Where Immortals Once Walked

“Young Master, there’s nonstop fighting in the dense woods up ahead. The scent of blood coming from there is heavy.”

“Dense woods?” The youth glanced toward the surface of Three-Heart Lake. “Did those crows say dense woods?”

He lifted his chin and took a few deep sniffs of the air. “Well, the imperial nectar scent is incredibly strong here. On that point, the crows weren’t lying.”

He walked a few steps closer to the lakeshore, then sprang up into a tall tree—the very one He Lingchuan had used to anchor his web—and inhaled again.

With his eyes closed, his nose seemed to see the shape of scent itself. What he sensed was a vast swath of imperial nectar residue hanging over the lake, richer than anything he had ever encountered, and laced through it were a few faint strands of dark, bloody musk.

The youth opened his eyes. “Imperial nectar paste?”

When something got too intense, it flipped to the opposite extreme. To his hypersensitive sense of smell, a fragrance this rich crossed over into something almost rank.

There was no question about it in his mind. He was certain that the scent had to be coming from a substance even denser than ordinary imperial nectar.

It was a scent no living creature could resist, because it reached straight down into the soul and yanked.

The youth’s eyes began to glow with a faint red light, though his voice stayed even.

“Something intercepted imperial nectar over the lake? And it didn’t collect a little, either. Wait, this smells like a human.” It was barely there, diluted by the mountain wind and buried under the nectar’s scent, but he caught it anyway.

Thinking it through, it made sense. The lake was wide open with no canopy or obstruction, so it was an excellent place to catch spirit rain.

“So someone was harvesting imperial nectar in midair?” He looked toward the place where creatures were still tearing into each other. “Then why are they killing each other over there?”

One of his men said, “Maybe they caught him.”

“Well, that would make sense. Let’s go take a look.” The crows had been screaming about “imperial nectar paste” the whole way—a term that acted like a magnet. Who knew how many competitors it had pulled in?

Spirit rain was the kind of miracle that only came once every few decades. And a natural chunk of imperial nectar paste? That was like winning the lottery twice.

At the moment, the victors in the woods were two monsters called laozhi. Their bodies were wolfish, but their heads could split open like a blooming flower bud, revealing whip-like tongues that lashed out.

As juveniles, these creatures were like plants as they were rooted in the ground and unable to move. But once they became monsters, they grew limbs, tore themselves free of the soil, and wandered the forest to hunt. As they matured, the prey on their menu grew larger and larger.

It was the same basic principle as those ginseng dolls and ganoderma horses[1] that could scamper all over the mountains—just bigger, uglier, and hungrier.

They were eating human corpses on the ground, one bite per body, slowly.

As the black-clad youth and his people approached, the two laozhi turned to face them and issued a warning hiss.

They were of the type of creatures that could see without eyes and hear without ears.

“Scram!” the youth said, utterly unafraid as he strode forward. “Or I’ll kill you!”

A violent red light flared in his eyes. The air around him seemed to dim, as if black smoke were coiling at his shoulders.

With every step he took, everything within about five meters began to wither. Trees shed leaves, flowers and grass drooped and died, and even the rich black soil bleached pale and cracked.

One laozhi’s front toe happened to be within that range. It jerked back with a sharp squeal, as if scorched.

That toe shriveled before their eyes. Its light-green skin became mottled with brown spots, like leaf blight.

The spots quickly spread, and the toe turned yellow.

The laozhi had no choice but to bend down and bite its own toe off.

After that lesson, both creatures clearly understood what they were dealing with. When the youth advanced, they retreated. They still hissed a couple of times, but anyone could hear the fear underneath.

They had been badly countered, either by his divine technique or by something in his very nature.

The scent of imperial nectar had their mouths watering, and they hated giving ground. But in the end, they did not dare fight. They turned and fled, leaving most of their “meal” behind for the black-clad youth.

They might have been born from plants, but they were not blocks of wood. They knew when they were outmatched. If they lingered, they would die.

His men rushed forward to strip the battlefield.

Before long, they were grinning ear to ear.

“These two collected three bottles of imperial nectar. Nice!”

“And the belly hides on these two berserk apes had plenty of—Ugh, what the hell, it’s fruit!”

Someone else presented two folded leaves like treasure. The youth opened them and found a small lump of solidified imperial nectar paste, barely bigger than a fingernail.

“Which body did this come from?”

“The tiger,” the subordinate said, pointing back. The tigress on the ground had already been eaten down to half. “Her teeth were halfway ripped out already. It came loose easily.”

The tigress must not have been able to resist. She’d probably eaten most of what she stole, leaving only this tiny lump behind, which is why the other monsters had simply devoured her body for the spirit qi instead.

“So this is the paste the crows were yelling about?” The youth frowned. “That’s barely anything.”

One of his men chuckled. “There are forty-plus corpses here. If we strip them all, it adds up.”

They had spent all night gathering in the valley and had not even gotten a third of what was lying around here. In times like these, murder really did pay.

The youth fell silent for a moment. “Can we tell who died first?”

His man grimaced. “They all died within the last half hour. Sorting out the exact order is kind of...” He trailed off.

Then, the youth noticed something peculiar, specifically a mandrill corpse on the ground.

