Chapter 83: Same Grave in Life, No Resting in Peace in the Earth

"There's no way it could have snuck up behind us and accomplished something so major without us noticing," Xie Lian said in a low whisper.

Even if Xie Lian didn't believe in his own abilities of observation, he believed in Hua Cheng's. And when it came to gut instinct for danger, he honestly did trust himself quite a bit.

"Let's retrace our steps and see," Hua Cheng said.

The two walked side by side and returned the way they came, turning and rounding corners for a while before they came to a stop.

It wasn't that they stopped voluntarily; rather, they were forced to stop because there was no more path. Even though the tunnel wound and turned in all directions, it was still only a single road. But before they had reached their original starting point, they were blocked by a cold, hard stone wall that hadn't been there earlier!

The two were unsurprised. Xie Lian wondered, "Is this an illusion, or is this real?"

A silver butterfly flew languidly over and tapped lightly on the rugged stone wall. The wall seemed completely normal, and the butterfly was forced back.

"It's real," Hua Cheng said.

Xie Lian nodded. "Then this is tricky."

There were two common types of devil walls. The first type was an illusion, meaning one would see a wall where there actually wasn't one.

This type was easy to get rid of; just touch it and give yourself a slap, or douse yourself with a bucket of cold water to wake up and then touch it.

The second type muddled one's sense of direction and memory, and this type was a little more daunting. For example, at a fork in the road, they could confuse you—make you think you had chosen the left path when you had actually turned right. This so-called "Devil's Roundabout" was nothing more than a petty trick; there is a slight natural deviation to every person's gait, and inhuman creatures can confound the mind to distort the perception of this deviation. They can make someone think they're walking in a straight line when they're actually making a large circle. Once they made it back to their original starting point, they would be puzzled: "Huh? How did I end up back here again?!"

Both methods were paltry tricks to the two of them. As for the cold stone wall before them, it was an unexpected third type: it was real.

Xie Lian was considering whether to give the wall a brutish punch to see what was behind it when Hua Cheng spoke up.

"Gege, give me your hand."

Xie Lian was puzzled, but he still obediently gave Hua Cheng his hand. Hua Cheng gently took the hand he'd been offered and held it in his own palm. His other hand hovered over it like he was putting something on it.

Xie Lian held his breath for a moment. Then he raised his hand, curious.

"This is…?"

On the third finger of his left hand there was now a thin red string, carefully tied there by Hua Cheng. The red string extended outward and connected to a red string knotted around Hua Cheng's finger.

Hua Cheng smiled and raised his own hand to show him that they now had identical tiny red butterfly knots on their fingers.

"Now we're joined together."

Xie Lian could feel his face grow hot. Maybe he was a little too self-conscious. He hurriedly rubbed his cheeks hard before he smiled back, scared that Hua Cheng might notice his heart was beating faster than normal.

"Is this some sort of spell?"

"Yes." Hua Cheng straightened his expression and dropped his hand.

"Even though we won't separate voluntarily, this is a precaution. The red string won't break and won't grow shorter. As long as this red string remains unbroken, it means the person on the other end is all right. It will surely lead us to each other, unless one of us is no more."

"What do you mean by 'no more'?" Xie Lian asked.

"Dead or dissipated," Hua Cheng explained.

Xie Lian was about to speak when he heard the faint sound of tremors in the distance. He listened intently and wondered, "Is someone throwing fists?"

Considering the power and frequency, it seemed like someone was throwing heavy punches at the mountain itself.

"Such power definitely couldn't belong to an ordinary mortal; it must be a martial god," Xie Lian remarked. "Could it be General Pei?"

"It's coming from ahead of us," Hua Cheng observed.

"Ahead" meant the direction they had intended to go, but that they had to turn back from because Pei Ming and the others disappeared. But Pei Ming and the others had been behind them when they vanished—how could they suddenly reappear ahead? And if it wasn't Pei Ming, who could it be?

The two exchanged a look and walked toward the noise side by side, ready to check it out. But when they were about halfway back, the mountain-punching sound disappeared. They couldn't tell whether it stopping was intentional or if the energy fueling the punches had been depleted.

