Withered Horse Ravine.
High mountains flanked its banks, their sheer cliffs rising thousands of feet.
Turbid currents surged through the ravine, and miasma blanketed it like a canopy.
The place had originally had no name. According to legend, a mighty immortal had once passed through, and his divine steed, 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 melted away, its entire body rotting into sludge, leaving only a bare skeleton standing in the shallows.
That was how Withered Horse Ravine had earned its sinister name.
Of course, a rumor was still only a rumor.
Any cultivator with a little common sense could tell, after a moment's consideration, that the story did not hold water.
A creature taken as a mighty immortal's mount would surely have possessed an extremely high cultivation level-at the very least, it would have been a Great Demon beyond the Painting Realm.
How could a body at that level have had its flesh rotted away by a mere mouthful of muddy water, ending up as nothing but bare bones?
Still, however embellished or exaggerated the legend might have been, it spoke volumes about the virulence of the miasma and the treacherous nature of the water.
On an ancient path overgrown with knee-high weeds.
Two figures walked into this land of death, one behind the other, at an unhurried pace.
It was rather laughable.
Both were Painting Realm cultivators, for whom shrinking the earth to inches or riding the wind was child's play,
Yet here they were, trudging through the mud on their own two legs like ordinary mortals.
It was decidedly odd.
But the young monk practiced Taining Temple's Bitter Zen, which emphasized keeping one's feet firmly on the ground,