Right after spirit rain, monsters always went for other monsters first. This mandrill was just a big monkey with no cultivation at all, which was probably why it was still mostly intact.

“Why would a normal mandrill be dead in the middle of a brawl between monsters and cultivators?”

A normal animal should have been fleeing as far as possible. Unless it had tried to sneak in and steal imperial nectar in the chaos and gotten killed for it.

He crouched and examined the wounds. “It was bitten to death by a predator.”

There had been several predators here. Which jaws had ended it?

Just then, a white-browed crow swooped down from a nearby treetop and landed on a low branch, flapping its wings.

“It was bitten to death by a tiger! I saw it myself!”

A crow? The youth’s gaze sharpened. “You’re the ones spreading the news everywhere?”

“Yes.” The crow tucked its wings. “One man stole our imperial nectar paste! It was bigger than a duck egg! That mandrill was his underling!”

Bigger than a duck egg?

Everyone’s faces changed.

A natural lump of paste could match a hundred times its volume in liquid nectar, with even more uses besides. It was now no longer a wonder to them why the crows had seemed so mad.

From its attitude, the youth could already guess. “The man didn’t die?”

“Two tiger monsters attacked him. He controlled one and killed the other,” the crow screeched. “Then white cranes came. He left the tigress’ body and ran into the woods.”

“Ran?” The youth’s eyes flicked. “You lost him?”

“We can’t find him,” the crow admitted. “But to the west is the Gobi, and that’s empty and bare; and to the east is Three-Heart Lake. He could only have gone northeast!” It then described what He Lingchuan was wearing. “He was wearing a Nuo Opera mask.”

One of the youth’s men suggested, “Young Master, should we summon the local guardian spirit and ask?”

“Probably not today.” Guardian spirits were monsters too, and they would not respond during an imperial nectar eruption. “Besides, we might not even be able to command the local guardian spirit.”

Instead, the black-clad youth pulled out a violet-gold hammer and gave it a shake.

The hammer expanded the instant it caught the wind, swelling until the head was bigger than a human skull.

He flipped the grip and slammed the hammerhead into the ground, striking hard three times.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

A shockwave rippled outward, and the surrounding trees shivered, leaves raining down.

However, the impact was oddly gentle. It did not smash anything, but what it did do was blast away the morning fog and thin haze hanging through the woods.

In an instant, the forest looked crisp and clean, like it had been washed.

That was a result of the violet-gold hammer’s special ability: Barrier-Breaking.

If there were illusions, misdirection, or even invisibility divine techniques in play, a few strikes like that would force them to reveal themselves.

Clearly, the youth believed the thief had deliberately left the tiger corpse behind, then stayed nearby to watch the chaos, planning to step in afterward like a fisherman scooping up the final catch.

Because if it were him, that was exactly what he would do.

His men fanned out to search and capture.

One of them suddenly went pale and pointed behind the youth, shouting, “Behind you!”

A huge gray python had somehow slid right up to the youth’s back. It was nearly one meter thick. It could camouflage itself, turn invisible, and it even left no trace on the ground as it moved, so no one had sensed it.

It was already coiled in an attack posture, ready to ambush him. But the youth’s three hammer strikes had shattered its invisibility technique.

Now the snake sat brazenly in the middle of the clearing.

Exposed, it struck instantly, moving so fast that the black spots on its body blurred into a line.

The youth did not even turn his head. He simply stepped sideways, perfectly avoiding the bite.

The python flowed with the motion and snapped toward his waist, and it then met the hammer.

It was almost comical. It looked like it had politely guided its own head right into the strike.

DONG!

A massive, lingering clang rang through the woods.

The giant python went flying, its head smashing a small tree in half.

That blow had landed on its jawbone. Not only did it shatter the bone, but it also knocked the jaw crooked. For a while, the snake would not even be able to close its mouth.

The python tried to lift its head. It failed to do so twice, and it was clear that it was badly concussed.

The youth walked over unhurriedly, raising the violet-gold hammer for a second strike to the skull.

He had just reached the python when it suddenly surged and wrapped around him in a tight coil.

Its jaw was broken, so it could not bite properly, but that did not matter. A python’s true weapon was its body. Once it had prey pinned, thousands of muscles could contract together, crushing the life out of it.

His men rushed forward and shouted, “Young Master!”

But the python feared that hammer. It lifted its head high, placing its head out of its reach. Unless someone had a horse-chopping saber[2], no one could cut it down.

The giant python hissed. “Back off! Or I’ll strangle him!”

Its scales were thick and hard. Every so often, a gleam flashed along its body. Even as the men hacked at it, it still held, though the pain clearly hit deep.

And then, in the middle of that, the black-clad youth spoke calmly, “I searched everywhere and found nothing, yet you actually deliver yourself straight to me.”

What?

The giant python did not understand what the youth was talking about.

Then the youth opened his mouth and bit down on the python. Even though his arms were pinned, his neck could still move, and all he had to do was lower his head.

1. Uh, I honestly have no idea what in the world these are. ☜

2. The horse-chopping saber or zhanmadao is a single-edged sabre with a long, broad blade, and a long handle suitable for two-handed use. It was used as an anti-cavalry weapon made to slice through a horse’s legs. However, I think that in some of these types of stories, they’re made to cleave straight through mounts. ☜