Soul Attachment Secret Art

Late at night, outside the city, at a desolate roadside inn, Long Tiebi and several other burly men clad in iron armor squatted in the courtyard of the ramshackle little inn, diligently tending several huge earthenware pots that gave off a rich, strange fragrance.

One pot held several freshly slaughtered black dogs; another contained a Dragon-Tiger-Phoenix stew of three highly venomous twin-winged bamboo-leaf green snakes, three spirit cats, and three golden pheasants; yet another held thin, snow-white slices of strange meat rolling endlessly in the boil. It was said to be Bitterbone Fish, a specialty of Bitterwater Lake in the deserts of the Western Di Protectorate. Its flesh was extremely tough, but when stewed thoroughly with certain special herbs, its flavor became incomparably rich and fragrant—a peerless delicacy of the mortal world.

Beside the pots was a bonfire, where two whole sheep, twelve beef shanks, and several suckling pigs roasted over the flames, glistening brightly with oil.

The three pots, each large enough for an adult to bathe in, boiled furiously. Long Tiebi and the others kept twitching their noses and gulping down mouthful after mouthful of saliva, their eyeballs nearly falling into the pots. As for Barrel, Alda, and Bilibili, who squatted foolishly to one side, each held a huge earthen basin. Their eyes had turned green as they stared at the wondrous food, saliva dripping down in streams half a foot long.

Lin Qi and Longcheng sat facing each other inside the inn. Dozens of huge wine jars had been casually placed around them. Longcheng had dug these treasures out of the ruins of Warm Fragrance Pavilion. Beneath those millennium-old Osmanthus Trees, whose shade covered the sky, vintage wines had been buried for at least three to five hundred years. Every sip was worth a hundred gold coins—genuinely