By dusk the following day, the two could wait no longer and headed toward the ravine entrance.
As usual, Cheng Xinzhan hid a soul inside his Bamboo Body and left it outside.
The blue mist was hard to make out in the twilight, but its chill sent a shudder through them. The ghosts in the mist suddenly surged over, circling them and pressing against them to sniff like dogs.
Neither man's expression changed. The rare treasures they carried had disguised their auras as those of demon fiends, and they swaggered inward along the Mengdong River.
The farther they went, the more they noticed the cold mist, originally indistinguishable from the night, gradually turning blue and luminous again.
Only after passing completely through the blue mist did they discover blue lanterns hanging all over the sheer cliffs on either side. The entire Soul-Losing Ravine was a ghastly blue; the cold mist had been dyed blue by the lantern light.
Under the blue lanterns, they could see clearly that this was a world utterly different from the one outside.
The Mengdong River in the middle was bone-chillingly cold, yet many dark plants grew in it, along with bizarrely shaped insects, fish, snakes, and frogs. Vegetation also flourished on the stone walls to either side, but under the blue lanterns, everything was either blue or black, making it all the more eerie.
Outside, houses were built from the ground up, rising from low to high and spreading outward in every direction. Here, it was the reverse: chambers were hollowed into the mountains from the stone walls on either side, then stacked upward.
Thus, amid the dark vegetation, countless stairways and caves could be seen on the mountain walls to either side, forming something like an ant nest growing on the cliffs.
The ravine