They would catch fish and till the fields during the day. At night, they’d head out with swords in hand to Night Hunt and slay evil. If they got bored of living the pastoral life, they could pretend there was no such thing as retirement. They could re-enter society and it would all be the same.
But this life of theirs was still missing a little one…
“A little what?” Lan Wangji suddenly spoke up.
“Huh?”
It was then that Wei Wuxian realized he had said the last sentence out loud. He quickly and sensibly explained, “I said, Little Apple is still missing a little companion…”
Little Apple twisted its head to look at him and spat hard. Wei Wuxian smacked its head and laughed as he pulled its long ears but quickly found he could laugh no more.
His daydreams had reminded him of something.
He’d once had a little one with him. Had the child lived, he would have been in his teens now.
The Burial Mounds were located deep in the Yiling mountain range.
It was said that the Burial Mounds were a mountain of corpses. That one could unearth a corpse by sticking a shovel into any given spot on the ground. This was true. The Burial Mounds were originally an ancient battleground, used in the following years as a dumping ground for unidentified bodies. This resulted in the place being swathed in a persistent, perpetual miasma of resentment and yin energy until it finally became the nightmare of everyone in the Yiling region.
The trees on the hillsides were black as coal, as if they had been contaminated by resentment. A wall more than three meters high had been constructed at the foot of the mountain. Its surface was densely packed with engraved incantations that prohibited humans and non-humans alike from crossing over, whether entering or leaving. This wall of incantations enclosed the entirety of the Burial Mounds and had originally been built by the third family head of the Wen Clan of Qishan. It was impossible to purify the overwhelming force of resentful spirits within, so they’d had to settle for the second best option—imprison and isolate them.
Wei Wuxian had knocked down this wall once. The current one was new, rebuilt and reinforced under the Jin Clan of Lanling’s leadership.
But upon their arrival, they discovered that a long stretch of the wall had been knocked down once again.
Leaving the donkey at the foot of the mountain, Wei Wuxian strode over the ruins of the stone wall to continue his ascent along the path. Not long after he saw a headless stone statue of a beast. The stone beast weighed more than five hundred kilos and had been guarding the mountain path for many years. Vines coiled all over its body, and moss grew in its cracks. The head of the beast had been hacked off with a heavy axe and hurled a short distance away, where it had then been smashed to pieces, perhaps as a demonstration of power.
This had clearly been done recently, since the statue’s fresh, snow-white insides were on display at its beheaded stump. Farther along, they encountered another statue that had also been hacked in half.
Wei Wuxian immediately guessed that these were the mountain-guarding stone beast statues the clans had set up on the feng shui points—or key geomancy points—of the Burial Mounds after his death. Stone statues like these had the ability to suppress nefarious things and exorcise evil. They required expert skill and expensive materials to craft. Unfortunately, it seemed they all had been destroyed. Truly, what a waste.
Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji walked a few more steps, side by side. With an inadvertent glance back, Wei Wuxian saw that Wen Ning had already appeared.
His head hung low, and he stood unmoving next to a stone beast statue.
“Wen Ning, what are you looking at?”
Wen Ning pointed to the base of the statue.
It had been built atop a thick, round and short stump. Beside the stump were three smaller, shorter stumps that were charred black, as if they had been burned by raging fire.
Wen Ning kneeled and dug his fingers deep into the earth to grab a handful of black soil. Holding it in his palm, he whispered, “… Jiejie.”
Wei Wuxian didn’t know what to say. He walked over and gave him a firm pat on the shoulder.
There had been two extremely arduous periods in Wei Wuxian’s life, both of them spent here. He’d never intended to revisit his old haunts or take a trip down memory lane.
And for Wen Ning, the Burial Mounds were even harder to forget.
A gust of cold wind swept by. The sea of trees rustled, sounding like the whispering of millions of tiny voices. Wei Wuxian listened intently. Bending down on one knee, he gently murmured something to the ground beneath him.
Suddenly, a bulge disrupted the earth.
Like a pale flower blooming from black soil, a skeletal arm slowly emerged. The bony hand reached feebly upward, and Wei Wuxian reached out with his own to hold it. He lowered himself even further, and the motion made his long hair slide over his shoulders to cover half of his face.
He put his lips to the skeletal hand and whispered something, then fell silent as if he was listening. After a moment, he gave a slight nod of his head. The hand furled back into a bud and burrowed back into the ground.
Wei Wuxian stood up and brushed soil off himself. “More than a hundred people have been caught and dragged up the mountain, one after another, in the last few days. They’re all still alive and imprisoned at the peak of the Mounds, but whoever grabbed them has already left the area. There’s no telling what they plan to do, but in any event, be careful.”
The trio walked further up and came across a number of dilapidated huts erected along the mountain path.