◎Eldest Senior Brother, if you’re not afraid, why are you clutching Senior Sister Fuhua’s clothes so tightly?◎
The Rizhao Mountain range encompassed countless towering peaks, but Hundred Swords Mountain was not connected to them. Rizhao bordered the Nayan River to the east and the Withered Wood Forest to the south—and Hundred Swords Mountain rose from the very heart of that forest.
The Withered Wood Forest was, as its name suggested, an endless forest of dead trees. Not a blade of grass grew for miles, and even the beasts, birds, and insects within were all bleached bone. Anything with flesh and blood was exceedingly rare.
After descending from Rizhao Mountain, the group trekked through the towering woods for over two hours before finally reaching the forest’s edge.
“——So when you enter the Withered Wood Forest, you absolutely must keep up with Senior Sister Fuhua. Not a single step apart. Understood?” Mingzhu chattered nonstop the whole way. Ming Fuhua and Lu Qingkong couldn’t be bothered to respond, but Zhou Fuxue and Younu—the other female cultivator from West Mountain, an inexperienced country bumpkin—crowded around him, hanging on his every word.
Younu was the youngest junior sister of West Mountain, around Zhou Fuxue’s age. Her face was still childish, yet already showing the first hints of the beauty she would grow into, her starry eyes brimming with light. She flitted around Mingzhu like a sparrow, chirping, “Eldest Senior Brother is so knowledgeable! Eldest Senior Brother is amazing! How do you know so much? This is Younu’s first time in the Withered Wood Forest. Unlike you, so calm and composed—I’m ashamed.”
Mingzhu preened, so puffed up with flattery he nearly floated away. “Naturally. The Withered Wood Forest may be full of strange things you’ve never seen outside, but come a few more times and you won’t be scared anymore.”
Zhou Fuxue had only been listening to learn what the forest was like. Hearing this, he gave a cold snort and ruthlessly exposed him. “Eldest Senior Brother, if you’re not afraid, why have you been clutching Senior Sister Fuhua’s clothes this whole time?”
Mingzhu: “…”
Ever since they’d entered the forest’s outskirts, Mingzhu had been glued to Ming Fuhua’s side, trembling as he pinched the hem of her outer robe, refusing to let go for anything.
Ming Fuhua turned and gave him a cool look.
Mingzhu coughed, puffing himself up despite his bruised dignity. “Well, ahem, your Senior Brother was worried your Senior Sister would be scared, so I held on. You kids wouldn’t understand.”
Younu was easier to fool. She gasped in awe and worshipped him all the more. “Eldest Senior Brother really is amazing!”
Mingzhu: “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing. Heh heh.”
Zhou Fuxue watched his cowardly performance coldly, snorted, and ignored him.
The Withered Wood Forest was full of towering trees, withered yellow from root to leaf. When the breeze passed through, the leaves rustled dryly. Looking closer, quite a few birds made entirely of white bone flapped their skeletal wings and alighted lightly on the branches, their pitch-black eye sockets seeming to stare down at the five below, occasionally emitting the dry “clack clack” of bones knocking together.
The more timid Younu shrank closer to Mingzhu in fear, whispering, “E-Eldest Senior Brother, those birds… are they still alive?”
Mingzhu gently patted her head and said softly, “This is the Withered Wood Forest. Nothing here is alive, and nothing here is dead.”
At those words, not only Younu but even the aloof Zhou Fuxue felt a chill race down his spine, and couldn’t help edging closer to Mingzhu.
Along the way, even as withered wolves, tigers, and leopards watched them hungrily from the sidelines, Ming Fuhua and Lu Qingkong strode forward with expressionless faces, as if they didn’t see the horrifying skeletal creatures at all, perfectly composed.
It was the three trailing behind who suffered. Every time they spotted a skeletal animal, Younu and Zhou Fuxue would both shiver involuntarily, and sometimes Younu would let out shriek after shriek. By the end, even Mingzhu—strained as he was to maintain his Eldest Senior Brother’s dignity—was screaming right along with them. The scene was pure chaos.
Younu: “AHH—Eldest Senior Brother! Bone tiger! AHHH!”
Mingzhu: “AAAAH!! I can’t see it, I can’t see it! Don’t make me look!”
