An Fei witnessed her life settle into a relaxed and mundane pattern over the next few days. She bathed by the pond, ate the meals provided by He Xin along with Xu Lingxin, and when she wasn’t sleeping, she was forced to roam in the depths of the forest. The celestial maiden had demanded that to preserve her health, the young girl was to remain in the secluded depths of the sea of trees.
With a basket filled with poisonous berries slung over her shoulder and an oil lamp grasped in her other hand, An Fei wandered through the hellish cold domain.
Hardly any sunlight managed to penetrate the potent barrier of leaves and branches, causing her surroundings to closely resemble the midnight skies hanging over the Morning Star Temple. When combined with the cool, soft sensation of lifeless soil rubbing against the base of her feet, the Mourning Forest closely resembled a mausoleum of spirits.
It was cold, dark, and insufferably lonesome.
“Cold here, cold there, cold everywhere… am I supposed to freeze to death?”
The oil lamp seemed to be constructed of a special material, as the absence of any semblance of warmth failed to suppress the thin, flickering flame. Despite the small lamp’s endless persistence, all it provided for An Fei was a narrow, circular region of illumination – which, when contested against the invincible darkness that threatened to swallow her up, didn’t seem to offer much. The young girl heaved a light sigh and lowered herself into a seated position on the ground, the oil lamp placed against her chest.
There was nothing she could do. Rather, there was nothing she was supposed to do.
“Continue moving towards Jiang’an? How do I even manage that, when I don’t even know the relative area?”
An Fei shook her head in dismay, and broke into a wave of uncontrollable shivers when a chilling breeze struck her exposed nape. She drew the thin silk garments closer to her body, and cursed at Xu Lingxin several times over in her mind.
She was going to die from frostbite before there was any ‘healing’!
The temperatures within the depths of the Mourning Forest was certainly capable of freezing water into solid chunks of ice. With each breath, An Fei could easily spot the vaporous trails departing from her lips when she exhaled, even without the flimsy assistance of the oil lamp. The young girl drummed her fingers on the smooth surface of the lamp’s outer shell, and forced herself to ponder.
She lost the map of the Shattered Continent after the incident where she was stabbed in the back. Her location was unknown, though from the Cantonese-style dialect and He Xin’s commentaries about the border wars across Great Yong and Bei Tang, it seemed probable that she was either within Bei Tang, or Great Yan.
The golden kernel nestled in her heart that allowed her to possess a meagre amount of spiritual essence despite the world’s suppression was completely depleted and replaced with a solemn, glacial sky-blue crystal. And… her sight.
She could no longer see the colors of the world.
“And on top of that, I need to ingest poisons to remain consciousness… hm?” the young girl grumbled, but paused mid-complaint.
“Ingest poisons, confined to a deadly environment… poisons, deadly environment… toxins?”
Why did this arrangement seem so familiar?
An Fei leaned her body against the cold, soft soil, allowing the cold to seep into the depths of her bones. The numbing sensations tenderly massaged and inundated her meridians and nerves from the toes and extended their hands towards her head. The young girl indulged herself in the inviting lure of the Mourning Forest, when her lips gently parted in realization.
From He Xin’s complaints, the Mourning Forest was prohibited from entry for the cultivators of the Morning Star Temple. They assigned Xu Lingxin, a cultivator of the Spirit Building Realm, as gatekeeper. The young maiden He Xin had once let it slip that those who entered the Mourning Forest ultimately perished if they remained for too long, though not due to a frightening spiritual beast, but rather… unnatural causes.
The forest ruled by the ancient, monolithic trees forbade even the smallest of grass to take root in the soft, silky soil – much less an animal to mature into a spiritual beast. Perhaps it was due to the near-absolute lack of sunlight, or another factor?
“The temperature in this forest can freeze the pond, but I haven’t suffered from hypothermia. The berries are poisonous, but I feel invigorated from them,” An Fei rubbed at her brow, and shivered at the added stimulus.
“Spiritual medicines here can harm me, and spiritual qi or spiritual essence can completely disembowel my existence…? Hm? Spiritual essence?”
The berries contained spiritual essence that posed harm towards the cultivators of the Shattered Continent, hence they were beneficial to their health? The Mourning Forest, as well?
Impossible.
An Fei chuckled and shook her head at the laughable idea. The young girl dispelled the momentary derision in her heart and continued to indulge in the mixture of discomforting numbness and euphoric exhaustion coursing through her body. She lay against the cold, silky soil as she watched the minute transformations of the whispering branches and singing leaves as they greedily devoured the sunlight.
It didn’t make logical sense.
But then, few things in the Shattered Star Continent adhered to logic and rationalism.
“People can absorb some element from the atmosphere that allows them to shatter their physical constraints. Those who succeed can fly through the air, run at superhuman speeds, cause physical manifestation through their thoughts, and live for hundreds of years…”
But the air content of the Shattered Star Continent didn’t seem much different from that of the Earth in her memories, just void of the pollution brought by modern technology. The basic materials remained consistent, but she certainly didn’t recall any stones on Earth possessing the ability to automatically purify any water source they contacted, nor a type of clay that could mitigate the weight of its contents…
An Fei rapped her head in frustration, and gathered her belongings. She patted the smooth soil with her palms, admiring the astonishing texture that closely resembled the fine-woven silk fabrics of Jiang’an; cool, soft and smooth to the touch, as well as the faint, lingering texture of rubbing infinitesimal grains of sand. The young girl hoisted the basket on her shoulder and grasped the oil lamp, and began the slow walk of exiting the forest.
The monoliths of ancient wood and darkness silently guarded her presence as she followed the suffocated trails of sunlight. An Fei gently pushed at the branches to form a path wide enough to support her frame, and paused when she arrived at the trail of wooden branches embedded into the ground.
She stepped forward to clear her shoulder of the branches, but hesitated whether to make another movement.
The young girl blinked at the unusual figure prancing around the trail of wooden branches, and quickly realized that the foreign silhouette was a woman seemingly in her early twenties. An Fei raised her right hand towards the inner folds of her robe to trace the gloomy hilt of the qama, while the former seemed to have yet to notice her presence.
“Who are you?”
An Fei furrowed her brow and called in a sharp tone. The young girl relaxed her body and began lowering herself into a position that granted her a sliver of agility, and a faint shard of apprehension tore at her heart. She didn’t have a single thread of spiritual essence remaining in her body, and it was doubtful that the <Steps of Underlying Shadows> would rescue her in such conditions.
Anyone who stepped near the Mourning Forest was bound to be a cultivator to some extent…
The woman turned at the abrupt noise and crinkled her brow in annoyance, making apparent that her concentration had been disrupted by An Fei’s shout. The woman swept her gaze through the clearing until she found An Fei standing at the fringe leading into the depths of the forest, triggering her lips to part in surprise. As the young girl watched, the woman sheathed her sword and clasped her hands in the standard salute of the jianghu.
“This one is Xu Meilian, inner disciple. And you… who might you be?”
