Let You Die Knowing Why

"Looks like I'd better cultivate some kind of night-vision technique in the future. It feels like I've formed an unbreakable bond with crawling through holes."

Wei Suo looked at the maze-like underground mausoleum before him, almost on the verge of tears. He had never liked entering caves where even escaping could take forever to fight demon beasts and the like. But ever since that time he and Lin Daoyi had done it in a cave, there had been the Stone Maggot Cave, and now the underground mausoleum beneath Green Wind Mausoleum—one cave after another.

The entire underground mausoleum resembled a city that had been shaken into utter ruin by an earthquake, then buried underground. Wei Suo now stood on a crumbling stone stairway. Collapsed stone pillars and statues littered both sides, while ahead lay countless palaces, half-collapsed or completely ruined, shrouded in darkness. The most common sights were half-standing statues and broken stone columns that had once supported the palaces, along with scattered dry bones.

More than seventy or eighty feet above Wei Suo's head, a crack over a man's height split the ceiling of the cave. This underground mausoleum beneath Green Wind Mausoleum was now like a dilapidated house riddled with holes. Wei Suo had entered through that crack, but his Wind Cloud Boots could only let him rise fifty or sixty feet into the air. He had gotten down here easily enough, but getting back out meant finding another exit.

After looking around for a while, Wei Suo said to the Green Robe Old Man, "Old man, you have to keep watch for me. If I accidentally trigger some restriction or get ambushed by a demon beast and die in here, then in this godforsaken filthy place, it might be another tens of thousands of years before anyone finds you."

"Stop talking nonsense. I'm watching," the Green Robe Old Man snorted unhappily. "Even if you die, you needn't worry about me. I don't have many years left anyway."

Wei Suo nodded repeatedly, blinking hard. He did not dare take out a luminous pearl. Once his eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, he drifted toward the place where the sounds had come from.

The environment inside the underground mausoleum was awful, and Wei Suo was frightened.

Collapsed rubble lay everywhere. It was pitch-black, with all kinds of branching paths, and there was not a single decent road to speak of. Many of the palaces he passed were on the verge of collapse. Sometimes, a ruined roof slanted over half a wall, making Wei Suo's heart hang in his throat as he passed beneath it, worried that his luck might be so bad that he would simply be crushed to death inside.

Other times, a path that looked perfectly fine would turn out to be a broken bridge after he walked farther along it, with a bottomless abyss stretching beneath his feet. With no road ahead, he could only turn back, forcing him to keep changing the marks he had left behind for fear of getting completely lost in this place.

Even worse, after he had walked toward the place where the earlier sounds had come from for a while, the sounds there vanished. Instead, from another direction that seemed extremely far away, came the sounds of someone casting techniques.

"Beautiful Nangong Yuqing, where exactly are you? At least give me a hint."

One thing was certain: Nangong Yuqing was somewhere within this underground mausoleum, which spanned who knew how many hundreds of miles, and she was definitely within three hundred miles of Wei Suo. A moment ago, the communication jade talisman in his hand had still glowed. But this communication jade talisman was ultimately a low-grade item. It could only tell him that Nangong Yuqing was in here and should be safe for the moment; it could not transmit any additional information at all.

Caught between advancing and retreating, Wei Suo stood before a narrow passage.

The passage allowed only one person through, but a crack of roughly the same width split open the ceiling above it and extended upward. A little faint light refracted in, making the entire passage like a strip of sky between cliffs.

Listening to the distant sounds from the other direction, Wei Suo gritted his teeth and entered the narrow passage.

That place was simply too far from where he currently was. What if, after he finally felt his way halfway there, the sounds vanished again? That would be wasted effort. It was better to first check out the place where he had heard the earlier sounds.

There was even less room to maneuver in such a narrow strip of sky, so Wei Suo became twelve times more cautious, every nerve in his body taut.

Suddenly, the Green Robe Old Man's voice sounded in his ears. "Careful, there's a cultivator ahead!"

At the end of the narrow passage lay another stretch of collapsed palace buildings.

A stone stairway ran through the ruins. Inside a half-collapsed hall beside the ruined stairway, a middle-aged cultivator in a black cloak lay in ambush in one corner, his eyes vigilantly fixed on the stone steps ahead.

The middle-aged cultivator had a long, narrow face and triangular eyes. His features looked somewhat sinister, enough to rival the red-robed cultivator who had fought Wei Suo over the Earth Fire Furnace Room.

Without any warning, the cultivator suddenly sensed something and whirled around.

Beside the ruins of a palace not far to his left, Wei Suo, dressed in green, was looking at him with a solemn expression.

"It's you!"

The black-cloaked cultivator's expression changed drastically. He immediately fired two streaks of black light from his hands. They were a pair of glittering magical treasures shaped like bird claws.

"What's going on?!"

