Where Immortals Once Walked

He looked down and found himself thinking the exact same thing as He Chunhua.

How the hell did this kid get up here?

But the giant bird had its own problems. Its strength was limited to begin with, and it was only barely staying aloft in this torrential storm, its wings soaked and heavy. Carrying two grown men had already pushed it to its limit; now, with a third burly, iron-blooded fighter suddenly clinging to it, how was it supposed to cope?

No matter how frantically it flapped its wings, the bird flew more and more crooked, sagging lower and lower as it drifted toward the flood below.

Dong Rui was scared out of his wits. Worse, both father and son had squeezed themselves up under the bird’s belly, where he could not get at them. All he could do was howl helplessly, “Let go! Let go, both of you!”

Why is it that every time I ran into these two, things turn into a catastrophe for me?

Karmic debt. It has to be karmic debt.

From beneath the bird’s belly came Lingchuan’s voice, clear and sharp through the rain, “Head back to land, or we all die here!”

He had already burned one of his best lifesaving tricks. The thing he had shoved into his father’s belt earlier was a ghost-shadow cicada shell. If he fell into the flood again, there would be no second chance.

Dong Rui did not dare argue anymore. He twisted the giant bird’s head toward dry land and forced it to fly back.

But the bird simply could not handle the load. With three men hanging off it, every wingbeat cost all its strength. The closer they got to land, the lower the bird flew. Cold water lapped across He Lingchuan’s insteps; the surface had already reached his ankles.

He glanced around.

All he could see in every direction was raging, muddy water. There was no more high ground to speak of, no riverbank, and no army.

He Chunhua was horrified. His body moved on instinct, struggling upward, and He Lingchuan shouted, “Don’t move!”

Unfortunately, it was too late. The giant bird had already reached the end of its strength. With He Chunhua thrashing around on top of it, how could it stay in the air? It let out a strangled croak and dropped into the water.

The raging currents showed no mercy. The wave collapsed over them, forcing all three men under.

Being able to swim did not help in a situation like this. He Chunhua swallowed several mouthfuls of muddy water. Suddenly, his hand slid across something solid.

A drowning man clutched at the chance of life without thinking.

His fingers locked around it.

It was a stunted tree growing at the edge of the rocky slope, half its branches already scoured by the flood and whipping wildly in the water.

Luckily, the roots still held. They could barely support one He Chunhua.

He still had a grip on his son’s trouser leg.

When he managed to blink the water out of his eyes and look up, he saw Dong Rui wrapped around the giant bird, and the bird’s remaining talon still hooked around He Lingchuan’s boot. All three of them were tangled together in a miserable, flailing knot.

“Chuan’er, grab... grab my...” He Chunhua wanted to tell his son to grab his hand, but He Lingchuan was being hammered by the current, his body bent over.

The weight of three men, plus the brute force of the flood, all pulled downward on He Chunhua.

Even with some cultivation to his body, he barely lasted two seconds before pain exploded up his arms, threatening to rip them from their sockets.

Worse, the little tree itself was starting to loosen.

He Lingchuan lifted an arm and fired a sleeve arrow toward the trunk, hoping to lodge the hook and haul himself back in.

Just then, a massive wave slammed into them. The impact knocked the arrow aside with brutal force.

“...” Can my luck get any worse?

The real problem was that the grappling hook and the arrow were a single mechanism. In other words, he did not have another shot!

On shore, the Yuan soldiers finally noticed what was happening. Wu Shaoyi sprinted over, shouting, “Ropes! Bring ropes!”

But there was no more time.

Another wave crashed down, this one carrying a hulking bull in its tumbling mass. The beast’s bulk smashed straight into Dong Rui.

The impact turned his mind to paste.

These bulls had not escaped the flood either. Whatever talent they normally had for crossing water was useless now. They could only wait to die.

There was a rending tear as the fabric gave way.

He Lingchuan’s trouser leg ripped in half.

The flood snatched two men, one bird, and one ox away in an instant, sweeping them over sixteen meters downstream and out of sight. All that remained in He Chunhua’s hand was a wet, ragged strip of cloth.

“Chuan’er...” He Chunhua stared at the torn fabric in his grip, disbelief hollowing him out.

The Yuan soldiers on shore hurled down ropes, then heaved together to haul the battered sapling upward. They finally managed to drag He Chunhua out of the water.

