Where Immortals Once Walked

Two months later, in a forest in the southern part of Rongshan.

A bat flew down from the horizon and landed on Dong Rui’s shoulder. He tilted his ear to listen, and his spirits rose at once. “The town is two and a half kilometers ahead! Only two and a half kilometers left!”

The snow had melted, and the ground was damp.

But they had no way to ride the snail toad, because Dong Rui had performed two more surgeries on it. As a result, the snail toad had entered a state of dormancy and recuperation. It did not move, did not consume energy, and did not even need to eat self-heal herbs. Dong Rui had hidden it in his backpack.

Previously, the snail toad had carried people. Now, a person carried the snail toad.

Dong Rui himself was so exhausted he was dazed. All he wanted was to find a place to hide, then sleep his fill.

To him, He Lingchuan and Zhu Daniang looked like two tireless aberrant creatures.

Especially Zhu Daniang. Ever since she had divided property with her sister and obtained one of the molts, her energy had become almost frighteningly abundant. No matter how harsh the mountain forest became, she accepted everything with relish.

In Zhu Daniang’s own words, she had slept enough over the past three thousand years. Now, she believed that she should be out and about.

She had adapted well to her new body.

Zhu Erniang had filled the molt with flesh and blood before giving it to Zhu Daniang. That was equivalent to letting her seize a soulless, blank body, so the difficulty was almost zero, aside from the possibility of losing some memories.

According to the Soul-Stealing Mirror’s observations, the two recent eruptions of imperial nectar had stirred heaven and earth spirit qi back into slightly greater activity. This just happened to help Zhu Daniang control this body.

However, she was now the second-ranked fugitive on Lingxu City’s Ranking of Heaven. To avoid trouble, Zhu Daniang had made some disguising alterations to her appearance. First, she concealed the distinctive star map on her abdomen, changing it into the red-and-black coloration unique to poisonous spiders. Her body had become noticeably more angular, with sharp spines along her edges, and she had also shrunk by two sizes overall.

Now she looked nothing like the burrow spiders at all. He Lingchuan gave her a thumbs-up. “Like a big crab.”

Crabs also had eight legs, angular or square-ish shells, and serrated edges along their shells...

And crab roe.

Dong Rui yawned again. “Aren’t you the least bit curious where this brat went these past two months, Zhu Daniang?”

“No.”

“...” After spending so much time together, he could now easily tell the pair of spider queen sisters apart.

Zhu Daniang was very straightforward and did not like all those twists and turns, while Zhu Erniang was intelligent and could think like a human.

Dong Rui scraped the rotten mud from the bottom of his shoe against a tree trunk, then suddenly pointed at the sky. “The Tianluo Star stopped shining a long time ago. You know that, right?”

“Mm-hm.”

“I don’t know when it happened, but it went dim and never lit up again.”

He Lingchuan stroked his chin. “Now that you mention it, that really does seem to be the case.”

Dong Rui turned back and glared at him fiercely. “Does it have anything to do with what you stole from the Heavenly Palace’s Star-Plucking Tower?”

Only recently, while looking up at the night sky, had he realized Tianluo Star was gone!

Was the Tianluo Star important? Of course it was!

If there had been no Tianluo Star in the sky, He Lingchuan’s Mount Xu Plan would never have existed in the first place!

“Yes. Of course it does.” He Lingchuan smiled. “But this is top secret. Anyone who knows it will fall into extreme danger, even greater danger than being hunted by the Heavenly Palace. Do you want to hear it?”

Dong Rui sneered. “Is our current situation not dangerous?”

Seeing that He Lingchuan was about to speak, he immediately cut him off. “Forget it. Maybe some other time.”

He was not mentally prepared yet.

After walking another kilometer, they entered dense, shadowed woods. The evening wind howled around them.

They had found the road again, and it had clearly been repaired by human hands as the ground was quite level.

“Hurry up!” Dong Rui urged them on, but He Lingchuan and Zhu Daniang instead slowed their steps and looked around.

“What is it?”

“The forest is too quiet.” Even in winter, when tired birds returned to the woods at dusk, there should have been some noise. Yet at the moment, there was not a single sound.

Not to mention, Zhu Daniang’s eight claw tips had extraordinarily sharp senses. Even if a field mouse were tunneling or walking beneath the snow, it would not escape her perception.

But now, she actually said, “I can’t sense any life. Look at these trees.”

Trees?

Dong Rui lifted his head and examined them carefully.

In autumn and winter, most trees had already lost their leaves, leaving only bare branches and dead limbs. They were also covered in thick snow, so naturally they could not look as lush as they did in spring and summer.

Even so, Dong Rui discovered round holes in the tree trunks, each about as thick as a little finger.

Hm? What did this? Did someone drive nails into the trees?

Once he paid attention, he realized that there were at least seventeen or eighteen round holes on the tree.

This tree has them, and so does that one... Dong Rui checked more than a dozen trees in a row. No matter their size or thickness, all of them were covered in round holes!

Zhu Daniang suddenly said, “They were made by mouthparts.”

He Lingchuan struck the trunk with his palm.

The great tree, thick enough that two people could barely wrap their arms around it, snapped cleanly into two with a crack, the sound far too crisp.

A huge section of broken trunk crashed down.

Even that did not startle any roosting birds.

The forest remained terrifyingly silent.

“Look.” He Lingchuan pointed at the tree’s cross-section. “The inside is completely dead.”

Dong Rui leaned closer and saw that the surface He Lingchuan had broken open was gray-black, covered in countless radial cracks.

From the inside out, this tree had no moisture or vitality left at all.

He Lingchuan randomly broke several more trees. No matter the species, no matter whether they were thick or thin, all were in the same state.

Dong Rui’s bat monster puppet also found a dead wild rabbit in a crack between rocks.

It had not rotted, but it was shriveled dry.

“It was sucked dry.” As Dong Rui said this, he looked at Zhu Daniang. “Is this the doing of one of your kind?”

He had studied burrow spiders and seen how the spider queens ate people. They did indeed inject venom first, then they would drive their mouthparts deep and suck up the dissolved blood-and-flesh essence in great gulps.

He even pointed. “Look. There are spiderwebs over there too.”

White threads drifted in the depths of the dense forest, trailing in fine strands with the wind. He Lingchuan stirred up several lengths with his saber and studied them carefully. They were very sticky, and their toughness was decent as well.

“Nonsense.” Zhu Daniang refused to take that blame and would not allow her own kind to take it either.

He Lingchuan also said, “This isn’t spiderweb.”

Zhu Erniang’s spider silk had many uses, and he recognized every type. At first glance, these white threads did look somewhat like spider silk, but in truth, their strength and weaving pattern were completely different from those of burrow spiders.

Dong Rui yawned. “Standing here won’t get us any closer to figuring this out.”

The two men and one spider temporarily set aside their doubts and continued toward the town.

Soon, fields appeared one after another. However, these fields were all covered in white webs.

They ignored them and kept going.

At last, they arrived at the town.

The small town in the forest was abnormally quiet. There were no human voices and no lamplight.

Dong Rui sighed.

After sleeping in the open and living on wind and dew for two months, he had been hoping to reach the town, eat a hot meal, enjoy a proper hot bath, and live the kind of life a human should.

In the end, even this tiny little wish had come to nothing.

The dozens of houses in the town were eerily still and silent. Some doors stood wide open, creaking in the north wind.

He Lingchuan looked at the road. “Judging by the footprints on the ground, no one has walked here for at least half a day.”

The rain had started last night, so the ground was somewhat muddy, but there were no fresh footprints.

This town should have at least three to five hundred permanent residents, right? Yet not a single person had come out to walk around?