High mountains, deep waters, each practicing their own arts (5,000 words offered, seeking

monthly ticket support~)

Dianwen, Limitless Mountain.

On the lower mountainside lay a stretch of level slope called Peach Blossom Garden.

This place had originally been called Drunken Snake Slope, for a grove of poisonous peach trees grew here, each trunk as thick as a water vat, the oldest over a thousand years old. In the center of the grove lay a deep pool, over thirty zhang across and more than a hundred and twenty zhang deep, named Thousand-Foot Pool.

The pool was bitterly cold. A subterranean chill rose from its depths, which the people of Limitless Mountain called Cold Pool Miasma. The peach grove was poisonous, and its poison grew stronger when the flowers bloomed, earning it the name Peach Blossom Miasma. Whenever the peach blossoms opened, the two intertwined over the water, forming Cold Pool Peach Blossom Miasma.

This miasma smelled fragrant and sweet, its rich scent drawing eyeless cold snakes up from the bottom to gather it. Some snake demons lacked intelligence and knew no moderation when gathering miasma, often intoxicating themselves until they floated on the surface. Then the Limitless Mountain disciples waiting nearby would emerge with rope nets to collect them. They could refine the eyeless cold snakes into gu, or cut open their bellies to extract the miasma. Refined by the cold snakes, the poisonous miasma became the still higher-quality Cold Snake Peach Blossom Miasma, which could serve as a strand of yin qi for forming a core.

Properly managed, this should have been an excellent spiritual site, but the demon fiends of Limitless Mountain clearly had no talent for that. Their method of management was to throw offending disciples and captured mortals into the cold pool, letting the cold snakes feast to their hearts' content so that they would breed in greater numbers.

Later,