Outside Stone Creek Town, in a desolate forest rarely visited by people.
Li Hai stood with his hands behind his back, sizing up the kindly old man before him. He clicked his tongue and sneered.
"Zhou Yugen, Zhou Yugen. You look like a decent human being, so why don't you act like one?"
The old man... that was, Zhou Yugen, stared at Li Hai in terror, forcing a smile as he asked, "Young hero, may I ask how I, Zhou, offended you? Why did you destroy my garden, kill my subordinates, and then abduct me to this wilderness?"
Li Hai had no intention of answering. Instead, he asked, "Zhou Yugen, do you remember Qiu Fangzheng?"
"Qiu... Fangzheng?"
Zhou Yugen furrowed his grizzled brows and racked his brains for a long while. Then he gave a bitter smile. "Young hero, forgive this old man. I'm frail with age, and my mind has grown weak too. I truly can't remember."
"You've forgotten?"
At those words, Li Hai couldn't help sneering coldly. "I'd say you've harmed so many people that you can't remember them all."
"Uh, well... heh, heh, heh." Zhou Yugen could only laugh dryly.
Li Hai asked again, "If you can't remember Qiu Fangzheng, then what about his younger sister, Qiu Fanglan? Have you forgotten her too?"
"Qiu Fanglan... Lan..."
After thinking for a while, Zhou Yugen gave another bitter smile. "Young hero, to be honest, I truly can't remember anyone by the name of Qiu Fanglan..."
"You're lying," Li Hai interrupted. "Your heart skipped a beat."
Before Zhou Yugen could offer another excuse, Li Hai kicked him in the leg.
Crack!
Bone and flesh burst apart, and blood sprayed everywhere.
"Aaah!"
After a scream of agony, Zhou Yugen clutched the mangled leg, its bone jutting out stark white, and collapsed to the ground.
"Well?" Li Hai asked at his leisure. "Do you remember now?"
"I remember, I remember!" Zhou Yugen stammered through the pain. "Qiu Fanglan... I sold her."
"Sold her?" Li Hai frowned. "To whom?"
"I sold her to a wealthy family," Zhou Yugen stammered. "They... they needed a daughter, so..."
Before he could finish, Li Hai kicked and broke his other leg.
"Aaaah!"
The pain nearly drove Zhou Yugen mad. At last, he could no longer keep up his kindly façade. He glared at Li Hai and snarled, "You little bastard! I answered you, so why did you cripple my legs?!"
"Your qi is in disarray, and you're full of lies." Li Hai shook his head with a sigh. "I've lost patience with you."
With that, he took a hemp rope and several knives out of his portable realm.
"Looks like I'll have to make you suffer."
Li Hai toyed with a sharp knife as he looked at Zhou Yugen's terrified face. "Then you'll tell the truth."
A bloody spectacle of screams and torture slowly unfolded in the depths of the desolate forest.
Under the knife's repeated cuts, Zhou Yugen, the "actor" in this gruesome show, finally began to tell everything he knew.
Only then, from Zhou Yugen's account, did Li Hai gradually learn what Qiu Fangzheng's younger sister had gone through.
After Qiu Fangzheng had been murdered, Zhou Yugen had wasted no time in abducting his younger sister, Qiu Fanglan, and bringing her back to his estate.
Over the next three months, he had tortured her until she was barely recognizable and nearly driven insane.
Before long, Zhou Yugen had lost interest in Qiu Fanglan and sold her for a pittance to a band of human traffickers.
As for where the traffickers had taken her afterward, Zhou Yugen didn't know.
In the years that followed, he had only learned from the traffickers that, after being shunted from place to place, the girl seemed not to have lived past twenty.
Most likely, she had died.
"What a beast."
Li Hai shook his head with a sigh. "Your whole family are beasts."
Then he turned his blade and chopped off Zhou Yugen's head.
"My lord, you mean... my younger sister..."
In the cavern deep in Fish-Plate Mountain, Qiu Fangzheng stared at Zhou Yugen's severed head, his voice trembling with excitement. "She was... rescued?"
"That's right." Li Hai nodded in confirmation. "After you died, Zhou Yugen had only just taken Qiu Fanglan to his estate when a passing martial arts expert rescued her."
"Th-then what happened afterward?"
For some reason, Qiu Fangzheng suddenly spoke much more fluently. He hurriedly asked, "My lord, how did Xiao Lan... how did Xiao Lan fare after that?"
"She did well."
Li Hai said, "According to what I found out, not even half a year after that expert rescued Xiao Lan, she fell in love with his son and married him. Then they left Coiling Dragon Mountain and went north to the Great Jing Dynasty."
"Jing was a good place. It was peaceful and stable."
Qiu Fangzheng smiled for the first time in ages. "How should I put it... it was certainly much better than Coiling Dragon Mountain."
"Unless something unexpected happened," Li Hai continued, "your younger sister's grandchildren should all be grown up by now."
"Indeed." Qiu Fangzheng was content. "My parents can finally rest in peace, knowing what happened from beyond the grave."
Li Hai fell silent.
"My lord." Qiu Fangzheng slowly rose to his feet. "I'll take you to the Ancient Sect Ruins now."
"Very well." Li Hai nodded and stood up as well.
Then the two of them... no, the two ghosts turned into two hazy shadows and plunged into the pool, vanishing from the cavern.
After leaving the cavern, Li Hai followed Qiu Fangzheng as they passed through layers of mountain, weaving this way and that into the depths of Fish-Plate Mountain.
It was during this journey that he learned for the first time that a ghost's ability to pass through things wasn't limitless.
Any ghost could easily pass through sealed buildings and thick rock walls, but this ability to etherealize and move through solid objects couldn't be used forever.
Put simply, it was like how even someone holding their breath would eventually have to breathe.
When ghosts passed through solid objects, there was a limit to how thick an obstacle they could cross in one go. They couldn't pass through endlessly.
For example, the maximum wall thickness a lowest-tier Dead Soul could pass through was ten zhang.
If a wall was more than ten zhang thick, then unless it contained a wide crack or a large hole, a Dead Soul couldn't pass through it and could only linger outside.
As for the higher-tier Fierce Soul, after testing it, Li Hai found that its maximum wall thickness was roughly a hundred zhang.
That was neither particularly thin nor particularly thick—a rather awkward middle ground.
If Li Hai were trapped in some underground cavern where the earth above, below, and all around him was more than a hundred zhang thick, he could only sit in his underground prison. There would be no way out.
As for an even higher tier of ghost, some records in the warehouse at the Demon-Slaying Division outpost in Ox-Horn Town suggested that it was called the [Solid Ghost]. A Solid Ghost might be able to pass through walls a thousand zhang thick.
In other words, even a thousand-zhang-deep underground, a Solid Ghost could pass straight through.
That was an incredibly powerful level.
"My lord, we're at the narrow path."
In an unfamiliar cavern deep in Fish-Plate Mountain, Qiu Fangzheng pointed to the dark cave in the rock wall ahead and said respectfully to Li Hai, "Just follow this narrow passage all the way to the end, and you'll reach the outer wall of the Ancient Sect Ruins."
Li Hai gazed steadily at the cave ahead and said in a low voice, "Good. Let's go."
Then the two ghosts turned into black smoke and shot into the cave.
Before you continue