Volume 5, Chapter 6 – Return

“This damned place… it’s way too quiet.”

Moving quietly along a mountain path, Shen He gripped her wooden sword in one hand and used her phone for light with the other, feeling that something was off about the route today.

She had been playing around Qinglao Mountain since childhood. Most people might think there was only one road into the valley here, but she knew of at least three hidden side paths that could get around into it.

Those paths were all hard to walk, though. You had to climb up from the side for part of the way, which took a fair bit of effort.

What struck Shen He as strange was the news she had seen on her phone: all of Qinglao Mountain should already have been sealed off by the Inspectorate.

She was on the mountain’s side slope, less than two hundred meters from the main route into the valley. Dense grass and leaves blocking the view was one thing, but how could there not be the slightest sound at all?

Wasn’t there a road right outside?

Forget the noise of passing cars—how was it that she couldn’t even hear birds or insects?

Shen He felt something was wrong, and for no reason she could name, the hair on the back of her neck began to rise.

She had actually been very cautious. In fact, she had never intended to sneak into the valley itself. She had only wanted to climb up to the side ridge and use her phone from there to take a few photos of the Inspectorate sealing off the entrance.

If she got any closer, surveillance would catch her immediately. That was why she had come to climb the ridge in the first place. She had never expected to run into something supernatural at the very edge of the area.

Feeling uneasy, Shen He turned on the demonic-aura detector built into her phone and saw the reading had already reached 25%, close to the green threshold.

Her expression turned even uglier.

One had to know that a phone’s demonic-aura detection function was terrible.

It was good enough just that it existed. Its precision, sensitivity, and accuracy were nowhere near comparable to those of real instruments.

If her phone was reading 25%, then the real number had probably already crossed the green line—in other words, reached over 30%.

That meant the fluctuations in the nearby field were already quite severe. A strong demonic aura was spreading outward from the valley, and it had already affected the place where she stood.

She quickly took out a tube of balm from her pocket, squeezed out a bit of the pungent paste, and smeared it over her brow center, crown, both temples, and beneath her nose.

The strong, sharp, stinging smell invaded her head straight through her nostrils. She immediately felt her mind clear, and all at once she could hear the wind around her again.

Clear-Bright Spirit-Waking Balm… it actually worked!?

Shen He felt both delighted and terrified.

Delighted because it had worked.

Terrified because the scene before her had changed completely. The somewhat familiar side path had turned into a dense, overgrown forest.

Shen He panicked a little. First, she turned on her phone and tried to get her location.

Failed.

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Forget using any of those functions normally. The phone signal had dropped to zero. She couldn’t send messages or receive them.

Forcing herself to calm down, Shen He carefully examined her surroundings. Relying on her fairly good memory and her familiarity with Qinglao Mountain’s terrain, she determined that she had somehow ended up deep inside the valley.

How could something like this happen?

Clutching her forehead in frustration for a while, Shen He concluded that some filthy thing must have interfered with and polluted her mind from a great distance away, silently distorting her five senses and consciousness without her noticing.

In other words, she had been hypnotized. She had thought she’d only walked a short stretch, but in reality it had been at least three times that distance, and she had noticed nothing at all the entire time.

Well, great.

Now that she understood what had happened, Shen He’s scalp crawled.

From the inside of the valley to the southern side slope was at least a kilometer. If something could interfere from that far away, then whatever vicious thing it was… she definitely did not want to meet it head-on.

“The main road out isn’t far from here. If I remember right, it’s about fifty steps.”

Shen He quickly calculated the best course of action.

Going deeper was out of the question. She was not the kind of person who liked courting death.

The best option was to run to open ground immediately. That way, maybe some aerial lookout would spot her and guide outside rescue in.

Shen He moved at once. Following the direction she remembered, she hurried outward with her phone’s light on, nervously watching for any abnormal movement in the surrounding forest.

The sun had not fully set yet. It was barely still twilight. But this deep in the woods, the light level was already extremely low.

So many places were blocked by grass, bushes, and trees that walking among them felt like bathing in clusters of shadow.

Shen He grew more and more frightened. The shadows cast by those plants seemed to join together into the blurred outlines of monsters. Her nerves were so frayed that she startled at every little thing, and that fed directly into her movements: ignoring the soreness in her ankles, she forced herself to move faster. No matter what, she had to get through those fifty steps as quickly as possible.

Crack!

Suddenly, a crisp sound came from under her foot.

At the same time, a thick blood-red mist burst upward, engulfing Shen He from head to toe.

Pfft!

Shen He accidentally inhaled a mouthful of the mist, and at once her vision swam.

When she focused again, she found a strikingly handsome, tall man standing before her, and for some reason his brows and eyes looked extremely familiar.

“Xiao He, how did you end up somewhere this dangerous?”

The man held out his hand to her.

