Where Immortals Once Walked

The guard originally weighed only a little over sixty kilograms, but when He Lingchuan caught him, he felt extraordinarily heavy, as though he had caught Jiao Yu.

Fushan Yue had long since told him that ordinary humans could not remain in the Fu Realm for long, or their lives would quickly be in danger. Even cultivators would feel their bodies grow heavy upon their first arrival. Now that He Lingchuan was personally experiencing it, he estimated that the gravity here was more than three times that of the mortal realm.

The guard straightened. “Thank you, Lord He.”

Before entering the eye of the storm, everyone had already placed a rinsing bead in their mouth and pressed it against the inside of their cheek. Only then could they breathe and speak normally.

Otherwise, even cultivators could not hold out for long in the Fu Realm due to the poisonous air.

He Lingchuan looked around. As far as he could see, the land was vast and empty, filled only with mountains, stones, and sand. Every few dozen meters or so, a low clump of plants grew from cracks in the ground. They looked more like tufts of hair than grass, but at the tip of each blade, there was usually a pale white bead.

This was the rinsing bead.

Rinsing bead grass was the only plant that could survive in the Fu Realm. It was said that its seeds had come from the mortal realm and had been sucked into this place by the storm, where they took root and grew. Every time the eye of the storm opened, and air from the mortal realm poured into the Fu Realm, the rinsing bead grass would intercept it and condense the air into beads.

Aside from these plants, the land could truly be called barren.

Yet the surface was not monotonous, because the soil came in all kinds of colors—yellow, red, blue, green, violet, and black. There were also strange rocks riddled with holes, hills shaped like mushrooms, and great mountains layered like terraced fields.

Climbing to higher ground and looking out, there was a vast, desolate grandeur to the place.

Crystal clusters also grew frequently from the ground, some like clear quartz, some like hard stone, each different in color and size. The small ones looked like snowflakes, while the large ones rivaled hills.

Once all four of them had arrived, He Lingchuan took out a box, looked at it, and then he pointed north. “Let’s go. We’ll find the others and regroup.”

This box was the tracking bee compass, one of Songyang Mansion’s new products.

Songyang Mansion had already established ties with the Crown Prince of Chiyan, so before the Grass Sea Hunt began, they had sent over test products.

Without question, this was the most popular piece of equipment. He heard that on the opening day of the Grass Sea event, Songyang Mansion had sold seventy tracking bee compasses.

The Chiyan team had long since used the bee pupae stored in the box to mark the advance party. Now that He Lingchuan and the others had entered Fu Realm afterward, they could use the tracking bees’ traits to locate their companions.

They had only just crossed realms, and as soon as they took a step, they immediately felt the effort.

It was not merely like carrying two more versions of himself on his back. Even his internal organs and brain seemed dragged downward, and his blood flowed more heavily toward his lower limbs, making it difficult to supply the heart. He Lingchuan gathered qi in his dantian and found that even his true energy moved noticeably more slowly.

Most serious of all, this world did not contain the slightest trace of spirit qi.

Compared with this place, even the spirit qi of the mortal realm could be called abundant.

This also meant that cultivators who entered the Fu Realm could not replenish their true energy unless they brought profound crystals with them.

Here, every use of power had to be carefully calculated.

He Lingchuan circulated his true energy, steadied his breathing, and slowly adjusted. What made cultivators stronger than ordinary people was their more robust bodies, which allowed them to adapt to harsher environments.

Near the eye of the storm, there was also a Lingxu City garrison. Their task was to prevent duonao beasts from accidentally charging into the mortal realm. When He Lingchuan and the others arrived, an officer stepped forward to warn them, “Don’t go west.”

“Thank you for the warning. Why?”

“There’s the Giant Thunderclap Beast to the west. Go that way if you want to die.” Having fulfilled his duty, the officer shut his mouth tighter than a clam shell.

He Lingchuan instinctively looked west. Sure enough, lightning flashed over the distant mountains in that direction, illuminating heaven and earth as bright as day.

Is that the “powerful being in the forbidden depths of the Fu Realm” that Fushan Yue repeatedly warned me about?

It did not seem that far. One would reach it by walking west.

He immediately handed over a banknote. “Sir, what’s the origin of this thunderclap beast, and how far west would we have to go before encountering it?”

The note’s denomination was large and very sincere. The officer’s expression softened too.

“Ten go, ten die. A hundred go, a hundred die. The Giant Thunderclap Beast’s territory spans over 3,000 hectares. It’s one of the Fu Realm’s seven officially recorded lords. It stands over 8 meters high and is 20 meters long, with lightning as its innate power. It doesn’t even need to get close to punch right through you.” The officer put away the banknote. “This time, the eye of the storm actually opened right next to its territory, which is quite bad luck. We sent people west to scout before. Ten went, and nine never returned.”

“Fortunately, the Giant Thunderclap Beast is very lazy and doesn’t like moving around, or else we would have had to beg the state preceptors to open another Storm Gate.” The officer continued, “Also, according to reports from hunters returning from the front, a large beast tide has appeared to the northwest. Be careful.”

He Lingchuan sucked in a breath, thanked him, and walked away.

Generally speaking, the paler a duonao beast’s skin and the larger its body, the stronger it was. Of course, one could not rule out the rare few duonao beasts that evolved camouflage colors to make opponents believe they were powerful.

And in the Fu Realm, where gravity was more than three times that of the mortal realm, size was indeed directly proportional to strength. With that Giant Thunderclap Beast having grown to twenty meters in length, its power was beyond question.

A lord-level monster could easily contend with a thousand people. All the more so when this one possessed an affinity for lightning. Participating squads would absolutely not provoke it.

