Where Immortals Once Walked

This fellow has just recovered his breath, and he’s immediately stressing his own importance again. He Lingchuan did not expose him. His brow merely furrowed. General Ling, however, was far more direct. “Over a year ago? What does a year-old rumor have to do with what’s happening now?”

The timeline stretched so far back that it seemed almost absurd.

“Please, just hear me out.” Pockmarked Wang no longer dared to be coy. “To the east of Zhitian Township, there’s a nest of porcupine monsters, over a hundred of them! Their territory lies at the foot of Mount Yulun, and it’s extensive. They’ve never gotten along with the locals. They cause trouble often. The townsfolk don’t like them, but they can’t do much about it either. That nest has been there for over a century. Those porcupines were around long before Zhitian Township even existed.”

“So what?” He Lingchuan prompted. Although Beijia boasted of humans and monsters coexisting, in truth, most monsters still preferred to cluster by race and carve out their own territories, keeping clear boundaries with humans.

It was instinctive racial segregation. Take the old ram nearby, for example. It would rather hole up with its flock on the outskirts of the county city, eating and drinking well, than live inside the city proper.

“Last winter, Mount Yulun suddenly collapsed. It seems their den was buried,” said Pockmarked Wang. “But at the time, no one went into the mountains, so no one knew. It wasn’t until spring, after the snow melted and people entered the mountains again, that they discovered the landslide and that the porcupine monsters’ nest had been destroyed.”

He Lingchuan frowned. “And this counts as a missing persons case? Isn’t that just a tragic accident?”

“I have a companion from Zhitian Township,” Pockmarked Wang said quickly. “He was hired to clear the debris. He found that all the porcupine corpses were piled together, as if they had huddled and died in a cluster. And they were nothing but bones. There were over a hundred of them. Not long after that, townsfolk were attacked by a porcupine monster. One died, while the other was injured. The authorities were alarmed and sent people to search, but after over a month, they found nothing. Eventually, the matter was just entirely dropped.”

When he finished, He Lingchuan said at once, “That old incident doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what happened at Mount Niutou.”

Pockmarked Wang’s face was grave. “Even if they were crushed to death... Lord, you know porcupines never like crowding together. Especially not over a hundred of them.”

The more effort he put in proving his point, the greater his chance of survival. Otherwise, he was dead.

“When living creatures face absolute despair, their reactions can defy imagination,” He Lingchuan replied, then shifted the subject. “You said that on your way back to Shuangyi Town, you ran into a ghost wall and somehow ended up at the official fields?”

“Yes, yes!”

He Lingchuan nodded slowly. “Then someone set you up.”

A ghost wall was usually how common folk referred to a maze or bewildering array. It was meant to disorient, confuse, and make people wander in circles.

However, the key here was that an array required advanced preparation.

Someone had laid a bewildering array on their route home, steering them deliberately toward the official fields where they would provoke the drillwind beasts.

“Who came up with the plan to steal from that caravan?”

“My cousin, Wang Ling,” Pockmarked Wang answered. “He said a group of bumpkins from Wudou Town had arrived, strangers who didn’t know the local rates, and their goods were good. If we succeeded in the operation, he said that I’d get two, two taels of silver!”

He hurriedly explained, “By ‘bumpkins,’ I mean outsiders who don’t know the going rates around here.”

“And this Wang Ling is now dead?”

Pockmarked Wang nodded. There was no grief on his face, only resentment. “Serves him right. I twisted my ankle that night, and he didn’t even stay to help me!”

“Where did he get his information?”

“Uh, I’m not sure, but if I had to guess, then maybe the gambling den. Whenever he had money, he went there.”

He Lingchuan thought for a moment before asking, “What about the caravan you robbed? How much do you remember about them?”

Pockmarked Wang had replayed that night countless times in his mind. “It was a small merchant group. There were only thirty-odd men and about ten cargo wagons. We stole two of the wagons. They were loaded with chewing tobacco, and more than a dozen bamboo tubes filled with saltpeter. Wang Ling knocked one open by accident, and the entire wagon froze over.”

He Lingchuan pressed his fingers to his temple. “They were smuggling chewing tobacco and saltpeter, yet you actually dared to touch them?”

Chewing tobacco was a highly profitable commodity. In Beijia, it was officially monopolized. Smuggling it was a serious crime. As for saltpeter or nitre, it was a vital military material, a key ingredient in gunpowder. Civilian transport of it was strictly prohibited.

“Sometimes... people transport it,” Pockmarked Wang muttered hesitantly. “We’ve seen it before, and we’ve... we’ve...”

“Stolen it before?”

He shrank under the stares of Jiao Yu and General Ling and gave a tacit admission.

Yes, it was frankly not rare for these small towns and villages to have people who dealt in businesses where they could get their heads chopped off. Tobacco and saltpeter were small and compact. Once stolen, they could be divided up. Each person sold a small portion through their own channels and quickly laundered it away.

They were local toughs, so they had their routes.

