After leaving that border market town, Yun Qing continued north.
The years flowed silently through the Blood Haze Wasteland.
Several years passed in a blink.
Yun Qing walked alone through those ruined mountains and decaying rivers, witnessing all the most absurd forms life could take.
In one village, cooking smoke curled into the sky, children chased each other along the field ridges, women sat outside their doors mending clothes, and old people squatted at the foot of walls, basking in the sun. But at night, the entire village would slowly turn inside out. Houses writhed like flesh, countless eyes split open across the fields, and the people who had smiled and spoken to him during the day peeled off layer after layer of skin, revealing tangled masses of black roots beneath.
They still talked of rice and firewood, fretting over next year's harvest. They warmly invited Yun Qing into their homes and served him a bowl of hot soup.
With his eyes closed, Yun Qing silently "looked" at the blood soup before him.
Yun Qing did not kill them.
He drove two new posts into the nearly collapsed wooden bridge at the village entrance, then buried a small Purification Formation beneath it.
The formation would not last long. Perhaps half a month, perhaps only until the day after tomorrow.
At least while the formation remained, the child in the village who liked running to the bridge to catch fish would not be swallowed by a "fish."
After that, Yun Qing stepped out of the "Mortal World" and into the "Cultivation World."
In an immortal city, the city lord called herself True Person Hua. She opened her Daoist Hall to all and taught mortals methods of warding off evil and averting calamity.
Countless cultivators begged to become her disciples. Dressed in