What appeared before Li Ling was still the same stone stele and hillside.
Overall, the terrain had undergone no major changes.
But the atmosphere around them looked entirely different.
The birdsong, fragrant flowers, and dreamlike colors of a fairy-tale garden beneath the moonlight were gone, replaced by a shroud of gray-black mist and an eerie feeling, as though nightmares had invaded.
The two approached the stele and silently studied it for a while. The characters carved into the enormous rock seemed to have dimmed somewhat, taking on an ancient, weathered quality.
Mo Qingping mused, "This stele..."
Li Ling asked, "Is something wrong?"
Mo Qingping said, "Nothing. I was just wondering whether this was the Dao Marker Senior Zixu left behind."
Li Ling could not help feeling surprised. Mo Qingping had actually taken the stele for something True Person Zixu had created and left behind.
On second thought, however, it was a reasonable guess.
A Dao Marker could be placed in all sorts of stones, sand, plants, and trees, or even in other mobile Dream Spirit Bodies.
All that mattered was establishing a connection between them.
The Dao Marker Li Ling had set himself was merged into the soil of the earlier forest, buried underground and inconspicuous.
The advantage was that outsiders would have difficulty detecting it. The drawback was that sensing and contacting it was rather troublesome even for him. It took a prolonged effort to establish the connection and draw his Dream Spirit Body over.
Mo Qingping stood beneath the stele and thought for a while. "Never mind that for now. I should leave a Dao Marker too, to make future explorations easier."
He took something from his pouch: a metal spearhead over a foot long, visibly solid and sturdy.
A question suddenly occurred to Li Ling, and he