According to Xu, the Fangshi, the corpses below were feasting, and the area of their feast kept expanding. Once, they had remained at the very bottom. Later, "they" gradually floated upward.
They floated, drifting as though ascending to immortality. Yet what should have been a scene from an immortal realm had become profoundly eerie now that its inhabitants were corpses. Those dead bodies floated endlessly, their sinister aura seeping into the very source of life.
All things withered.
In other words, the vitality here might not have originated at the very bottom.
Because of this, Xu, the Fangshi, had been forced to move upward, but he only moved to places where there was a "medicinal fragrance."
That fragrance was also why he had survived. It repelled insects, suppressed evil, surrounded him with protection, and preserved his vitality.
Later, Xu, the Fangshi, discovered that the places where the medicinal fragrance appeared followed a pattern.
Following that pattern, he climbed up and eventually found the true source of the scent.
"Here," Fangshi Xu said, pointing at the "iron man." "This cavern is the seat of the Heartfire, connected to the apertures and every bone.
"The fragrance from his body spreads through those places."
By apertures and bones, he meant the small holes around them. They resembled tiny holes gnawed into a living person by Parasites. The scent from this Fangshi named Kuai had not dissipated in thousands of years.
It traveled outside through these vents.
This was undoubtedly an extraordinarily intricate feat of calculation.
Its implications were far-reaching, because being able to plan this precisely meant that, unlike Xu, the Fangshi, this man had known what he was doing.
The "iron man" who had died here had come prepared.
He had not "wandered in by mistake," as Xu, the Fangshi, had.
Lin