“Sister, are you back?”
It was a young voice.
It sounded like a little girl.
But deep in the Nihility State, where not even weeds or insects survived, how could there be a little girl?
Li Ban continued deeper.
A steady crunching sounded beneath his feet.
He suddenly squatted down and picked up a stone.
It was not a stone.
It was a weathered human bone.
Another breeze blew past.
“Sister, are you back?”
Li Ban slowly stood up.
There was no one left alive here.
Priest Qian Que's group was having a much harder time advancing.
Their group was large, and the mist deep in the Nihility State was thick. If they were not careful, someone could easily fall behind.
Fortunately, they had two Solar Priests with them. As long as a person did not disappear completely, they could easily be brought back.
But no one had the nerve to constantly make the Solar Priests go looking for stragglers.
Thus, the group moved slowly.
Of course, this slowness was only relative to a priest's usual travel speed.
A few days later, they arrived at the provincial capital of Yun Province.
The elevation here was already much higher than the average in the Nine Provinces, and the mist was even denser.
“Let's find a place to rest in the ruins ahead,” Priest Ai Jing suggested.
After walking for days and nights, even priests felt fatigued.
The group slightly changed direction and entered the ruins of a town.
In the mist, ruins decayed quickly. Most of the buildings here had already been reduced to rubble.
Only a few houses built from special materials barely retained their original structures.
Within this dilapidated city, the group found a golden house.
An actual house made of gold.
At a glance, it clearly was not the work of an ordinary person.
“It was likely created by a priest. They must have used the Shaping Technique.”
Whoever the golden house had originally belonged to, it was now ownerless.
Their group of seven or eight entered the golden house.
The inside of the house and the outside were like two completely different worlds.
The golden house was fully furnished, complete with a jade tea set resting on the table.
Judging by the arrangement, the former owner had been drinking tea with someone right before leaving.
Cat Girl circled the room and even went into the inner bedroom to take a look.
“The owner of this house was a woman.” She touched the adjacent wall. “So rich!”
“This should be the residence of Imperial Dynasty Priest Xiu Ye.” Priest Ai Jing also entered the bedroom. “She was a Cloud Hidden Priest. Her life before becoming a priest might have been too impoverished, so later on, she developed a lasting fondness for objects of gold and jade. It became an obstacle in her cultivation. Unable to break through, she found it difficult to make the clouds part to reveal the stars.”
Traveling with the group these past few days, Cat Girl had also received a lot of guidance.
This treatment far exceeded what Li Ban had received at that same stage.
The main reason was simply that everyone had nothing else to do here.
Until they found concrete clues about Xiao Suo, the search process was undeniably tedious.
“After experiencing the disaster in Yun Province, did Priest Xiu Ye manage to break through?” Cat Girl asked.
She knew many people's mentalities only matured after experiencing major upheavals.
Priest Ai Jing shook her head. “After the Mutated Element erupted, three priests died in the Nihility State, and one went missing. Xiu Ye was that missing priest.”
“Missing?” Cat Girl blinked.
Having been missing for so many years, she was effectively dead.
Li Ban left the empty cave.
By the time he emerged, the cloak that had originally guided him into the cave had quieted down.
“Did you just want to go in and take a look?”
Li Ban suspected that a raw soul was hiding inside this cloak.
He just chose not to rashly inspect it.
A raw soul hiding in a cloak had persisted in the Nihility State for so many years. If he recklessly shattered its current state of existence, it would very likely cause it to collapse.
“Do you know if there are any living people anywhere else here?” Li Ban asked the cloak.
The cloak gave no reaction.
Li Ban thought for a moment and used the Telepathy Technique to communicate directly with the cloak.
This time, the cloak finally reacted.
It left Li Ban's shoulder and flew off in a particular direction.
Li Ban followed it and discovered perfectly walkable mountain paths underfoot the entire way.
This entire area was shrouded in white mist, and he had no idea how the cloak recognized the paths.
Li Ban followed the cloak through the mountains. Sometimes heading up, sometimes heading down, they visited many caves, but there was no one alive inside any of them.
Occasionally, Li Ban could hear lingering calls within the caves, but most of them contained only fragments of corpses.
After following the cloak for almost half a month, Li Ban finally left the mountainous region and arrived at an abandoned town.
He knew it was a town because a massive stone at the entrance read “** Town”.
But aside from the word “Town,” the other characters had already weathered and crumbled away, rendering them completely illegible.
Li Ban followed the cloak into several cellars.
These cellars also held human remains, but similarly, no one alive.
Li Ban remained patient and did not rush the cloak, searching through the remains of the dead over and over in vain.
By the time the cloak was about to lead Li Ban out of the town, he finally spoke up.
“Are these all the people you saved back then?”
The cloak gave no reaction.
Li Ban sighed softly. “Let's go.”
They continued onward.
However, right where they left the town, Li Ban suddenly saw a massive, five-meter-tall ice crystal standing ahead.
Wisps of frigid air emanated from the ice crystal, quickly turning into white mist that dissipated into the surroundings.
Li Ban only had to get a little closer before he realized his fingers were frostbitten.
This body belonged to an ordinary person, so it naturally suffered frostbite very easily.
He pulled his hand back and gently touched the frostbitten area.
The frozen flesh on his fingers crumbled into fragments and fell to the ground, leaving only the finger bones shakily attached to his palm.
“What is this thing? It possesses extreme cold, but once it separates from the ice crystal, it turns into harmless mist.”
“What is this thing?” Cat Girl's ears perked up as she stared at the tall ice crystal in front of her.
That ice crystal was a full seven or eight meters tall, radiating white frigid air.
However, three meters away from the crystal, the frigid air abruptly vanished, becoming part of the white mist.
Priest Qian Que and the others also walked over.
Just a moment ago, Cat Girl had suddenly sensed something in this direction, run over, and found the ice crystal here.
Priest Qian Que looked up at the ice crystal. “This is the remnant of a Mutated Element.”
Priest Hao Ze eagerly approached it. Once his arm froze, he retreated and healed it.
“Brother, did you see this kind of ice crystal when you were patrolling the border of the Nihility State?”
Priest Hao Yang did not like to talk, but he always answered his younger brother's questions.
“I have. When the Nihility State first stabilized, we shattered many ice crystals like this at the border. That is why the mist at the border is much thinner than it is here.”
“Should we destroy all the ice crystals we find here?” Cat Girl suggested.
But Priest Ai Jing, walking behind the group, shook her head. “It would just be a waste of spiritual rhinoceros. There is no point.”