Gu Hui slowly descended back to the riverbank, gazing at the night sky and mountain stream, now restored to tranquility.
Yet he felt little relief.
The altar in that ancient cave, the shattered ancient sealing artifact, and that unprecedented "Ghostblood Shade"... all of it pointed to a deeper mystery.
Just how had that thing broken free? Had time worn away the seal, or had it been... deliberate?
He vaguely felt that the waters of the Southern Border ran far deeper than he had imagined.
Eliminating that conspicuous menace might have merely lifted the curtain on a far greater storm.
Though the matter at Mountainback Market had been settled, its root cause remained unknown. Zhou Yixian and the escort guards' mention of other strange happenings in the Southern Lands still lingered in his mind.
He no longer followed the official roads exclusively. At times, he traveled through mountain forests; at others, he forded streams. On one hand, this was to avoid needless trouble; on the other, it allowed him to more deeply sense the breath of this land.
The farther south he went, the stranger the terrain became. The mountains grew steeper and more bizarre, while the vegetation consisted largely of species rarely seen in the Northern Lands—lush and verdant, carrying a primal wildness untouched by cultivation.
The air grew more humid. Poisonous miasma and swamps appeared from time to time, while ordinary villages became increasingly scarce. When he did encounter them, they were usually inhabited by mountain folk who lived by hunting and gathering, their customs more rugged yet simple.
Along the way, he passed several more villages rumored to have suffered incidents of "dried-up blood essence."
Investigating in secret, he discovered that the lingering sinister aura in these places shared the same source as the ancient cave at Mountainback