"What does this mean? A mark, a motto, a code?"
Always messing around with this sinister, ill-omened rubbish. One look tells you it's unlucky. Well, now you really are sleeping forever, aren't you?
His gaze fell on the words "May I sleep forever and never wake," then shifted to the middle-aged man who now truly slept forever. Li Ling could not help grumbling inwardly.
Still, he understood that these cultivators' ethics and views on life and death were indeed worlds apart from those of mortals.
It was not just demonic cultivators of the evil path. Even righteous cultivators had long since transcended the mundane world and held beliefs utterly different from those of ordinary people.
Li Ling gathered the items and carried them in batches to a nearby tree hollow to hide them.
It was rather like a squirrel's habit of hiding things everywhere. If he forgot where he had put them, he would have quite a scramble searching for them.
Fortunately, none of them were particularly important. If he really lost them, so be it.
This demonic cultivator was utterly penniless. Those few talismans and pills are of no use for now. What truly deserves attention is the information hidden in that sentence.
And that man who appeared earlier-just where did he come from?
From their conversation, there should be another band of accomplices hiding in the shadows. That talk of needing manpower... it sounded as though they were plotting something big.
As Li Ling pondered, he flew toward the branch where Special Envoy Mu had stopped earlier.
But Li Ling soon discovered that, useful as his innate gift was, it still demanded extra attention. It was not easy to keep track of his target while flying at high speed.
Fortunately, this was not much of a problem yet. Even flying flat out, he could only cover around a hundred li an hour.
The real headache was that Special Envoy Mu lived up to his reputation as an expert and insisted on traveling high above the ground.
There was a perfectly good official road beside him, yet he refused to use it. Instead, he leaped into the trees and darted through the tangled branches, as though he could not show off his abilities without flaunting his lightness skill.
On second thought, however, Li Ling realized he hardly had the right to criticize him.
Ever since he had begun soul projection, he had always floated around. After learning Cloud Escape, he flew everywhere and had never once considered landing and walking on his own two feet.
Even when he killed that demonic cultivator just now, he had felt none of the reality of getting blood on his hands.
This was probably another change brought about by divine abilities.
Ah, I can't just follow the official road anymore. Otherwise, with only a few forks to choose from, I could move much faster.
But even away from the road, he still has to travel between human settlements. He probably took to the wilderness to save time.
With that thought, Li Ling gradually found a lead again.
He tried not to rely too heavily on his innate ability. Instead, following the map in his memory, he headed toward a city called Cascade River County, a little over ten li ahead.
Cascade River County was also a city along the Great Lin River, beside the stretch between the royal city and Huangkou Town.
It lay directly along Special Envoy Mu's line of departure and was very likely his destination.
Sure enough, after traveling more than twenty li, Li Ling caught Special Envoy Mu's scent in the crown of a large tree.
He really did come this way. The scent is still fresh!
Encouraged, Li Ling continued tracking him and discovered that Special Envoy Mu had not entered the city. Instead, he had headed toward a cluster of old buildings on its outskirts.
The buildings were enclosed by a low wall and had their own courtyard. A wooden plaque hung above the main gate, bearing the words "Longhe Charity Cemetery."
Li Ling sensed something was wrong. He sniffed carefully, and waves of a stench like rotting meat reached him through the air.
It was the smell of corpses!
The mortuary carried an eerie air in the darkness. Probing with his Spiritual Consciousness, he saw five thin wooden coffins arranged neatly in the main hall. The smell came from within them.
These were probably the bodies of traveling merchants who had died far from home, unclaimed victims of violent crimes, or poor people whose families could not afford burial and had left them here temporarily.
But Li Ling had smelled dead bodies before. In his recollection, it had simply been a natural process of decay, comparatively mild in character, with the odor of sodden, rotting earth.
What reached his senses now, however, was a pungent stench strong enough to choke him, with even a faint trace of blood mixed into it.
It felt familiar. This was precisely Special Envoy Mu's smell!
The Three Treasures Demon-Refining Art-the method of corpse refinement! There must be corpse demons inside, personally refined and controlled by Special Envoy Mu.
In a flash of inspiration, Li Ling guessed what might be lying in the coffins.
Suppressing his disgust, he extended his Spiritual Consciousness into them.
What he saw made his hair stand on end. Even in his state of soul projection, he could not help feeling the illusion of gooseflesh rising across his body.
Inside were not corpses at all, but enormous centipedes like pythons!
