My heart sank. The corpses from the Earth Immortal Village had all escaped. The celestial omen predicted by the tomb guardian of the Wuyang King's ancient tomb had, in the end, all come true. It was too late for anything now; what was destined to happen in the unseen currents of fate could not be changed by anyone.

The bodies climbing out of Coffin Mountain nearly obscured the dark blue cliff face, a crushing black mass stretching as far as the eye could see. The corpse of the Earth Immortal Master Feng Shigu, his head split in two, was unmistakably among them. Under the throng of the undead, they approached us ever closer. In the chaos, it was impossible to discern their movement, yet in an instant, they were at our feet.

Events unfolded too rapidly to allow for contemplation. I scrambled upwards along the narrow bird path carved into the rock, seeking only to put as much distance as possible between myself and Feng Shigu, who had transformed into a "Corpse Immortal." But my legs felt filled with molten lead; despite my urgency, any movement on that steep path was agonizingly slow.

Grandpa Sun Jiu was utterly disheartened. Wounded on the shoulder, one arm was entirely useless. He collapsed onto the narrow stone track, resolved to flee no longer. As Feng Shigu's corpse scaled the cliff like a gecko, enveloped in a layer of unusually foul-smelling black mist, it surged upward, directly toward Grandpa Sun Jiu.

I had no time to intervene. A chill swept through me, and I thought Grandpa Sun Jiu was surely finished. Just as I braced to continue my own desperate flight, an unbelievable scene unfolded before my eyes. The Corpse Immortal completely ignored Grandpa Sun Jiu, brushing past him and lunging instead for the Fatty, who was farther away.

The Fatty cried out in alarm and immediately turned, leaping toward a hanging coffin impaled diagonally on a rock spur. In desperation, he cared nothing for the height. The hanging coffin jutted out from the cliff face like a wooden spike. With one desperate lunge and leap, he smashed a hole through the coffin lid. One of the supporting wooden stakes beneath immediately snapped under the impact, and the remaining stakes, unable to bear the weight, began to creak ominously, about to break.

The Fatty clung to the hanging coffin, afraid to move, fearing any further action would send him plunging into the churning river below along with the coffin. His escape had effectively marooned him on an isolated island, with no other place to flee. He had hoped for a moment's respite, but the "Corpse Immortal" shadowed him on the sheer cliff, pursuing him relentlessly.

Watching from the side, a sharp thought pierced me: Why did the "Corpse Immortal" Feng Shigu bypass the nearer Grandpa Sun Jiu to target the Fatty? Could Feng Shigu, even in death, still recognize a descendant of the Guan Shan Feng family? I knew little of other matters, but tomb raiding—the Dàodǒu—inevitably involved ancient corpses, funerary objects, and coffins. Having been immersed in this world for years, I had picked up considerable lore. I knew that when a corpse rises to attack, it is invariably drawn by the living person's Yang energy—a phenomenon known in folk tradition and Taoist circles as "Dragon Sight."

Dragon Eyes can only perceive things with life and spirit, and the eyes of a zombie are useless; they rely solely on electrical impulses transmitted by living organisms or mediums. Hence the folk saying of "Dragon Sight." If the Corpse Immortal Feng Shigu bypassed Grandpa Sun Jiu, what did that imply? Was Grandpa Sun Jiu neither a "moving corpse" (Xíngshī) nor a living person? Did he truly possess no soul, merely a "shadow" in our perception?

