Aspiring to the Immortal Path

Getting to Neverwinter required first entering the underground, and without Huangfu Meng leading the way, Tang Jie would never have guessed what that entrance would be.

It was a hole full of turbid water, with animal feces floating on the surface. The entire thing stank like a cesspit.

Standing at the edge of the pit, Tang Jie frowned. “This is the passage to the underground?”

Huangfu Meng nodded. “There’s a formation down below that can teleport us to the underground. It’s been there for ages. The pool is made from Severspirit Stone, which cuts off all ripples of spiritual energy, and the odor makes fiend beasts unwilling to investigate this place. This is the only way to avoid their sharp sense of smell… They are very sensitive to the scent of humans.”

“What of the food?” Tang Jie asked.

He noticed that Huangfu Meng didn’t have a Mustard Seed Bag.

“I just drag it in,” Huangfu Meng answered. “It’s fine if it’s dirty… The starving don’t care about such things.”

She turned to look at the fiend corpses.

Twelve fiend corpses would be quite the pain to drag in.

“This is…” Huangfu Meng grabbed the Mustard Seed Bag and immediately recognized it, her body shaking in excitement. For the resource-starved subterranean humans, a Mustard Seed Bag was almost a mythical treasure.

“A gift,” Tang Jie casually said. With a wave of his hand, he stored the fiend corpses in the bag, and then he covered the two in a barrier and descended into the water. He had no desire to cover himself in the filth and stench of the pool.

“There’s Severspirit Stone down there, so spell arts don’t work—” Huangfu Meng reminded Tang Jie, then she came to the startling realization that Tang Jie’s methods were completely unaffected.

Huangfu Meng was stupefied, and then she remembered her elders from the village once telling her that Severspirit Stone was not all-powerful and that powerful cultivators could ignore its existence.

How strong did one need to be to ignore the Severspirit Stone? Huangfu Meng didn’t know, but this man had undoubtedly reached that level, so strong that she couldn’t imagine, so strong that twelve Fiend Kings might as well have been made of matchsticks in front of him.

This made her look at Tang Jie differently, her eyes shining while her heart became restless.

They soon reached the bottom of the pool.

Following Huangfu Meng’s directions, Tang Jie pressed on a small outcrop in the wall, upon which the wall opened up. A beam of light shot out of the hole, blocking out the water while permitting Tang Jie and Huangfu Meng entry.

They pressed down on a stone within to close the wall.

Huangfu Meng led Tang Jie through. There were many traps, dead ends, and alarms set up on the path, showing how cautious the architects of this place had been.

In the depths of the cave, Tang Jie saw a teleportation formation.

The teleportation formation was very crude, and Tang Jie took a quick look at the coordinates it currently led to. For him, the teleportation formation itself had no value, and only the coordinates mattered—the fiends could have had some who understood teleportation formations among them, but teleporting to the underground was one thing, and finding the humans was another.

Huangfu Meng started to adjust the coordinates on the teleportation formation—it appeared that the set from before was incorrect.

A very careful young girl.

“Alright, we can go to the village now,” Huangfu Meng excitedly said. With all these fiend corpses, the village wouldn’t have to worry about food for quite some time. Moreover, fiend corpses were packed with power, which could make the villagers stronger.

Once they had stepped into the formation and inserted spiritual stones to activate it, Tang Jie and Huangfu Meng appeared in another teleportation formation.

This was also located in a cave. When they emerged from the cave, pulling aside the grass used to disguise it, Tang Jie saw a dark and yellow world.

There was no sky, only a ceiling of rock.

The light came from the ground, not above.

Earthfire emerged from the splintered rock, bringing light and heat to this dry and still subterranean world.

Huangfu Meng pulled on Tang Jie and pointed. “The village is over there…”

And then she stopped.

Black smoke was rising from the direction Huangfu Meng was pointing, and it was possible to see the flickering of flames.

Huangfu Meng began to shiver uncontrollably.

Tang Jie held Huangfu Meng fast. “Come on, let’s go.”

He swiftly flew toward the location of the black smoke.

The sight of a burning village quickly appeared before them.

Huangfu Meng tried her best to keep her composure, but as they got closer and closer and the village’s situation became more evident, Huangfu Meng could see that Neverwinter Village was covered in corpses.

“Uncle Wu, Auntie Li, and Three Tooth, Uncle Han…” Huangfu Meng shouted one name after another.

Her former friends and elders could no longer answer. They lay on the ground as the fire charred them black.