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“Grab on to me!”

“I’ll take you out!”

Shen He instinctively started to reach out.

But then a sharp smell invaded her nose, and a flash of lightning seemed to go through her mind. She suddenly remembered—this man’s face… wasn’t it exactly the same as the old photos of her father when he was young?

Horror.

Shock.

Shen He sprang backward at once and jabbed at the man with her wooden sword.

Pop!

The man burst apart like a soap bubble.

The patch of forest light around him shattered with him.

Gloop, gloop…

Hiss… hiss!

A series of unsettling, grotesque noises came from all around. And when Shen He finally adjusted to the darkness, she realized in dread that the ground was covered in a blood-red carpet of algae-like growth, from which countless blood-flesh structures like tendons and membranes were spreading outward.

What the hell is this—

Whirling around in panic to inspect her surroundings, Shen He saw that within a radius of a hundred meters, nearly everything was blanketed in that blood-red carpet. The flesh had even wrapped itself around all the trees and leaves, and at the source of those spreading tissues were several fragments of “blood-eggs” embedded in the ground.

Th-th-th… these are the “meteors”?

Every hair on Shen He’s back stood on end.

So it really is filthy stuff?

Am I done for!?

Gloop, gloop…

She turned sharply again and saw bubbles starting to rise from the “carpet” at her feet.

It looked like the bubbling of lava or boiling water in cartoons, except it was happening on the surface of living biological tissue.

Shen He tried to run, but her body felt as if it had been nailed in place. She couldn’t move at all.

I’m dead!

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She turned her gaze deeper into the forest and saw that amid countless fragments of “blood-eggs,” there was another giant “blood-egg” over three meters tall.

Crack, crack!

Fissures appeared across its surface.

Shen He squeezed her eyes shut in terror and resigned herself to whatever fate would decide.

After a long while, when she felt no pain at all, she cautiously cracked her eyes open again. The giant egg had split open halfway, and the blood-red biological tissue all around it was flowing inward, little by little condensing into a humanoid outline.

It was unmistakably the outline of a woman. Shen He could swear she had never seen a woman with proportions that perfect.

Every curve, every measure, every line was exactly right. Even though she could only see the figure from behind, she was already awestruck.

Too beautiful!

Is she a voidfiend?

I’ve never seen a woman this beautiful in my life. This can’t possibly be my hallucination… am I going to die by her hand?

As the woman turned around, revealing a face of overwhelming beauty and seduction, Shen He felt as though she had been struck by an illusion spell and became completely lost in it, unable to pull herself free.

“Oh…”

All the blood-flesh tissue gathered in behind the woman’s head, spilling down like a sheet of blood-red hair. She slowly opened her eyes and looked at Shen He first of all.

“How interesting.”

Smiling, the woman lifted her bare foot lightly and walked over to Shen He, then raised a hand and pinched up her chin.

“Little sister, would you like to learn the sword from me?”

“I…”

Yes!

A thousand times yes!

Shen He screamed the answer inside her heart and was just about to speak—

When the next instant, a bursting explosive sound rang out by her ear.

Zheng—!

A white arc of light poured down like a celestial river overturning from the sky. In only an instant, the breathtaking woman before her was swallowed by the surging torrent. She was cut down before she could even let out a scream.

The wind howled.

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Everything was blown away and scattered in moments.

When Shen He came to her senses once more, the scene around her—whether the blood-flesh growths, the rocks, or the forest itself—had almost entirely vanished.

In their place was a rough and profound trench, and a woman in a black dress who looked exactly like the incomparable beauty from before, except that she had snow-white hair and a pair of golden eyes.

“A soulless grudge. After staying with me long enough, it even learned to imitate outward form.”

The woman spoke, her voice clear and exquisite.

The moment Shen He heard it, she felt her spirit lift, as though she had been cleansed for no reason at all. That only made the woman before her seem all the more mysterious and sacred, with an aura of solemn authority radiating from her whole being.

“Are you hurt?”

The woman in black—Bai Xiang—looked toward the girl in front of her.

“There is, one might say, a slight karmic tie between us.”

“In that case.”

“If you would be willing…”

“I WOULDN’T!!!”

Shen He came fully to her senses, shrieked at the top of her lungs, and ran off without even looking back at Bai Xiang.

“Hm?”

Bai Xiang was briefly taken aback, then understanding dawned on her face.

“So she was frightened.”

“With a temperament like that, she really isn’t suited to seek the Great Dao.”

“But…”

She frowned suddenly and lifted her head slightly toward the sky.

“Ten years into the new dynasty—how could something like this be allowed to reach so deep into the interior?”

Whatever.

It was not worth worrying about for now.

Bai Xiang could not be bothered with such a trivial matter.

She flexed her fingers, planning to search the surrounding area first and find where her natal Dao-sword had landed.