A drifting belt of debris swept past the spot that he had been hanging just moments earlier—branches, stones, broken wagon parts, and clumps of mud pouring down from upstream in an endless torrent.

For that scene, only one old saying truly fit: The boundless forest sheds its leaves shower by shower[1].

No one could survive that kind of indiscriminate assault. No one.

And if they had been just a few breaths slower, he would have died then and there as well.

He stood on the shore, his clothes sticking to his skin, the water streaming from his armor and hair, but inside he felt nothing but a vast, empty ache.

His son was gone.

Around him, whistles shrieked, and voices still shouted orders.

The battle was not yet over.

Wu Shaoyi took in his pale face and vacant stare and could only murmur, “My lord, accept your grief. We have to retreat!”

Dropped into a flood like that, short of an immortal descending from the heavens, who could possibly live?

They could only wonder what kind of divine sorcery Nian Zanli had used to bring “Water Buries the Yuan Army[2]” to life.

At that moment, however, Nian Zanli himself was tasting a misery no one else could see.

Because this flood... just would not stop!

The moment he saw the Yuan Army turn into drowned rats, goal accomplished, he tried to raise the vase and call back the water.

He had formed the hand seals over and over, but nothing changed. The torrent still roared out of the mouth of the vase, wild and unstoppable.

The artifact drank his true energy and his essence, qi, and spirit with terrifying greed, as though it were a giant elephant that had not tasted water for three days.

“Damn you! Stop! Stop! Stop already!”

The vase did not listen.

Only now did he truly remember the warning Hong Chenglue had given him.

Although the Verdancy Vase might merely be a high-tier imitation of the Ancient Era’s Cloudwater Bottle, its temper was just as vicious as the original.

Nian Zanli had thought “bad temper” meant it was proud and finicky, difficult to cajole into action. He had not expected that once it started drinking his essence, it would not hold back in the slightest. If he weren’t a veteran cultivator with deep reserves of true energy, he would have already been sucked dry into a weightless husk.

And only now did he understand what Hong Chenglue had really meant. When a mortal wielded this artifact, complete control would be but a fantasy.

In his panic, he could only tilt the mouth of the vase toward the river’s main course.

The Han had calmed for a time while the vase drank, but now the river was roaring again. Pouring the vase’s water back into it was like stacking one flood atop another, slamming the next two flood waves together into something even more monstrous.

The first wave alone reached over thirteen meters high.

By then, the entire southern bank of the Han was underwater. The flood had a wide, unobstructed corridor to rush through. Once it found that path, it barreled through with a vengeance, recognizing nothing and sparing nothing, swallowing anything it could grab.

Nian Zanli watched as the earthen banks collapsed under the impact of the thirteen-meter-tall wave. Soldiers who had just clawed their way to safety were washed back into the water, whether they were of Xun Province or Yuan.

The muddy surge was crowded with tiny black dots.

Each dot was a living person, flailing desperately.

And each dot was a life about to disappear.

Between one crest and the next, they vanished beneath the surface...

The flood kept eating away at the remaining shoreline. No matter how fast the survivors ran, their legs could not outrun the collapsing earth.

Nian Zanli felt every inch of it like a knife sawing across his heart.

They were his soldiers. They were men whom he had spent years forging into a formidable army, officers he had personally promoted and tested.

And in one instant, the water had claimed half of them.

But he did not dare let go of the vase.

He had no idea how many times he had cycled through the hand seals. His lips were numb. Finally, the vase stopped.

No more water poured out.

Nian Zanli swayed back two steps, his arms too locked and rigid to lower at once.

He tried to speak an order. When he opened his mouth, what came out was a spray of blood.

Rage and injury had boiled together to assault his heart.

His bodyguards rushed to steady him. “General! General!”

He could just barely hear his own voice muttering, “Hong Chenglue, you bastard... You screwed me over...”

He repeated it a few times, then finally forced the words out, “Chase... chase the Yuan Army. Don’t let Zhao Pan escape...”

Even if this counted as a victory, it was a bitter one. It was a victory in name, a crushing loss in truth.

Since it had come to this, he had to at least achieve the strategic goal of crossing the river.

Only then did he suddenly remember the promise Hong Chenglue had made when offering his plan.

Hong Chenglue had merely guaranteed that the Xun Province’s army would make it across the river.

You fucking dog!

The curse never made it out loud. Between the strain of controlling the Verdancy Vase and the fury choking his chest, Nian Zanli simply collapsed.

