Where Immortals Once Walked

“A team of ten, and three are already dead or wounded. Is this common in other years?”

“No, no. It’s rare.” His teammate said, “The Grass Sea Hunt has been going on for centuries. There are already studied methods for dealing with every kind of duonao beast, though new variants do occasionally appear. Generally speaking, our team should be able to handle even six at once without much trouble. Also, when we run into beast herds, multiple teams will also cooperate.”

Although the teams competing in the Fu Realm were rivals, intelligent beings all knew how to adapt. When the pressure grew too great or when there was profit to be had, temporary cooperation was nothing unusual.

He Lingchuan said helplessly, “So if you run into a beast tide, you just lie down and die?”

“Usually, we avoid them.” His teammate shook his head. “We’re not stupid. If a herd is too large, we do our best to stay far away.”

“Over all these years of the Grass Sea Hunt, the greatest threat to us has actually been the Fu Realm’s air.” He smiled bitterly. “Most people who have died here died from suffocation. Some died in their sleep, while others failed to grab a rinsing bead in time and suffocated.”

“Ah...” Right, sleeping in the Fu Realm’s actually quite a big problem. After all, who could keep changing their rinsing bead every fifteen minutes while asleep?

That’s definitely something that requires teamwork. Some people must go to sleep while others keep watch.

He Lingchuan pointed at the low hill and asked them, “Then how do you explain what’s in front of us?”

His teammates looked at one another. Eventually, one of them answered, “Sometimes beast tides go mad and chase people.”

This was, after all, another world. Even though Beijia had been skillfully harvesting resources from it for centuries, accidents could not be ruled out entirely.

“What reasons would there be?”

“The lead beast going mad, or something driving the beast tide from behind,” while answering, that teammate of his drew his blade and went to dig out floating stones. There were too many beast corpses here, and more than half had not yet been processed.

To everyone, this was a treasure trove.

One duonao beast shaped like a giant bull yielded a floating stone the size of a melon. His teammate scraped away the mucus on its surface, grinning so broadly that his mouth could hardly close. “This piece is equivalent to three ordinary ones!”

Free gains were always sweet.

When all participating teams returned to the mortal realm, they had to sell the floating stones they obtained to the authorities. The authorities bought them at a set price. As for how they were measured, a violet floating stone the weight of a goose egg was the standard unit, called one grade.

Floating stones were like the hide of a duonao beast: the stronger the creature, the paler their color.

He Lingchuan glanced at the floating stone. It was an irregular cylinder, pale violet and fully translucent. Duonao beasts used floating stones to resist gravity, or else their bodies could never grow so large.

His teammate was cutting into the beast’s corpse when He Lingchuan suddenly saw the sand and soil beside his foot shift, as if sinking.

“Watch out!” He moved without thinking, grabbing the man by the shoulder and yanking him backward.

Just as his teammate’s body was pulled away, there was a sharp rustling sound from underground, and a whirlworm suddenly burst out.

Its body was thicker than an oversized tire. Although it had no legs, the force with which it leaped out was anything but weak. Its twenty-meter-long body sprang twelve meters out of the ground, its mouth stretching to its widest at the same time.

If his teammate had still been standing there, he probably would have been swallowed whole.

In that instant, He Lingchuan saw its maw clearly.

The thing had ten full rows of razor-sharp teeth in its mouth, arranged in a spiral, extending from its mouth all the way into its digestive tract. As long as it twisted its body once, the flesh of whatever prey it had bitten would be evenly sawed apart, divided, and sent straight into its belly.

When it opened its mouth wide, the outermost teeth protruded outward. When it shut its mouth, they folded inward. Once prey was seized, it was almost impossible to escape.

This was He Lingchuan’s first time in the Fu Realm, and in the end, he had still misjudged his strength and speed. His rescue was not as timely as it would have been normally.

Besides, his teammate no longer weighed just a little over 60 kilograms, but more than 300.

In the end, though the whirlworm failed to swallow the man whole, with a turn of its head, it still managed to bite onto the man’s leg.

The man cried out. His calf immediately felt the touch of the whirlworm’s saw-like teeth.

Once this thing latched on, breaking free was very difficult.

He Lingchuan drew Fleeting Life and slashed.

Cold saber light flashed once through the air, and half the whirlworm’s head was cut open.

Green pulp sprayed out.

The sensation of cutting through it was not clean either. It really felt like cutting through a tire, hard and tough.

It made sense. The Fu Realm’s creatures fed on minerals and soil, so their skin and flesh were unlikely to be soft to begin with.

He Lingchuan put up his protective vigorous qi. Otherwise, the acidic pulp would have ruined his face if it had ended up splashing onto it.

The whirlworm shrieked in pain, and two small pits immediately sank into the sand nearby.

Two more whirlworms emerged and pounced straight at them.

He Lingchuan reacted quickly, throwing the wounded man onto the nearest boulder.

It looks like these things can hide in the sand, but surely they can’t do the same for stone, right?

One whirlworm shot toward him.

When it burst out of the ground to ambush its prey, it really did resemble a spring. However, He Lingchuan was already prepared. Using the Swallow’s Return movement technique, he had moved six meters away.

Combat was the fastest way to adapt to the local gravity.

His limbs still felt heavy, but he was no longer as helpless as he had been at first. Best of all, Fleeting Life felt weightless in his hand, even more agile than his own arm.

In the Fu Realm, its performance was excellent.

Before He Lingchuan had even steadied himself, he fired a sleeve arrow with his other hand.

The arrow flew slightly slower than it would have in the mortal realm. This was probably because the arrow’s body had become heavier and no longer matched the parameters Li Qingge had originally tuned with such care.