Grandpa Sun Jiu was a man of profound depth, seemingly inheriting the secretive traditions of the Guanshan Taibao. He remained unmoved upon seeing the remains of his father and elder brother in Coffin Gorge, and he spent almost his entire life plotting to enter the Earth Immortal Village to loot the tomb and destroy the bodies—actions far beyond the capability of an ordinary man. However, these things could still be explained within reason. The truly anomalous occurrences regarding Grandpa Sun Jiu only began after we entered the Wuyang King's ancient tomb. It was in the underground palace, where Wuyang King was once interred, that the secret hidden within him began to surface. The fact that an archaeology scholar possessed an ancient, lost demonic art was merely the "tip of the iceberg." Subsequently, others discovered maggots appearing on his body, extreme terror toward dried black donkey hooves, suggesting he was a mere automaton. Yet, he showed no reaction before the Guixu Ancient Mirror, and the divination candles used in the Mojin secrets failed to react to him. It seemed this man was nothing definitive—neither ghost nor man, nor moving corpse. If these possibilities were excluded, what was he? He possessed form and substance, flesh and blood, walked with a shadow, and his clothes had seams. Could he, in fact, be the true "Corpse Immortal" of Coffin Mountain?

I had speculated this before but lacked certainty, intending to bring him out of the mountains for closer investigation. But seeing the strangeness manifest in Grandpa Sun Jiu again, phenomena that defied common sense, inevitably breeds fear. Subconsciously, I refused to believe such bizarre things, yet facing it now, denial was impossible. The thought sent a jolt of cold electricity through my scalp.

In that split second, there was no room for further thought. I paused slightly on the cliff's bird path. Seeing the Fatty isolated and in extreme danger, I immediately cast aside these tangled thoughts. Ignoring the motionless Grandpa Sun Jiu on the ground, I urgently gestured to Shirley Yang, who had climbed higher, signaling him to hurry and rescue the Fatty.

Given our rudimentary communication methods, contact over long distances relied almost entirely on shouting, and understanding depended on hand signals. But after spending so much time together, we had developed an unspoken rapport; a simple gesture could convey our intentions. Shirley Yang leaned over from above and saw the situation clearly. He knew this was a moment of extreme peril where a Flying Tiger Claw wouldn't suffice. Fortunately, the gorge was riddled with hanging coffins. He immediately called to Yao Mei'er, and together they shoved a nearby hanging coffin off the cliff edge.

Seeing a hanging coffin plummeting toward him, the Fatty dodged just as the coffin whistled past, striking Feng Shigu squarely on the head. The impact smashed his head, which had already split open from the mouth, clean off his neck, leaving a headless torso clinging to the sheer rock face.

Shirley Yang tried to lower the Flying Tiger Claw to assist, but the stream of corpses emerging from Coffin Mountain had already formed a complete encirclement on the cliff face. Shirley Yang and Yao Mei'er could only continue pushing down hanging coffins, stone slabs, and wooden stakes. However, they only had three or four damaged hanging coffins near them; they couldn't possibly hold back the hordes pouring out of the Earth Immortal Village.

Knowing we had reached the final moment, I pressed Grandpa Sun Jiu: "The Corpse Immortals from Coffin Mountain are all out now. You must tell us what you intended to do. Don't let us die as confused ghosts."

Grandpa Sun Jiu was distracted, his face like still water. He didn't look at me, his gaze fixed solely on the headless body Feng Shigu had left clinging to the cliff. He mumbled, "What I intended to do? I want to..." Before he could finish, the bird path we stood on suddenly collapsed. Grandpa Sun Jiu realized the gravity of the situation, cried out "Ay-yo!" and lost control on the path barely wider than a foot. The collapse was so sudden that I didn't even have time to react. By the time I understood, he had slipped down the cliff with the rubble, plunging directly into the dark, misty abyss where Coffin Mountain emerged, vanishing without a trace.

I peered down hastily, unable to see where Grandpa Sun Jiu had fallen. Instead, I saw a mass of pitch-black material wriggling out from the neck cavity of Feng Shigu's headless corpse, seemingly covered in short, fine black corpse hair. When ancient corpses, sealed in absolutely airtight coffins for ages, suddenly come into contact with flowing outside air, the skin undergoes accelerated changes, collapsing and shrinking instantly, while a layer of moldy corpse bloom develops. (How disgusting!) But the corpses from the Earth Immortal Village, other than Feng Shigu, had mostly lain exposed underground for hundreds of years without coffins. For them to undergo such a transformation was highly abnormal. The black mist in the gorge thickened, making the sliver of daylight overhead appear exceptionally dim. But this time, I was extremely close to Feng Shigu's body, seeing with absolute clarity. The black substance hidden inside Feng Shigu's corpse—we had previously seen something strikingly human-shaped, "ghost shadows," embedded in the chalcedony rock layers in the Jade Grotto before the Lingxing Hall. The Bingzhu Yexing Tu (Candlelight Night March Scroll) also subtly described this ghostly black substance.

