Where Immortals Once Walked

That loud boom had occurred the moment the Wind Demon absorbed the North-South Divine Wind and tore the Baoshu King’s root sphere apart.

A dignified state envoy, who had been surrounded and protected by layers upon layers of guards, had somehow ended up deep inside the mountain, with both legs broken. No matter how you looked at it, he was a captive being held at someone else’s mercy.

Second Boss Shi figured whoever could haul a man like that down here was someone he absolutely could not afford to offend, so he simply had not dared to help.

He Lingchuan nodded. “You did the right thing.”

It seems that when Fushan Yue saw that the Wind Demon was about to break out of the root sphere, he simply threw the Chiyan envoy into a hidden crevice in the mountain’s belly, then turned around to go scavenging for profit.

That bastard really doesn’t let a single opportunity go to waste.

He Lingchuan’s eyes flicked sideways.

Then again, neither do I.

Just then, Second Boss Shi suddenly grabbed his sleeve and yelped, “Look there! Look!”

He Lingchuan swept his gaze forward and saw that the mountain road ahead had spawned countless tiny tornadoes, one after another, lined up like a procession as they came to harvest lives.

This was honestly not that surprising. Although the Wind Demon had gone to chase the escort captain, that did not mean that it had just forgotten about the considerable number of enemies that were left behind. For the moment, it simply decided to split off this whole squad of smaller tornadoes to mop up the stragglers.

And because it had just absorbed the North-South Divine Wind, these little twisters might not have been large, but they were unnaturally dense and stable. They held together for over five kilometers without dispersing, sucking up people, horses, and wagons as they traveled, then flinging them right off the cliffs!

Seeing that line of tornadoes headed straight toward the Stone Gate Merchant Caravan, Second Boss Shi’s voice began to shake. “My caravan! Brother He, what do we do?!”

He Lingchuan did not answer him. He simply drove the cliff ram downhill at full speed.

Speaking of the Stone Gate Merchant Caravan, seeing the Wind Demon wreak havoc on the opposite mountain and the escort unit getting beaten into a rout, the Stone Gate Merchant Caravan had of course stopped dead. No one dared proceed.

There were many other travelers trapped behind them as well. Nobody could go forward, and nobody could retreat. The mountain road had become a bottleneck, so they could only watch the distant tornadoes with wide eyes—pointing, chattering, and debating—like spectators enjoying a performance.

It was not their problem, so they treated it like entertainment.

Then someone screamed, “What’s that?!”

“Tornadoes! Tornadoes are coming this way!”

“Run! Everyone run!”

The people at the front turned as one and fled backward, wishing their parents had given them two extra legs.

The Stone Gate Merchant Caravan saw them too. They saw tornadoes swinging around from behind the ridge, and it was not just one, but a whole row of them.

Scalp-prickling terror swept through the caravan. People spun to run only for a bighorn cliff ram to come bounding up an impossibly steep slope from below. It looked terrifyingly reckless, yet every landing was steady and sure. The rider did not even wait for the ram to fully settle before shouting, “Stone Gate Merchant Caravan, follow me! I can guarantee you your lives!”

In times like these, those words were more powerful than any oath sworn by the sea or the heavens. And Second Boss Shi was perched behind the rider, waving and yelling at everyone, “Move! Follow us now!”

When everyone’s mind had turned to mush with panic, those two appearing on that unmistakable bighorn ram was like a beam of light cutting through the dark.

Nobody stopped to think; they simply followed.

The usual return path had been blocked by the row of tornadoes. He Lingchuan did not feel like getting sucked into the sky, so he had taken a slanted route instead, looping around under the cliff for nearly half a circuit, then having the ram jump across the official road’s jam of stalled wagons to reach them.

If his ram were not absurdly good at leaping, he would never have made it.

Luckily, from the top of Mount Fengmo, he had already memorized the terrain. He led the caravan, and the caravan urged its wagons, steering into a mountain col on the left front side.

A few people looked up at the tornadoes on the ridge, faces drained white. “T-This place doesn’t block the wind!”

Rather than retreating, aren’t we just charging straight into the tornadoes? The moment they reach us, aren’t we just going to be swept into the air ourselves?

“You won’t get swept away,” He Lingchuan snapped, waving them on. “If you don’t want to die, move faster!”

At a moment like this, whoever spoke with iron certainty became the pillar everyone clung to. People gritted their teeth and forced their legs to keep moving.

Compared to the panicked crowd fleeing the other way, they were practically going against the flow.

The col was spacious, but not spacious enough. Most of the caravan’s wagons could cram in if they squeezed. Seven or eight of them, however, simply would not fit.

“Abandon those!” Second Boss Shi made the call on the spot, herding the people in.

The wagons had barely come to a stop when the tornadoes arrived.

He Lingchuan saw the sky behind the caravan abruptly darken and knew the wind was upon them.

He did not panic. He calmly pulled out three Wind Lion Lord statues from his storage ring and had everyone haul them to the hollow’s three corners, which were at the outer edge of their formation.

The instant the statues touched the ground, everyone’s robes stopped flapping. The col they were in became a true wind shelter, like a harbor in a storm.

Then the tornadoes hit. Their tails swept past the group, ripping mud and grit into the air. The once broad slope was visibly shaved thinner right before their eyes, as though the mountain itself were being eaten away.

Any single tornado was weaker than the Wind Demon’s main body, but the current setup’s advantage was its numbers... The ten-odd tornadoes working together created a roar that felt apocalyptic.

Other than He Lingchuan, nearly everyone in the caravan dropped flat—crouching, crawling, hugging their heads, terrified that if they rose even a few centimeters, they would be torn away.

Though if they really were not protected by the Wind Lion Lord statues, would those few centimeters have really made any difference?

