"Hey, this fish has roe in its belly! Roast it over the fire and it'll be wonderfully crisp!"
He expressed his disgust through action. Dong Rui was furious, yet utterly helpless. After the meal, he found some broad blades of grass, wove himself a mask, and put it on, finally concealing the lower half of his face.
Just as the two finished eating, Zhu Erniang arrived.
He Lingchuan held up the leftover fish and offered, "Care to sample my cooking?"
Zhu Erniang declined. She liked slurping jellied marrow and could eat raw meat, but despised anything cooked. "Once you're done, follow me. I'll find you a place to run your experiments."
Dong Rui pointed to the abandoned buildings behind the gravel beach. "Won't this place do?"
"When another flood comes, this area will be submerged," Zhu Erniang replied. "You two took a trip underwater; that city was originally above the water level too."
With no other choice, the two followed her. Dong Rui could not resist asking, "Where on earth are we?"
"This is Demon Nest Swamp, a no-man's-land on the border between Beijia and Fu Kingdom, belonging to neither."
Fu Kingdom?
The two exchanged glances. He Lingchuan let out a surprised sound. "Isn't that east of Beijia?"
He had slept through hundreds of li?!
The waters of the Han River had actually carried him all the way here.
He Lingchuan probed, "Didn't you originally live in Ghost Needle Stone Forest? How did you end up moving thousands of li away to Demon Nest Swamp?"
Zhu Erniang snorted. "Back then, Baling Kingdom and Panlong City went to war, bringing the fighting right onto my turf. In my anger, I struck and killed one of Panlong City's generals. Afterward, Panlong City kept coming to cause trouble. I couldn't bear the constant harassment, so I had no choice but to relocate."
Hearing this, He Lingchuan suddenly realized the truth.
*Right.* In real history, Zhu Erniang had killed Panlong City's General Nan Ke, an act General Red would never tolerate. Once Panlong City won the Battle of Weicheng, they turned back to settle scores with her.
Zhu Erniang being forced to relocate made complete sense. Perhaps she had suffered some bitter setbacks along the way, which was why she refrained from elaborating.
This diverged completely from how events had unfolded in the dream. In the dream realm of the Dafang Pot, because He Lingchuan had burned down her underground burrow farm in time, Zhu Erniang had rushed back to her lair, allowing General Nan Ke to escape. Thus, Panlong City never forged a blood feud with her. Afterward, General Red merely flexed her muscles to intimidate her, restoring their previous pact, so Zhu Erniang never had to move.
Going forward, would the discrepancies between the dream and real history grow ever wider?
"I lived in Beijia Kingdom for a time, found it dull, and then drifted straight down the Han River to finally settle here." An ancient demon of her age was ill-suited to life in the demon kingdoms of later eras.
He Lingchuan asked about the origin of the submerged city: "Did the inhabitants leave because the water level rose?"
"How could it be that simple?" Zhu Erniang recounted slowly. "This was originally the territory of the Jiana tribe. They lived in seclusion from the world. At their zenith, they were said to number well over a hundred thousand, producing a succession of mighty experts and witnessing divine miracles. It's said they even guarded a sacred relic bestowed by a deity. Later, fiends descended from the heavens and slaughtered every last one of them. Several decades after that, the swamp waters rose, swallowing their ancestral home as well."
She was leading the two away from the abandoned town. But as they walked past the grandest structure, He Lingchuan looked through its wide-open doors and caught sight of a statue inside.
The statue was carved from a single slab of granite, standing over three zhang tall. Finding a boulder so massive and well-proportioned in a marshland was no easy feat, and hauling it here had to be even harder.
No trees obstructed the front of the building, allowing a beam of sunlight to slant inside and illuminate the statue.
So the highest structure in the entire city was actually a temple?
He Lingchuan let out a long murmur of surprise, shifted his stride, and strolled inside.
The interior of this exotic temple was spacious. Weathered by over a century of wind and water, it was overgrown with moss, yet most of the white stone floor tiles remained flat and intact. Treading upon them produced clean, resonant notes like striking chimes, sending echoes through the air.
The altar table had long since rotted into dust, but a small patch of ground before the statue was worn into a hollow—clearly the result of devout worshippers kowtowing day after day, year after year.
He Lingchuan stood right there, gazing up at the statue.
It depicted a goddess with gentle, benevolent brows and a face radiating deep compassion. Her eyes were cast slightly downward, looking upon the worshippers below. In her hands she held a treasure jar, a soaring flood dragon flanked her side, and beneath her feet she trampled an evil spirit.
Though tangled vines clung to her, dulling the majesty she once held, He Lingchuan stared without blinking, his gaze filled with sheer shock.
Zhu Erniang and Dong Rui entered as well. "What is it?"
"Is this the deity worshipped by the Jiana tribe?"
"Indeed. They worshipped the Moon Goddess," Zhu Erniang said slowly. "This is the Moon Goddess whom generations of the Jiana devoutly revered. A pity she failed to shield them from the fiends that claimed their lives."
The Moon Goddess? He Lingchuan was momentarily baffled. This was clearly Mitian!
The heavenly deity worshipped by the entire populace of Panlong City, Lady Mitian.
Having entered and exited the dream so many times, he had naturally visited the Mitian Temple. The Mitian deity worshipped there differed slightly in facial features and expression from this statue, but he would never mistake her.
Moreover, he had just seen this very face in his dream.
General Red!
