Where Immortals Once Walked

Everyone froze for a beat.

The squad had come to trust He Lingchuan’s judgment quite a lot by now. Doorboard blinked in confusion. “Why?”

Hu Min hurriedly cut in, “Hold it, hold it! Place your bets first, then we’ll hear the explanation!”

He followed He Lingchuan’s lead and put down one tael of silver. A’Luo thought it over and also put his money on “return west.”

Doorboard fished out his coins, looked from one side to the other, hesitating. “Then I, I’ll bet...”

He wanted to bet on “return west” too, but he had barely started shaping the word west with his mouth when Willow’s fine brows shot up, and her eyes narrowed.

He instantly changed course. “I bet we march east!”

“What about you, Old Yu?” Their beastmaster, Old Yu, was also with them.

Old Yu scratched his head. “I don’t gamble.”

Everyone made dismissive sounds.

Hu Min gathered up the silver, and only then did He Lingchuan cough lightly and begin.

“Jintao to the east is prepared. I’ve heard their troops are much better than West Ji’s, and it’s mountainous terrain. They’ll have the advantage of both land and people. This fight won’t be easy.”

Willow shook her head. “We’ve fought through worse.”

“Second, our campaign loses its justification.” He Lingchuan laid it out, “The Red General led us like a tidal wave because the capital seemed to be summoning us home, but now the monarch has already made it explicitly clear that we’re not allowed to return. If we keep marching east, we’re defying His Majesty’s command, and morale won’t be as high as before.”

He Lingchuan then sighed and added, “An army without a righteous cause not only fails to win, but it also invites danger upon itself. And third, West Ji’s provocations before were carried out under the direction of the State of Baling. Now that we’ve destroyed West Ji, there’s no guarantee Baling won’t make a move. If we can’t take Jintao quickly, and Baling harasses Panlong City at the same time, that becomes a two-front threat. That is extremely dangerous.”

Hearing that, the squad felt bitter and unwilling.

There was one point He Lingchuan did not say aloud: if Zhong Shengguang led over a million people back to the motherland, such a huge population would inevitably shock the State of West Luo to its core.

That many people needed land to settle on, food to eat, beds to sleep in, and markets to trade in.

It would be enough to establish a state within a state.

So if Zhong Shengguang returned to West Luo, he would at the very least have to carve out a fief for himself. However, he had no domain within the homeland, so where would it come from?

Naturally, he would have to take it from others.

And that would be the beginning of a new upheaval. West Luo was already chaotic, so would they really dare to let Zhong Shengguang come back and add fuel to the fire?

If he returned to West Luo, it would not be coals in a snowstorm, but rather more snow on top of the already stacked snow.

It was completely understandable why the ruler of the state did not want them to return.

* * *

The next morning, Mount Yulun.

In a straight line, it was only six kilometers from Youtian Town, but the mountain roads twisted like a snake, and actually walking it took over two hours.

The magistrate of Baishi County sent a local villager as a guide. His nickname was Big-Mouth Zhao. He had hunted on Mount Yulun for twenty years, and he had even been the one who discovered last year’s incident.

Mount Yulun was composed of more than a dozen peaks. The deeper they went, the richer the spirit qi became. Not only did He Lingchuan’s breathing feel unusually smooth, but even his walking stirred the flow of true energy within his body.

Cultivation here would be more efficient than elsewhere. In this era, it could almost be called a blessed land or a hidden paradise.

No wonder the porcupine monsters refused to move.

The plants here were denser, and the trees were taller. Strange flowers and rare herbs could be seen everywhere.

He Lingchuan even saw a small human-shaped figure flicker across a cliff face. It was not actually a human, but rather a fully formed ginseng doll.

As they walked, He Lingchuan asked Big-Mouth Zhao, “After the whole porcupine nest was wiped out, which monsters occupy this territory now?”

Big-Mouth Zhao grinned. “Such good land? Of course, it belongs to the county.”

He Lingchuan was genuinely surprised. “Confiscated?”

“These porcupines had merit in their ancestors, so Mount Yulun was granted as their fief. Now the entire clan has been exterminated, and no descendants remain. Mount Yulun became ownerless land, and naturally reverted to county property,” Big-Mouth Zhao explained. “The county sealed it off as a treasury of wild medicinal herbs. Monsters and villagers alike are forbidden from entering privately to gather the growth here.”

Cultivated herbs were never as good as wild ones. Everyone knew that.

General Ling sighed and said, “So the porcupines had only a little ancestral merit to rely on. They had no ties or backing in the township. It’s no wonder they died, and no one cared.”

No one argued. The words were harsh, but the logic was sound.

The disappearance of the drillwind beasts became a major case because General Ling was very much involved in everything related to drillwind beasts. The local authorities could not dodge responsibility when General Ling came knocking. But when over a hundred porcupines died, the county had only performed a perfunctory examination and sealed the nest, calling it done.

Whether it be connections, backgrounds, or patrons, it was apparent that those mattered in monster lands too, not only among humans.

Along the way, He Lingchuan also saw Zhitian Township’s water sources.

There were two long rivers that looked like twin jade sashes and flowed first through the porcupine clan’s former territory, and only then into Zhitian Township’s fertile fields. The water was crystal clear, and the riverbeds had been widened. The surface was at least sixteen meters across.

There was even a large lake, broad and expansive. He Lingchuan pointed at a dam and asked Big-Mouth Zhao, “Was this built last year?”