Since they had already come this far, why turn back? Xie Lian and Hua Cheng continued to walk in the direction from where the sound had come. A few silver butterflies danced in the blue-toned darkness of the cave ahead of them, lighting their way. Xie Lian's sharp eyes caught sight of something odd on the stone wall.

"What's that? A red string?"

They couldn't tell what it was from afar, but it was extremely bizarre.

It looked like a red string, but much thicker. It kept twisting around, looking more like a long red worm the closer they got. Xie Lian approached and examined it carefully.

"Isn't this one of Banyue's scorpion-snakes?"

Sure enough, it was the bottom half of a wine-red scorpion-snake, twisting and throwing its body around. Its upper half was buried in the stone wall.

"Did it crawl into a hole that it couldn't get out of?" Xie Lian wondered.

"Probably not," Hua Cheng said.

The scorpion-snake's body was dangling in the air; snakes didn't climb walls, so how could it have slithered up so high before crawling into a hole? Besides, there were many small crevices in this stone wall; if it had wanted to crawl into a hole, why pick such a small one? The "hole" was also strange—it was almost the exact same shape as the snake's body, which was why the serpent had gotten so thoroughly trapped.

Xie Lian wanted to grab hold of the snake and pull it out to see, but the snake was abnormally active and swinging its tail madly; it was attacking randomly with its stinger and kept almost hitting Xie Lian. So Hua Cheng flicked it. The motion seemed completely casual, but the snake seemed shocked by this and was too stunned to move. Xie Lian didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and he was just about to speak up when he quickly shut his mouth.

"Do you hear that?"

"I do," Hua Cheng said.

The two looked ahead at the same time.

From within the darkness, they could hear the low sound of breathing: very steady, very calm.

Two wraith butterflies dallied and danced around each other and fluttered toward the breathing sound, flying higher and higher and lifting their silver light upward. Gradually, a pair of hands was illuminated.

They were the hands of a person—the hands of a man. They were spotted with blood and covered in gashes, and they drooped like a corpse's.

As the glowing butterflies moved upward, the person's messy head was revealed, which also drooped as if he was dead.

However, there was no lower body.

That's right—the person "hung" so high on the stone wall didn't have a lower body. He only had an upper half, like he had grown straight out of the wall!

In the past, Xie Lian had seen nobles and aristocrats hunt for rare game and take the head as a trophy. They would treat it with chemical solutions to prevent decay, then hang it on the wall of their residence. The sight before him reminded him of those neatly displayed trophies—the heads of tigers, bucks, wolves, and other such beasts. However, this man was obviously breathing—he was still alive!

Xie Lian took a step closer. "What is this creature? Is this the true body of the mountain spirit?"

But there was no response from beside him. Xie Lian felt chills crawl up his spine. He whipped his head around—and sure enough, Hua Cheng was gone!

"San Lang?!" Xie Lian cried.

Naturally, no one answered, but the man hung on the wall mumbled like he was talking in his sleep and about to wake. Under the current circumstances, however, Xie Lian had no interest in him whatsoever. He spun around a few times in his search, then remembered the red string tied around his finger and raised it in renewed cheer. Sure enough, the red string was still there—and it was unbroken. Xie Lian relaxed a little at the sight and picked up the red string, tugging on it as he walked. He walked and walked until he reached the end of the thread.

The red string was strung through a stone wall!

Xie Lian couldn't believe it. He yanked at it a couple times, but his efforts only pulled out an endless length of red string from within the stone wall. It almost made him suspect that Hua Cheng was inside.

The moment that idea occurred to him, Xie Lian raised Fangxin and was ready to shatter the wall without another word. But the tip of his sword hadn't even touched the stone when his sight went black. It was as if the wall before him had opened a giant mouth, and it howled as it swallowed his entire body whole!

The blackness didn't recede—it only grew darker and darker as Xie Lian was swallowed. He was surrounded by sand and mud, crushing him with their weight and suffocating him. Everything moved endlessly; it felt like he had been swallowed into the stomach of a giant yao beast that had gobbled down a mishmash of things and was tumbling it all around in its stomach to digest. It also felt like he was sinking into quicksand—he couldn't exert any power even though he had the strength, and the more he tried to struggle, the deeper he sank. Xie Lian wanted to break the wall to escape, but then he realized that Hua Cheng could also be trapped here. And so, instead of backing out, he moved forward, swinging his arms to break away the earth and sand as he pulled at the red string and arduously continued onward.

