After a full day of relentless travel, the vegetation around them gradually thinned, and the terrain grew increasingly steep and treacherous.
At last, as the sun dipped toward the horizon, the two of them stood before a desolate and forbidding mountain.
Cold wind threaded through the narrow gorges, producing a howling, mournful wail like the cries of ghosts.
"Senior Brother, this is the place."
Lin Wuxie stopped walking and pointed toward a sheer, mist-wreathed cliff face ahead — a broken wall of rock that dropped away into bottomless shadow.
A flicker of complicated memory passed through his eyes.
Half a year ago, he had been gathering medicinal herbs here when a frenzied wild beast gave chase.
He had lost his footing and fallen. He had been certain he was going to die — but midway down, by some twist of fate, he had crashed through a thick curtain of hanging vines and tumbled into a hidden cave partway up the cliff face.
"The cave was completely dark inside. There was only a skeleton that had long since turned to dust, the dried husks of a few starved Gu worms, and a tattered beast-hide scroll I couldn't read a single word of."
As he spoke, Lin Wuxie reached into his Aperture with a lingering unease and summoned the Gu worm.
It was a strange creature — roughly the size of a toad, but with an absurdly oversized sucker-maw where its head should have been.
Rank 1 — Small Swallow Gu.
"This Small Swallow Gu was hibernating inside the ribcage of that skeleton. It was the only living thing in the cave."
Lin Wuxie gave a bitter smile.
"I'd broken my leg in the fall. I was starving and dying of thirst. I had no other option — I forced myself to refine it on the spot, then used its devouring ability to drain the blood essence from the bats in the cave."
"That was the only thing that kept me alive long enough to climb back up on the vines."
Listening to Lin Wuxie recount that brush with death, Lin Mu kept his face expressionless and gave a calm, measured nod — as though everything was proceeding exactly as expected.
In truth, he had no solid footing here at all.
He had bluffed Lin Wuxie with a vague impression from the original story, casually claiming this was some kind of Food Path inheritance. What school it actually belonged to, he genuinely had no idea.
But the lie had already been told.
To maintain the image of an all-knowing Shadow Sect Senior Brother, he had no choice but to keep performing certainty he didn't feel.
"Master's inheritances have always been left only for those who can survive the worst. The fact that you lived through it — that is your fortune."
Lin Mu delivered the line with flat composure.
He then drew Lu Xingyun's detailed sheepskin map from his robes and held it up against the fading light, attempting to cross-reference their location.
A moment later, his brow furrowed slightly.
The map's notation for this area — marked as Gut-Severing Cliff — was vague at best.
It showed only a few wavy lines indicating rough terrain, with a single line of hasty annotation beside them:
"Treacherous ground. Possible inheritance. Unexplored."
Lin Mu felt no particular disappointment.
The Gu world spanned nine heavens and ten earths — vast and boundless, with inheritances as numerous as blades of grass.
Lu Xingyun had been a professional surveyor, but no one could have set foot in every corner of the ten-thousand mountains. Gaps were only natural.
"Let's go. Lead the way. We're going down."
Lin Mu put the map away and gave the order without hesitation.
Both of them were capable Gu Masters now. There was no longer any risk of a fatal fall.
With their hardened bodies, the two descended the near-vertical cliff face like a pair of agile lizards, moving quickly and with ease.
After dropping roughly several dozen zhang, Lin Wuxie stopped at a recessed section of the cliff wall, densely overgrown with poisonous vines.
He reached out and parted the thorned vegetation with practiced familiarity.
A hidden opening — just wide enough for a person to pass through bent at the waist — revealed itself once more.
A stale, cold breath of air surged out from the mouth of the cave.
Lin Mu pressed a hand over his nose and mouth with careful caution. He did not enter immediately.
Infiltration required absolute safety — he activated his Gu worms and swept a thorough inspection through the interior from the entrance.
Only after confirming there were no lethal traps waiting inside did he bend low and step into the cave that had been sealed for half a year.
The interior was cramped and badly deteriorated. The air was stale and foul.
Apart from a few blind bats startled into flight, there was no sign of life.
Lin Wuxie followed behind Lin Mu, looking around at the place that had changed the course of his life. Something stirred in him at the sight of it.
He watched Lin Mu's back, and a powerful sense of belonging welled up in his chest. He couldn't hold back the words.
"If not for the thread of fate Master left behind here half a year ago, I would have been nothing but a pile of rotting bones by now."
