hundred years studying the pattern of imperial nectar’s appearances, and he proposed a bold hypothesis—”

It paused for effect.

“—He believed imperial nectar’s appearance was very likely connected to the death of gods.”

“The death of gods?” He Lingchuan rarely heard that term. “As in a god falling? But after the great catastrophe, which was before the Middle Era even began, the gods already left our world.”

If there were no gods left down here, how could there be the death of a god at all?

“These gods came from somewhere. The great catastrophe merely drove the surviving gods back to their own world, but some were too badly injured. They returned and still died.” The mirror continued, “Back in the early Middle Era, Tian Shengzi put in tremendous effort to obtain the times of those gods’ deaths and compare them against the times imperial nectar erupted. And then, heh!”

He Lingchuan flicked the mirror. “Enough with the suspense. Who taught you this bad habit?”

He did not even ask how Tian Shengzi could possibly get the dates of gods dying in another world. It had to be difficult beyond belief.

The mirror spun in a tight circle on the tabletop. “He found that imperial nectar eruptions or appearances always occurred within two to three months after a god died.”

He Lingchuan’s eyes narrowed. “How many cases did he compare?”

“Twelve,” the mirror said smugly. “And in three of those, the gods died in succession, within twenty hours of one another. Tell me that isn’t too neat to be a coincidence!”

The shortest interval on record for imperial nectar was three eruptions in three days. And two or three months earlier, three gods had died within twenty hours of one another.

The mirror was not wrong. The match was absurdly clean.

“However, Tian Shengzi’s calculations had an error margin of a full month,” He Lingchuan pointed out at once. “Lingxu City’s prediction is accurate to within five days.”

“Oh, come on. It’s been more than two thousand years. You’d hope later generations learned something and improved, wouldn’t you?” the mirror snapped back. “Tian Shengzi published his hypothesis, but hardly anyone believed him. Even most of the Heavenly Evolution Sect thought it was nonsense. After all, he couldn’t actually produce a shred of proof.”

He Lingchuan nodded slowly. I mean, that’s fair. Where was Tian Shengzi supposed to even get evidence for something that intangible?

The mirror went on, “Still, who’s to say later generations didn’t adopt it anyway?”

“If Tian Shengzi was right, why would a god’s death in the heavens cause an imperial nectar eruption in this world?” These were events happening in entirely different worlds.

“How would I know?” The mirror drooped, suddenly becoming listless. “I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. By the time I came into existence, Tian Shengzi had already passed away.”

He Lingchuan thought back to the last eruption of imperial nectar, when the He father and sons and the Coordinating Army had happened to be near Fengling Port.

Everyone had complained that there had not been enough. Split across so many mouths, each person received only a pitiful amount.

If Tian Shengzi was right, then two or three months before that eruption, a god should have died.

What happened two to three months earlier?

A small, seemingly insignificant incident surfaced from the depths of He Lingchuan’s memory.

Before the rebel leader Lu Yao had been killed at Woling Pass, he had swallowed a black talisman. It had clearly been his last desperate trump card, yet nothing happened. Lu Yao was still beheaded on the spot.

He Lingchuan had later handed that talisman over to the Marquis of Songyang. She peeled away the disguise covering the paper and recognized it as an invocation talisman, a talisman that used the caster’s own body as a vessel to invite a god to descend.

As for why the talisman had not worked, it was because the god never responded to Lu Yao. At the time, the Marquis of Songyang had guessed that the god had either abandoned him or been too occupied to appear. In other words, the god had stood him up.

But after hearing the mirror’s story, another possibility rose in He Lingchuan’s mind.

What if the god tied to that invocation talisman was already dead?

If your patron was already gone, it would be strange if you could still summon them.

And when he pushed the timeline back three months from the imperial nectar eruption, one major event did, in fact, line up, and it was an incident that had shaken Yuan’s court.

The rebel leader Hong Xiangqian had been defeated at Woling Pass!

The rebels had originally surged north like an unstoppable tide. After taking Woling Pass, they reached their peak. No matter how the government forces encircled and suppressed them, they could not be crushed. Even Shihuan and the capital itself came under severe threat.

Lu Yao’s invocation talisman had clearly come from Hong Xiangqian. This meant that the Auspicious Origin Divine Master had been worshipping his own god.

So were his string of victories, as well as his eventual defeat, also connected to divine backing?

Had the god behind him suddenly fallen, cutting off support and becoming one of the key reasons the rebel army collapsed?

At the very least, the timing fit.

This then raised an even darker question: who killed the god behind Hong Xiangqian?

