Western Hunan, before Heavenly Scabbard Mountain, on the Yuan River.
Ye Lianchen watched with his own eyes as the three people from Hanging Coffin Gorge took quite a few things out of their Cave Stones and set them on the ground for Shi Buyu. Once Shi Buyu nodded, they turned and left.
The thirteen ice coffins, including his own, were drawn along by a force of magical power, following behind them as they flew into Heavenly Scabbard Mountain.
With a loud shout from Shi Buyu, the entire caravan advanced again and stopped at the entrance to Heavenly Scabbard Mountain. For the Water Gang, this was where the real business began; trading unusual corpses was merely a sideline.
Only when Ye Lianchen drew close to Heavenly Scabbard Mountain did he make out what was strange about it.
Heavenly Scabbard Mountain was pitch-black. From a distance, it looked like a wooden stump standing on the ground, with no peak on top, just a surface as flat as if sliced by a blade. Its sides were rounded like a bucket, as though it were one solid whole. Viewed together with the dark clouds above, it resembled an enormous black Lingzhi.
When Ye Lianchen had gazed at it from afar, he had wondered how a mountain could be so enormous and so regular in shape.
Now that he was closer, he finally saw that this was not a single mountain at all!
It was formed from countless slender mountains, all equally straight and flat-topped, packed tightly together!
Calling them slender mountains-or, more aptly, sub-mountains-was only in comparison to Heavenly Scabbard Mountain as a whole. In fact, even the smallest sub-mountain was dozens of zhang across.
These sub-mountains rose straight up, with sheer cliffs on all four sides and gaps of ten or so zhang