"Senior Brother... when do you think the Sect will call us back? When will we truly return to Shadow Sect's fold and pay our respects to Master?"
Cough——!
The moment the words Shadow Sect left Lin Wuxie's mouth, Lin Mu stumbled mid-step.
The corner of his eye twitched violently. A wave of acute awkwardness and cold guilt crashed through him.
He had thrown that name out on a whim — borrowing the most prestigious and imposing Demonic Path faction from the original story, purely to intimidate this little brother into submission.
But only now, with a jolt of belated horror, did the full weight of what he had done hit him.
In this timeline, Shadow Sect was not a fictional name.
It was an organization founded by the avatar of an Immortal Venerable who had once stood unrivaled beneath heaven — the Spectral Demon Venerable himself.
If a genuine Shadow Sect member ever caught wind of this, there would be nothing left of Lin Mu — not even ash.
Lin Mu forcibly swallowed, turned around immediately, and let his expression harden into something colder and more severe than Lin Wuxie had ever seen from him.
He fixed Lin Wuxie with a piercing stare and spoke in a low, sharp voice that carried a distinct edge of killing intent.
"Wuxie. What did I tell you before?!"
"The Sect's operations in the Southern Border are of the utmost sensitivity — the implications run deep! Our identities here are those of solitary Demonic Path cultivators! The name Shadow Sect is an absolute taboo!"
"From this moment forward, you will bury those two words so deep inside you that they never surface again."
"If the Sect's greater plan is exposed, neither of us will escape with our lives — no matter how many deaths we owe!"
Lin Wuxie flinched hard at the severity in his Senior Brother's eyes.
He clapped both hands over his own mouth immediately, eyes wide with alarm, nodding frantically like a man pounding garlic — swearing silently that he would never make such a careless mistake again.
Satisfied that the boy's mouth was thoroughly sealed, Lin Mu let out a quiet, private breath of relief and turned back around, redirecting his attention to the skeleton at the center of the cave.
It was a skeleton seated in a cross-legged meditation posture.
Whatever clothing it had once worn had long since crumbled to dust under the erosion of time.
Lin Mu circled the remains twice, then crouched down and carefully picked up the dried, desiccated husks of the Gu worms scattered around the skeleton.
He closed his eyes and extended his Primeval Essence in a fine, careful probe.
His expression shifted inward with a start.
These Gu worms had been dead for an unknowable number of years — their specific types were impossible to identify.
But from the faint, residual aura still clinging to their husks, they had been, at minimum, Rank 3. Possibly Rank 4.
"This means the skeleton seated before me was, in all likelihood, a Rank 4 Gu Master."
That conclusion only deepened the furrow between Lin Mu's brows.
He leaned in close and examined every inch of the bones with meticulous care.
There were no cuts or blade wounds anywhere on the skeleton. No signs of blackening or discoloration from poison.
The bones were clean and faintly luminous. The posture was serene.
It looked, for all the world, as though this person had simply exhausted their lifespan and passed away peacefully in this spot.
"But that makes no sense."
Lin Mu straightened up and looked around the bare, crude cave, his eyes full of puzzlement.
A Rank 4 Gu Master who intended to leave behind an inheritance — why would they do it so carelessly?
Just find a random cave halfway up a cliff, drop their Gu worms and their secret texts on the ground, and leave them to be eaten away by time?
This was completely contrary to every convention of inheritance-leaving in the Gu world.
It looked less like a deliberate inheritance and more like someone who had found a place to die in a hurry.
"There is something hidden about this skeleton. Something no one else knows."
Lin Mu's gaze finally settled on the tattered beast-hide scroll Lin Wuxie had left behind in the corner, now thick with dust.
Every unanswered question led back to that scroll — the one Lin Wuxie had been unable to read a single word of.
Lin Mu walked over, bent down, and picked it up.
He turned it over first and examined the back. It was blank — nothing but the mottled marks of age.
Then, with a casual flick of his wrist, he turned the scroll over to its front face.
And in the instant his eyes touched the writing recorded there —
Hum——!
It was as though a hundred thousand thunderbolts detonated simultaneously inside his skull.
His pupils contracted to the size of pinpoints.
Every muscle in his body locked rigid and seized without warning. Even his breathing stopped entirely.
A shock so profound it could not be concealed surged up from the depths of his eyes like a tidal wave crashing against a shore.
Because — on this beast-hide scroll, belonging to the Southern Border, belonging to the Gu world —
The characters densely recorded across its surface were not the common script of this world.
They were rows of — English letters.
Words from Earth.