Chương 124: The Gilded Corpse (3/3)

As Skycloud City's oppressive shadow gradually faded behind them, the land to the north changed at once.

For the first five miles, all that met the eye were ruined vassal plains and long-abandoned clay quarries. The earth was desolate, its spiritual veins long since exhausted, leaving behind only pale, lifeless mud like rotted bone ground into mire. Where once Qi had flowed in golden currents beneath the soil, now there remained only hollow channels—collapsed arteries in the corpse of the land. The very ground seemed to recoil underfoot, yielding with the sickly softness of flesh gone to decay.

The rain carried the taste of soot. Heavy drops struck Shi Yan's dark iron Yaksha mask with dull, forceful taps, each impact sending faint rivulets streaming down the demon-face ridges and dripping from the chin in slow, deliberate rhythm. The moisture beaded along the curved cheekbones and collected in the hollow eye sockets before spilling over, as though the mask itself wept tears of ash-stained water.

Ye Bing, however, moved across the perilous northern road as lightly as a swallow skimming water. Her boots touched the slanted, broken ground without leaving any noticeable trace. Each step was placed with the precision of a blade-dancer, her weight distributed so perfectly that even the saturated mud refused to hold her print. The hem of her acid-scorched cloak whispered against wet stone and root, trailing behind her like a tattered banner borne through countless battlefields.

Shi Yan followed at her side, keeping pace without the slightest disorder in his steps. The two traveled on foot without pause. Where Ye Bing moved with cultivated grace, his gait was different—mechanical in its exactness, relentless as a siege engine. His massive frame cut through the rain-drenched gloom with the inevitability of falling stone.

With his base [55 Physique], this bitter night journey—one that should have wearied the flesh and shaken the breath—amounted to little more than a measured walk. His breathing remained deep and steady, without the least sign of exhaustion. The cold that would have driven mortal travelers to seek shelter and flame simply slid off his enhanced body like oil from polished steel.

His lungs drew the frigid, soot-laden air with mechanical regularity, each breath precisely metered, controlled by the soldier's discipline that death itself had not erased.

From time to time, Ye Bing turned her head and cast a glance behind her. Beneath the rain-soaked brim of her bamboo hat, her eyes gradually narrowed. Water dripped from the woven edge in steady streams, blurring her vision, yet what she sought required no clarity of sight—only the keen spiritual sensitivity of one who had survived by reading the subtle language of Qi and breath.

Not a single strand of disordered breath.

Her pupils contracted slightly as realization settled like frost upon her thoughts. The pale scars along her jaw tightened as her expression grew more guarded.

A trace of vigilance rose in her heart.

Not long ago, this man had avoided a Netherworld Warden's anchor strike by relying on an overbearing Body Art. Had it been any ordinary Body Cultivator of the Dragon-Spine realm, that burst of force alone would have left their blood and breath in turmoil. The meridians would have fractured inward, spiritual energy would have backflowed like poison through the channels, and their organs would have compressed under the rebound force.

Without at least half a day of secluded recovery and several precious blood-pills worth their weight in spirit stones, they would not even have steadied their steps.

And yet this masked man—Fellow Daoist Shi—merely continued onward.

His steps were neither hurried nor slow, each one firm and exact, as though measured long in advance. His endurance seemed inexhaustible, and his silence was as heavy as a mountain pressing upon the road. Not once did his breathing falter. Not once did his gait lose rhythm. It was as though the laws that governed mortal flesh—fatigue, pain, the slow erosion of will beneath hardship—simply did not apply to whatever walked behind that iron demon-face.

Just what kind of thing did the Chamber forge in secret?

Ye Bing's gaze turned once more toward the dark and dangerous road ahead. Her scarred fingers flexed once against the worn leather of her sword grip, a habitual gesture born from unease.

Perhaps… the Deaconess has truly gone mad. What she fashioned was no mere retainer, but a weapon clothed in human skin.

"Stop."

His voice cut through the curtain of rain, cold and decisive.

Ye Bing stopped at once. Her hand fell to the hilt of her broadsword as her gaze swept across the dark ridgeline, searching for hidden killers, roaming beasts, or patrolling Enforcers. Her body shifted into a half-crouch, weight settling onto the balls of her feet, coiled like a spring prepared to release violence in any direction. The rain hammered against her shoulders and back, but she did not flinch.

Her sharp pupils darted across shadow and stone, cataloging angles, estimating distances, marking every fold in the terrain that might conceal ambush.

Yet Shi Yan was not looking toward the horizon.

