Chapter 147 — The Already Dead
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Within the Shadow Realm of black and white, the blood-red mud that ceaselessly welled up from the black mist churned like something alive. It poured endlessly out of the fog, yet seemed to vanish endlessly into thin air as well, never spreading any farther beyond the black mist. It resembled some sort of nauseating, hair-raising soft-bodied creature, and as it rolled and writhed it kept giving off a murky, disturbing sound. At first Gao Yang assumed the noise was simply the normal sound of mud churning, but soon he picked out, from within that gurgling, something like the murmuring of a person talking in their sleep. No one could extract any logical information from those blasphemous, chaotic whispers; they brought only fear, irritation, delusion, and unease.
Not only Gao Yang—even Amber had never seen anything so eerie in the Shadow Realm. It clearly corresponded to where the original cultivation vessels had stood, yet this blood-red mud was utterly unlike the Shadow Realm's usual rules of "reflection" onto the waking world. It was plainly something more twisted, something that ought not to exist here at all. Rather than saying it was "reflected" here, it was more as if it had usurped the place of something that should have been here.
Gao Yang watched the mud welling endlessly from the black mist with instinctive disgust, then glanced back at Amber: "What the hell is this stuff... was it these things that frightened you?"
Something struck him as odd. The blood-red mud gave off a deeply unpleasant feeling, and the ceaseless whispering was maddening, and some uncanny power kept trying to project horror slideshows into Gao Yang's mind—but beyond giving Gao Yang a faint thrill like staying up late watching horror films in his previous life, none of it moved him in the slightest. And Amber was a woman who feared neither heaven nor earth, a terror who had dared to crawl into ancient tombs and rob graves during the demon tide. That these mud pools had given her a fright was possible, but for her to be so shaken as to lose her composure—that made no sense.
Amber looked odd too. She glanced at the mud with a hint of lingering dread: "Y-yeah... but just now, one look at this stuff and I felt like my head was about to explode with terror. Even recalling what it looks like sends waves of hallucinations through me. But now, I don't know why... it's still disgusting, but it no longer feels like I'm being psychically attacked."
"Is that so?" Gao Yang looked at Amber, then frowned back at the mud. Then he tightened his grip on the Pioneer's Sword and cautiously walked toward the source of the mud.
Some intuition told him that the monstrous "mutated hybrid" outside, with its uncanny vitality, was most likely connected to this pool of mud in the Shadow Realm. If this mud wasn't dealt with, the investigation here would probably never proceed smoothly.
Watching Gao Yang walk forward, Amber nervously broke into a sweat on his behalf. Before an anomaly that defied common sense, combat ability seemed less than reliable—but the next second, her eyes went wide with astonishment.
Because as Gao Yang advanced step by step, the ceaselessly churning blood-red mud was actually retreating little by little!
At first it wasn't very obvious, but after Gao Yang had taken a few steps, the mud that had been spreading in all directions actually caved inward over a large area—obvious enough that anyone would notice.
Gao Yang himself was stunned by this. He took another step forward, and the mud retreated another step. He simply stopped, and the mud too stayed where it was, slowly writhing in place.
"What's going on?" Amber's astonished voice came from behind. "This stuff seems... afraid of you?"