They headed north.

Along the way, the others often saw He Lingchuan bend down to scoop up a handful of soil, a few crystal clusters, or several grains of fine sand and put them into his pouch. Everyone assumed that, since this was his first visit, everything felt fresh and novel to him. In truth, this was a request from the divine bone amulet.

Yes, the Generous Pot seemed very interested in this foreign realm too, and wanted He Lingchuan to gather a few samples for it to admire.

As they continued north, dead duonao beasts became a common sight along the roadside, and they came in all kinds.

Duonao beast was merely the mortal realm’s general term for the monsters of the Fu Realm that produced floating stones. Just as monsters in the mortal realm came in all varieties, the Fu Realm’s duonao beasts were strange and diverse. Some were stocky, some slender, and some ran on four or six legs.

However, creatures that stood and walked upright on two legs like humans were especially rare. He Lingchuan guessed that it might be because of the gravity.

These duonao beast corpses always had large holes in them. Not only had the floating stones in their skulls been dug out, but the crystal clusters growing on their bodies might also be good materials for artifact refinement. Over the past several hundred years, Lingxu City’s craftsmen and artisans had already discovered many uses for the duonao beasts’ materials.

The farther they walked, the more dead duonao beasts they found. Sometimes, there were entire herds of them.

At a glance, it was obvious that they had been hunted.

During the first five days of the hunt, the participating teams had basically slaughtered all the duonao beasts within fifty kilometers of the eye of the storm, except to the west. Now, He Lingchuan and the others could travel very safely. The road was lined with duonao beast carcasses and newly grown rinsing beads in the cracks of the ground.

Every few hours, rinsing beads could grow anew, so everyone had to remember to gather them.

If participating teams wanted to harvest more floating stones, they could only travel farther out.

This was not only a competition of combat strength and stamina but also of financial resources, storage capacity, and transport capacity.

He Lingchuan also noticed that there were always aberrant creatures resembling oversized earthworms beside the duonao beast corpses. They ranged from slightly less than a meter to several meters long, and often several or several dozen of them lay on the carcasses, writhing as they chewed away.

He Lingchuan simply could not find their eyes. Perhaps these aberrant creatures were born eyeless. Their way of eating was also very peculiar. They attached the suction cups at their front ends to the prey, then twisted their fleshy bodies, wrenching off a piece of meat.

He Lingchuan could even see the meat chunk swell into a bulge as it moved through the creature’s body.

His teammate introduced them as whirlworms, one of the Fu Realm’s scavenger creatures. They could not produce floating stones, and their bodily fluids were corrosive, so hunters had no interest in them whatsoever.

There were also other oddly shaped, furtive little animals, but those need not be described.

Led by the tracking bees, He Lingchuan and the others took no detours. Overall, they walked north for most of the day and reached a stretch of low hills.

Here, the duonao beast corpses were piled into small mountains.

The group climbed to higher ground and looked out. The scene stretched for at least several kilometers.

The crimson earth had been dyed violet-black by beast blood, looking ominous at a glance.

It was deathly silent. Only the occasional squeaking of scavengers feasting broke the quiet, sounding like someone walking in wet cotton slippers.

He Lingchuan’s brow furrowed as he saw that quite a few participating hunters’ bodies had appeared here too.

There were humans and monsters alike, all of them having died gruesome deaths. However, the Fu Realm’s scavengers had no interest in them.

If something was not on their menu, they did not even want to touch it.

At a glance, he saw at least twenty to thirty corpses.

He Lingchuan’s teammates had each entered the Fu Realm two or three times before, and one of them crouched to examine the ground. “Looks like they ran into a beast tide.”

“A beast tide?” He had heard the term as soon as he entered the Fu Realm.

“Just like herds of wild oxen or wild horses in the mortal realm, many duonao beasts move in groups. Sometimes a group has more than a hundred.”

He Lingchuan shaded his eyes with his hand and looked out. “There are far more than a hundred here.”

“Beast herds can also gather together and migrate. That’s what we call a beast tide. There’s no telling how many there might be.” His teammate smiled bitterly. “Once they start running, they’re an unstoppable flood. Whoever stands in their way dies.”

He Lingchuan knew that duonao beasts also killed and devoured one another, and that they formed a complete ecological chain. The duonao beasts at the lower end of the chain did not eat grass, but crystal clusters and nutrient-rich soil, while the duonao beasts higher on the chain fed on them.

Slaughter, struggle, and feeding, living beings were the same everywhere.

“They retreated that way.” He Lingchuan pointed southwest. As an experienced hunter, he could see the traces of a fighting retreat. Besides, even while at a disadvantage, the contestants had not forgotten to cut out floating stones and other valuable parts from the beast corpses.

One of the team members suddenly cried out softly, “One of ours.”

He ran to a corpse nearby and crouched down.

He Lingchuan followed and looked. It was indeed one of Fushan Yue’s personal guards. His throat had been cut open.

What killed him should have been enormous, sharp claws, because there were also two claw marks across his chest. The force had been so great that half his lung had been dug out.

“It was probably a heavy-clawed beast moving with the beast tide. This kind of aberrant creature likes to track prey.” Just as predators often followed wild ox herds in the mortal realm.

“There’s another one here!” someone else shouted. “Old Bao and Wei San are dead too!”

Not far away, there were two more corpses belonging to Chiyan guards. Technically, one was a man, and the other was a bear monster.

He Lingchuan had opposed putting that bear monster in the starting lineup from the very beginning. Its movements had already lacked agility in the mortal realm, and under the Fu Realm’s gravity, it would only be slower still. Now, seeing it lying there, he let out a long sigh.