Though General Red wore a cold, detached expression while this goddess's face brimmed with compassion, their facial features were at least seventy percent alike—especially those signature amber phoenix eyes.
Separated by ten thousand li, Panlong City's guardian deity had once possessed followers deep in Demon Nest Swamp as well, bearing an entirely different title?
He could only ask Zhu Erniang, "How much do you know about this Moon Goddess?"
"How would I know?" Zhu Erniang tapped the ground. "When I arrived, this place had long been abandoned."
Dong Rui also asked curiously, "Then how do you know the Jiana tribe was wiped out by fiends?"
"Strictly speaking, they weren't entirely wiped out. Some descendants escaped and settled along the fringes of Demon Nest Swamp." Zhu Erniang stroked her round belly with a foreleg. "Before eating my prey, I always enjoy having a chat with them and hearing interesting stories."
Once again: life in the swamp was simply too dull, and she was an archdemon who loved listening to stories.
He Lingchuan and Dong Rui: "..."
They truly needed to escape as soon as possible.
A thought struck He Lingchuan. "Do you know what year the Jiana tribe was destroyed?"
Zhu Erniang stood motionless, working through the mental arithmetic. After a good while, she said, "Well, if the Jiana descendants remembered correctly, it should be a hundred and seventy-four... no, a hundred and seventy-two years ago today."
A hundred and seventy-two years ago? Wouldn't that be Year Seventeen of the Panlong calendar?
Just a year or two after the incident at the Chifeng mine tunnel.
While Panlong City, sheltered by Mitian, was flourishing, the Jiana people who worshipped her were nearly wiped out.
With the timelines so close together, what connection lay between the two?
"Did you ever see the statue of Mitian worshipped in Panlong City back then?"
"Of course not," Zhu Erniang said displeasedly. "Do you think I could just walk into Panlong City looking like this? Why, is there some connection between them?"
"They look too much alike." He Lingchuan merely answered offhand, but Zhu Erniang was even more casual: "What's so strange about that? Many gods possess more than one form and more than one title in the mortal realm."
*So that was it?*
The two men and the spider departed the Jiana ruins and walked into the dense, boundless jungle.
After journeying several li, the terrain began to rise, forcing the two to clamber up a mountainside.
Ahead lay a massive sinkhole in the earth—an irregular pit roughly ten zhang across at its widest, plunge-deep. Calamus and saplings grew all over the rock walls.
Zhu Erniang pointed at the sinkhole. "We're here."
He Lingchuan looked around and saw faint, looming silhouettes of spiders lingering throughout the woods, realizing immediately that Zhu Erniang did not trust them in the slightest.
On the burrow spiders' home turf, even the swamp eels dutifully paid tribute to them. Unless the two of them sprouted wings, escaping would be nearly impossible.
At this moment, even He Lingchuan could not help missing the perks of Dong Rui's bizarre bird.
Dong Rui was also gazing up at the sky, perhaps harboring the exact same lament.
Right then, Zhu Erniang raised her foreleg and shoved them down into the sinkhole—
Her movement was blazingly swift, and striking from behind, even He Lingchuan failed to dodge.
With a splash, Dong Rui plunged into the water. He Lingchuan flipped midair and landed squarely on a small tree growing from the cliffside.
The water in the sinkhole was crystal-clear, yet bottomless.
As Dong Rui flailed in the water, Zhu Erniang's silhouette loomed at the edge of the pit: "My children will lead you to the laboratory. Everything you need is there; just tell them if you require anything. The terrain down here may be complex, but there is only one exit. I advise you not to play any tricks, or you will watch yourselves get sucked dry drop by drop!"
He Lingchuan and Dong Rui exchanged a glance, both shuddering.
Sure enough, a passage beside the water led deep into the heart of the mountain, its entrance guarded by over a dozen spiders.
As Dong Rui waded ashore, He Lingchuan leapt down to the cave entrance, keeping himself completely dry.
When the two stepped inside, two small spiders moved ahead to lead the way.
Dong Rui spat out a mouthful of water. "She really doesn't trust us. Hey, do you still have that red elixir you stole from me or not?"
He asked twice, but He Lingchuan did not answer, merely glancing left and right.
The sinkhole was not isolated; it connected to a karst cave system, branching into fork after fork before long. Yet the little spiders seemed intimately familiar with the layout, guiding the way without the slightest hesitation.
"Hey, you..." What was there to gawk at in an ordinary karst cave?
Soft grass and fungi grew abundantly in every crevice along the rock walls, and the sound of trickling water could be heard flowing steadily downward, destined to empty into the sinkhole.
He Lingchuan spoke up suddenly: "There's something strange here."
Having just been tossed into a sinkhole by a spider demon, Dong Rui snapped crossly, "Is there anywhere that isn't strange?"
The cave admitted no daylight, but fortunately the burrow spiders had transplanted fluorescent spores throughout, which served as streetlamps and kept the passage fairly bright.
"Touch this rock wall."
Dong Rui reached out to stroke the cave wall. It wasn't particularly hard, feeling as though it were coated in a thin layer of soft hide, and its color leaned toward a faint ochre.
Was moss growing on the rock? He looked closely—there was none. Instead, traces of vines that had once crept across the stone were visible everywhere.
"Strange. What kind of stone is this?"
Meanwhile, He Lingchuan was busy concealing his own shock, too distracted to reply.
Turning a few corners, the guiding spider led them to a stone chamber:
"We have arrived."
Several spider demons stood guard here, so it bowed out and withdrew.
Chapter 321