Over the next few days, Li Ling blended incense and cultivated at home by day, then used Soul Departure to wander wherever he pleased at night. His days were full indeed.
Once all the materials were ready, he made a fresh batch of Returning Soul Incense, setting aside half as tribute and secretly keeping the other half for himself. He also drew on his understanding of incense properties to try improving the old formula for Spirit-Communing Incense.
This was not something he could accomplish overnight. Only repeated exploration might bring success.
Another night came, and Li Ling lit his incense and used Soul Departure with practiced ease. His soul wandered through the night, traveling more than a hundred li away.
With cultivators in this world, cartography was fairly advanced. He had already studied a map of the entire Mystic Xin Kingdom and examined the regions around the Royal City, so he reached a place called Huangkou Town without difficulty.
It stood upstream on the Great Lin River, which flowed through the Royal City. The Lin waters passed here and stretched for thousands of li, serving as a major transport artery since ancient times and giving the town a prosperity unlike that of other places.
He had come because, over the past few days, he had heard a strange tale: a water monster had appeared here and eaten several people.
With nothing else to do, he had come to take a look. If he happened to encounter it, he might even be able to help the locals.
Most strange tales from the countryside are caused by low-level demons and spirits. The local authorities can usually wipe them out at a modest cost.
If that fails, they can invite a cultivator to intervene. It offers a potential opportunity to accumulate merit and ward off calamities and tribulations, though help doesn't always arrive in time...
Drifting over the water near the town's docks, Li Ling used his perception to project the surrounding scene as though he were seeing it with his own eyes.
Under the moonlight, ripples glittered across the water, tranquil and peaceful. Yet the docks, normally bustling with night boats and merchants doing business after dark, were utterly silent, revealing the panic that had gripped the town.
His spirit body rode the cloud fiend to shore. After surveying the surroundings, he fell into thought.
Could the water monster be able to come ashore, frightening everyone into staying indoors?
Water monsters often came ashore to terrorize residents. That was nothing new in this world.
But the surroundings were thick with mingled smells of dirt, dust, and fish, and Li Ling did not know what the monster smelled like. After circling several times without success, he decided to investigate inside the town.
He had not flown far when he suddenly smelled the heavy scent of a large gathering and hurried over.
Torches stood like a forest in an open space ahead, with heads surging beneath them. The blazing aura radiated an almost tangible heat, making even Li Ling reluctant to approach.
Watching from a distance, he found that the townspeople seemed to be discussing something with fierce indignation.
Li Ling's attention was soon drawn to a frail figure in the middle of the crowd.
It was an adolescent boy with a grimy head and face. He appeared to have been beaten, his face mottled with bruises and the corner of one eye badly swollen. His head drooped weakly, and his entire body was bound beneath a flagpole.
"...It's all his fault! If he hadn't summoned the water monster, how could any of this have happened?"
"I always knew there was something wrong with this fellow. Who would've thought he really was making trouble behind our backs?"
"Kill him! Avenge our murdered neighbors!"
"Yes, kill him! Kill him!"
Li Ling had arrived rather late and did not yet understand what had happened. But as the townspeople clamored for blood, a powerful stench of rotting corpses spread through the air. Even he involuntarily recoiled a little, instinctively covering his mouth and nose.
A local gentleman in brocade robes, apparently a man of considerable standing, stepped forward. "Neighbors, please hear me out."
The crowd responded, "Go ahead, Master Huang."
Master Huang cleared his throat and addressed them. "This boy is a loner and has had no one to raise him properly since childhood. It is hardly surprising that he would turn to crime. But a human life is at stake, after all. I suggest handing him over to the authorities and letting the county deal with him. Whether they kill him or cut him to pieces afterward will be none of our concern."
Someone in the crowd said, "That makes sense. Let's hand him over to the authorities, then."
Another said, "But the county seat is twenty li away, and it's nighttime..."
"Then leave him tied up here for now. I doubt the brat can escape."
"That works, but keep him bound on shore and watch him closely. Don't let him summon the water monster to rescue him."
Master Huang said, "How about this? I'll leave some men to watch him."
He immediately selected two of his household servants and instructed them, "You two stay here. Make sure you keep a close eye on him."
The two servants bowed. "Yes, master."
Li Ling watched all this with a frown and discovered that, of everyone present, the strongest stench of rotting corpses came from Master Huang himself, despite his high-sounding words.
He did not look like someone who would have any dealings with a boy like this. Why was he so deliberately targeting him?
