Chapter 34: A Chance Encounter
Bodies lay everywhere in the temple complex. Bodyguards. Servants. And a few young men whose understanding of the dangers of the forbidden region came from books alone. They stared up into the sky, their faces filled with the terror they had experienced before dying.
There were also dead jellyfish.
Unlike humans, when jellyfish died, they became shapeless gray sludges that flopped to the ground and emanated a noxious stench. They didn’t seem anything like the beautiful, colorful creatures they were in life. They also emanated a powerful level of mutagen that seeped into everything around it.
The disaster continued.
As the young men and women desperately fled into the jungle, the jellyfish pursued them, wreaking death and havoc.
It wasn’t until about two hours later that Xu Qing reached the temple complex. When he looked around at all the corpses, his facial expression didn’t change. He had seen many corpses in his life. He left the dead bodyguards and servants alone, but did collect some of the jellyfish remains to study later. Whatever possessions remained on the corpses were tainted by the dead jellyfish mutagen, and were thus useless.
Eventually, Xu Qing stopped next to one corpse in particular. It was Ol’ Stony. His chest had a gaping hole in it, but the blood was already coagulating. The man stared up with vacant eyes that still contained a bit of regret.
Xu Qing sighed.
He wasn’t a god, so even though Ol’ Stony had bought insurance from him, there was no way he could have saved him from this. That was even more the case considering the Fog of Confusion hadn’t risen up.
After a quiet moment, Xu Qing knelt and closed Ol’ Stony’s eyes. Then he buried him. He didn’t bother with a gravestone. As Sergeant Thunder had said, scavengers didn’t have family, and thus, there was no need for any ceremony. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That was the life of scavengers. They struggled to survive in a chaotic world, and after they died… being able to rest in peace was enough. It was sad, but that was how most scavengers ended up.
Standing in front of where he’d buried Ol’ Stony, Xu Qing looked in the direction of the basecamp and thought about his life recently.
It had already been four months since he arrived at the camp.
Captain Bloodshadow was dead. Flamecrow was dead. Fatmountain and Horsefour were dead. Savage Ghost was dead. Boneblade was dead. Ol’ Stony was dead. Sergeant Thunder had retired. And there were many other scavengers who had died during that time.
It was a brutal, chaotic world in which human life wasn’t worth much.
The only way to keep on living is to get even stronger.
Expression turning cold, he turned and left.
In the fading evening light, a wind blew, rustling his clothing. It was a cold sound, and it grew fainter as he disappeared into the jungle. Despite the light fading, it still worked hard to penetrate the leafy canopy, as if it sought to shine on Xu Qing as he ran. But he was too fast, and the light couldn’t catch up.
After moving for some time, Xu Qing suddenly stopped and looked down, a disbelieving gleam in his eyes. Kneeling, he sniffed the air as he looked at one plant in particular, and more specifically, an almost undetectable trace of powder on one of its leaves. If it weren’t for his solid understanding of poisonous plants, and his familiarity with the smells in the forbidden region, he wouldn’t have noticed it. After observing the powder for a moment, he plucked off the leaf and stared at it even more closely.
I can’t identify every ingredient, but I know it has ageless centipede blood in it!
His eyes glittered as he thought back to a lecture in which Grandmaster Bai talked about ageless centipede blood.
It had certain medicinal properties, but was usually used as a catalyst in other medicines. And because it could be combined with other medicinal items to create a substance that attracted beasts, it was an important ingredient to hunters.
Does this have something to do with those jellyfish going on the move? Narrowing his eyes, he carefully put down the dangerous leaf, then brought out a packet of poison powder.
After scattering the powder on the leaf with the ageless centipede blood on it, he started moving again, this time in a different direction.
He had no intention of going in a similar direction as the young men and women Ol’ Stony had been working for. Their affairs had nothing to do with him, and he didn’t want to get involved. Even if they were friends of Chen Feiyuan, he wasn’t duty-bound to help them. Besides, they had experts with them who could fight the giant jellyfish, and as far as Xu Qing was concerned, those experts could be a threat to him as well. Most importantly of all, it seemed like someone in that group had, for some unknown reasons, intentionally provoked the jellyfish.
After determining where they were, Xu Qing went around them. The sky was dark by the time he reached the canyon and his laboratory. Carefully putting all his newly harvested medicinal plants into storage, he started working on the white bolus project again. Despite having avoided the fleeing young men and women, as the night grew deeper, Xu Qing could still hear the rumbles and booms of their fight. And it was getting closer. He frowned.
Eventually, when he heard footsteps nearing, he sighed.
Getting to his feet, he walked out of the laboratory and into the moonlight. From the entrance of the canyon, he heard frantic voices.
“The path leads here!!”
“Everybody hurry. Get inside!”
The voices belonged to a group of bedraggled young people in tattered garments. They looked terrified.
Behind them were a dozen or so people of the same age, then seven or eight bodyguards, most of them injured to varying degrees.
