They walked down a winding goat path.
Crossed the profound darkness.
It was as though they had stepped onto a land of the dead. Withered trees stood lonely beneath a mist-shrouded sky without sun or moon.
Tu Shan Jun looked back over his shoulder.
The little path gradually turned illusory, yet it remained like a thin thread linking the inside and the outside.
The soil beneath their feet seemed dead.
This was a high slope, and upon its barren earth stood a small house.
The house was dilapidated beyond repair, lying there silently like a corpse, waiting for the living to discover it and lay it to rest in the ground.
Watching Xu Hongshang prepare to continue forward, Tu Shan Jun quietly said, "Be careful."
Xu Hongshang nodded and took Tu Shan Jun's hand.
"Even I am coming here for the first time," Pei Luotian said with a note of amazement.
"This place is?"
"A dead land."
"A dead land?"
"Land that has died is called a dead land," Xu Xuan explained.
"Why would land die?"
"The heavens can die. Why can't the earth?"
"The heavens can die?"
"Haven't you heard?"
"If Heaven had feelings, Heaven too would grow old."
"What happens when people grow old?"
Pei Luotian picked up the thread. "They become old immortals who refuse to die."
Third Lady had not expected her ancestor to have such a humorous side.
All she could say was that these ancestors and elders—though they normally possessed peerless majesty and world-shaking cultivation—were, at their core, still people. Whether good or evil, clever or foolish, as long as they were human, they still had joy, anger, sorrow, and delight.
Xu Xuan said with a smile, "Those who grow old without dying become spirits."
"What kind of spirit do I look like?"
"You