By the cold moonlight filtering through the gaps in the leaves, Lin Mu fixed his eyes on the yellowed paper-silk and read.
The blood-written characters at the beginning of the letter still held a certain bearing and form — one could faintly make out the free-spirited nature of the man who had written them.
But as the lines progressed, the writing grew increasingly unsteady and trembling, until even the basic shapes of the characters became difficult to recognize.
It was plain enough. This wandering Gu Master named Lu Xingyun had been enduring unimaginable physical agony and absolute despair when he wrote these final words.
The first line read:
"Since childhood I have held the ambition to travel every great mountain and river under heaven. Yet my talent was shallow, and half my life slipped away in vain. After reaching Rank 3, I felt the world had become a cage with no way forward. And so, against the desperate pleading of my family, I set out alone on a journey through the vast Southern Border."
Between the lines ran a thread of pride — and beneath it, regret written in full.
Lu Xingyun wrote candidly that after entering the ten-thousand mountains, a measure of luck had led him to several unclaimed blessed grounds, where he had gained some benefit.
That unexpected run of fortune bred in him a blind arrogance, and he pressed deeper and deeper into the heart of the Southern Border without knowing his own limits.
But as the saying goes — walk along the riverbank long enough, and your shoes will get wet.
In a deep valley, he had the misfortune of stumbling into a terrifying Beast Tide Rampage — a stampede of hundreds of wild beasts that had lost all reason.
Though Lu Xingyun had Rank 3 Gu worms to his name, the relentless waves of that frenzied beast tide forced him to exhaust every last hidden card he possessed, fleeing in blind panic.
He barely escaped the encirclement — only to blunder, gravely wounded and near death, straight into the territory of this bloodthirsty ape colony.
Out of the tiger's den, into the wolf's lair.
Crippled by his injuries, his cultivation was nearly useless and every defensive Gu worm he owned had been destroyed. Against these violent apes, he had no strength left even to resist. He was taken alive.
Looking at the pile of his fellow humans' bones rotting in the corner of this foul tree house, he knew there was no way out. His death was certain.
"This map is the work of my entire life, drawn by my own hand. It records the major inheritances and places of great danger I encountered along the way."
By the middle of the letter, the writing had already begun to blur:
"Whether it is true or false, I leave it for those who come after to discover. Ah... what a pity. What a lament. I, a frog at the bottom of a well, never did manage to travel to the prosperous Central Continent, never did lay eyes on the vast and boundless Eastern Sea..."
The final lines had deteriorated into something barely legible — the characters twisted and deformed beyond recognition, the dried black bloodstains smeared across the paper like the frantic scratchings of a dying hand.
Lin Mu narrowed his eyes and leaned close to the paper-silk, straining to make out the words from the blotched and chaotic marks of blood.
"These apes... feed on raw flesh and blood..."
"Eating me alive..."
"It hurts... it truly hurts..."
There the letter ended.
Lin Mu looked at those words — every character written in blood, soaked through with despair and bitter unwillingness — and could not help but feel a quiet, passing weight settle over him.
The Gu world was merciless. All living things were as insects — all of them food for something else. There was no high or low, no noble or base.
Only the most primal law: the strong consume the weak.
Human Gu Masters hunted wild beasts and stripped their hides and bones for refinement. Wild beasts, in turn, devoured human flesh and blood to strengthen themselves. That was simply how things were.
The peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King had possessed formidable blood vitality to begin with, and had kept the Rank 2 Stick Insect Gu hidden in its hand as a secret weapon.
Even a fully healthy Rank 3 Gu Master who walked into its ambush without caution would have found it difficult to deal with — let alone a heavily wounded one like Lu Xingyun.
"To think that in your final moments, enduring the agony of being eaten alive, you still thought to leave a thread of hope for those who came after..."
Lin Mu folded the blood letter carefully and tucked it into his chest. His eyes were deep and still as he murmured quietly:
"I have slaughtered these beasts and cracked open that ape's skull. Consider it my repayment of the debt, and your vengeance settled on your behalf. Cause and effect are clear. Rest now."
After a long moment, Lin Mu turned the ragged-edged scroll over to its front face.
He held it up to the moonlight — and his breath caught slightly.
This was a priceless treasure beyond any measure.
Across the wide expanse of the sheepskin map, following the intricate and winding ridgelines of the Southern Border's ten-thousand mountains, an enormous number of red and blue markings had been recorded in dense, meticulous detail — covering hidden inheritance sites and the territorial ranges of major Beast Kings alike.
Lu Xingyun had been not only a wandering Gu Master, but a remarkably professional surveyor.
His annotations were exhaustive, categorized with care — each location marked with its danger rating, the type of wild beast present, and whether he had personally explored it.