They had gleaming shells and blade-like clawed legs. Scarlet from head to tail, hideous and terrifying, they lay rigidly inside the coffins.
No, they don't seem to be ordinary centipedes...
Li Ling took another look and froze.
At the head of each centipede was an actual human head!
These were monsters made by joining dead people's heads to centipedes. He had no idea which sect or faction this legacy belonged to, but it displayed the characteristics of both corpse refinement and gu refinement. Their energies blended together in an excellent union, something no crude process of simply stitching them together could have achieved.
"How disgusting," Li Ling remarked.
He recalled that the general outline of the Three Treasures Demon-Refining Art had mentioned using human corpses as materials to create corpse-demon monsters.
There was even a method of extracting bloodline energies from different individuals and merging them to assemble all five elements!
Mathematically speaking, being born with a complete set of spirit roots was not a likely event for any one individual. Considering the five elements alone, the odds were one in two to the fifth power. Factoring in balanced yin and yang and manifest traits, that became one in a thousand.
If only one of the five elements was needed, the odds were much higher. Gather a group of people anywhere, and one could always find someone with a particular spirit root attribute and balanced yin and yang.
Based on this principle, an expert of the demonic path had devised a method for plundering others' spirit roots.
Since spirit roots were not physical organs but conceptual things, transferring them required a sufficient quantity of flesh and tissue. The most useful part was the head, where a person's mind resided.
Anyone who had never read the Three Treasures Demon-Refining Art-or who had read it but learned without thinking-would certainly never have considered all this.
But Li Ling had tried to create his own cultivation method based on its principles and had thought deeply about them. He immediately understood how these monsters had come into being.
Humans and Gu Worms have completely different physiological traits, and their ways of using divine abilities and spells are worlds apart. Humans need a complete set of spirit roots to practice qi refining and cast divine abilities and spells, but demons, spirits, and Gu Worms can instead make use of a single favored spirit root.
Humans, however, can use their intelligence to cultivate all manner of divine abilities, master the transformations of yin and yang, and pursue the Great Dao. Other species find that much harder...
These centipedes should be carefully bred giant Gu Worms. But their creator wasn't satisfied with ordinary gu-control methods and used them as rootstock for grafting instead.
They must have undergone selective cultivation to bring out the greatest possible effects of a single spirit root or a special technique.
Li Ling could even imagine another method that joined multiple corpses together to assemble a complete set of all five elements.
Seeing five coffins and five Human-Head Centipedes here was no coincidence. It was the inevitable answer supported by sound reasoning.
If there had been only three or four, the set would certainly have been incomplete. Six or more would mean additional reserves.
If the text is accurate, a single Human-Head Centipede possesses strength comparable to a qi refining cultivator. Then there's Special Envoy Mu himself...
Li Ling recalled their earlier encounter in the forest. The man's energy had felt deep and profound, unlike that of an ordinary novice in early qi refining.
At present, Li Ling had yet to master the ability to transform qi into Gang Baleful Energy. His divine sense was also weak, leaving him unable to deal with someone like this.
Moreover, this place might be a stronghold for demonic cultivators. Special Envoy Mu appeared to hold considerable status, and he might have others like that middle-aged man serving under him.
Li Ling did not act rashly. Instead, he circled the area several times, carefully investigating.
Sure enough, Special Envoy Mu sat quietly in a room beside the main hall, apparently pondering something.
In a room on the left deep within the mortuary, a man who carried a bloody scent sat cross-legged, circulating his cultivation. Black mist coiled above his head, suggesting that he practiced baleful intent refinement.
In the room on the right was a gaunt old man who had already gone to sleep. Numerous vessels resembling clay basins and earthenware jars hissed around him, with many large scarlet centipedes like long snakes stirring restlessly inside.
Behind the buildings, in what appeared to be a storeroom, was a haggard man around forty.
Dressed in the coarse cloth of an ordinary commoner, he crouched hunched over in a corner, looking witless.
He appeared to be the mortuary's original caretaker. After the demonic cultivators had taken over like cuckoos usurping a magpie's nest, they had bewitched his mind and tossed him here.
There was no doubt that this was a hidden stronghold. As far as Li Ling knew, places like mortuaries had always been a focus of the Unusual Events Bureau's attention, but with supernatural means, evading routine inspections was not difficult.
After all, few cultivators ran errands and did the legwork. Ordinary inspecting officials and constables could not easily see through these people, and over time they would grow lax.