He stepped beneath the vast canopy of an ancient cypress, where the dense branches briefly shielded them from the bone-piercing ash-rain. Without a word, his hand moved to his waist. Water streamed from his sleeves as he shifted, pooling briefly at his boots before sinking into the pale, exhausted mud.

Ye Bing watched as his hand slipped into his spatial pouch. Her body tensed instinctively, expecting him to draw out some blood-stained talisman, a searching artifact, or a medicinal pill blazing with potent spirit-light. Her breathing slowed. Her grip tightened a fraction on the scabbard. Every scar on her body seemed to tighten in anticipation of whatever horror the Chamber's creation might unveil.

Instead, he took out a parcel wrapped in tough, dried lotus leaves and bound with coarse hemp cord.

Ye Bing blinked once, slowly, as though her eyes needed a moment to reconcile what they perceived with what her instincts had prepared her to face.

With practiced ease, he snapped the cord apart with a single twist of his wrist. At once, a rich scent spread into the damp air—salt, reed-marsh, and thick animal fat, mingling with the acrid notes of wood smoke and preserved spice. Within lay several strips of heavily salted smoked boar meat, together with ash-baked flour cakes, rough and gray-brown in color, each marked with the faint imprint of river clay from whatever crude oven had birthed them.

He took one strip of meat for himself, then tossed the remaining lotus parcel toward her with a casual flick of his wrist.

Ye Bing caught it by reflex. Her hands closed around the greasy bundle, feeling the slick residue of rendered fat seep through the dried leaf wrapping. She lowered her eyes to the preserved mortal meat, then raised them again toward the fearsome iron Yaksha mask. Rainwater continued to stream down the demon-face in thin, unbroken lines, pooling at the sharp ridges of its snarling fangs before dripping to the earth below.

Among cultivators, those who stepped into the Furnace-Core realm often did not even need to eat, as most simply consumed bigu pills—small, compressed pellets of spiritual grain and refined Qi that sustained the body without the burden of digestion. Eating mortal food, aside from satisfying one's cravings, sometimes also introduced many impurities into the body—base matter that clouded the meridians and weighed down the spirit like stones in a silk pouch.

Not only that, but consuming the dense, salty flesh of the mundane world was, in many eyes, a crude act that muddied the body and clouded one's Dao heart. It was the habit of outer disciples, mortal laborers, and those too poor or too weak to transcend the needs of the flesh. This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"What is this?" she asked. Her voice carried a faint edge of bewilderment, as though he had handed her not rations, but a riddle wrapped in lotus leaves.

"Rations," Shi Yan replied. His voice came muffled through the iron grill of the mask as he bit into the hard flour cake with a blunt crack. The sound echoed faintly beneath the cypress canopy—dry, matter-of-fact, utterly devoid of ceremony. He chewed with the efficient rhythm of a soldier accustomed to eating in mud, in cold, in the intervals between killing and being killed. There was no elegance to it. No cultivation of taste or savoring of essence. Only fuel consumed to sustain the machine of his body.

Ye Bing looked down at the parcel in silence. Then she tugged her moisture-mask aside and bit into the smoked boar.

The taste was rough and heavy, thick with salt and smoke, lacking the refinement cultivators favored. The meat was fibrous, dense, almost punishing in its texture—nothing like the spirit-beast delicacies served at sect banquets or the tender flesh of Qi-infused livestock raised in blessed pastures. Yet once it entered her stomach, a slow warmth spread through her limbs, driving back much of the biting chill carried by the rain.

It was a mortal warmth, simple and unrefined, but real in a way that even potent medicinal pills could not replicate.

She turned to look at the towering, frightening man chewing in silence beside her. His massive frame loomed like a monument carved from iron and shadow, the rain hammering uselessly against his shoulders and back. The Yaksha mask stared forward, unblinking, its hollow eyes fixed on nothing—or perhaps on everything, cataloging threats with the cold precision of a predator at rest.

For all his savage strength and merciless bearing, he was not some inhuman fiend.

He was merely a man who understood killing fields.

A man who knew that survival demanded fuel, warmth, and preparation—not pride, not ceremony, not the empty illusions of transcendence.

…

Before long, the barren clay quarries and desolate vassal plains outside the northern gates of Skycloud City gradually disappeared behind them. In their place rose jagged stone and tangled ridges, until even the dim sky above was swallowed by a vast and oppressive canopy. The transition was abrupt, as though they had crossed some invisible threshold from the dead lands of man into a territory where older, darker laws held dominion.

"We are near," Ye Bing stated. Her voice was low, barely audible above the whisper of wind threading through ancient timber.

Shi Yan's pace slowed by a hair.