After a moment's thought, Li Ling decided to follow Master Huang in secret.
He was only a little over a hundred li from home. As long as he started back before half past three in the morning, he would still make it in time.
Yet after returning home, the man soon went to sleep with a young woman who looked like his concubine in his arms. On the surface, nothing seemed unusual.
By the time Li Ling returned to the street corner, midnight had passed. Apparently frightened of the water monster, the servants on guard had not slackened off or dozed, but were sitting to one side, talking privately.
Li Ling listened curiously for a while. Most of their talk concerned how withdrawn and strange the boy was, and how he hid away doing who knew what wicked things.
But after circling the boy several times and carefully smelling his scent, Li Ling found only the normal, fresh fragrance of plants. He was certainly no criminal.
In a sense, it was truly rare for someone beaten so badly to harbor no resentment. Without his realizing it, Li Ling's opinion of the boy rose another notch.
He was probably a fundamentally kind person, or perhaps simply too meek to feel ill will toward anyone.
Just as Li Ling was reflecting on this, an indescribable stench suddenly struck him, nearly making him retch.
What a stink! What in the world is that?
Examining it closely, he found it seemed to be a mixture of fishiness and rotting corpses. Such smells were not uncommon at fish markets and docks, but one so overpowering and choking was exceedingly rare.
Li Ling snapped his head around toward the source of the smell, his expression turning grave.
His Spiritual Consciousness still extended only about ten zhang and could not penetrate the deep curtain of night. Yet the sense of smell granted by his extraordinary gift reached far beyond it. He could vaguely detect a source of intense stench more than a hundred zhang away, approaching as swiftly as a galloping horse.
Suddenly, a dense, ink-black mass of Gang Baleful Energy appeared within Li Ling's perception. Before he could react, one of Master Huang's servants had been pierced through.
Bang! The Gang Baleful Energy exploded, scattering blood and entrails across the street.
"Aah! Help!"
The other servant screamed and tried to scramble away. But his legs trembled violently, and he stumbled to the ground, unable to get up again.
At the edge of Li Ling's perception, that dense, ink-black mass of Gang Baleful Energy appeared once more.
With a wet ripping sound, the Water Arrow-like Gang Baleful Energy pierced the servant's body again, then exploded, tearing him apart on the spot.
A bloody mist seemed to rise above the two servants' corpses. A strange wind swiftly swept it into the mass of foul odor, after which the source of the stench retreated rapidly toward the docks.
Li Ling hurried after it. Once he drew closer, he finally saw its true appearance.
It was a gaunt, almost human-shaped figure, with claws like blades. It ran on all fours like an ape, moving with tremendous speed.
Is this a water monkey?
Water was yin by nature, and rivers and lakes held many wronged souls who had drowned, making them more fertile grounds for yin spirits and all manner of evil entities. Most likely, someone had drowned in a nearby stretch of river, giving this beast the opportunity it needed to grow powerful.
It was said to be a kind of demon born with the ability to communicate with yin spirits, growing stronger by murdering people. Folk superstition commonly called it a water ghost. Who knew how many people's vitality and essence it had devoured before growing bold enough to raid the shore?
What concerned Li Ling even more was that it had mastered a spell resembling Water Arrow. That unquestionably qualified as supernatural power. At short or medium range, its sudden attacks were as swift as arrows, and few mortals could evade them.
"Catch the water monster! Catch the water monster!"
The townspeople seemed to have laid tripwires or similar traps in the streets. Before long, gongs and drums began to sound.
Bolstering one another's courage, they rushed out carrying woodcutting blades, rakes, pitchforks, and other implements. Yet they only dared shout from behind, and soon could do nothing but watch the water monkey leap into the river and disappear in the blink of an eye.
Li Ling had long since given up expecting anything from them and dove in after it himself.
Entering the water this time brought him an entirely new experience.
Like other things devoid of spiritual energy, the water could not block his Spirit Body after Soul Projection. But the river water did possess a certain mass, and invisible pressure surged at him from every direction, still producing some sensation of touch and resistance.
Not only did this noticeably slow Li Ling's movements, it also compressed the range of his Spiritual Consciousness by nearly half.
Li Ling had no choice but to rise above the surface and track it from the air. Fortunately, the river was shallow and his extraordinary innate gift remained unaffected, so he would not easily lose its trail.
The water monkey never noticed Li Ling's presence. It followed the current downstream all the way to its lair, more than twenty li away.
The lair lay in an ancient riverbed in a valley downstream, deep in wilderness rarely visited by people.