Only He Lingchuan stood in the center of the three statues, head tilted up, watching the tornadoes.

They seemed to pause deliberately, as if assessing this group.

In the past, they never attacked people or farmland near the Wind Lion Lord’s statues. But today...

Well, this crowd doesn’t look hostile, nor do they look threatening. After only a brief pause, the tornadoes spun away and chased after the panicked prey fleeing ahead.

The caravan members stayed flattened on the ground for a long while before daring to lift their heads, and by then, the tornadoes were already gone.

They had been directly under the shadow of the tornadoes, yet not a single person was hurt.

From their perspective, the silhouette of He Lingchuan standing there looked impossibly tall, impossibly steady.

He looked safe, reliable, and like something you could lean on.

A caravan hand stammered, “Young Master He, a-are we safe now?”

He Lingchuan patted a Wind Lion Lord statue’s broad head. “It’s fine now. You can all get up.”

They stood and looked left, then right, and shivered. There were no living people left on the road other than themselves.

The clouds overhead gradually thinned. He Lingchuan pointed toward the sky. “Wait until the weather clears and the sun comes up, then continue forward. It’ll probably be fine.”

“Where are you going?” Second Boss Shi now treated him like an anchor. The thought of He Lingchuan leaving made him jittery.

“To settle a score with someone. We’ll meet up ahead.” With that, He Lingchuan urged the ram forward. One leap carried them more than six meters, and in the blink of an eye, he was bounding away into the rugged peaks. “Rest assured, the Wind Demon won’t show up again anytime soon.”

* * *

When the Wind Demon finished dealing with the escort captain and returned, it found the remaining guards had fled halfway down the mountain. It was furious.

The escort unit had origin energy protecting their bodies, and the row of small tornadoes could not compare to the Wind Demon’s main body, so they had lost only a little over twenty men. The rest ultimately escaped.

This part of the mountain had no forest, but it did have a stone forest, the ground of which was made up of ice that had been eroded over countless years, containing countless pits. Stone pillars rose and fell in uneven clusters, and the terrain was far less open than the mountaintop.

With no roaring north wind feeding it as an endless supply, the Wind Demon chased for another few hundred meters and realized it truly could not fight properly here.

The guards had also dispersed, moving separately; some had even hidden inside subterranean karst caves. The Wind Demon expended tremendous effort just to catch one or two.

After a stalemate of half an hour, it had no choice but to retreat in frustration.

There was another key reason for its choice to retreat, and that was that it was badly injured.

Every blow the escort unit landed carried origin energy. The Kingdom of Baoshu’s origin energy was so fierce that a wild monster like itself could scarcely endure it. If not for the mountaintop’s howling winds and if not for the timely replenishment of the North-South Divine Wind, then after being repeatedly assaulted by three hundred guards, the one who would have ended up fleeing with its tail between its legs would have been the Wind Demon itself.

And besides, was a root sphere grown from the Baoshu King’s spirit seed really so easy to break free from?

The North-South Divine Wind’s power had been mostly consumed in that struggle.

Now the Wind Demon needed to return quickly to the wind tunnels beneath the Ethereal Sect ruins to lick its wounds and recover.

After such a long fight, what merchant caravan would dare remain on the official road? Anyone who could turn back did. They would rather return to Heiyan Stockade and wait a few extra days for the road repairs than risk moving forward; otherwise, they would retreat to a safe distance, watching the Wind Demon return to Mount Fengmo from afar.

Of course, most people had never gotten the chance.

Up and down the mountain, bones and corpses paved the road.

Second Boss Shi remembered He Lingchuan’s words. Once the clouds finally broke and sunlight returned to the world, he led the merchant caravan onward.

Sure enough, the road was peaceful, and nothing happened to them.

If you ignored the dead bodies hanging everywhere from cliffs and ridges, and the shattered remains of wagons and horses, the road almost looked normal again.

As for He Lingchuan, he found a massive boulder for cover, checked that no one was nearby, and then quietly opened every root-sphere fragment from his storage ring, just in case anything went wrong later.

As expected, he found the spirit seed.

Perhaps because its monster energy had been exhausted, it no longer blazed with arrogant golden light. It had reverted to a pale-yellow seed, wrapped in a hard shell dotted with faint speckles.

If he had not personally watched the treant hand it to the Prime Minister Tang, He Lingchuan might have mistaken it for a bird egg. He pinched it experimentally and found it a little brittle. It seemed as though if he were to squeeze it too hard, he might crush it. If he did so, then it might no longer satisfy the divine bone amulet’s requirements.

He carefully brought it close to the divine bone. The amulet flared red and, without the slightest hesitation, sucked it inside.

The divine bone amulet had devoured something as enormous as Zhu Erniang’s molted shell without effort. He Lingchuan did not see how swallowing a single small seed could pose it any difficulty.

Now he understood that what the divine bone amulet wanted was what the Generous Pot wanted.

But why would a divine artifact want a tree seed?

As for the remaining root fragments, He Lingchuan did not waste them either. He fed them all to the Soul-Stealing Mirror.

“Ah, this, this, this! Aahhhh!” the mirror cried out in delighted glee.

At the Baoshu King’s birthday celebration, it had once wished for nothing more than a single branch.

Who would have thought that its wish would come true so quickly, and in quantities several times greater?

Master is giving me far too much!

* * *

At the same time, a vigorous roar thundered out from Mount Baiyun.

It was not earth-shattering, yet it instantly spread through the entirety of Fufeng City, rattling the spirit qi and blood of every living being, making everyone’s heart churn with discomfort.

Man or woman, young or old, human or monster, everyone froze mid-task and looked northward in trembling dread.