Younu: “…”
Zhou Fuxue: “…”
The silent Withered Wood Forest echoed with their alternating screams until Ming Fuhua finally couldn’t bear it anymore. She yanked Mingzhu to her side and tossed the two children over to Lu Qingkong to look after, and at last, peace descended.
They walked on quietly like this, but the deeper they went, the more a yellow-sand-like haze began to rise around them, acrid to the nose.
An enormous snake skeleton came gliding slowly through the withered grass beside them. Ming Fuhua’s eyes shifted, and she reached out and clapped a hand over Mingzhu’s eyes.
Mingzhu hung limply on her shoulder, asking without energy, “What’s wrong?”
Ming Fuhua ignored him and turned to Lu Qingkong. “Ahead is the Withered Bone Mist. If we linger in it too long, I fear we’ll turn into those withered bones ourselves—neither alive nor dead. Can you use Object Control to carry the two of them?”
Lu Qingkong said, “I have a Crippled Spirit Vein. I haven’t even reached Core Formation Stage. I can’t use Object Control.”
Ming Fuhua frowned. Only after the snake skeleton had finally crawled past did she release her hand.
Mingzhu said, “Last time Master brought me here. How come we never ran into any Withered… Withered Wood Mist?”
“It’s Withered Bone Mist,” Ming Fuhua corrected him flatly. “Daoist Master Guining’s Spiritual Power is boundless, so of course he could scatter the mist with a single sweep of his palm. But the rest of us don’t have that kind of power.”
Lu Qingkong studied the pale Withered Bone Mist nearby, and something seemed to occur to him. He pulled a palm-sized Wooden Boat from his sleeve. “Everyone step back.”
Though puzzled, the group spread out.
Lu Qingkong set the boat on the ground and lightly traced two strokes across the array on its hull with his slender fingers. The Wooden Boat began to grow—but perhaps because Lu Qingkong wasn’t quite familiar with this array, it shrank back to its original size twice midway before finally expanding to the size of an ordinary boat.
Lu Qingkong hopped aboard and checked every array on the vessel one by one before announcing, “The arrays can hold for half an hour at most. We just need to reach Hundred Swords Mountain before they fade.”
Ming Fuhua wasn’t skilled with arrays, but she had heard of this eccentric-tempered junior brother. Rumor had it that although he was young and had a Crippled Spirit Vein, whether by innate gift or something else, he had been extraordinarily proficient with mechanisms and arrays since childhood, and Daoist Master Guining had accepted him as a personal disciple despite the rules.
She nodded. “Half an hour. That’s enough.”
The moment Ming Fuhua nodded, Younu cheered and hopped joyfully onto the boat, waving at Zhou Fuxue beside her with easy familiarity. “Little Junior Brother, come on!”
The boat was extremely crude, its entire surface carved with intricate arrays that looked, on closer inspection, rather eerie.
Ming Fuhua hauled Mingzhu aboard, pressed his head into her embrace, and gave Lu Qingkong a slight nod.
Lu Qingkong sat cross-legged at the bow and slipped an iron piece from his sleeve into the center of one array. The wooden boat jolted violently, and suddenly two wings sprouted from its sides—row upon row of wooden slats, pegged to a pitch-black beam that was itself covered in dense array runes.
Then the battered vessel slowly rose from the ground and, amid the shrieking of the two children along with Mingzhu, shot into the sky, taking a long while to stabilize into a wobbly glide. With Lu Qingkong calmly guiding the arrays, it flew toward the peak of Hundred Swords Mountain jutting into view in the distance.
Younu, small face deathly pale, gripped the boat’s edge and watched the Withered Wood Forest shrink below. True to her childish nature, wonder quickly overwhelmed her fear, and she soon turned to chatter happily with Zhou Fuxue.
Zhou Fuxue was slow to warm up to people; for every ten things Younu said, he only responded with an offhand “mm,” not sparing a single extra word. Even a lively girl like Younu eventually found it dull, so she simply abandoned him and scooted over to Ming Fuhua, peering curiously at Mingzhu burrowed in her arms. “What’s wrong with Eldest Senior Brother?”