However, that did not matter. The arrowhead still sank fiercely into the whirlworm’s body.

It had been pouncing at another Chiyan man. He Lingchuan seized the spider silk and pulled with the momentum, dragging it off course and swinging it like a windmill toward the third whirlworm.

The two aberrant creatures slammed together and twisted on the ground for a long while.

The other two teammates also charged forward, their blades falling like rain.

All three aberrant creatures had been wounded, so they hissed and burrowed back into the ground.

He Lingchuan immediately scanned his surroundings. Several more whirlworms were gathered nearby, but they had not come over to trouble him. The few that fled left several large round holes in the ground, but the surrounding sand slowly slid downward, filling them in.

The wounded man had only just recovered from the fright. His teammates hurried over to stop the bleeding, purge the poison, and bandage him.

“Careful that joy doesn’t turn into sorrow.” He Lingchuan shook his head. “Didn’t you say whirlworms don’t like human flesh?”

“It was probably protecting its food and thought I was trying to steal from it. Those things don’t have a brain.” The man hissed as his wound was disinfected. “Still, whirlworms as large as these ones are incredibly hard to come by.”

“Hard to come by?” He Lingchuan mocked himself. “Is my luck that good?”

“It might just be because of how many beast corpses are here. With this many, it isn’t all that strange for worm kings and worm generals to have been drawn over.” Another said, “If a worm king has come, this place is no longer safe.”

“How large is a worm king?”

The man pointed at the largest pit in the sand. “At least three to five times bigger than that one. Ordinary weapons can’t even scratch its hide.”

He Lingchuan replaced his rinsing bead, observed from the hill for a while, then suddenly jumped down to the ground.

“I was standing here just now, but the whirlworms behind didn’t come close. Why?”

These worms were clearly from the same nest and even seemed to help and watch out for each other. Yet when he stood here, the whirlworms behind him simply would not approach, even showing hesitation.

Of course, his teammates could not answer his question.

After observing for a while, He Lingchuan pointed at several footprints on the ground. “What kind of duonao beast is this?”

The footprints formed a row. Each was as large as He Lingchuan’s own foot, and their owner was likely a four-legged creature. But the footprints were shallow in front and deep at the back. Each had three side-by-side toes, which showed that the aberrant creature’s center of gravity was shifted backward and that it could at least half-stand upright.

There were also drag marks behind the footprints.

I’m guessing it’s got a tail?

He Lingchuan did not understand duonao beasts well enough to identify the beast from a few footprints alone. However, beside the prints were two corpses, both frozen into solid blocks of ice.

One was a duonao beast, and the other was human.

He Lingchuan tapped them twice with the back of his saber. The sound was clear and hard, showing they were frozen solid from the inside out.

There was no ice or snow on the ground nearby. These two unlucky souls could only have been struck by some kind of divine technique, spell, or innate ability.

The three others came over to look, then shook their heads to indicate they did not recognize it.

But He Lingchuan looked at the two corpses, and a thought stirred in his mind.

“Are there many varieties of duonao beasts that can use ice divine techniques?”

“I’ve only heard of frost-silver beasts.”

“I’ve never heard of any other duonao beast being skilled in that kind of divine technique either.”

At that, He Lingchuan grew interested. But his teammate immediately added, “Still, we can’t be certain a frost-silver beast killed these two. That aberrant creature is extremely rare and only lives on cold mountains.”

As soon as one entered the Fu Realm, the surface temperature was already around minus ten degrees Celsius, and every spoken breath came out in white vapor. He Lingchuan gazed toward the distant mountains. It was hard to imagine how cold it was up there.

For frost-silver beasts with an affinity for ice, the mountaintops were indeed a more ideal habitat.

No wonder so few people across the years have hunted frost pellets. Setting aside the difficulty of killing frost-silver beasts, just climbing those mountains alone should already be quite a lethal challenge.

Under this gravity, visitors from the mortal realm already suffered abnormal heart rates and blood pressure, and even walking was hard. Add climbing a dangerous peak and risking one’s life on top of that, and one was simply making trouble for oneself.

There shouldn’t be as many duonao beasts on the mountains as down here, though, right?

In truth, before entering the Fu Realm, he had purchased many lightness talismans. These were also considered an essential supply for hunters over the years. However, ordinary lightness talismans could only offset half a measure of gravity and lasted at most an hour. Meanwhile, the special lightness talismans developed specifically for the Fu Realm, which could completely cancel the effects of gravity, lasted only a few dozen breaths at most.

And none of them were cheap.

Therefore, unless there was an emergency, most hunters basically did not use these talismans.

He Lingchuan followed the team southwest while asking about what frost-silver beasts looked like.

Unfortunately, though everyone had heard of frost-silver beasts, none of them had actually ever seen one.

“The mountaintops are basically forbidden areas too. Besides, we don’t want to see frost-silver beasts.”

He Lingchuan pointed ahead. “But it seems to have followed the beast tide southwest.”

If it really was a frost-silver beast, why would it leave the safety of the mountains and run down to the ground?

No one present could answer that question.

The wounded man’s calf had been cut with two spiral-shaped wounds, but the injury was not deep. He Lingchuan took a two-wheeled cart from his storage ring for him to ride in, while another teammate pushed him along.

Under this gravity, blood was all pressing toward the legs. An injured person should not be walking.

Fortunately, the wound had been treated in time, and the medicine was effective. This kind of flesh wound would be mostly healed up in half an hour. Otherwise, if the man had suffered a much more serious injury, then He Lingchuan would have had someone push him directly back to the mortal realm.