“Yes,” Big-Mouth Zhao answered honestly. “It was finished this spring. The township has always wanted to build two lakes for water storage so it won’t lack water in winter, but the porcupines were strongly opposed to it. They said that it took up too much of their territory and required too much logging. It’s been deadlocked for years. But now, it’s been resolved.”

“That’s not resolving a problem,” said He Lingchuan. That’s resolving the one who raised the problem. “Two lakes? Where’s the other one?”

“Three to four kilometers east of here. They’re still digging. It’s not in use yet,” said Big-Mouth Zhao. “I’ve passed by twice. There are people working there constantly. They say it won’t be finished and filled until next year.”

Soon, Big-Mouth Zhao led them to the porcupine nest.

No one had come here in a long time. Weeds grew thick in the cracks, and even saplings nearly a meter tall had sprung up.

However, the terrain was still clear enough for He Lingchuan to see.

There had originally been several fissures, or perhaps honeycomb-like caves, stacked in multiple layers, as though carved long ago by water or glacial erosion.

Nonetheless, it was more than enough space for over a hundred porcupines.

Now, however, the honeycomb caves had been completely crushed by hundreds of boulders, the largest of which was over ten meters tall.

No matter how high your cultivation, if something like that fell from above and hit you, there was no surviving it.

He Lingchuan looked up. The cliff wall above was sheer, as if sliced clean.

“Can snow even accumulate on this kind of cliff in winter?” He remembered the county records had blamed the incident on an avalanche.

“If it’s not an avalanche, it’s a rockslide. What’s the difference?” Big-Mouth Zhao was not as particular. “If you get hit, you die either way.”

“Then why did you report it as an avalanche at the time?”

“Uh...” Big-Mouth Zhao scratched his head. “Well, there were a lot of avalanches last winter. I mean, there were even people who died from them in two towns. And back when I was here last year, well, there was snow and fallen rocks...”

So he’d guessed.

And the county dared to file it that way too.

He Lingchuan did not know whether to laugh or cry. He then said to Jiao Yu, “Let’s go in and take a look.”

Big-Mouth Zhao blurted, “We still have to go down?” His legs did not want to move. This was from last year. Why are they still so caught up on it? “The entrances have already been sealed.”

He Lingchuan only flashed half a tael of broken silver.

Big-Mouth Zhao: “I’ll lead the way!”

He guided them into the nest caves from the side.

After discovering the whole porcupine clan had been crushed to death, the county had not dug out all the bodies. They had simply sealed off several entrances and exits, calling it their burial.

It was sloppy, but not exactly wrong.

Only the living insisted on resting in the earth.

He Lingchuan took out a heavy hammer and smashed open a sealed entrance.

Inside, it became clear that the water-carved tunnels had once been a labyrinth, branching everywhere. The widest sections could fit two or three people side by side, while the narrowest could not even fit a whole watermelon.

However, the tunnels had collapsed in countless places from the boulders above, turning many passageways into dead ends.

Big-Mouth Zhao crawled into a stone hollow with them and pointed forward. “Here! This is the place! They were piled like a little hill here back then.”

In this area, a person could not stand upright.

He Lingchuan had to hunch forward to move.

As for the drillwind beasts, they had reverted to the size of ordinary goats, allowing them to move easily in the tunnels just like the tiger.

The stone hollow was spacious, but once you imagined a hundred porcupine-monster bodies stacked there, it became claustrophobic. Jiao Yu took one look and said, “Pockmarked Wang was right. The way they piled up is too bizarre.”

These were porcupines. Even if their relationships were close, they would never huddle like that.

That was not intimacy, but rather mutual harm.

He Lingchuan asked Big-Mouth Zhao, “Did many people come down here?”

“Not many,” Big-Mouth Zhao said, pinching his nose and trying to remember. “Just me, the county coroner, and a few digging workers.” Hardly anyone wanted to come down for filthy work like this, so the site was still fairly well preserved.

Even though the boulders had cracked open the fissures, the stench down here was awful. Big-Mouth Zhao gagged a few times and begged, “My lord, when can we go back up?”

“Wait.” Jiao Yu was examining bones while He Lingchuan surveyed the hollow’s edges.

Porcupine quills lay scattered everywhere, each one striped black-and-white and sharp as needles.

They had barbs and venom. Anyone stabbed by them would be in serious trouble.

Some of the quills were even buried deep in the stone wall.

Even He Lingchuan had to exert significant effort to pull them out, showing how powerful the force had been when they were fired.

He asked Jiao Yu, “How do porcupine monsters attack?”

“Attack?” Jiao Yu thought. “They retreat at extreme speed, or they simply shoot out poisoned quills.”

“How many can they shoot at once?”

“Dozens,” Jiao Yu said. “And all at the same time.”

“Impressive.” He Lingchuan had once considered designing a torrential pear blossom needle launcher, and yet these porcupines came with the hardware built in. “Anyway, they shouldn’t have been firing quills inside their own nest for fun.” Even if they didn’t wreck plants, they’d hit their own companions.

Jiao Yu came over, looked around, and sniffed. “An enemy entered the nest. The way these porcupines died is the same as the drillwind beasts.”

General Ling added angrily, “After killing them, the murderer threw them back into their burrow, not even bothering to cover the obvious flaws! And those Zhitian Township bastards didn’t bother doing proper work! They couldn’t even see something this simple!”

He Lingchuan fell into thought.

It was quite dark underground, but several bundles of glowgrass illuminated everything in sharp detail.

He Lingchuan pointed to a section of rock wall bristling with quills. “These red patches, are they blood?”

The stone wall was mottled with red stains, but they did not quite look like blood.