Unfortunately, Li Ban was destined to get no peace to absorb the spiritual rhinoceros today.
He had barely sat down when someone knocked on his door again.
'That knock—it's Lu Qinghe.'
Li Ban immediately went to open the door.
"What is it?"
"A delivery."
Li Ban followed Lu Qinghe out to the front courtyard and saw that she had brought out the cart pulled by the old horse.
Goods were piled high on the cart, covered with straw mats that made it impossible to tell what was underneath.
"Where are we going?"
Halfway there, in a deserted spot, Lu Qinghe said, "Your attitude toward me is different now. Change it back."
Right now, Li Ban was somewhat afraid of her.
But that was not the attitude a prison guard should have toward a menial servant.
Li Ban gave a bitter smile. "If someone could still treat you the same after seeing your other side, they wouldn't be human, would they?"
Lu Qinghe stared straight ahead. "If you can't change it back, I can help you."
Li Ban froze.
Lu Qinghe enjoyed torturing people psychologically.
She believed that repeated exposure led to desensitization.
If you were afraid of corpses, you slept in a pile of them.
If you were afraid of bugs, you raised dozens of them on your body.
If you were afraid of the dark, you were sealed in pitch blackness for a day.
If you were afraid of pain, she had a hundred ways to make you hurt without leaving a single scar.
Li Ban took a deep breath. He looked back at the tall pile of straw on the cart and feigned curiosity.
"What are we delivering?"
A glimmer of satisfaction flashed through Lu Qinghe's eyes. "Corpses."
"Corpses? Delivering them to the Myriad Ancient Pagoda?"
Li Ban paused.
The corpses of slaves wouldn't be sent to the morgue; they were all digested by the treant prison guards.
So the corpses on this cart all belonged to spirit practitioners!
"Do all the corpses in the morgue eventually get sent to the Myriad Ancient Pagoda?"
"After being sorted, everyone takes what they need."
'Need what?'
Li Ban didn't ask any further.
He lifted the straw to take a look.
The bodies here were mostly intact. He had counted most of them himself, and none of them were missing any parts.
Whether the General was Zhai Liu or Du An, it seemed neither of them had used the Core Element to absorb the bodies.
He turned around in silence, pondering the connection between the Death Prison, the corpses, and the Myriad Ancient Pagoda.
'Perhaps Du An's goal in collecting corpses wasn't to feed them to the Core Element, but to trade them with the Myriad Ancient Pagoda?'
'Does that mean all the corpses from the Death Prison flow into the Myriad Ancient Pagoda after being sorted?'
'If Du An didn't truly need the corpses, could he still be the General the Laboratory was hunting for?'
Carrying these doubts, he followed along until they reached the Myriad Ancient Pagoda and handed the cart over to the pagoda's guards.
Lu Qinghe was a very efficient person. She didn't chat with anyone; after handing over the corpses, she immediately led Li Ban back.
As a result, apart from driving the cart, Li Ban had been of no help whatsoever. He didn't even know why he had been brought along.
That was until they passed by the River of Forgetfulness again on their way back.
"Whoa." Lu Qinghe suddenly spoke up, bringing the old horse to a halt.
"Follow me."
She called Li Ban over to the riverbank and pointed at the calm water and the corpses bobbing up and down within it.
"Jump in."
Mist still blanketed the River of Forgetfulness, and the nearest corpse fisher was far away.
Li Ban stepped up to the riverbank and glanced down. Without needing a second look, he jumped straight in.
He knew a clumsy breaststroke and a dog paddle. In his previous life, he had only ever swum in pools.
But he believed that Lu Qinghe wouldn't dare let him die.
The water of the River of Forgetfulness wasn't cold.
Even though the surface was shrouded in mist and dotted with floating corpses, the water itself wasn't piercingly cold.
The moment he hit the water, Li Ban immediately began to paddle and tread, but his hands and feet only struck corpses—flesh that was yielding yet stiff.
In fact, before he could even really swim, he bobbed right back up to the surface.
During the brief moment he was submerged, Li Ban had glanced down toward the bottom of the river.
Beneath the water was a dense, pitch-black mass that undulated continuously with the current.
At this distance, even Li Ban's right eye couldn't clearly make out what was down there.