By now, what remained of both armies had gathered along the shore.

Earlier, pressed for time, Nian Zanli had unleashed the flood before all his soldiers had finished crossing. Then he lost control of the vase and drowned his own troops as thoroughly as the enemy’s.

Both sides had suffered catastrophic losses.

Zhao Pan, who had led the pursuit and thus escaped the worst of the flooding, took stock as he pulled his forces back together. At this moment, roughly three-tenths of his men remained.

One massive flood had swallowed nearly thirty thousand of his elite troops.

Both sides sounded their rally calls, but Zhao Pan felt as if his own heart had sunk to the riverbed.

He had lost.

After two to three months of stalemate in northern Xia Province, the campaign had ended in his defeat.

He had failed the monarch!

Just then, He Chunhua came pounding up, the remaining Xia Province troops forming up behind him. Seeing Zhao Pan’s hollow stare, He Chunhua grabbed the front of his armor and bellowed, “Snap out of it! You haven’t lost! The fight isn’t over!”

Zhao Pan had been ready to slap his hand away, but those words froze him. “What?”

He Chunhua’s face was twisted, his entire body caked in mud and water. A clump of hair was plastered across his nose; nothing about him resembled the mild, elegant gentleman of old.

But the light in his eyes... it was hard to say whether it looked more mad or more brilliant.

“General Zhao, you’re stuck on the wrong thing!” He Chunhua shook him hard. “Think about what your mission was! It was to hold the north against Nian Zanli! Look over there, really look!”

The night was still dark, the rain relentless, and soldiers were still stumbling about in confusion. Until now, Zhao Pan had not been able to make sense of the field. He turned in the direction He Chunhua was pointing.

All he saw was a vast, churning expanse of water.

The high ground Nian Zanli’s forces had reached was gone. The waves had been taller.

The flood had swallowed it whole.

“His men were washed away, too. He’s no better off than you,” He Chunhua snarled, his face flushing red. “And do you really think there’s no price to pay for a divine technique like that? Only an idiot uses something that shakes heaven and earth without counting the cost!”

Use a technique that matches your strength.

Try to reach beyond your realm, and the price would come due.

“General Zhao, Heaven has not forsaken us!”

The words split through Zhao Pan’s fog like lightning. He felt as if his mind had just been seared clean.

Yes. His mission was to hold the north and keep Xun Province from pushing south. As long as their advance was checked, he had done his duty.

His army had been mauled, but in what world was Nian Zanli doing any better?

It had been a stupid, brutal exchange of lives for lives, but he had not lost yet.

He asked He Chunhua, “And your men?”

“I still have two thousand. They’re all yours to use!”

“Good!” Zhao Pan wiped the water from his face in one rough swipe, then called for his best remaining troops. He scraped together eight hundred men, then folded the Xia Province troops into the formation as a hardened core. Then, he actually ordered them to charge straight toward Nian Zanli’s shattered army.

In moments like this, whoever regained their wits first seized the advantage.

Zhao Pan’s banners and war drums rose again, crashing through the lingering panic. Newly rescued Xun Province soldiers, soaked and exhausted, heard the oncoming thunder and scattered in terror. The Yuan troops, seeing their own side’s formation firm and its spirit rising, rushed to join them. With every stride forward, their numbers swelled.

Something had gone wrong on Nian Zanli’s side. His troops were fleeing westward along the riverbank, leaderless and frantic, their main banner lost. They looked like a routed mob.

By then, Hong Chenglue and his group had retreated all the way into the safety of the forests. From that higher ground, they looked down over the battlefield below.

Wu Qing stood beside him and let out a long breath. “Neither side has come out ahead.”

This outcome was nothing like what anyone had imagined.

Hong Chenglue lifted his head and looked east. At last, a faint smile tugged at his lips. “It looks like I can return to Beijia ahead of schedule.”

In his hand, he was tightly gripping a wooden comb.

[End of Fifth Arc]

1. This is a line from a poem by Tang dynasty poet Du Fu (杜甫) titled On the Heights (登高). The full line is actually something along the lines of: The boundless forest sheds its leaves shower by shower, the endless river rolls its waves hour after hour. That’s just one out of four lines in the poem, by the way. ☜

2. This should be a play on words of the classic campaign of “water burying/flooding the seven armies (水淹七军)” from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. ☜