According to what they said, they'll gather in the royal city within three days. I just don't know whether they're making a temporary connection or planning something else.
For demonic cultivators hiding in the shadows like these, changing strongholds should be nothing unusual. If they've squeezed all the value out of this mortuary, abandoning it completely would be perfectly normal.
But none of that is my concern. Whether they can seize the opportunity to surround and wipe them out is up to the Unusual Events Bureau.
Li Ling prepared to leave and report this evil den to the Unusual Events Bureau.
Just then, however, he suddenly noticed Special Envoy Mu light an oil lamp and spread out something resembling a map to examine.
Curious, Li Ling floated over and watched from three feet above his head.
It was indeed a map. It depicted Xuansin Royal City and the terrain of over thirty towns and cities and more than a hundred villages along the Great Lin River, marked in different dyes.
The Great Lin River flowed through several kingdoms on the Mystic Continent. Within the Mystic Xin Kingdom, it was also called the Shimmering River and was the kingdom's most important waterway. On the map, it looked like a flood dragon coiled into the shape of the character 几.
Li Ling could not immediately tell what the markings meant, but instinctively felt they were important. He hurried to memorize them, trying to deepen his impression as much as possible.
Special Envoy Mu moved his finger across the map and murmured, "War has broken out in the south. A rare opportunity..."
Li Ling thought, War in the south? Does he mean the war between the Mystic Xin Kingdom and the Zhu Yuan Kingdom? Both kingdoms' cultivators have been concentrated there, leaving their interiors undefended. Whatever these people intend to do, it will be much easier.
But after saying that, Special Envoy Mu offered nothing more.
He did not seem to have a habit of talking to himself and revealed no further information.
Just as Li Ling was feeling disappointed, he suddenly saw Special Envoy Mu take something out of his traveling bag and examine it closely.
Once the object left his person and was no longer concealed by Special Envoy Mu's own energy, a familiar delicate fragrance immediately spread through the air.
Li Ling stared at it in disbelief, which abruptly turned to delighted surprise.
It was that kind of wooden twig shaped like an animal's finger bone!
Unlike the yellow-wax agarwood he had seen before, its surface was somewhat dull and lacked that translucent sheen of wood steeped in wax.
This was a kind of fragrant wood that had not yet formed agarwood.
Agarwood could not be obtained simply by cutting down a tree. It required resin to accumulate and solidify within the wood. Its causes varied, but all were closely related to resin.
The piece Li Ling had unexpectedly obtained before had formed after being buried in the earth through a fortuitous coincidence.
On the twig before him, shaped like an animal's finger bone, Li Ling smelled the fragrance of vegetation. There was not much incense essence.
Yet on closer inspection, every strand of incense essence still possessed an astonishing potency ten times that of Spirit-Communing Incense.
After finding only a few strands, Li Ling felt his divine sense stir eagerly.
This stuff really packs a punch!
It was the most beneficial substance he currently knew of for strengthening divine sense. If the effectiveness of consuming Spirit-Communing Incense for Incense-Feeding Soul Tempering was rated at one, suitable for everyday use, this substance's effectiveness was a full ten.
And this was merely an unprocessed twig.
Based on Li Ling's previous tests, once agarwood formed, its incense essence would undergo a transformation in quality. At the very least, it would reach the level of the yellow-wax agarwood he had obtained a few days earlier.
Blending it with other aromatics to make Spirit Incense would improve it further still. By then, its effectiveness might exceed ordinary Spirit-Communing Incense by thousands or even tens of thousands of times.
Li Ling did not expect to reach that stage just yet. Obtaining more yellow-wax agarwood like his previous piece would already leave him perfectly satisfied.
The twig before him naturally released little incense essence, and Li Ling did not expect to rely on it for cultivation. But from beginning to end, he had remembered that what he wanted was an entire forest, not a single tree.
Now that he had found another clue, he had a lead on where that forest lay. How could he not be excited?
These demonic cultivators are very likely carrying this substance with them. Perhaps it has something to do with cultivation or feeding demons!
Could the discrepancy in the number of deaths that Hundred-Household Commander Zuo mentioned last time have been caused by this stuff?
But from the looks of it, they're sparing no expense and using Heavenly Treasures to accelerate the growth of demonic beasts. Their motives really do invite speculation.
This was probably his greatest gain of the day, Li Ling thought as he gave Special Envoy Mu a long, penetrating look.
I borrowed a little from the monster designs in The Puppeteer, but there is no connection whatsoever, so please do not read too much into it.