Chapter 511 - 255: "Don’t Come Over!

Chapter 511: Chapter 255: "Don’t Come Over!

The scenery within the [Painter] Path was grim, yet filled with the flowing light and shadow of an ink wash painting—a place where horror and magnificence coexisted.

Few in the world were fortunate enough to walk two Paths simultaneously. In fact, Zheng Xiu had spent the last year exploring the feasibility of cultivating multiple Paths. It was just that none of the Mystics around him bore two Paths; as it happened, he was the one to experience it for himself.

It was precisely because of this experience that, after a moment of thought, Zheng Xiu deduced the nature of this "Bund." He muttered to himself, "This is... the Ferryman’s Bund? Right?"

After the Orange Cat’s prompting, Zheng Xiu had unintentionally started calling the "Path" a "Bund." But even now, he still didn’t understand what "Bund" actually meant.

Zheng Xiu had directed the last part of his question to the Orange Cat.

But after waiting a moment, the Orange Cat remained quietly curled in his arms without any reaction. Zheng Xiu froze, recalling the wild thoughts he’d just had, and hastily tried to explain. "Oh, crap. Did I just accidentally say what I was thinking out loud...? Ptoo! Not what I was thinking! You know me, I’m not that kind of guy. How could I think a mere cat was... well-endowed and curvy? Ptoo! Not that there’s anything wrong with you, I just mean..."

After a moment of rambling, incoherently trying to explain himself as somewhere between a "normal person" and a "weirdo," the Orange Cat still had no reaction. It was eerily quiet. Puzzled, Zheng Xiu pulled the cat out and held it up in front of him.

"Meow!"

The Orange Cat pawed dopily toward Zheng Xiu’s face.

"What did you say?"

Zheng Xiu was dumbfounded. Ever since he had mastered [Foreign Language], it was rare for him to be unable to understand meows.

"Meow meow!"

The Orange Cat looked around frantically. It seemed it could only hear Zheng Xiu’s voice but couldn’t see him at all. It was as if it had gone blind.

"Are you kidding me? You bring me in here and then you just crash?" Although Zheng Xiu knew perfectly well that the Orange Cat’s usual "abnormality" was due to being possessed by some creature from the Darkness, and this was just the normal Orange Cat. Still, he was furious. ’You’re just going to drop everything and quit in this godforsaken place, in the middle of nowhere? So irresponsible!’

SWISH, SWISH. Zheng Xiu swung his palm, spanking the Orange Cat’s bottom, trying to "spank" it back to its senses. The Orange Cat whimpered, shrinking pitifully back into Zheng Xiu’s arms, its meows filled with innocence, as if to say, *This cat doesn’t know what’s going on either!*

’Er... It really is quite perky.’

Zheng Xiu wasn’t actually hitting it hard. Seeing that this and that method still wouldn’t turn the Orange Cat back into the "Pillar Cat," he could only give up. Since he was here, he would make the best of it. Cradling the Orange Cat protectively, he flew deeper into the Bund, following the course of the river.

The sensation of flying here was different from the outside world. It was less like flying with the form of the Caged Sparrow and more like "swimming." The space was filled with a "medium" that wasn’t "air." As Zheng Xiu moved, something seemed to tug at his limbs from time to time. While it wasn’t enough to stop him in his tracks, it gave him a stifling feeling of being unable to move freely.

After the "greed contamination" incident earlier, even though he felt uncomfortable moving, Zheng Xiu didn’t dare to recklessly channel his [inspiration]. It wasn’t that he was scared or a coward, but simply a matter of caution; he was worried something would go wrong.

Now that the mysterious Orange Cat from the Darkness had gone offline, Zheng Xiu was left to explore the [Ferryman] Bund all by himself.

The distorted zones pressing in from all sides vaguely formed a continuous curtain of light. Gaps would flash open within this curtain from time to time, seeming to lead to other mysterious places.

A glint flashed in Zheng Xiu’s eyes as he faintly guessed the reason for the [Ferryman]’s elusiveness. Whether it was Zhu using the Crow Fosterer’s Passage for long-distance travel, or the [Ferryman] traversing along the rivers, this mysterious zone—a crevice between the Darkness and the Common World, which the Orange Cat called the "Bund"—seemed to be the key to their ability to appear and disappear at will.

"Wait a minute!"

Zheng Xiu suddenly remembered something. He grabbed the scruff of the Orange Cat’s neck, holding the little female cat in his hand and manhandling it. He glared at the cat, recalling that night he was dining with Wei Chen, when the Orange Cat had smacked its paw on the area outside the map.

"Were you trying to say he was hiding in the ’Bund’?"

The Orange Cat tilted its head.

It didn’t understand what Zheng Xiu was saying.

It was even blind, unable to see where Zheng Xiu was.

"So that’s how it is! That explains everything! No wonder no one could ever find Zhu! I’ll be damned!"

Having figured things out, Zheng Xiu was in a great mood. He flew along the "river" for an unknown amount of time.

Until, in the distance, on the thick, bubbling black river, Zheng Xiu saw a lone skiff.

Two people stood on the skiff.

A man and a woman.

"Found you."

Zheng Xiu grinned and dived, a streak of inky light and shadow moving at high speed. He left a dazzling afterimage in his wake, as if to split the scenery of the Bund in two.

On the skiff.

There stood Bai Qiuyue and Fragrant Maiden, the very two who had recently escaped from Lu Town.

As an Innate Mystic of the [Ferryman] Path, Bai Qiuyue was naturally unique. He had been able to enter this mysterious place since long ago. At first, he didn’t know where he was. Before his Innate Mystic Skill Awakened, over twenty years ago, Bai Qiuyue was merely a young boatman on a canal.

Though Bai Qiuyue was a poor swimmer, he insisted on ferrying people across the river, making him an absolute oddball in the eyes of his peers. His fellow boatmen even joked with him, "Ah Yue, you’d better learn to swim! Otherwise, who knows, you might fall in one day and—glub glub—drown!"

The young Bai Qiuyue paid them no mind. Though he couldn’t swim, he was an expert at rowing his boat, navigating freely through wind and rain. He even earned the local moniker "Flying Skiff on the Waves." Later, after he married and had children, he worked even more diligently, out on his boat every single day. A few years into his marriage, he was happily blessed with a son and a daughter.