In total, they numbered more than twenty. As they ran into the canyon, the bodyguards took up defensive positions by the entrance. Meanwhile, the young men and women breathed sighs of relief and looked around the beautiful canyon. Almost immediately, they noticed Xu Qing standing there outside of his laboratory.
“Someone’s here!”
The young men and women cried out in alarm, and stumbled back, away from Xu Qing. At the same time, three of the bodyguards flew past them and glared at Xu Qing with both vigilance and killing intent.
The killing intent caused Xu Qing’s eyes to turn as cold as ice. Then he looked past the guards to the young men and women. Two of them stood out to him.
One looked to be a bit older than Xu Qing, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. He was in bad shape, but instead of being flustered like his companions, he was alert and on guard.
The other was a pretty young woman whose garment was very dirty. She appeared to be terrified. However, Xu Qing had seen so much in life that, at a single glance, he could tell that her terror was an act.
Furthermore… that girl wore a set of very clean gloves. Xu Qing, who was already very knowledgeable about working with poison, knew that gloves like that had many uses.
For instance: scattering medicinal powder.
Eight bodyguards, all with cultivation bases in the sixth level of Qi Condensation. Everyone else is in the fifth level or lower. They’re organized into three groups. That fellow is the only one with a cultivation base in the seventh level. And that girl… is the one who brought the jellyfish. The experts fighting the big jellyfish aren’t here. They must have led the big jellyfish away from the main group.
It was Xu Qing’s habit to size people up this way. And there was no way that these young men and women could have any idea that all he needed was a single glance to determine so much about them.
However, the bodyguards were different. They could sense the coldness in Xu Qing’s eyes, and upon looking at his laboratory behind him, the vigilance in their eyes grew stronger.
Here they were in a forbidden region, where they found a canyon with a workshop in it. It could indicate only one thing; this young person in front of them was familiar with the forbidden region, and probably lived inside of it. And that meant that he was a dangerous person.
“Fellow Daoist, are your parents around?” one guard said. “We have no ill intentions. We were attacked by some mutant beasts and fled here to hide.”
“We’ll leave at daybreak,” said another guard. “Please forgive us for disturbing you.”
The guards were instinctively polite. And their words were a surprise to the young men and women behind them. Sensing that something unusual was going on, they peered at Xu Qing.
The oldest young man in the group looked at Xu Qing for a moment, and his expression turned serious.
As for the girl with the gloves, she looked at him suspiciously. Then she glanced at his laboratory, and could smell the faint aroma of medicinal plants. That was enough for her to get an idea of what Xu Qing was all about.
Meanwhile, Xu Qing frowned as he looked over the group, then at the canyon entrance. Without saying a word, he walked back toward his laboratory. Doing so, he gave them tacit approval to stay.
Seeing that, the bodyguards sighed in relief. However, the young men and women all seemed nervous.
The only exception was the girl with the gloves. Her eyes glittered strangely, and then she spoke in a cautious but seemingly hurt tone.
“You’re… you’re so mean! We just want to hide here from the mutant beasts! If we go out there, we’re dead!”
Her voice seemed to provoke sympathy in those who heard her speak, and it caused the young men in the group who liked her to suddenly swell with courage.
“That’s right! How could you be so cold-blooded?”
“We have no ill intentions. We just want to rest here for a bit.”
“It’s not like he owns the forbidden region! We don’t have to ask his permission!”
A few softly spoken words were all it took to get these people riled up at Xu Qing. They weren’t whipped into a fury, but it was enough that the girl felt pleased with herself. She liked using people, and right now, she wanted to know more about the young man they’d encountered.
However, that was when a cold light glittered from Xu Qing as his dagger shot out with lightning speed toward the girl.
Her face fell, but before she could dodge, the dagger passed by her ear, slicing through a lock of hair, and then thumping into the stone behind her. Sparks flew. The shocked young woman’s right hand hung in the air where she’d thrown it up to defend herself. Then she looked at Xu Qing, and saw him glaring back at her with the cold, murderous eyes of a wolf. The look in his eyes shook her to the core.
As for the bodyguards and the other young men and women, they looked similarly astonished. The former became even more vigilant than before, while the latter let loose exclamations of surprise.
Giving the girl a hard look, Xu Qing suppressed his killing intent and said, “We met by chance, like patches of drifting duckweed. Don’t push me.”
Then he walked back to his laboratory. He seemed to meld with the moonlight, becoming as cold as the night.
Everyone else in the canyon went silent. During that brief moment, many in the canyon suddenly felt they had faced a danger just as frightening as the jellyfish outside.
In the silence, Xu Qing entered his laboratory. And then a bloodcurdling scream rang out from the entrance. A small jellyfish had just found them, and had stabbed one of the guards, sucked up his organs, and then entered the canyon.
And behind it was a whole host of jellyfish, rushing forward.