A hand reached out and firmly seized his wrist. Xie Lian was alarmed.

"Who?!"

Mud poured in the moment he opened his mouth, and he miserably spat it out. As for that hand, it grabbed him and pulled him into a pair of arms. A familiar voice came from above.

"Gege, it's me!"

At the sound of that voice, Xie Lian completely relaxed and hugged Hua Cheng tightly. "Thank goodness…the red string didn't break. I really found you!" he blurted.

Hua Cheng embraced him firmly back and said with conviction, "It didn't break! I found you too."

As it happened, they both experienced the same strange incident. Xie Lian was observing the half-bodied man hung high on the wall, and Hua Cheng was keeping an eye on their surroundings, guarding against anything that might ambush them from the shadows. Xie Lian had been standing right next to him, but it only took a split second, the blink of an eye, for him to disappear, a stone wall looming where he once stood. Hua Cheng had pulled at their red string, following and searching, and he went inside to look for Xie Lian when he discovered it was threaded into this wall.

Though there had probably only been a single wall between them, they had both feared that the other was trapped inside and entered at the same time. Xie Lian mentally repeated for the umpteenth time that Hua Cheng really always thought of everything.

"Thank goodness we're linked by a red string! Otherwise, who knows if we would have found each other. And no wonder General Pei and the others disappeared so abruptly—they weren't ambushed, they were instead…swallowed by the mountain spirit."

"That's right," Hua Cheng said. "We picked a bad spot to dig and wound up breaking right into the mountain spirit's stomach."

Xie Lian unconsciously cleared his throat.

This was true—they were currently, without a doubt, in the stomach of one of the three mountain spirits. When Yin Yu had asked Xie Lian whether they should start digging upward, their chosen location just happened to be where one of the mountain spirits was resting, and Xie Lian had cheerfully agreed. He had the world's most unbelievable luck, no lie.

The sand and mud were crushing in on them, monopolizing more and more of the space around them, and the air was getting increasingly suffocating.

Xie Lian felt they really shouldn't stick around here much longer.

"How do we get out?" he asked.

"The mountain spirit got dug into from the bottom, so it's not very happy," Hua Cheng replied. "It's trying to digest us right now. A bit annoying, but rest assured, gege, we'll get out eventually." Then he joked, "This must be what 'same grave in death' feels like."

Xie Lian was slightly shocked by the comment, but the corners of his lips curved upward. He hastily suppressed himself the moment he noticed.

"The half-bodied man outside was probably also swallowed by the mountain spirit. The punching sound we heard must have been him pounding at the stone walls trying to escape. He and that scorpion-snake are the same; they were only half swallowed."

Which was why the effect was so terrifying.

"But he's not someone from our Mount Tonglu traveling group," Hua Cheng pointed out.

Xie Lian recalled that messy hair. "Wait, I know who that was. It was probably Qi Ying!"

Hua Cheng thought for a while before he seemed to remember. "Oh, the one with the curly hair. I guess that was him."

"I wonder if he's all right," Xie Lian said. "Did he pass out? He wasn't responsive earlier."

"He's fine, just asleep," Hua Cheng said.

"…How do you know?" Xie Lian asked.

"I left a few silver butterflies outside," Hua Cheng said. "I sent one over to him just now. My right eye can see through it."

As soon as he spoke, he made a soft sound of interest, as if he'd seen something strange.

"What is it?" Xie Lian asked.

Hua Cheng didn't respond, only bowed his head slightly and gently lifted Xie Lian's chin so they could touch foreheads. Xie Lian's eyes instantly widened, but then he closed and reopened them.

"This is…truly magical."

His right eye was seeing a completely different scene from what was before him. It was dark, but he could see rough silhouettes. The silver butterfly that was monitoring the outside seemed to be hiding behind a bunch of weeds. A black shadow was slowly approaching from below.

"Someone's coming. I wonder who it is," Xie Lian whispered.

"Where is your silver butterfly hiding? Will it be discovered?"

"It's in his hair," Hua Cheng said. "Its light is concealed—it won't be discovered."

The black shadow finally came close enough to be distinguishable.

The man lifted his head to reveal a ghastly pale face.

"Yin Yu?" Xie Lian said.