The corpses drifted west with the current, and on the pitch-black riverbed, something seemed to be moving along with them in unison.
Li Ban took only a single glance before an inexplicable surge of terror hit him. He quickly tilted his head upward, refusing to look any longer.
Grabbing onto a corpse to break the surface, Li Ban checked his bearings and quickly searched for Lu Qinghe's figure.
She was still exactly where she had been. Spotting Li Ban immediately, she waved at him.
It seemed she expected Li Ban to swim back on his own.
'Swim back through a river of corpses?'
That meant swimming against the current.
Li Ban struggled to swim upstream using his clumsy strokes.
However, he was met with all sorts of resistance.
Getting back to the surface had been easy enough, but swimming back to the bank was going to be difficult.
For every meter he swam forward, the current dragged him back half a meter, and colliding with a corpse bumped him back another half.
After struggling for ages, he was still exactly where he started.
On the shore, Lu Qinghe initially stood watching with her hands behind her back, but eventually, likely out of boredom, she went back to sit on the cart.
'This definitely won't work.'
'No matter what Lu Qinghe is trying to train me for, if I perform poorly, she'll definitely make the training harder.'
"I won't be able to make any headway on the surface."
Li Ban clung to a headless, bloodless corpse to catch his breath for a moment.
"Hah... hah..."
He stared down into the water. Thinking back to the terrifying dark shapes he had just seen, he steeled his resolve and dove under anyway.
There were fewer corpses beneath the surface than floating on top.
At the very least, Li Ban wouldn't be constantly bowled over while swimming underwater.
He held his breath and stroked with all his might. Whenever a corpse drifted toward him, he either pushed it aside early or dodged it.
Doing this, Li Ban finally began to make progress upstream.
But he hadn't swum far when he suddenly felt something stamp viciously on him.
The kick nearly knocked the wind right out of his lungs, and his body began to sink.
Li Ban tried to twist around underwater to see what had kicked him.
Just then, he suddenly felt something wrap around his ankle.
It felt like strands of hair.
Pitch-black, freezing, slender, slimy, and tough.
'Am I tangled in water weeds?'
Getting tangled in water weeds underwater was extremely dangerous.
Thanks to Lu Qinghe's training, Li Ban didn't panic. He simply twisted his body hard and reached down for his ankle.
A ring of thin, black algae was wrapped tightly around his ankle, though he had no idea how it had snagged him.
He drew his dagger and tried to slice through the pitch-black weeds.
But the black weeds were incredibly tough. Despite hacking and sawing with his razor-sharp dagger, he only managed to sever a few stray strands.
With the constant churning of the water, wisps of black also began to coil around the dagger and Li Ban's wrist.
It was as if the algae possessed a consciousness of its own, tightening around his hands and feet to drag him to the bottom of the river and turn him into its plaything.
The black algae surrounding him grew thicker and thicker.
It looked like hair, but felt like the grasping arms of a drowning man.
'Have I run into a water ghost?'
Holding his breath for so long was already making his lungs burn.
He quickly ran through the elements he possessed, but it seemed none of them could deal with underwater weeds.
But there was still one element he hadn't fused yet.
'Fuse the element: Silver Kingfisher!'
[Fused mortal-grade creation-type element: Silver Kingfisher. Ability acquired: Seeker Clockwork Bird.]
'What?'
'A bird?'
With no time to overthink, Li Ban immediately unleashed the Silver Kingfisher.
A streak of silver light burst from his chest. Without needing any command, it darted straight into the black algae.
In less than ten seconds, the black algae recoiled as if someone had struck its ticklish spot, shrinking back instantly.
Having failed to free his ankle in time, Li Ban was yanked deeper into the River of Forgetfulness with a sudden swoosh.
His feet immediately touched down on something spongy.
It was soft and covered in tiny holes, each about the size of a thumb.
All the black algae had retracted into those holes.
Because the strands tangled around Li Ban couldn't retract in time, they automatically snapped off.
Only then did Li Ban finally regain his freedom.
At the same time, that streak of silver light flew out from one of the holes and sank back into Li Ban's chest.
He had no time to check what exactly the Silver Kingfisher was or what it had just done. He immediately turned around and swam for the surface.
However, his mission assistance system suddenly sent a prompt.
[Waste element "Cyan Silk Algae" discovered. Absorb?]