"Still, you have to trust me. I gave you my word, and I won't go back on it."
"And the Stone Stele from Dragon Tiger Mountain can count as my gift to you for our first meeting."
Seeing Toutian speak with such conviction, Ye Lin wavered.
The Nine Swords held too much appeal for him. After all, right now, he was searching blindly.
Eastern Continent was vast. Finding the whereabouts of the remaining Stone Steles was like searching for a needle in the ocean.
Everything depended on luck.
By the time he found all the locations of the Nine Swords, it would be who knew how many years.
"Fine, I'll go with you. But why are you so insistent that I accompany you to the Dark Forest?"
Only then did Ye Lin voice the question that had been troubling him.
He had heard of the Dark Forest. It lay in Demon Race territory.
And the forest was full of wandering ghosts and lost souls.
When cultivators died, if their souls weren't destroyed by their opponents, the souls of powerful cultivators could seize the chance to possess another body and be reborn, while the souls of weaker cultivators dissipated between heaven and earth.
They returned to heaven and earth, were born of heaven and earth, and died in heaven and earth.
Yet, for various reasons, some cultivators' souls didn't dissipate after death. Instead, they could continue cultivating, devoting themselves to the path of ghost cultivation.
The souls in the Dark Forest belonged to the dead of various races. They dwelled there and, in theory, could endure as long as the Dark Forest remained.
That was because the Dark Forest was an extremely unusual place, with a mysterious force that could nurture souls.
The most dangerous thing, however, was that the souls