The heavens and the mortal realm were already separated. If someone could slay a god, then the only plausible culprit was another god.

So even gods aren’t safe?

“Hey, why are you spacing out again?” The mirror flashed light at his face, trying to snap him out of it.

“If imperial nectar appears again in three days, then which god died this time?”

It seems that the divine realm isn’t peaceful either, huh? He Lingchuan thought with a flicker of malicious amusement. If a few more gods dropped dead, and the mortal realm got a few more rounds of imperial nectar, would his cultivation not surge yet again?

“The monster emperor definitely knows. The information came from Lingxu City, didn’t it? Go and ask it.”

“Maybe I’ll get the chance someday.” He Lingchuan shrugged. “Who knows?”

After tossing around for half the night, if he did not sleep now, dawn would come. He stripped off his clothes, dropped into bed, and fell asleep within seconds.

The mirror: “...”

Is this man a pig or what?

* * *

Since they were already familiar, He Lingchuan went “Bam, bam, bam!” on the door. “A’Luo!”

He called several times before the door finally creaked open.

A’Luo was disheveled, face dark, clearly ready to unload a stream of curses, but the moment he saw it was He Lingchuan, his tone dropped. “What is it?”

If it had been Hu Min, he would have been cursed bloody.

However, He Lingchuan had been making waves in Panlong City lately. Besides, A’Luo had won quite a bit of money betting at the gambling tables thanks to him.

Who could stay angry when seeing their cash cow?

He Lingchuan looked up at the sky. Isn’t it already late morning?

“The sun’s practically roasting your ass. How can you still be asleep at your age?” He had not even finished when he caught movement inside the room behind A’Luo. “Huh? Who’s that?”

“No one.” A’Luo shifted his body to block the view. “Talk, what do you want?”

“You’re not inviting me in?” He Lingchuan chuckled. “Your medicinal tea’s pretty good.”

A’Luo did not budge. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“Sleeping with who?” He Lingchuan raised an eyebrow. They were all young men with hot blood. Summoning someone for the night was not exactly shocking—instinct was instinct, needs were needs. But the fact that A’Luo would not say it outright and would not let him see meant the person inside was not from some brothel.

As A’Luo’s face grew uglier by the second, He Lingchuan cleared his throat and steered back to business. “That imperial nectar powder formula you gave me, can it be improved again?”

“What, was it not working well?” A’Luo sounded genuinely puzzled. “I haven’t heard anything about imperial nectar coming again.”

“It feels like the effect’s still a little weak. I want an upgraded formula, just in case.” This was He Lingchuan’s real intent. “I’ve grown a bit lately. The prescription probably needs adjusting.”

A’Luo reached out and took his pulse, then frowned in thought for a long while. “Your cultivation really has increased fast. There’s also a lot less blockage in your meridians. You can use a stronger formula now.”

Naturally, stronger people needed stronger prescriptions. He Lingchuan now needed a more domineering medicinal power. The Red General’s imperial nectar prescription, for example, definitely would not be the same as an ordinary person’s—that is, if she even used one.

“So?” He Lingchuan prompted.

“So I need to think it through properly. Come back in the evening.”

A’Luo stepped back and slammed the door shut with a bang. If He Lingchuan had not moved quickly, his nose would have been smashed.

He probably did not need “time to think” at all. He Lingchuan heard light footsteps inside, ones much softer than A’Luo’s.

Just as he turned away, Hu Min sprinted over from across the street.

“Broken Blade, what are you doing here? We’ve got a mission!”

He Lingchuan’s spirits jolted awake. His first mission after joining the Gale Army, was it finally here?

He kept one hand on A’Luo’s door and raised his voice. “Do we need to bring A’Luo?”

“It’s not a combat mission. We won’t need him,” Hu Min said, glancing at the wooden door. “Is he home?”

A’Luo’s muffled voice came from inside, flat as a board, “Not home!”

Before his patience ran out and he barked, “Scram,” He Lingchuan and Hu Min wisely made themselves scarce.

Hu Min, speaking like a veteran sharing hard-earned wisdom, said, “The first mission after joining the Gale Army is usually pretty nasty. It’s tradition.”

A hazing ritual. The army’s oldest trick.

“But you said it’s not a combat mission.”

“I don’t know the details either. Upper command specifically assigned it to you three rookies, Willow and Doorboard included.” Hu Min gave a nasty little grin. “No room for the rest of us.”

The Red General had personally authorized He Lingchuan to form his own squad. For a fresh recruit, it was an exceptional promotion and practically unheard of.

In wartime, though, if you had merit and ability, everything was negotiable.