The two streaks of black light struck Wei Suo's chest almost without delay. Yet instead of seeing blood erupt from Wei Suo's chest as expected, the cultivator watched the heavy black claws pass straight through Wei Suo's body without any obstruction. Only transparent ripples like water spread across Wei Suo's form.

Almost at the same time, a copper ring as thick as a bucket suddenly clamped around him. Then, before he could make a sound, amid the howling wind, more than a dozen terrifying black skulls and a streak of black light slammed into him from behind.

The cultivator's head flew straight into the air, while the power of the black skulls riddled his body with holes.

"A Divine Ability Realm Fifth Level cultivator."

Wei Suo emerged from the darkness behind him, looking immensely relieved.

Wei Suo, now dressed in gray, swiftly stripped all the clothes from the cultivator's body, rolled them up, and quickly followed the stone stairway into the vast cluster of collapsed buildings ahead, like a forest of stone.

As for the "green-clothed Wei Suo" standing motionlessly to the left of the cultivator's corpse, it only slowly faded and dispersed into the air after quite some time.

For a time, every sound in the underground mausoleum abruptly disappeared, leaving the entire place as silent as death.

Wei Suo did not know whether he should breathe a sigh of relief or become even more nervous.

Thirty or forty yards ahead of him lay a bottomless abyss. Above it stood a stone arch bridge spanning both sides. Apart from several thick cracks, it still appeared intact.

Among a pile of huge square stones near the bridgehead on Wei Suo's side, as though they had been transported in but not yet carved, another cultivator lay in ambush. Wei Suo had no idea what material this cultivator's robe was refined from, but like a Gray Rock Snake, it could change color according to its surroundings. At this moment, his robe was exactly the same grayish-white as the square stones. Had the Green Robe Old Man not warned Wei Suo, then in such extreme darkness, Wei Suo might not have noticed him even from nearby.

Wei Suo used the Qi Gazing Art to examine him. This cultivator, whose face he could not make out, was astonishingly the same as the cultivator he had just distracted with an Illusionary Light Talisman and ambushed to death—a Divine Ability Realm Fifth Level cultivator.

It seemed that not every member of the yellow-robed cultivator's group was a terrifying Circulation Realm cultivator.

But clearly, the yellow-robed cultivator's group was considerable in number, and they seemed somewhat familiar with the underground mausoleum's layout. They had already stationed people in many places, apparently secretly monitoring the movements of Tie Ce's people, waiting for the right moment to strike and launch a large-scale slaughter.

Wei Suo held his breath and watched for a moment, then took another Illusionary Light Talisman in hand. As before, he quietly approached the cultivator lying in ambush near the bridgehead.

Including the one in his hand, Wei Suo still had four Illusionary Light Talismans left. One of them was a Big White Pig Illusionary Light Talisman, but under these circumstances, Wei Suo felt it was better to use one that created an image of himself. After all, as before, he could identify friend from foe at a glance rather than judge by appearance and accidentally kill one of Tie Ce's people.

"What, trying to ambush me?"

But just as Wei Suo drew to a halt, nearly scared out of his wits, the cultivator suddenly turned around when Wei Suo was still at least twenty yards away.

The cultivator looked to be in his thirties. His face was thin and gaunt, with high cheekbones. Most eye-catching of all, one of his eyes was missing, covered by a black eyepatch. He was one-eyed, and he now stared at Wei Suo with that single eye, his hands clasped behind his back as he sneered continuously.

Wei Suo pulled out a Fireball Talisman in great alarm and cried out in disbelief, "How is that possible? How did you discover me so quickly?"

"What, you think a mere First-Order Fireball Talisman can deal with me?" The one-eyed cultivator looked at Wei Suo with extreme disdain and pointed a finger. A pitch-black iron shield floated before him.

"Forget it. Running into a high-level cultivator like you is just my bad luck. I finally managed to sneak in here, but instead of encountering Tie Ce's people, I still ran into you people." Wei Suo lowered the Fireball Talisman with a deathly pale face. "But I still can't understand it. How did you discover me immediately?"

The one-eyed cultivator smiled smugly. "There's no harm in letting you die knowing why." With a wave of his hand, a small silver-black shadow suddenly darted up from below him and leaped into his hand. It was a rat with silver-black stripes across its body.

"A Silver Devouring Rat. So it was beast-taming." Wei Suo froze for a moment, then understood at once.

"Why are you stuffing the Fireball Talisman back into your robe? You'll have to take it out again in a moment." Seeing Wei Suo nod, lower his head with a sigh, and tuck the Fireball Talisman back into his robe, the one-eyed cultivator could not help laughing loudly.

"What are you doing? A Mystic Tortoise Shield?" But then his eyes suddenly widened. After Wei Suo tucked the Fireball Talisman into his robe, he waved his hand and produced a black shield resembling a tortoise shell, which floated before him.

(Another powerful update is here. And with everyone's red votes being so powerful, I'll definitely do my utmost to maintain three updates a day during the New Year period! There will also be a featured post in the review section—those who want bonus points and highlights can go claim them.)