Tang Jie brought Huangfu Meng to the village entrance, and the moment they landed, Huangfu Meng rushed in.

She pushed through the flames to bring out their bodies, not caring for how the flames might scorch her. Tang Jie waved his hand, creating a barrier to protect her. But despite her best efforts, there was no bringing back the dead, and most of them were already so blackened that they were no longer recognizable.

As she stared at all of this, she finally broke down into tears. All of the beautiful scenes she had imagined had instantly turned to ash, which just about anybody would find impossible to accept.

Tang Jie didn’t chide her, simply watching. He knew that all the chiding and soothing in the world did nothing in this kind of situation. People needed to vent their emotions in times like this.

He just hoped this venting wouldn’t take too long.

Surprisingly, Huangfu Meng regained her senses very quickly.

After a little while, Huangfu Meng stopped weeping.

She gathered up the charred bodies and buried them together, raising a grave marker for them. All of this was done in an orderly fashion, and while Tang Jie could have helped her do all this with a raise of a hand, he ultimately chose to just watch.

After completing the grave, Huangfu Meng kowtowed several times and said, “Grandpas and grandmas, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, so long as this Huangfu Meng still draws breath, I will get revenge for you!”

She stood up and said to Tang Jie, “Come on. I’ll take you to that spring of blue water.”

She knew that if she asked, her so-called revenge could be instantly completed, but she just gritted her teeth and set off.

Tang Jie asked, “From your tone, you seem to know who destroyed your village?”

Huangfu Meng replied without turning her head, “In the underground, there are only two kinds of beings that can threaten our survival. One is the fiends, and the other is the Blood Disciples. Fiends wouldn’t burn the village, let alone leave the bodies, as humans are a delicacy for them. Thus, it can only be the Blood Disciples.”

“Who are the Blood Disciples?” Tang Jie asked.

Huangfu Meng paused for a moment before answering. “Humans… failures of humans. They can’t survive in the underground, but they don’t dare to provoke the fiends, so they steal from other humans instead. They’re scoundrels and perverts, shameless bandits who will sometimes even eat other humans. If they eat humans for long enough, their eyes will become red, and they become bloodthirsty and wicked, so they are called Blood Disciples.”

“I see. It seems like the underground human world is a lot less monotonous than I thought,” Tang Jie commented.

He was not at all surprised by the savage bandits that Huangfu Meng had described.

The more perilous the situation, the more it tested a human’s conscience.

Chaos arose from suffering, and evil had its roots in poverty. It wasn’t for no reason that bandits were everywhere in eras of disorder.

Tang Jie was unsurprised that there were bandits in the underground.

There was nothing more normal.

To be honest, bandits were probably the norm in the underground, and villages like Neverwinter were the rarity.

Tang Jie wasn’t surprised by the existence of the Blood Disciples, but he was surprised that Huangfu Meng could still keep her mind clear. Although this wasn’t exactly a hard conclusion to reach, it at least meant that this was a girl who could use her head.

Humans mostly had about the same level of intelligence. It was just that some people were good at using it, some people weren’t, and some people simply couldn’t be bothered.

Huangfu Meng was clearly one of those good at using her intelligence. Tang Jie felt like he could see himself in her.

But in the end, he said nothing, simply following Huangfu Meng to the location of the spring. He didn’t even tell Huangfu Meng that he had already sensed a group of people several kilometers away retreating from the area. They were most likely the Blood Disciples that Huangfu Meng had spoken of, leaving after a successful raid. So long as Tang Jie wanted, he could chase them down and kill them, but he didn’t. He simply left a mark on one of them and followed Huangfu Meng to the spring.

He wanted to see when this girl would ask for his help—someone as smart as her must have already thought about this. She wasn’t asking only because she was waiting for a better opportunity.

Tang Jie was happy to test this girl and see her skills.

It wasn’t long before they reached the spring.

It was in the middle of a swampy area in which grew a dark yellow moss. This was the Shadow Moss that Neverwinter had relied on to survive. It had once covered the swamp, but now, there was barely any left.

After walking through this swamp for quite a while, Tang Jie finally spotted their destination.

A pile of rock debris was sitting in the middle of this swamp, and a spring of deep blue water dribbled out from the cracks, exuding an extreme cold.

Tang Jie was greatly disappointed, for this was not Skyspring Water.

This was just a spring of ordinary water that was contaminated with cold energy, which had frozen the Shadow Moss to death.