The Fallen and beasts

By the time Lin Shan regained consciousness, it was already noon the next day.

The jigsaw-like seams covering his body had faded a little, and the feeling of weakness had vanished.

To Lin Shan's dismay, his heartbeat had disappeared, and he could no longer breathe properly because air leaked out.

It seemed this body had already "died."

Lin Shan thought to himself:

The so-called Specter Physique probably doesn't mean this body I can see and touch. Otherwise, it would be far too weak. Maybe it means a "physique" in some unknown sense, like the soul.

Lin Shan ate as usual. Perhaps he would no longer starve to death without food, but his "body" still needed to eat.

He feared that if he kept going without food, this body would rot away completely.

Sure enough, his guess was right. After eating, he distinctly felt his heart begin to beat faintly.

After his meal, he resumed his journey. A glance at the markings on the Parchment showed that only 130 kilometers remained.

Looking at the Parchment now, Lin Shan noticed something he had overlooked. His head had shattered into chunks of flesh, so where had the Parchment gone? Why hadn't it fallen out of his mind? Even if it wasn't inside his actual brain, but in a sea of spirit or consciousness like those described in novels, all those "seas" should have disappeared when he died. Where had the Parchment been then?

The more Lin Shan thought about it, the stranger the Parchment seemed. That terrifying spiritual pressure hadn't affected it in the slightest.

At that thought, he couldn't help glancing at the Red Lantern beside him, which had been crumpled into a ball.

He had been holding the Red Lantern at the time, so it had also been crushed, its physical form compressed into a warped sphere.

Fortunately, Spectral Objects could not be destroyed, just like spectral entities. He could sense the Red Lantern slowly recovering, though the process might take a long time. Until then, his visibility while traveling through the Ash Fog would be limited to ten meters.

He continued onward, and evening came again. Even the Ash Fog high overhead could not obscure the Red Moon. Pale red moonlight spilled over the Ash Fog, sending a layer of faint red ripples across it.

Even now, he was still inside that footprint crater.

After eating a gray bun, Lin Shan settled down to rest on schedule.

When he woke the next day, he found that the jigsaw-like seams on his body had faded further, and his heartbeat had grown stronger. It seemed he would soon recover completely.

Feeling the changes in his body, Lin Shan breathed a sigh of relief. As long as he could recover, that was enough. His body temperature was already too cold for a normal person. If he lost his heartbeat and breathing as well, even he wouldn't dare say for certain whether he was still human.

Two hours later, Lin Shan reached the edge of the ruined city. He estimated that he had walked nearly eighty kilometers through the ruins.

How many people must have lived in a city this vast? In the end, they had all become a flattened painting along with the city.

It was not until noon that Lin Shan saw a nearly two-meter-high sheer rise ahead. He leaped up onto it, and the world before his eyes instantly became three-dimensional.

Ahead and behind him were like two different worlds: a three-dimensional world and a two-dimensional one.

Lin Shan calculated that he had walked nearly a hundred and fifty kilometers inside the footprint.

A single footprint was a hundred and fifty kilometers long. Lin Shan dared not imagine what that meant for the unknown creature's size.

The trees ahead began to grow denser, but they all shared one feature: they were bare, without a single leaf.

Ever since leaving that enormous footprint, Lin Shan had been on his guard. The Red Lantern had yet to recover, and walking through the Ash Fog now was like treading on thin ice. Every step could bring danger.

It was midday.

Leaning against a tree, Lin Shan studied the markings on the Parchment. Less than fifty kilometers remained, but this time, his target was constantly moving. The marker shifted from time to time, sometimes farther away, sometimes closer.

Suddenly.

A sound of something cutting through the air reached his ears.

Lin Shan's pupils abruptly contracted. Without a second thought, he hurled himself toward the open ground beside him!

The next instant, a massive white figure swept through the spot where Lin Shan had just stood, its fist smashing a deep crater into the ground.

"Such strength."

Lin Shan looked at the gorilla before him. Its entire body was covered in white fur, and its muscular frame stood over two meters tall when upright.

Lin Shan wasted no words. He commanded a spear formed from Heart Light to thrust at the white-furred gorilla.

Of all the weapons he could form from Heart Light, the spear felt most natural in his hands, and its long-range thrusts packed the greatest offensive power.

Trailing golden radiance, the spear reached the white-furred gorilla with the speed of thunder before the ear could catch it. The gorilla neither ducked nor dodged, meeting it head-on with its fist.

Clang!

The clash of metal rang out where fist met spear tip, and sparks flew in all directions.

As they remained locked together, the pale golden spear suddenly began to spin, sharply increasing the force of its thrust.

With a whoosh, it pierced straight into the flesh through the white-furred gorilla's fist, carrying a spray of flesh and bone fragments out through its back.

The white-furred gorilla let out a miserable scream and tried to flee, but Lin Shan would never let it have its way. The spear tip swung back and angled downward, spinning at tremendous speed high in the air. With a whoosh, it pierced straight through the gorilla's throat.

Boom.

A moment later, the white-furred gorilla crashed to the ground.

The battle had begun abruptly and ended even more abruptly. Lin Shan had not moved an inch from where he stood.

This was how battles worked in the Ash Fog World. Strong was strong, and weak was weak. It was also a clash between spiritualities. If Lin Shan's Heart Light spear had failed to penetrate the white-furred gorilla's physical defenses, or could only inflict minor wounds, then he would have been the one lying on the ground now.

Lin Shan stepped forward to examine the corpse. This was a genuine beast at the level of Transcendence, though it probably hadn't reached that level long ago.

After recovering from his earlier injuries, two-tenths of his heart had now turned pale gold. If Sequence 9 could be divided into stages, then he should already have entered the second stage, raising the upper limit of his spirituality another notch.

"Are the Fallen and beasts really the same kind of creature? The Fallen... should all have cores, right?"

He remembered that what he needed was Sikatini's core. If this white-furred gorilla was also one of the Fallen, then it should have a core too.

He went to great effort, chopping the white-furred gorilla into a pulp, but still found no trace of the supposed core.

This happened to prove another of Lin Shan's guesses: there was a difference between the Fallen and beasts.

It was like the difference between spectral entities and Spectral Objects. Both possessed supernatural powers, but the former could serve as ingredients for sequence potions, while people could borrow the power of the latter.

The Fallen and beasts worked the same way, then. Both fused spirituality into flesh and blood to wield it as power. The Fallen could serve as potion ingredients, while beasts could not be used in potions but could be tamed to serve people.

As for why such a distinction existed, he had no way of knowing. It was like Newton discovering universal gravitation. The law already existed; Newton had merely discovered it.

Leaving the heap of pulped flesh alone, Lin Shan shaped his Heart Light into a broad longsword and murmured to himself:

"With my current spirituality, perhaps I can give it a try."