Chapter 92: SEE THE WALL

CHAPTER

92

SEE THE WALL

JIEYUAN

—∞—

Meiyao glanced back, frowning. “What are you—”

“Meiyao, is that man dead?” Jieyuan asked, as plainly and as clearly as he could. Call him jumpy, but he wasn’t taking any chances here.

“Of course he is,” Meiyao said. “Why would you— Oh.” She turned back to the shrub, stared down at it for a moment. Then she nodded at him. “I see it now. But no. He’s dead.”

Her eyes shifted past him, and Jieyuan followed them. Daojue was behind them, looking over. He hadn’t moved any closer, though.

Quietly, intently, Meiyao added, “I can tell.”

“Right,” Jieyuan said. He’d trusted Meiyao’s instincts—well, more precisely, Divine Nature Intuition—so far to keep them alive, and it’d worked out just fine. If she said the man was dead, and not some higher-realm cultivator with a very odd idea of resting, then he’d take her word for it.

He approached again, stepping in just next to Meiyao, and leveled another look down at the supposedly—assuredly, rather—dead man.

Again, he got the same impression, that he was looking at a sleeping person. He’d never seen a livelier corpse—besides, of course, that whole plants-growing-out-of-the-body business. And he’d been to the funeral of more than one family member, all of whom would go through the care of the best morticians Radiant Gold City had to offer. And morticians tended to be pretty good at their job, seeing as they catered almost exclusively to the rich and wealthy—who were the only ones that bothered prettying up a corpse before cremation.

“This is why you ran off earlier?” he asked, splitting his attention between her and the corpse.

“Ran off…”

He looked up, and saw that Meiyao was frowning again.

Then she blinked. “Right. I must— I’m sorry. It’s just that—that I felt a presence, and…” She looked back down. “He was a Linzushen.”

“Ah.” That’d explain why Meiyao had taken off like that. Jieyuan took a more careful look—but it was hard to tell, with all the plant in the way. But then he looked further up, past the head, at the hair pooling over the head.

There. The stems were even thicker over the area, clustered, crowding it, but now that he knew to look for it, he spotted some flashes of brown the same shade as Meiyao’s hair. It was surprisingly clean—he glanced over at the body and confirmed that, plants and nakedness aside, the corpse looked rather tidy, not a hint of dirt or grime on it, even though it must’ve been lying there for who knows how long.

How long… Jieyuan realized, then, that something else didn’t quite add up. “I thought your mother was the last Linzushen?”

He searched for some family relation that’d fit the man’s young age—he couldn’t get a clear read, but he didn’t see any wrinkles—but he’d been given to understand Meiyao’s mother was an only child. “Is this… a cousin?”

It might fit—a cousin of her mother, and Meiyao’s once or twice removed. If the Linzushen had been as crazy as the rest of the Viridian Death Cult, he could see one of them deciding to take their chances with the Dome. To seek the Viridian—as they’d call this particular form of suicide.

But that wouldn’t really fit the bill, either. Because the man was dead, and a cultivator’s youth didn’t follow them to their grave.

“No,” Meiyao. “The last male Linzushen was born two centuries ago. This isn’t any Linzushen I know of, either. And this bush growing around him, on him…”

She focused down—not on the man, but on the foliage—just for a moment, then nodded. “It’s over a thousand years old. If not two thousand.”

“That’s… That’s a two-thousand-year-old corpse, then?” Jieyuan tried to make sense of it. By all rights, the body shouldn’t have just rotted, but outright reduced to mush, to little more than fertilizer. A thousand years—two thousand years—was a long time. Well over a dozen generations, to a mundane. Even to a Redsoul it’d be several generations away. “But I thought—when we die, don’t our bodies turn mundane? Is it a bloodright thing, or—”

She shook her head. “Rot doesn’t take as easily to the Linzushen, yes, but even then, not to this extent. We do still decompose, it’s just that it takes about thrice as long. Left on the ground like this, even a Linzushen’s corpse won’t last a few months, let alone years—never mind centuries. This is different. This…”

Her expression grew distant, vague. “I think it was the mist. It must’ve preserved him.”

The mist. Even now—always—it wrapped around them. It didn’t look specially thicker around the corpse, didn’t seem to hold it in any special way, but Jieyuan could see it. Pretty much everything odd about the Viridian Dome could be blamed on the mist. The viridian mist was, in a way, the Dome itself.

It could mess with the mind, possibly even with space and distance—it wasn’t too much of a stretch it could keep a corpse fresh, either. And that’d go a long way to explain why it looked this way, like it was still alive. As well as the nakedness—his clothes must’ve rotted away into scraps, picked up by the wind or the ground. There was the question of how the man had died, but it’d been a thousand years and you didn’t need much to die in the Dome.

But then another question still came to mind.

What about chromal beasts?

Jieyuan cast a quick look around. Meiyao had been way louder than usual on their way here—and so had himself and Daojue, in their rush to follow her—but nothing had come out of it, even though it was as if he could throw a coin into the mist and hit a dozen of them. Meiyao didn’t seem particularly concerned, either. She’d been distracted, before, when she’d rushed over, but she’d already gathered herself. If there was danger around, she’d know.

Was the mist keeping the beasts away, then? From the corpse? Chromal beasts wouldn’t go out of their way to hunt for food, but if they found food lying around they wouldn’t mind take a bite, either. And the corpse looked distinctly bite-free.

It’s probably not quite respectful of me, but… He pursed his lips. What if? What if they picked up the corpse and lugged it around with them? He considered—really considered—whether it’d be worth it, assuming the dead Linzushen served as some kind of beast repellent.