Beneath his boots, the ground changed from pale, slick mud to thick layers of rotting roots. The texture shifted beneath each step—no longer the yielding softness of exhausted earth, but the spongy, decomposing tangle of centuries-old growth. In a single step, the air turned sharply colder. The open wind of the plains vanished at once, replaced by the heavy stillness of ancient timber and old earth.

The scent changed too—no longer soot and mineral decay, but the wet, musty odor of fungus, moss, and slow rot, threaded through with something faintly metallic, like blood left too long beneath stone.

Well, it looks like a natural place of ambush, Shi Yan judged inwardly. His gaze swept over the dense, interlocking branches that shut out the gray light of morning. Behind the narrow slits of his iron mask, his eyes moved with tactical precision, marking sightlines, calculating angles of approach, identifying choke points and kill zones with the practiced efficiency of a man who had walked through warzones and lived.

Sight from above was nearly severed. Shadows crossed shadows, and hidden angles lay everywhere. Every rise and narrow pass could become a throat-sealing point. If foes knew these woods well, then whoever entered from outside would be as fish on the chopping block.

They had entered the Weeping Pine forests.

This was the true outer boundary of the Cloud-Mirror Sect's ancestral domain.

Here, the world itself seemed wounded.

It was as though the land had once suffered some ancient heavenly calamity, and even after countless years, the scars had never faded. The trees were monstrously vast, each trunk broad enough to rival a mortal dwelling. Their bark was neither straight nor natural, but twisted into knotted whorls that faintly resembled stretched human faces, frozen in silent torment. Hollow eyes seemed to stare from the wood.

Mouths gaped in perpetual screams, their features worn smooth by centuries of rain yet still disturbingly recognizable. Some trunks bore long, vertical gouges that ran like claw marks from crown to root, as though something immense had once raked its fury across the forest and left these monuments to its wrath.

Thick clusters of dark green needles wept a ceaseless gray sap. Drop by drop, it fell upon the forest floor like a slow and mournful rain, carrying the stench of rusted iron and spoiled blood. Where the sap pooled, the ground turned slick and black, and no lesser vegetation dared to grow. The air itself tasted wrong—bitter, faintly metallic, as though the very essence of the forest had curdled into something both sacred and profane.

They left the main sect roads and kept strictly to concealed hunting trails overrun by brush and vine. Hour after hour, they pressed onward. Between them hung a heavy silence, born from the caution needed to live in a place where even the trees seemed to harbor watchful malice. Ye Bing moved with the soundless grace of a ghost, her every step placed with the care of one who knew that the wrong noise at the wrong moment could summon death.

Shi Yan followed, his breathing controlled to near-silence, his massive frame somehow managing to pass through the undergrowth without snapping branch or crushing stone—a feat of pure, mechanical body control that defied his size.

It was during this long march that Shi Yan finally caught his first clear sight of the Cloud-Mirror Sect's main base.

At the edge of a deep ridge, the forest canopy opened for a brief moment, and the mist drifted aside like a veil drawn back by an unseen hand. Far ahead—some fifteen miles or so in the distance—the great peaks of the Cloud-Mirror Sect rose against the horizon like a row of celestial fangs, piercing the gray vault of heaven.

The ridgeline cut across the sky with the sharp, unyielding geometry of something eternal, something that had witnessed the rise and fall of dynasties and would remain long after the last mortal breath was spent.

Shi Yan stopped.

For the space of a breath, he simply stood there. His massive frame went utterly still, as though carved from the same stone as the ridge beneath his boots.

He had come from Earth. His mind had been forged in a world of iron, smoke, engines, and slaughter ordered by cold design. He had seen skylines of concrete and steel, towers that scraped the heavens not through divine will but through mortal ambition and engineering. He had witnessed the horrors of the Charnel Abyss—the meat-pits where cultivators rendered the living into spiritual fuel—and walked the mire of the Outer Wards, where human misery fermented in the shadows of sect grandeur.

Yet none of it had prepared him for the impossible grandeur of a true immortal summit.

The highest peaks of the Cloud-Mirror mountains did not merely brush the clouds—they ruled them.

Their summits were pure and flawless, as though carved from radiant white jade by the hands of primordial craftsmen who knew no imperfection. Waterfalls clear as crystal poured from the heights of heaven, plunging down in glittering torrents toward valleys hidden far below, their roar a distant hymn of purity and power.

Around the central spires revolved streams of orthodox golden Qi, so dense and resplendent they resembled threads of sunlight spun by immortal hands, casting forth an aura of perfect and untarnished divinity. The light shifted and pulsed with slow, breathing rhythm, as though the mountain itself were alive—a titan in eternal meditation, radiating the accumulated merit of ten thousand generations.

