Chapter 255 – Darkness (VI)

Chapter 255

Darkness (VI)

Alright, so our resident Alchemist and the second most experienced and knowledgeable person here has absolutely no clue what it is.

Long Tao, even if he knows, doesn’t seem likely to spill it.

And me? Well, I just think it’s one of the creepiest things I’ve ever seen in my life.

Yet.

Because, not twenty feet further in, I crouched down with the lantern and pulled apart the moss yet again, finding yet another body with that strange, half-glazed appearance of mummification.

It was a young man, perhaps in his mid-twenties or so, with a rather gnarly gash across his chest that was open but wasn’t actively bleeding. Just like with the woman, his clothes had long since decayed while his body remained eerily preserved, eyes opened just as widely.

Lao Shun crouched next to me as we pulled apart the rest of the moss, and as he examined the body, he’d concluded that the woman had likely died from some internal wound, as he couldn’t locate any on her body, unlike the young man ‘buried’ here.

“It’s different,” Lao Shun said as he frowned.

“What’s different?” I asked.

“There’s Qi in this body.”

“Oh? So, he died recently?”

“No. I’d put his time of death at around Zou Min’s,” he said. “There are only traces, very faint ones, but there’s undoubtedly Qi in him.”

As odd as it was, since he couldn’t make any sense of it, neither could I.

We buried the body once again and moved on, stopping every twenty feet or so and moving moss apart.

We didn’t find bodies in every ‘hole’, as it were; in about an hour, we found an additional four, all relatively young people just entering their twenties or inching toward their thirties, with the exact same states of their bodies.

Lao Shun supposed that they all died around the same time. They, just like the first young man we’d found, had varying amounts of Qi in them, too.

“… huh?” It was whilst we were looking for another patch of moss that I noticed something.

For some reason beyond my conscious thought, I looked east and started moving over while holding the lantern at the front and passing by several patches of moss, as that wasn’t what was ‘calling’ me.

I stopped in front of a random tree–nothing about it standing out of place from any other, save for one thing. It was hanging loosely from one of its branches, entangled and gently pulsating.

It was a vine.

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“What the fu–“

It was instantaneous; I’d dropped the lantern and drew out the sword in my scabbard in one motion, stabbing backward from my hips as though I’d done it a thousand times before. I immediately felt the blade tear through the flesh as warm liquid sprayed over my hands.