The darkness battered the barrier, twisting and warping it, but it never broke. The darkness twisted along with the distorted barrier, sometimes resembling a beast's claws, sometimes a human hand, sometimes all manner of malformed monsters, shifting through countless forms.
Suddenly, the darkness stopped its assault, and the invisible barrier grew still. A moment later, the barrier slowly began to cave inward, pressed farther and farther down.
As the barrier sank lower and lower, Lin Shan's heart climbed into his throat.
Fortunately, after being pressed down to a certain point, the barrier began to rebound slowly, as though whatever had exerted that pressure had left.
Lin Shan breathed a sigh of relief and drew more blood to replenish the Red Lantern's oil. It was his only hope of contending with the unknown things beyond the Ash Fog.
He had thought it was over and was just about to rest when his body suddenly stiffened. He felt something watching him. Was it that thing from before?
The feeling of being watched grew stronger and stronger. Lin Shan's entire body turned ice-cold, and his viewpoint began to rise. Once again, he saw the top of his own head!
His soul had left his body again! Last time, it had been the Specter Thread Fish's cry. What had caused it this time?
He looked upward. That single glance nearly scattered his soul... He hurriedly averted his gaze.
A gigantic eye was rooted in the void, black blood vessels writhing beside it. Pale blue souls were constantly being sucked into the eye from all around-human forms, beast forms, and strangely shaped creatures. None escaped its pull.
Because of the Red Lantern's barrier, the suction had become extremely weak by the time it reached Lin Shan, but it still pulled his soul out of his body.
He bit hard into the tip of his tongue, using the pain to jolt himself. His viewpoint began to sink, and his soul returned to his body once more. When he looked up at the sky now, he could see nothing. The eye was still there; he simply could no longer see it.
He did not know how much time passed. Just as the lamp oil was about to burn out again, the feeling of being watched finally disappeared. The Red Lantern withdrew its barrier, and everything around him returned to normal.
Lin Shan breathed a sigh of relief and helplessly drew more blood to replenish the lamp oil.
Dangerous was no longer enough to describe the Ash Fog. It was a land of death, the kind that left no road to survival.
If he encountered this sort of situation a few more times, then even setting aside whether he could withstand it, replenishing the lamp oil alone would drain him to death.
At dawn, he opened his eyes and sighed helplessly as he felt his increasingly frail body. The burning sensation in his organs had never gone away. Every additional day meant another day of erosion by the curse. Combined with his constant bloodletting lately, even a child in their early teens could have knocked him down now.
He continued on his way. In theory, he could cover fifty kilometers in a day, provided nothing unexpected happened along the way.
Perhaps he really was lucky. Half a day passed without incident. Although the beasts grew increasingly numerous along the way, Lin Shan spotted them in advance with the Red Lantern and circled around them.
He sat beneath a tree, gnawing on wild fruit he had picked along the way to replenish his fluids and strength. Whether it was poisonous no longer entered into his considerations. Apart from tasting bad, none of the fruit he had encountered so far had been poisonous.
The Parchment showed twenty-eight kilometers remaining to his destination. He had covered twenty-two kilometers that morning. With a little more effort, reaching the Purple Soul Flower Forest before nightfall would be no problem.
After resting, he picked up the Red Lantern and continued onward. The scenery along the path began to change. Green plants grew more plentiful, and the trees became increasingly dense.
Suddenly, an ancient tree several dozen meters tall uprooted itself nearby. Using its roots as legs, it ran off with a boom, boom, boom, then planted itself in the soil somewhere else.
Then, one after another, more than a dozen ants half a person's height crawled out from beneath the pit the tree had left behind. They communicated with their antennae, seemingly wondering where such a massive tree had gone. Whether their exchange produced any conclusion was unclear; afterward, the ants burrowed back into the pit.
Lin Shan watched, struggling for a long while to find something to say. He opened his mouth, but in the end said nothing. He chose to circle around the large pit and keep moving.
After what had just happened, he could not help eyeing the trees around him with suspicion, feeling as though they might suddenly wrench themselves out of the ground.
Night fell, and the Blood Moon hung overhead. Only five kilometers remained to his destination. Lin Shan walked through the darkness carrying the Red Lantern, intending to finish those last five kilometers that night.
It was not impatience. He was close to collapse, his body weakened to its limit. He should have reached his destination before nightfall, yet he had dragged the journey out until now.
If he delayed another night, he did not know whether he would still be able to stand. On the surface, he had about seven days left to live, but spending seven days alive lying down was still living for seven days.
"Cough, cough, cough..."
Lin Shan stared silently at the pale black blood on his hand. It was not only the blood he coughed up that had turned pale black; the blood he had drawn to replenish the lamp oil along the way had been the same color. Surprisingly, pale black blood seemed to work better as lamp oil. Not only did it burn longer, it also extended his field of vision to two hundred meters.
By now, he could no longer feel his breathing or heartbeat. That he could still live like a normal person was nothing short of a miracle.
Five kilometers. Four kilometers. Three kilometers.
With three kilometers left, something abnormal happened after all. As expected, he should never have traveled at night...
Ahead of him, an old man in a lavish long gown stood stiffly in place, his face deathly pale. His gray-white, lifeless eyes stared at Lin Shan without a trace of expression, as he stood rigid as a cold corpse.
Under that terrifying gaze, Lin Shan's entire body instinctively tensed. Extreme fear welled up in his heart and swiftly engulfed him. In that moment, he even lost all feeling in his body.
He knew this thing was absolutely not human. It was an eldritch entity, and an exceptionally terrifying one. The Red Lantern's remaining half-reservoir of black oil burned away in an instant, all because of a single look!
"Ash Fog... descends, Human... Race... mourns, blood... stains the sky, the sovereign dies!"
"Human Race... ancestral land... intruders die!"
The icy words echoed in Lin Shan's ears, as though they had come from the Nine Nether Hells.
Lin Shan's scalp prickled. The eldritch entity before him had actually spoken. The Human Race? Was he a member of this world's Human Race?
Just as Lin Shan was pondering this.
Darkness thick as ink spread from the old man's body and surged toward Lin Shan in an instant.
Lin Shan could not move a muscle. He could only watch helplessly as the darkness swept toward him. Under this terrifying old man's assault, he had no possibility of escape.
At that critical moment, a red figure appeared beside him. The Red Lantern floated out of Lin Shan's hand and into the red figure's grasp.
The next second, the flame inside the Red Lantern became blindingly bright! Red light enveloped heaven and earth. In that moment, red was the only color left in the world.
Seeing the darkness blocked, the old man's expression remained unchanged. The darkness spreading beneath his feet surged again, then swept forward!
Heaven and earth were divided between black and red. The two supernatural powers eroded one another, clashing and crushing against each other. In the end, the darkness prevailed. The red light filling the sky suddenly dissipated. Suppressed by the darkness, the red figure slowly vanished, and the Red Lantern fell to the ground.
"Human... Race..."
After the red figure disappeared, a halting utterance drifted through the air. It sounded like a woman's voice, yet it was exceptionally cold and sinister.
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