The Advantage Was Mine

The Imperial Way, the Tomb Guardian Beasts, and the burial goods scattered across the ground—Lin Feng was certain this was a tomb.

Was the Ghost Yamen inside a tomb?

No. Judging by what the flash flood had exposed, there were clearly few signs of age. Lin Feng recalled what Li Pusa had told him: the most recent rainstorm in the Western Hunan Mountains had been a month ago.

The legend of the Ghost Yamen went back much further than a month.

Had the Ghost Yamen moved, or had the wood spirit made a mistake?

Lightning kept piercing the heavens. Lin Feng narrowed his eyes and summoned a gust of wind to act as his eyes and explore the tomb passage.

Beneath the lightning, he sensed something familiar.

Everywhere else, the lightning made the landscape as bright as day. Only the tomb passage exposed by the flash flood remained like an eternal night, impossible to illuminate.

It was just like the place where Ghost Uncle had twisted his head off last time!

Listening carefully, he heard an ethereal sound inside the tomb passage.

It drifted out, though he could not tell whether it was the sound of Nuo Opera.

The entire tomb was utterly out of place in the Western Hunan Mountains.

It carried a strange sense of discord.

Could the wood spirit have been right?

Lin Feng tapped his sword with a finger. Wind poured into the tomb passage, and he sensed that it ran perfectly straight. There was no Self-Locking Stone to deter grave robbers. It continued straight down into the mountain, as though someone had excavated a mausoleum in the outer mountains of Western Hunan.

The straight stretch alone ran a hundred zhang!

After a hundred zhang, the wind Lin Feng had summoned was about to disperse.

Fortunately, this was wind meant for scouting, not killing.

Wind meant for killing could never reach a hundred zhang.

Nor was this passage open wilderness, where the wind would scatter.

For Lin Feng, different uses of wind called for different degrees of concentration.

Lin Feng flicked his sword, finding it unbelievable.

What did a hundred zhang mean?

Over three hundred meters. In terms of a building with three-meter stories, that was a hundred-story tower!

Outside, Lin Feng's eyes widened in astonishment.

Intense curiosity welled up.

What an enormous undertaking this tomb was!

Whose tomb was it?

Lin Feng was deeply awed!

And he felt a surge of excitement!

Because he knew this game might truly be extraordinary. Perhaps it existed within the history of some parallel universe.

What if, Lin Feng wondered, what if the Western Hunan Blood God had actually existed in some universe?

Judging by his limited knowledge,

there should not have been a mausoleum like this deep in the Western Hunan Mountains.

Western Hunan lacked the resources, both human and material. Even as a Seventh Rank Daoist bolstered by the mountain god's power, he could not have excavated a mausoleum like this in several years.

The sheer amount of work was staggering.

Hollowing out half a mountain to build a mausoleum was something the Li Tang Dynasty had only been capable of during those years of the High Tang.

It would have taken the resources of the entire nation.

In other eras, perhaps the First Emperor of Qin had possessed such capabilities. He could have hollowed out Mount Li to construct his mausoleum. But the point was, that had been Mount Li.

Although the Han Dynasty valued tombs, its people preferred lavish burials, stuffing gold, brass, servants, and land deeds into their tombs so they could enjoy everything from the living world in the Underworld.

They had no obsession with excavating mountains.

And no Han Dynasty princes or nobles had been based in Western Hunan.

Lin Feng suddenly felt that the fun of this game might not lie solely in clearing it.

He felt that the Western Hunan Mountains concealed far more secrets than he had imagined!

These were secrets connected to culture, civilization, and heritage.

Everyone had a desire to pry into secrets, especially when vague accounts of ancient times made them all the more intriguing.

Lin Feng was just such a person, and now he had suddenly encountered these ancient secrets in the Western Hunan Mountains, without knowing whether they were real.

His enthusiasm had been stirred.

Lin Feng did not recklessly approach. After a hundred zhang, the wind he had sent out was nearly spent. But just then, he sensed it touch something solid.

It seemed to be an underground structure, with water, pillars, and ropes?

Were people hanging beneath the ropes?

The wind Lin Feng sensed detected human shapes, but it had reached its limit.

There were other air currents flowing there as well.

Lin Feng's wind dispersed.

Just then, eerie music sounded from the distant mountain forest.

Even the thunder filling the sky could not drown it out. Lin Feng's eyes lit up.

Had Ghost Uncle arrived?

He left the tomb alone for now and sprinted toward the source of the eerie music. Once there, he hid behind a tree and saw several bizarre Terracotta Figures herding wild beasts ahead of them.

Toothless Old Lady walked along the path, with several dazed mountain villagers in front of her.

He had no idea where Toothless Old Lady had caught them.

Ghost Uncle followed behind the Terracotta Figures, seated in a carrying chair. But with Ghost Uncle standing over three meters tall, her carrying chair was anything but ordinary.

Its poles were thick, and sixteen people carried it.

What interested Lin Feng were the bearers.

The carrying chair's bearers were a special kind of Terracotta Figure, their bodies painted with blood-red incantations.

They were exactly like those Lin Feng had seen inside the banyan tree house.

At that thought, Lin Feng stepped out from behind the tree. Ghost Uncle, who had been resting with her eyes closed, suddenly saw him.

Only after Lin Feng moved away from the tree did his aura emerge, allowing Ghost Uncle to sense it.

The trees had been helping Lin Feng all along.

Sensing his aura, Ghost Uncle instinctively swallowed, both covetous and wary.

She climbed down from the carrying chair and cupped her hands. "Greetings, Lord Mountain God."

Toothless Old Lady immediately followed suit. "My respects, Lord Mountain God."

The Terracotta Figures were rather dull and did not understand why.

They remained where they were, contorting without taking action.

Lin Feng drew his sword, unable to help marveling at how pragmatic they were. When they first met him, they had called him "lord from afar." Now it was "Lord Mountain God."

At their first meeting, they had killed him outright and treated him as an ingredient for pill refining.

Through the mountain god authority, Lin Feng had reached the Seventh Rank.

Now they were willing to be reasonable.

"What guidance brings you all this way, Lord Mountain God?"

Ghost Uncle asked with an ingratiating smile.

Lin Feng said nothing. As lightning flashed overhead, his sword struck!

Amid the rain, the wind finally became visible. Breath rose from his lungs, and as he opened his mouth, the wind swept up the rain and turned it into weapons.

Seeing this newly arrived Lord Mountain God attack without a word, Ghost Uncle responded just as promptly. An incantation faintly appeared on her forehead, resembling the character for "king," and she opened her mouth, roaring the curtain of rain apart!

Then she rolled across the ground and transformed into a black tiger!

The story Lin Feng had read online was right. In the Ghost Yamen, Toothless Old Lady was a Clouded Leopard.

Ghost Uncle was a Black Tiger that had become a spirit!

But after returning to her true form, Ghost Uncle looked rather too enormous!

Even a pickup truck would have been no larger.

Lin Feng killed Toothless Old Lady with a single sword strike. The rain formed a thin sheet and sliced off her head at tremendous speed. That tiger's roar was an innate ability of tigers that had become spirits, but with Sword Heart Clarity, Lin Feng evaded it in advance and vanished into the forest.

Even Ghost Uncle had no idea where the newly arrived Lord Mountain God had gone!

Favorable timing, terrain, and support.

Ghost Uncle had none of them.