Lin Mu's gaze swept rapidly across the map and quickly located his current position.
He traced the route backward along the path he and Lin Wuxie had taken — and when his finger reached the stretch of dense forest they had skirted around several days ago, he found a striking mark drawn in vivid red cinnabar: a skull.
Beside it, a line of characters that made the skin crawl:
[Peak Rank 3 · Azure Gale Deer] (Extreme Danger!)
"A peak Rank 3 Thousand Beast King." Lin Mu drew a sharp breath. A chill ran through him.
If he had pushed forward recklessly that day, or gone to test it with his Rank 2 upper stage cultivation — his end would have been no better than Lu Xingyun's.
Lin Mu continued reading the map with careful attention.
It not only marked the precise locations of Black Blood Stockade and several surrounding factions — it also held something that made Lin Mu's eyes sharpen with genuine surprise.
In one section of the map, circled repeatedly in heavy strokes, was a place name: Red Mist Death Land.
This was the very location Lin Mu had once glimpsed by chance in the tattered Records of Strange Persons and Unusual Events back at Black Blood Stockade.
Lu Xingyun's annotation for this area was explicit:
"The outer perimeter is shrouded in red mist. Strange beasts lie dormant within. I once attempted to enter, but my cultivation was insufficient — I nearly lost my life in the mist. Those who come after: do not venture deep without a method to ward off poison."
Red Mist Death Land...
Lin Mu gripped the sheepskin scroll tightly. A sharp, focused light blazed in his eyes.
The strategic value of this map was immense — there was no other way to put it.
With this map in hand, even if he did nothing more than follow it faithfully, he could navigate the ten-thousand mountains — a place where every step concealed a potential death trap — and avoid countless certain-death situations while claiming gains that would otherwise have been unimaginable.
Hah...
After a long silence, Lin Mu let out a slow, heavy breath. He rolled the priceless map with great care, placed it inside his robes, and secured it carefully.
Then he turned around and faced the corner — the disordered pile of human remains and bleached bones, still carrying their faint, foul smell.
He straightened his collar. He stepped back half a pace. His expression became grave and solemn.
He bent at the waist in a deep, formal bow toward those bones — a bow given with complete sincerity.
In a Gu world this ruthless — where betrayal was as commonplace as drinking water, where father and son could turn on each other over half a Primeval Stone — a man like Lu Xingyun, who even in his final moments of absolute despair had not forgotten his purpose, and had used his own blood to leave behind a map and a path of survival for strangers who would come after him, was someone who genuinely deserved this bow from Lin Mu.
"Your road ended here. But I will carry your map, and go see the world's scenery in your place."
——
The darkness of night slowly receded. Along the eastern horizon, the first faint grey-white light of dawn began to spread.
At the break of day, morning mist drifted through the forest in slow, rolling waves.
The territory that had once been so loud and overbearing under the ape colony's dominion had fallen into a silence like death — a stillness so complete it was unsettling.
In the surrounding jungle, the smaller and weaker wild beasts that had spent so long being bullied and suppressed by the apes now poked their heads out from the undergrowth, peering around in cautious confusion.
Their simple minds could not make sense of it. The sun had already risen, yet not a single one of those overbearing apes had come out to fetch water or brew liquor. Not even a single screech had been heard.
Then the first ray of morning light finally broke through the heavy mist and fell across the central clearing — the ground stained a deep purple-black by poisoned blood.
What it illuminated was a scene so horrifying it would have made any predator's courage falter.
At the very center of the clearing stood a towering Jingguan — a pyramid of skulls — nearly half a zhang in height.
Lin Mu had built it from the heads of all fifty-odd apes, stacked layer upon layer with precise, deliberate order into a pyramid of pale bone and dark blood.
At its apex sat the wide-eyed head of the peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King itself.
Before the pyramid, arranged with careful formality, stood several jars of premium ape-brewed liquor.
The fragrance drifted outward — but beneath it ran a cold, solemn air of offering.
Across from the pyramid, the rubble and filth of the clearing had been swept clean.
In its place stood a large, freshly raised grave mound.
There was no headstone. Only a flat-cut plank of wood, driven into the earth at the front.
Buried within were the remains of the wandering Gu Master Lu Xingyun — and the bones of every other human who had died in this ape forest alongside him.
The skulls of the ape clan offered as sacrifice to the spirits of fallen human kin.
The pale light of dawn spread across the clearing — a place that now spoke of absolute slaughter and bleak, solemn remembrance — and stretched the shadow of the skull pyramid long across the ground.
In the deep, dark forest beyond —
Lin Mu and Lin Wuxie, pack on his back, had already slipped quietly into the dense shadows and disappeared.