Rotten Peach Mountain lay in the northeastern Southern Wastes, bordering Western Guizhou South, and spanned two or three hundred li.
Rotten Peach Mountain rose high on all four sides and dipped in the middle, its surrounding heights enclosing a valley. Dense peach groves covered the slopes, without a single other kind of tree among them, their blossoms fragrant and their fruit large. The valley floor had no ventilation, and accumulating moisture formed sludge. Flowers and fruit from all over the mountain rolled down into it, and the fiery breath of the Southern Borderlands' earth veins cooked the mixture into a potent peach miasma. None below the Third Realm dared venture too deep.
Rotten Peach Mountain had always been famous in the Southern Borderlands. Its miasma could be refined into magical implements, used in medicine, or gathered as yin energy and condensed into pills. It was a treasured land that the great sects of the Miao Borderlands and the Southern Wastes had long fought over.
With such fame came all manner of far-fetched stories. Some said the peach groves had grown from Patriarch Lü's Peachwood Sword during the Tang dynasty. Others said they had grown from the walking stick of a giant of the ancient Kuafu tribe. Still others claimed that ripe Peaches of Immortality had fallen from heaven, taken root, and sprouted here.
These legends had circulated in the Southern Borderlands for thousands of years, until sixty years ago, when floodwaters collapsed the valley at the mountain's center. The earth sank and baleful intent emerged, and only then did everyone learn that Rotten Peach Mountain was even more wondrous than they had thought.
Who could have imagined that a Ding Fire cavern lay beneath those lush peach groves? Over long years of accumulation, fermentation, and mutation, the peach miasma in