The Girl and the Monk

Withered Horse Ravine.

High mountains flanked its banks, their sheer cliffs soaring thousands of feet.

Muddy torrents surged through the ravine, and miasma hung over it like a canopy.

The place had originally had no name. Legend claimed that a mighty immortal had once passed through, and the divine steed beneath him, unable to endure the poisonous miasma, had lowered its head to drink a mouthful of the ravine's murky water.

In mere moments.

Its flesh had dissolved, its entire body rotting into sludge, leaving only a skeleton standing in the shallows.

That was how Withered Horse Ravine had earned its fearsome name.

Of course, a rumor was only a rumor.

Any cultivator with a little common sense could see, after a moment's thought, that the story did not hold water.

A creature taken as a mount by a mighty immortal must have possessed an extraordinarily high cultivation realm—at the very least, it would have been a Great Demon above the painting realm.

How could a body of that caliber have its flesh eaten away by a mere mouthful of muddy water and end up reduced to bare bones?

Still, however embellished and exaggerated the rumor might have been, it spoke volumes about the virulence of the miasma and the danger of the water here.

On an ancient path overgrown with knee-high weeds.

Two figures walked into this dead land, one behind the other, at an unhurried pace.

It was rather absurd.

Both were painting realm cultivators. Shrinking the Earth into an Inch and traveling on the wind should have been child's play for them.

Yet here they were, trudging through the mud on their own two legs like ordinary mortals.

It was decidedly strange.

But the young monk practiced the ascetic meditation of the Tranquil Peace Temple, which emphasized