The Great Lin River had changed course several times, creating many interconnected underground waterways in the surrounding terrain, like a maze. Had Li Ling not been in a state of Soul Projection, even genuine qi refining cultivation would not have made it easy to find the place in a short time.
Looking at its lair, he found that it was several zhang high and wound deep underground.
Li Ling surveyed the surroundings for a while, then understood.
This is actually a natural underground cavern!
The cavern did not look large. It certainly lacked the magnificent scale of the vast underground cities in legendary tales, but it could still be divided into several stone chambers resembling human rooms. It offered more than enough space for this creature, which had awakened its intelligence and embarked on cultivation through a chance encounter.
Besides pebbles and other objects scattered over the ground, there were a dozen or so human skeletons, along with fish and animal remains piled across more than half the lair.
Suppressing his nausea, Li Ling circled the place several times. Drawing on strange tales and the experience of members of the Immortal Sects in slaying demons, he roughly deduced the beast's origins.
It had probably once been an ordinary water monkey living somewhere in the Great Lin River. By chance, it had eaten the fresh remains of someone who had recently drowned, gaining the opportunity to awaken its intelligence.
According to legend, certain spirits and creatures could awaken their intelligence and increase their cultivation by eating fresh human flesh. Once that happened, they would leave their original groups and lurk near human settlements in search of more flesh and blood.
Humans were the spiritual primates of all living things. The spiritual potency and power within their bodies were tremendous nourishment for such creatures' cultivation and growth. Beasts without self-control could hardly resist this temptation born of their instinct to evolve.
Many animals addicted to eating humans came to be that way for precisely this reason.
This brought matters back to the theory of the five elements spirit roots inherent in human bodies. Even people with deficient spirit roots contained the five elements within them. Their yin and yang were merely out of balance, preventing them from activating those roots under normal circumstances. Once devoured by such creatures, however, these could still transform into energy for growth and evolution, giving them their own distinct value.
Combining what he had seen earlier with the beast's performance when it attacked the servants, Li Ling thought, This creature is probably already comparable to someone at mid-stage qi refining!
Low-level man-eating creatures were so hungry they would eat anything. Once they had made some progress, they began to grow selective.
With little time then, it had only managed to devour their vital blood before the uproar startled it into fleeing back to the water. Yet the ability to extract all the essence blood from the dead and draw out what it needed was still beyond an entry-level creature. This was a clear sign of evolution.
That did not mean, however, that it could stand on equal footing with a mid-stage qi refining cultivator.
Apart from a handful of exceptionally gifted demons and exotic beasts, most ordinary spirit creatures were inferior to humans. Human cultivators had not only magical artifacts and cultivation methods, but also intelligence, giving them far greater scope to act.
Even Li Ling felt eager to try his hand upon seeing this fiend and began considering how to dispose of it.
Unfortunately, apart from Cloud Escape, he had not cultivated any proper divine abilities or spells at all. For the moment, he could think of nothing.
Hm? What's that smell?
Suddenly, a strange fragrance interrupted Li Ling's thoughts. He raised his head in mild bewilderment and looked around.
It was a habitual gesture from having a physical body. In truth, he had already found the source of the smell without needing to look about.
It was coming from a pile of bones in an adjacent stone chamber.
Following the scent, Li Ling passed through the earthen wall. It felt like crossing a curtain of water that offered slight resistance. Soon, the space ahead opened up, and a clearer scene appeared.
Only then did he see that the fragrance came from a brocade box half-exposed in the dirt a dozen or so paces away.
Who knew how many years it had lain there? Its casing was already mottled and worn, yet the gold and silver ornamentation still offered faint hints of its extraordinary quality.
Li Ling carefully probed through the box for a while. Inside was a spiritual material resembling agarwood, which appeared to be some sort of resin.
After some effort, he used his Divine Sense, still capable of exerting less than one liang of force, to peel away the dirt and open the box. Sure enough, he had not been mistaken.
An exotic fragrance surged toward him and spread in every direction. Fully a million or more gossamer strands of incense essence abruptly appeared.
He involuntarily lost himself in the fragrance. Once he recovered, he was overjoyed. This is an entirely new fragrance I've never encountered before!
He gulped it down like a whale, and his Divine Sense surged, increasing by more than a hundred grams.
Judging by Li Ling's experience, each strand of incense essence here was a hundred times as effective as those in his previous Spirit-Communing Incense. Once he had absorbed them all, the contents of the box immediately began to wither at a speed visible to the naked eye.