Beyond the ruins, the last of the corpses disappeared. What lay ahead was a wasteland, silent as death.
Li Fan had not forgotten his objective. He turned back and conducted a more thorough search of the ruins.
Finding no useful information, he marked the site, chose a direction, and resumed his flight, skimming close to the ground.
Two days later, within the sea of mist, Li Fan discovered a new set of ruins.
The scale of these ruins was several times larger than that of Ruin Number One. Correspondingly, the scene of countless corpses piled upon each other was even more harrowing.
The vivid, lifelike expressions frozen on their faces made Li Fan feel as if he were standing at the very scene of the massacre.
Suppressing the turmoil in his heart, Li Fan conducted his customary search.
While he again found no valuable information, several corpses within the sea of bodies caught his attention.
The vast majority of cultivators in both Ruin One and this Ruin Two had died in an instant. Beyond the looks of terror and despair on their faces, they had left no clues.
But among so many, there were still one or two whose cultivation had been relatively stronger.
Before death, they had fixed their gazes in a certain direction, eyes brimming with resentment and bitter unwillingness, as if the entity that had taken their lives stood right there. Even after all these years, their bodies still maintained that posture.
For an outsider like Li Fan, it conveniently pointed the way through the White Mist.
Thus, following the direction indicated by the corpses, Li Fan flew at high speed for another day and found Ruin Number Three.
Employing the same method, Li Fan followed the killer’s trail and pressed onward.
Ruin Four, Ruin Five, Ruin Six... One ruin after another passed beneath him, until his remaining supplies were enough to last only three more days.
By then, Li Fan had already encountered eleven ruins in succession, each filled with piled corpses.
It was while racing toward the twelfth ruin that something strange occurred.
Despite flying straight ahead at high speed, he inexplicably found himself back at Ruin Eleven before long.
Finding the marker he had left behind earlier, Li Fan confirmed that this was no illusion.
He set out once more.
The result was the same.
Completing a full circuit, he returned again to his starting point.
After pondering for a moment, Li Fan remained calm and made a third attempt.
This time, he slowed his pace, constantly maintaining awareness of Ruin Eleven’s position as he flew. Only then did he begin to understand what was happening.
At a certain point along the path, he encountered something—he could not tell what—that instantaneously reversed the direction of his movements, without any warning or perceptible sign.
The first two times, Li Fan had been completely unaware. He had believed himself to be flying forward, when in truth, his direction had already been inverted. Naturally, it had not taken long before he returned to his point of origin.
Now, standing before the region that induced this change, Li Fan’s expression turned grave.
He flew into it.
His physical position did not seem to shift at all, yet Ruin Eleven—which his senses had placed behind him—had somehow, imperceptibly, appeared ahead.
Li Fan frowned slightly. Turning around, he flew in the opposite direction, attempting once more to put distance between himself and Ruin Eleven.
But before he had gone far, his sense of direction was scrambled again.
This time, however, Li Fan was prepared. He constantly maintained awareness of Ruin Eleven’s position behind him, continuously adjusting his course as he advanced.
Progress was slow and arduous.
Only after two more difficult days did he finally reach Ruin Twelve.
This particular ruin was the largest in scale among all he had encountered. Yet, on its periphery, he found no trace of corpses.
An anomaly is a clue to a deeper truth.
Li Fan steeled himself and began making his way toward the center of the ruin.
An absolute silence enveloped him. This Lost Domain was a world unto itself, a place even the demonic whispers from the Roaring Abyss could not reach. Aside from the sounds he himself made, Li Fan had not heard any other noise in a long time.
But as he neared the heart of Ruin Twelve, he heard a sudden, rustling sound.
The hairs on his body instantly stood on end.
Through the White Mist, which for some reason had grown thinner here, Li Fan saw a figure on the ground not far away.
A cultivator lay on his back, yet his limbs were grotesquely bent backward and downward. His arms and legs were broken at unnatural angles. His toes and fingers were twisted together like strands of hemp rope.
Yet, using these deeply unsettling limbs, the cultivator was slowly, laboriously crawling in a circle. It was impossible to tell how long this had been going on, and it seemed it would never stop.
Li Fan stared at the monstrosity that had persisted for who-knew-how-long within the mist.
His scalp crawled, and his heart skipped a beat. Holding his breath, he began to retreat slowly.
Yet, the perception of this contorted monster seemed extraordinarily sharp. It immediately detected the presence of a new arrival. Its hanging head snapped up, flipping onto its stomach, then rotated a full one hundred and eighty degrees to fix its gaze directly on Li Fan.
The monster's visage, now clear to Li Fan, sent a jolt through his heart.
Its facial features were completely inverted and misplaced. Two pairs of eyes occupied the space where a mouth should be, and they moved eerily, ceaselessly wandering across its face.
A nose was embedded deep within its skull.
Where the eyes wandered, a mouth followed, constantly gaping open and shut. Inside were not a tongue and teeth, but other faces, smeared with fresh blood.
Though its body was a twisted aberration, the contorted monster moved with shocking speed.
Its hands and feet scuttled across the ground, and in moments, it had arrived right before Li Fan. The ferocious, bloody faces within its maw seemed right about to press against Li Fan's own.
"Die!" Li Fan roared.
Strikes of the Great Five Elements Annihilation Sword erupted from him in rapid succession. Even as he threw his body backward in a frantic retreat, the streams of light did not cease.
To Li Fan's horror, the black sword light fell upon the monster, but its signature characteristic of utterly erasing anything it touched had lost all effect.
A sickening crunching, grinding sound of bones being compressed and twisted echoed from the creature.
The monster seemed utterly indifferent, the attacks merely causing it to hesitate for a split second before it scrambled toward Li Fan with even greater speed.
Li Fan unleashed over a hundred streaks of sword light in one furious breath. The monster took every single one head-on, yet showed not the slightest sign of injury.
Damnit!
Seeing the contorted monster was upon him, Li Fan cursed inwardly and prepared to activate Return to Truth.
The next thing that happened caught him completely off guard.
The contorted monster reached Li Fan's side, but instead of attacking, it bent its twisted form and knelt. It began to kowtow repeatedly.
As it kowtowed, it emitted a mournful, sobbing keen. Bloody tears streamed from its two pairs of wandering eyes. Its mouth strained desperately, as if trying to speak.
But its mouth held only a shifting, weeping mask of blood, utterly incapable of expressing the thoughts within.
What is happening?
Li Fan stared at the wailing, kowtowing creature before him, his own heart still hammering in his chest. Temporarily out of danger, he halted the process of Returning to Truth.
Yet, bewildered by the situation, he dared not make a rash move. Instead, he focused, patiently trying to decipher the mournful sounds spilling from the contorted monster’s mouth.
“Hea... ven...ly”
“Phys... ician...”
“?”
Perhaps it was a lingering effect of his prolonged exposure to the abyssal whispers, but Li Fan once again discerned those two words from the creature’s agonized cries.
Suppressing his shock, he ventured a question.
“Heavenly... Physician?”
The contorted monster let out a sound of pure, shattering anguish and slammed its head violently against the ground.