Where Immortals Once Walked

Getting a lump of imperial nectar paste this big was Heaven handing him a hearty meal, but sometimes a meal could also choke you to death.

Of course, He Lingchuan did not understand any of the theory behind it. He simply did not even have the bandwidth right now to wonder whether the Godslayer Pill’s violent backlash was normal. At this moment, he could only scramble to steer the surging true energy through his meridians, forcing it toward the Danzhong acupoint.

However, the surge of energy was simply too savage, and his meridians could not take it.

He felt his whole body swelling, tight and overfilled. He was like a balloon being pumped past its limit. If he did not divert the flow immediately, his meridians would rupture, and then he would rupture along with them, going off with a wet pop that would splatter the entire cave with his flesh and blood.

What now?

If the meridians that I’ve already opened can’t handle it, then...

Then I guess I have to resort to using the ones I haven’t opened yet?

Both ways carried their own death sentences: if he continued doing things as he was, then he would likely rupture his meridians, and once he did, he would die; on the other hand, if he failed to open them, he would die as well.

He Lingchuan had never been the type to just sit there and wait for fate to finish him. The moment the thought landed, he acted, redirecting most of the torrent into his extraordinary vessels[1].

He had only opened two of the extraordinary vessels before. The rest were supposed to be opened up slowly, by patient, grinding effort over time.

But if he refrained from doing anything right now, then he would lose all that time sooner rather than later.

He drove the raging true energy straight into the Conception and Governing Vessels[2].

These were the two most important of the Eight Extraordinary Vessels. They were the body’s vertical axis, the pathways along which yang fire rises and yin essence descends. The Conception Vessel, especially, was the shortest path from the lower dantian to the Danzhong. In He Lingchuan’s cultivation of the Meridian Art, these were the two channels he had wanted most.

They were also the hardest, which was why he had planned to leave them for last.

Today, he was risking it all.

Either they opened, or he died.

The pain of forcing a breakthrough was like someone hammering steel nails through his meridians, punching him full of holes.

Under normal circumstances, he would have screamed.

But right now, that was something he could not even manage. All he could do was grit his teeth and endure.

If he could not endure, he would die.

He could feel the clogged extraordinary vessels being pried open inch by inch under the pressure of the torrent. The resistance should have grown worse and worse—and it did—but the speed of the breakthrough grew faster too, like a train engine that struggled to move at first and then, once it started rolling, began to accelerate.

From Guanyuan, Qihai, Shenque... up through Jiuwei, Zhongting, and into Danzhong.[3]

And still the torrent did not stop. It surged past the Danzhong acupoint without settling, then continued upward to batter other points.

At the same time, the Governing Vessel was being forcibly widened as well.

While he waited for those two runaway armies to finish their mad charge and loop back, He Lingchuan could only steer the remaining flow through the regular meridians in a few cycles to keep everything from crashing into chaos.

About fifteen minutes later, the Conception and Governing Vessels finally broke open.

As the circulation snapped into a full-body loop, He Lingchuan let out a long breath. The two newly opened vessels felt like they were splitting apart with pain.

The rampage had injured his meridians.

But now the protective property of imperial nectar began to show itself, rapidly patching the damage it had just caused.

He did not have time to examine the internal injuries because the true energy he had split into multiple streams finally converged again, and they were now slamming straight into the Dnazhong acupoint.

After all those detours, he was back to the core step.

To expand a single point into a second dantian required explosive force.

Without imperial nectar, He Lingchuan simply did not possess that kind of power at his current level. The standard method would have been to refine and compress the true energy in his Qihai acupoint again and again until it could not be compressed further, then use that ultra-pure power to strike the Danzhong.

Even then, it could fail. Everyone’s body was different. When it came to this type of thing, there was no fixed measurement, no perfect template.

But today, he was borrowing the force of heaven and earth. The question was not whether he could blow it open; it was whether the imperial nectar would blow the Danzhong apart.

Helian Chen had told him to open the second dantian at the Danzhong first because the acupoint between the eyebrows was too close to the brain. If he went into qi deviation there, he would end up a drooling idiot. Faced with two risky options, it was better to choose the lesser risk.

However, that did not change the fact that the Danzhong was one of the body’s notorious lethal points. If someone struck it from outside, the consequences were terrifying, so what more if he detonated it from within?

In the blink of an eye, the Godslayer Pill’s force surged into the Danzhong. Before it could even be properly compressed, it blew open a whole new sea of qi there.

The first explosion barely consumed any of the pill’s power, so a second detonation followed, then a third.

This kind of power was far beyond what a human body could bear.

He Lingchuan vomited blood in mouthfuls, feeling as though his chest had been torn open into a hole.

He tried to pull the true energy away from the Danzhong, but it was already too late. The Godslayer Pill’s energy was gathering again, swelling fast, brewing yet another blast.

He Lingchuan could only think, I’m done for.

Even Fleeting Life seemed to sense the danger and trembled faintly, but He Lingchuan, who was the one who was actually facing imminent death, could not spare a shred of attention.

Is this it?

Is Heaven really going to take my life here?

* * *

From the outside, He Lingchuan still sat calmly on the cave floor, silent and motionless.

Only the twitching of facial muscles betrayed him, and the veins in his neck pulsed violently.

Outside in the tall grass, insects were in full chorus. Frogs and venomous snakes even came from farther off, hoping to find an easy meal.

The tiger lay on a boulder beside the cave entrance, unaware that anything was wrong.

The eyeball spider was right by its side, hanging two tightly wrapped grasshoppers from a strand of silk and eating with gusto.

No creature knew that inside the cave, He Lingchuan was walking through fire, balanced on the knife-edge between life and death.