He looked over at Meiyao. This was her family, even if from many generations past. They’d grown a lot closer over the last few days, but he didn’t know how she’d take the suggestion. It would be practical, but—well, also callous and possibly macabre. There was disturbing the dead, and then there was picking them up and carrying them around like some lucky charm.

So rather than ask outright, he cleared his throat and indicated the corpse with his head. “Do you want to get him out, or maybe get a closer look, or…”

“No,” she said. “Leave him as he is. The Linzushen don’t cremate our dead. We bury them in gardens. It’s common for plants to grow from our corpses. This is no garden, but it should suffice.”

That was that, then. Jieyuan discarded the corpse-carrying idea—it wasn’t worth the risk upsetting Meiyao, not when it was hardly a guaranteed thing, and they were doing well enough with her leading them—even as something else caught his attention.

So the Linzushen buried their dead. Somehow, that came to him as a surprise. It wouldn’t have been to Amyas, but Jieyuan had grown up in Radiant Gold City, where there were no graves or tombs. Instead, you had ashsteads, large buildings stretching deep underground where funerary urns were kept in niches, almost like books in a library. Richer households would have urn rooms, and in the case of bigger, established families, as had been with the Haoyujin, urn houses.

Jieyuan wouldn’t have even known that burying your dead was an option if it hadn’t been for Amyas’s memories. Up to now it’d never occurred to him to wonder why that was, either.

Nothing came to mind, and he set it aside. There were other concerns at hand.

“So what now, then?”

“We go on,” Meiyao said. She gave the corpse one last, long look, then nodded her head, stepping away. “Let’s go.”

They resumed walking. Daojue said nothing—no question about what had happened, what they’d been doing near the brush—as Jieyuan came close, only kept up pace behind as Meiyao took up the lead again.

Three clearings later, Meiyao came to another sudden stop.

She then shot Jieyuan a look, before continuing on to the next clearing at a slightly faster pace.

Jieyuan had a feeling he knew what this was about.

He stepped through into the next clearing after her, already looking for Meiyao.

At first, he didn’t see her, but then he followed the rope connecting them to a spot behind a large tree that took up the right side of the clearing.

Like the other ones found in the valley, it was entirely green, trunk included, though the shades varied, and it only glowed slightly, so soft you could miss it amid the glow of the mist around it.

Jieyuan wasn’t too surprised when, as he walked over and turned around to stand beside Meiyao, he saw a corpse. In the tree. The deep green wound grew around it, and the arms and legs of the corpses were hidden inside it, taken up by the trunk. Only the corpse’s upper body—that of a woman, this time—was revealed.

The tree kept the dead woman upright, its wood encroaching on her forehead. Not all of her hair was hidden away, though, and the front portion of it parted down at the forehead, leaving a slit through which he could see only the middle third of her face, and falling down over her breasts like wavy curtains of brains, stopping just short of the navel.

This time, even with the hair over it, he could see the resemblance to the Meiyao. The woman’s nose and mouth were bare, between the twin cascades of hair—the nose as delicate as Meiyao’s, the rosy lips almost as full, all features finely sculpted. What he could see of the body and figure, too—it definitely fit the Linzushen mold.

Meiyao stepped closer, pressed a hand to the trunk, just beside the corpse’s head. She was almost at eye-level with Meiyao. The dead woman’s position was a little awkward, half-bent.

If this was anything like the bush and the Linzushen man, earlier, then the tree must’ve grown around the woman, and carried her up into the air, until she was in her current position. He wasn’t sure that was how trees were supposed to work like that, but they were hardly supposed to glow like this, either. Chromal plants, much like chromal beasts, took nature’s rules under advisement and not much more.

“Another thousand-year-old Linzushen?” Jieyuan asked, quietly.

“Two thousand,” Meiyao said. “I can tell more clearly, with trees. And there are others, too.”

“Others?” Jieyuan looked around, but there was only the tree in the clearing. The forest floor was thick enough it could keep a corpse—

“Not here,” Meiyao said. “Nearby. In other clear areas.” She had that distant, faraway look again, somehow both focused and unconfused, though it wasn’t as intense this time. “A lot of them.”

“What about beasts?”

Meiyao focused on him again, just for a moment, before slipping back into her trance. It took maybe a minute before she broke out of it, and said, “None. Not even a trace. I’d noticed there weren’t any close by, but…”

Jieyuan nodded. The mist was keeping beasts away from the corpses, then. “Was there some kind of Linzushen expedition into the Dome, two thousand years ago?”

“Not that I know of,” Meiyao said. “In fact, two thousand years ago, the Dome was still expanding—” Her eyes widened. She looked between the corpse in the tree and the mist beyond. “Unless… I think I know what’s going on.”

Jieyuan waited for her to elaborate. But instead, she just turned around and kept on walking.

He had little choice but to follow. Again, Daojue—who’d appeared a while ago and stuck at the entrance of the clearing—didn’t say anything, and carried on with the rest of them.

They went through more than a dozen clearings—every other one, Meiyao would stop briefly to look at another vegetation-enclosed Linzushen corpse. Each time those pauses grew briefer and briefer. Her pace also picked up, getting faster and faster until she was eating ground just as fast as she’d when she’d rushed off earlier, when she’d sensed that first Linzushen corpse.

And then Jieyuan stepped into a new pocket—but it wasn’t a pocket, not like the others. As he passed through the curtain of mist, his vision cleared up—and kept on clearing, as his range of sight swelled, expanded.

Expanded to accommodate massive, towering stone walls—several hundred feet tall—coated in vines and roots, on either side of a massive gateway that stood as tall as the walls framing it, and wide open.

And past it, the ruins of a city.