The sun blazed overhead, and the air was damp and stifling.
The weather in the mountain forests of the Southern Border was always like this, enough to make anyone feel miserable.
Under the scorching sunlight, on a barren stretch of mountain land where weeds struggled to grow and trees were scarce, Du En and five others were digging pits.
He was eighteen years old that year and stood over seven feet tall. He was dressed from head to toe and had wrapped his hair in a thick cloth to cover his nose and mouth. Only his brows and eyes were visible, making him look quite ordinary. Yet his eyes remained calm and focused despite the sweat pouring down him.
His movements were rigid and methodical from start to finish. Neither physical exhaustion nor the layers of oppressive heat could distort them.
He simply used the steel shovel in his hands to dig out clump after clump of earth.
The soil brought up by the shovel was grayish-white overall. Every so often, he would also dig up some strange, viscous black clods.
After being flung away, those black clods would scatter at once, transforming into a cloud of dark, baleful smoke.
Under the sunlight, the baleful smoke quickly melted away.
But then an intense, foul stench of decay suddenly spread through the air.
"Cough, cough, cough!"
"Damn it, this really isn't work for humans!"
Someone nearby could not hold back and began coughing violently, as though their lungs were about to be coughed up, yet they did not dare remove the thick cloth from their face.
Someone else cursed and grumbled outright, their voice full of resentment, but with no alternative, they could only continue working.
"That should do it."
After shoveling out another clump of earth and piling it together with the others, Du En looked at the shallow pit that had taken shape. He planted his shovel in the mound of soil and spoke calmly.
Wei Ming, the newcomer assigned to work alongside him that day, stopped as well. He leaned on his shovel and breathed rapidly through the thick, damp cloth, taking a brief rest.
Du En said nothing. He merely turned his head and looked toward the other side, where a row of people lay on the ground, baked by the blazing sunlight and giving off a foul odor.
Or rather, a row of corpses.
Their names were unknown, and they had died in all sorts of ways.
Suicide, murder, exhaustion from labor, being bitten to death by demon beasts, being killed by Evil Cultivators...
In short, they had all been cultivators while alive. Though they did not even have straw mats to wrap their bodies in now, they had still been deliberately gathered together and transported here to be buried.
Burying corpses.
That was the work Du En and the others did.
A lowly job!
The working conditions were terrible, the pay was pitiful, and they were constantly looked down upon.
But this work had been assigned by the border city. Unless something unexpected happened, they would keep doing it until they died.
Whether before or after transmigrating, Du En had never wanted to live this kind of life.
But there was nothing he could do. That was simply how this world worked.
The immortal sects controlled the world, kept the common people in captivity, and selectively bred them, raising batch after batch of people with spiritual roots. Then they made them cultivate, squeezing even more value out of them.
That was why he had embarked on the path of cultivation, why he had moved to this border city in the Southern Border, and why he had been assigned this job and begun digging pits to bury corpses. By his count, he had already been doing it for a month and a half.
He had to report for work every day and bury dozens of corpses each day. There were only ever more, never fewer.
Sometimes, someone who had worked alongside him the day before would be lying on the ground the next day, waiting for him to bury them.
Thus, even though Du En had only worked here for a month and a half, he could already be considered one of the old hands at burying corpses.
"Let's continue."
"Okay."
The two of them walked together to a corpse.
It was a female corpse, dressed in rags and covered in claw marks. Half her face had been bitten away. The other half, still relatively intact, was delicate and refined, but it had long since frozen in place. Her wide, lifeless eyes still held the despair and unwillingness she had felt in life.
Du En lifted the female corpse by the shoulders, while the newcomer Wei Ming went to lift her legs.
Facing that half-good, half-ruined face, Du En's expression did not change in the slightest. Wei Ming, however, kept dodging his gaze, afraid to look at those rotten, stinking, hideous wounds.
"Be careful."
Du En reminded him.
Burying corpses was no easy task. Suicides and those who had died from exhaustion aside, the others had perished in all sorts of ways. Who knew what might still be left on their bodies?
For instance, someone who had died from poisoning might still have toxic substances on them. Accidentally touching and becoming contaminated by them could leave a person in the same state as the corpse they were carrying.
"Yes, yes, I know."
Wei Ming answered vaguely after being reminded. His eyes wandered, and he still did not dare look at the wounds.
Seeing this, Du En said no more.
Fortunately, the female corpse that had been bitten to death by a demon beast did not have any other problems. They laid her flat in the pit and covered her with a thin layer of soil. That was enough to let her rest in peace.
Then they continued digging pits and continued burying the next corpse.
An accident occurred while they were moving the next one.
Crack~
The moment they lifted it, Du En keenly heard a faint, brittle sound.
Something was wrong!
"Slowly..."
He had just begun telling his coworker to lower it gently, but it was already too late.
With a smack, the corpse suddenly broke in half. Rotten, foul-smelling corpse fluid, mixed with half-liquefied organs, gushed out, splattering across the ground.
"Whoa—cough, cough, cough!"
"Good heavens!"
"Back—ugh!"
The overwhelming stench burst outward, scaring the corpse buriers away.
But the two at the center were not so lucky.
Du En had stepped backward to avoid the splatter, so he was relatively fine. Compared to this even more disgusting scene, he had seen worse before. Thus, he merely narrowed his eyes and held his breath, feeling a little nauseous.
Wei Ming, on the other hand, could not withstand it at all. His eyes rolled back, and he was knocked unconscious by the stench.
Fortunately, he fell backward instead of pitching forward into the corpse fluid. Otherwise, he would truly have been spectacularly unlucky.
Though, as things stood, this could actually be considered fortunate...
Du En shook his head inwardly. After inspecting the mess again and confirming that it was merely foul-smelling, with no other strange substances, he was about to walk over and drag Wei Ming away.
As he took a step, he noticed that something seemed to be floating among the pile of half-liquefied organs.
Thus, as he walked closer and crossed over to it, he suddenly reached out and scooped it up without anyone noticing.
He then dragged Wei Ming to one of the few strange trees on the barren land and propped him up beneath its sparse shade.
Only after doing this, while the others were still distracted, did he look at the thing he had casually fished out.
It was a small pouch made of some kind of supple leather. If Du En had not mistaken it, that leather was highly resistant to corrosion.
So it had been hidden inside the corpse's stomach?
When he opened it, he found three Low-grade Spirit Stones and a folded note.
That was equivalent to his wages for an entire month. What an unexpected windfall!
Normally, corpse buriers did not have the chance to profit from the dead.
After the processes of searching corpses, collecting and transporting corpses, and so on, it was only at the very end that wretched workers like them were allowed to bury them.
Du En's eyes flickered. He tied the small pouch shut again, not caring that it was still stained with filth, and stuffed it inside his clothes. Then he turned his head toward the scene filled with stench and did not immediately return to work.
He wanted to wait for the smell to dissipate a little before waking Wei Ming.
During this brief interval when he could still rest, a thought stirred in his mind, and a frame appeared before his eyes, filled with rows of hazy text.
[Age: 18/91] [Spiritual Root: Low-grade] [Cultivation: Early Qi Refining (12/100)] [Technique: Yellow Earth Technique (Beginner's Practice 9/10)] [Spells: None] [Divine Abilities: None] [Hundred Arts: None]
Before you continue