And no one noticed that deep in the cave, the large clump of dry moss had turned damp, restoring itself to full vitality, and then began to split and spread outward at a terrifying speed.

It had no legs, but it could “move” by copying itself, growing forward, inch by inch, toward the entrance, as well as toward He Lingchuan’s back.

At this point, it could no longer be called a moss clump. It was a living, heavy fungal mat. On its surface, spores sprouted like bamboo shoots after rain, starting as tiny dots and, within a few breaths, swelling into mushrooms of the colors white, red, and a mix of red and white.

As soon as they opened their caps, they began to tremble.

With every tremor, they sprayed huge amounts of fine powder into the air.

In moments, the mat had produced hundreds of spore bodies, and the powder filled the entire cave.

This toxic powder carried a powerful hallucinogenic effect. Any creature that inhaled it would quickly fall unconscious or into madness.

However, He Lingchuan sat with his eyes closed, unaware.

At this moment, he was deep in inner circulation. He was not breathing through his mouth or nose at all.

Instead, it was the mirror hanging at the entrance that sensed something wrong.

“Hey, there’s something behind you! Hey!”

He Lingchuan had turned the mirror outward to watch for enemies. He never imagined the danger was coming from deeper inside the cave.

Damn it! I can’t turn myself!

The mirror was actually unable to see what was going on behind it. It had only sensed the danger.

It shouted and shouted, but He Lingchuan did not answer.

This is bad.

If my newly claimed master dies in here, and I’m without a mirror slave, then how in the world am I getting out of this cave?

What now? What now?!

While the mirror’s thoughts twisted in panic, the fungal mat reached He Lingchuan.

And then white ladybugs emerged atop it.

They had not flown in from outside. They crawled out from within the fungal mat itself. They were either residents that had been living there all along or eggs that had just hatched.

The moment they emerged, they began devouring the fungus, growing visibly. In no time at all, they went from sesame-seed size to hazelnut size.

Only then could you see the thin antenna-like appendage at their tails, tethering them to the fungal mat.

Now the mat had crept up to He Lingchuan and silently formed a ring around him.

As if counting down—three, two, one—the fungal mat suddenly folded inward with a slap, wrapping He Lingchuan completely.

Like someone yanking a blanket tight over a sleeper from head to toe, not a single hair showed.

At the same time, the ladybugs received some unspoken command. They swarmed onto him in neat groups of three or four, each group aiming for a specific vital point.

From their mouths extended long, needle-fine proboscises. Even through cloth, they pierced acupoints with uncanny precision. Naturally, this included the Qihai and the Danzhong acupoints.

The true energy inside He Lingchuan’s body was immediately siphoned out in a steady, unstoppable stream.

If any longtime resident of this forest had witnessed the scene, they would have recognized it at once.

A man-eating fungus was hunting again. This creature fed on living creatures. The ladybugs living in the fungal mat were its symbiotic partners, feeding on prey and funneling the nutrients back to the mat.

And what they drained first was always true energy, while blood and flesh came after.

The moment He Lingchuan began refining the Godslayer Pill, the man-eating fungus had awakened. It had been hiding here for a long time. It waited until he sank fully into meditation before it struck.

The day after an imperial nectar eruption, there were always scraps to pick up.

And if not scraps, then there was always meat.

The ladybugs began to drink, gulping greedily, and both they and the fungal mat were almost delirious with joy.

This prey’s true energy was absurdly abundant.

It was like walking into a shabby little diner expecting a plate of stir-fried noodles, only to sit down and realize they were serving an imperial banquet, and they were not allowed to leave until you finished every dish.

Yes, they typically did not leave until they drained their prey completely dry.

Hundreds of ladybugs drank as fast as they could. The true energy flowed through the appendage at their tails and fed straight into the fungal mat.

The mat began to swell. Every strand thickened, lengthened, grew plumper and wetter with power. New waves of spores erupted in batches, hundreds at a time. Each batch went from tiny dots to full mushrooms and burst again in seconds.

The mirror screamed, “Hey! Hey! What the hell is this?!”

It released an evil ghost to serve as its eyes, finally seeing the horror unfolding in the cave.

What the hell is that?! No, wait... that’s a man-eating fungus!

Fuck! He Lingchuan’s already wrapped up completely!

The mirror was about to alert the tiger to come rescue him when the fungal mat turned a deep, dark red and began expanding rapidly toward the cave entrance.

Clatter.

The mirror was knocked over and rolled into a corner, perfectly positioned to watch the entire scene.

It had seen man-eating fungal mats before, but the one before it strangely seemed to be violently out of control.

In truth, the mat itself was having problems.

It was thrilled at first. After all, this banquet was simply incredible, but then it got full.

It was the first time it had ever gotten full before draining its prey completely. It ordered the ladybugs to release He Lingchuan, planning to digest the true energy it had already taken and come back to finish later.

After all, the prey had been injected with the ladybugs’ toxin, so he should not even be able to raise a hand.

But when the ladybugs tried to pack up and leave, they discovered the worst possible issue that they could have at this moment. They could not retract their proboscises.

The true energy inside He Lingchuan had reversed and latched onto their proboscises, pinning the ladybugs in place. They were frozen, turned into living channels for true energy to pour out through, flooding endlessly into the fungal mat.

And now, nobody was allowed to leave the table!

1. Note that these are also often translated as extraordinary meridians, though I made the distinction as there’s a difference between the Eight Extraordinary Vessels and the Twelve Primary Meridians, which are major systems. I’ve mentioned this over a hundred chapters ago, but I’m mentioning it again now just as a reminder. ☜

2. These are also often translated as Ren and Du Meridians/Vessels. ☜

3. These are acupoints that go from below the navel up to the chest. ☜