“So you’re involved in that kind of business, eh?” He Lingchuan said with a faint smile. “What else do you remember about the merchants? The more detail, the better.”

“The leader was around forty. He wasn’t tall or fat. His beard was neatly trimmed. He wore a jade thumb ring on his ring finger. And right here—” he pointed at his own neck, “He had a flesh-colored mole.”

“Did you overhear their destination when you were scouting them?”

Pockmarked Wang thought hard but ultimately replied, “No, I don’t think so?”

“Alright, that’s enough. You can go back.” While He Lingchuan interrogated him, the goshawk and drillwind beasts had searched the valley. They found nothing.

The killer had cleaned up impeccably. There was no point in staying longer.

* * *

Back at the inn, He Lingchuan took out Fushan Ji’s compiled dossier and reviewed it.

The State of Chiyan was vast. Searching for a missing eagle was like fishing for a needle in a haystack.

Before he set out, Li Qingge had shared fresh intelligence: one month ago, Beijia had suffered a setback on the eastern front.

Two armies under Beijia’s command had failed to coordinate in time, resulting in a major tactical error. The enemy seized the opportunity.

One of those armies was from the State of Chiyan.

Considering the Lord Emperor’s fury, He Lingchuan could easily guess that perhaps it was the disappearance of the eastern imperial eagle that prevented timely intelligence from reaching the State of Chiyan’s forces, leading to heavy battlefield losses.

This was something that Lingxu City would naturally never tolerate.

He wondered about the source of the intelligence, but Li Qingge had not divulged it.

Among the compiled cases, Fushan Ji had circled three sets of key words in red ink.

The first words were: rainy night!

He thought about it and realized that every disappearance or incident had occurred on a rainy night.

He Lingchuan recalled the cliff ram nearly being stolen. It had indeed rained steadily that night, stopping only past the hour of the ox[1].

Why do the perpetrators only move in the rain?

The second word was: wilderness.

All of the incidents occurred in the outskirts or mountain forests, far from urban centers.

Humans lived in clusters. Many monsters preferred solitude, avoiding settlements. If the killers targeted rural areas, it was only natural that more monsters than humans would fall victim.

This also showed caution.

The third words were: multiple locations simultaneously.

Some cases occurred within a day or two of each other, yet the locations were separated by over fifty kilometers.

How could a killer travel that distance within a twenty-odd hours to strike again?

After experiencing the sheep-stealing incident firsthand, He Lingchuan leaned toward the conclusion that they were likely operating in separate teams.

In other words, this was almost certainly a cross-regional criminal syndicate!

Fushan Ji’s deductions ended there. It was possible that he had not found any more clues, or perhaps Fushan Yue had simply taken his head before he could find any more.

From He Lingchuan’s perspective, a top-down official investigation would yield little.

Bureaucratic efficiency? That was slower than an ox dragging a broken cart.

If they relied only on official manpower and records, the day of resolution would be distant indeed.

It was not just the motive that one had to look at. Even the choice of targets, the timing, and the locations would likely yield a pattern.

Their operations were extraordinarily covert. Had they not implicated Lingxu City’s courier this time, the scattered disappearances might never have drawn attention.

Let alone a monster state, even across the State of Yuan, occasional missing townsfolk and villagers were hardly worth mentioning.

There were too many reasons for a human or monster to vanish in this day and age.

Now, the question was: should he go to Wudou Town, where Pockmarked Wang had been tricked into a trap?

He Lingchuan was still busy thinking about it when he suddenly heard tapping from the window.

He opened it to find over a dozen crows perched outside.

“What, do you need something?”

The largest crow craned its neck to check that the goshawk was absent, then boldly hopped inside.

“You’re still investigating the Mount Niutou incident?”

He Lingchuan nodded. “Do you have a lead?”

“That depends on your reward.” The crow said brazenly, “No reward, no lead!”

He had dealt with such creatures since the Three-Heart Plain. They were the classic bully-the-weak types.

“Name your price.”

“One hundred and eighty kilograms of beef and mutton every month, and one hundred Spirit-Preserving Pills!” The crow then thought for a moment before adding, “And the forest south of Shuangyi Town as our exclusive nesting ground! No other birds allowed!”

One of He Lingchuan’s eyebrows rose in slight bafflement. “I am the Crown Prince’s envoy. Meeting me is like meeting him. You dare demand such terms?”

“The Crown Prince is rich! Pluck a feather from him, and it’s thicker than our thighs!” the crow sneered. “A few hundred kilograms of meat and a hundred pills a month is nothing!”

“Mm, that might be true.” Before the crow could react, He Lingchuan whistled sharply and flicked his sleeve.

A gust slammed the window shut, separating the leader from its flock outside.

The big crow sensed danger. Instead of attacking, it shot toward the paper window to escape, intending to pierce it with its beak to break out.

However, He Lingchuan had anticipated it. A net unfurled directly in its path, and the crow flew straight into it, as if delivering itself to be captured.

1. 1–3 A.M. ☜