Mingzhu was curled up at the stern, half his body buried in Ming Fuhua’s embrace, both arms clamped around her waist, his fingers trembling faintly.
Ming Fuhua patted his back gently and said flatly, “Nothing. He’s afraid of heights.”
From the bow came what sounded suspiciously like a cold snort from Lu Qingkong, mockery written all over it.
Mingzhu didn’t even dare open his eyes, asking over and over, “Fuhua, are we there yet?”
After nearly half an hour of this, they finally sailed across the Withered Bone Mist shrouding the area and arrived, wobbling, at Hundred Swords Mountain.
Hundred Swords Mountain pierced the clouds, its slopes covered in withered trees and massive boulders, skeletal birds and beasts weaving among them—serene and eerie at once.
Only when he heard Younu jumping and shouting that they’d arrived did Mingzhu slowly sit up. He glanced down carelessly and immediately went white again.
Ming Fuhua stood at the bow beside Lu Qingkong as the boat drifted slowly toward an open platform on the mountain.
Beside them, Zhou Fuxue clamped both hands over Mingzhu’s eyes, grinding his teeth. “Then just don’t look! Keep your eyes shut!”
Mingzhu wrapped himself tremulously around him, wailing toward Ming Fuhua, his only source of security, “Fuhua! Fuhua, save me!”
Ming Fuhua paid him no mind, saying flatly to Lu Qingkong, “I’ve heard you’re a Crippled Spirit Vein who can’t do anything—not even form a Core. Why would you want to come to Hundred Swords Mountain searching for a spirit weapon?”
Even called a Crippled Spirit Vein to his face, Lu Qingkong didn’t so much as flicker—unlike Zhou Fuxue, who would have seethed with humiliation. He seemed used to it. His jet-black eyes fixed on the approaching mountain, he answered evenly, “I didn’t come for a spirit weapon. Even if I found one, without forming a Core I couldn’t wield it anyway.”
Ming Fuhua said, “You come to Hundred Swords Mountain not for a weapon—then what for?”
Lu Qingkong tilted his head slightly, his unbound hair whipping wildly in the wind. Even the elegant Rizhao Robe carried an inescapable sinister air on him. He said flatly, “I’m building a mechanism that can contain every array in existence, and I need iron implements infused with spiritual qi. Don’t you agree, Senior Sister, that Hundred Swords Mountain is the perfect place to gather materials?”
Ming Fuhua’s eyes darkened instantly. Every weapon on Hundred Swords Mountain possessed a spirit and could never be melted down for mechanisms. The only weapons without Artifact Spirits yet retaining residual spiritual qi were located in…
She stared at him coldly, as if looking at some heretical demon. “You mean to go to the Abandoned Sword Tomb?”
A chilly smile curled across Lu Qingkong’s face. “Why not?”
“Have you forgotten Daoist Master Guining’s warning before we left? The Abandoned Sword Tomb is like crouching over a firewood pile—even Daoist Master Guining couldn’t guarantee escaping unscathed.” Ming Fuhua’s voice sharpened. “Do you think a Crippled Spirit Vein who goes in would come out alive?”
Lu Qingkong didn’t bat an eye. “How would I know without trying?”
Just as Ming Fuhua was about to say more, the boat beneath their feet lurched violently, followed immediately by the screams of Mingzhu and Younu.
Ming Fuhua whipped around. “What happened?”
Mingzhu had Younu and Zhou Fuxue shielded tightly in his arms, his face twisted in terror as he pointed to the side, stammering, “We h-hi-hit something!”
Ming Fuhua froze—then saw an enormous Withered Bone Bird sweep shrieking past the boat’s side, its razor wing-bones tearing through the wooden slats of the vessel’s wing. The whole boat instantly pitched and rolled.
At the sight of the massive Withered Bone Bird, Lu Qingkong felt not panic but a sickly fervor, and he murmured, “A Long Kite?”
The Long Kite’s wings were vast; even reduced to this neither-alive-nor-dead withered wood state, its flight remained graceful. After smashing one of the boat’s wooden wings, it slowly beat its wings in the air, banked, and came diving at them again—as if intending to smash their boat into a pile of kindling.
Mingzhu and Younu: “AAAHH!”