It was like a fragment of the Celestial Heavens, torn from ancient myth and set upon the mortal earth.

An involuntary awe seized Shi Yan's chest. For just a moment, the iron discipline that had defined him—the cold, mechanical pragmatism of the soldier—wavered beneath the weight of something vast and incomprehensible. His breath caught, shallow and tight, as though the very air before such majesty had grown too rarefied to sustain him.

So this was the allure of cultivation.

So this was why mortals in the gutters bent their backs until they broke, why men slew one another over a single spirit stone, why countless lives were wagered for the faintest thread of destiny—only for the chance to ascend to a place as lofty and resplendent as this. Here, in these golden peaks, was the promise that had driven countless souls to ruin: immortality, transcendence, escape from the crushing wheel of suffering and mortal decay.

Yet as Shi Yan continued to stare, his enhanced [55 Physique] vision, sharpened by the relentless logic of the System, began to pierce the veil of gold. His pupils contracted as details resolved—details invisible to the naked eye, but clear as knife-cuts to the predator's sight the System had granted him.

The awe faded from his heart.

In its place rose a slow, cold disgust.

The beauty was false.

The sect was rotten to the marrow.

As his gaze lowered from the golden halos of the upper peaks, the truth beneath the splendor revealed itself in full. What first seemed to be seas of drifting white cloud around the lower mountains was in fact dense, stagnant smoke billowing without cease from hundreds of colossal alchemy furnaces.

The great white marble stairways winding up the lower slopes were stained everywhere with dark trails of dried blood and suffering, marks left by tens of thousands of mortal slaves dragging ore upward on hands and knees, their bones ground to powder beneath the weight of sect ambition. Where the golden Qi blazed above, below stretched an empire of chains, whips, and silent, nameless death.

Worse still was the creeping violet blight.

The waterfalls that began so pure at the summit had turned a sickly, milky gray by the time they reached the lower basins, fouled by alchemical waste and pill-slag dumped without care into the sacred springs. Vast gardens of white lotus clung to the cliff faces, yet the edges of their petals had already bruised into a necrotic purple, curling inward like fingers stiffened by poison.

They were slowly withering, choked by the Yin-miasma seeping from the heavily guarded territory behind the mountain—the forbidden zones where the sect's true experiments unfolded in darkness.

This was no sacred land.

It was a gilded corpse.

A cruel and tyrannical sect, cloaked in the appearance of holiness, burning sweet incense in desperate excess to hide the stench of its own corruption. The golden Qi above was not divinity—it was a mask, a theatrical illusion maintained to dazzle the desperate and blind the ambitious, while below, the true machinery of the sect ground on: flesh into pills, blood into power, lives into stepping stones for immortals who had forgotten what it meant to be human.

But…

Shi Yan tilted his head slightly, a flicker of true confusion passing through his mind. His brow furrowed behind the iron mask, the question pressing against the cold surface of his thoughts like a splinter lodged too deep to ignore.

Why is there no memory of this?

He sifted through the broken recollections of the original host. The youth whose body he now inhabited had once been an "Outer Disciple" of this very sect—a designation that should have granted him access to at least the lower terraces, the outer courtyards where menial disciples trained and toiled. Yet among those inherited memories, Shi Yan found no image of these golden peaks, no recollection of jade pavilions, no sight of these vast stairways ascending the mountain. No sunrise viewed from marble balconies.

No chanted sutras echoing through mountain halls.

There was only darkness.

Windowless stone caverns. The stifling heat of subterranean blood-processing pits. The cruel, jeering faces of elders who had eventually carved his spiritual root from his spine with blade and hook, discarding what remained like refuse.

The conclusion turned his blood cold.

Perhaps… the original host had never seen the sect from the outside.

He had never been allowed to see the sky. His entire existence within the Cloud-Mirror Sect had been subterranean—a mole burrowing in the foundations of paradise, never permitted to glimpse the light that justified his suffering. Or, he mostly lived on the branch at Skycloud City, exiled and forgotten, a failed experiment discarded to the gutters where all broken tools were sent to rust.

The realization settled over Shi Yan like frost creeping across stone. His jaw tightened behind the mask. His hands, hanging loose at his sides, curled slightly—not into fists, but into the tense, controlled posture of a man restraining violence.

These people.

They built their heaven on the backs of those they never allowed to see it.

"We go along the treeline," Shi Yan said, his voice low and steady, each word measured and cold as winter iron.

"Do not expose yourselves."