They seemed capable of clinging to the cliff face and moving rapidly, emitting a bizarre stench of decay. Their external form was not fixed, and they were impervious to water, fire, swords, or guns. Corpses possessed by this substance remained uncorrupted and unrigid; even the blood within them did not coagulate. During the age of Sorcery, they were regarded as the "Dark Elixir for Suppressing Corpses" (Zhenshi Wudan), while the Guanshan Taibao Feng Shigu viewed it as an auspicious sign of the corpse achieving immortality through skeletal transformation.

Aside from the diagrams drawn by the Earth Immortals, and inside the Lingxing Hall and the corpses in the tomb, I must have seen this substance somewhere else—perhaps within Coffin Mountain itself, or even near the Wuyang King's tomb and the hanging coffins in the gorge. But due to my preconception that these were merely "Corpse Immortals" refined through some process, I had overlooked countless details visible to the eye. This black substance was likely a type of moss surviving in a humid, decaying environment, or perhaps the Corpse Moss (Shixian) mentioned in Feng Shui doctrine.

The culture of Sorcery and the Guanshan Divination Techniques mastered by the Feng family both derived from ancient Feng Shui principles, with Celestial Star Feng Shui playing a major role. But these principles and the Yin-Yang Feng Shui passed down by the Mojin Xiaowei are essentially branches of the ancient Zhou Tian trigrams, sharing the same origin. Their core principle is creation within Heaven's decree and the unity of Heaven and Man. However, ancient Feng Shui is far more profound and obscure, containing many impractical theories that largely fell out of use after the Han Dynasty. The Feng family of Guanshan truly mastered esoteric arts through tomb raiding in Coffin Gorge, studying lore dating back to the Three Dynasties—methods vastly different from the Situational School of Feng Shui I had always been familiar with. That is why this connection hadn't clicked in my mind until now. Upon this sudden realization, I grasped seven or eight tenths of the truth.

Coffin Gorge held thousands of hanging coffins of various types, and the Pangu Vein of Coffin Mountain was an extremely Yin location, gathering wind and qi, housing countless smaller coffins. Over the years, the organs of those corpses transformed within the mountain, sprouting a layer of black-green moss capable of parasitizing both the living and the dead. This Fleshy Moss (Routai) was the "Living Elixir" (Huodan) used by the shamans during the Wuyang King period to preserve the appearance of ancient corpses.

Later, the sorcerers discovered that while this substance could keep an ancient corpse intact for ten thousand years, it prevented it from leaving Coffin Mountain. Once outside the area where wind is gathered and water is amassed, it would breed and spread using the host's physical form, harming humans and animals across the world. This is why the sacrificial stele mentioned "severing the earth's pulse and sealing the mountain's containment." Coffin Mountain became an ancient forbidden zone.

A large part of Feng Shigu's esoteric arts originated from Coffin Mountain. Coupled with his obsession with deciphering heavenly secrets to prove his Great Dao, he became covetous of the "Living Elixir" stored in the mountain, intending to use this substance to refine himself into an immortal and build the Earth Immortal Village tomb to restore the earth's dragon energy. In truth, one couldn't say Feng Shigu's judgment was entirely wrong; the cycle of cause and effect has unfolded precisely according to his predictions and arrangements before his death. If that Pangu Corpse Immortal were to flow out into the world, one cannot imagine how many living souls would be "converted" by it.

In the Sixteen-Character Yin-Yang Feng Shui Secret Arts that I am familiar with, the chapter on "Things" (Wu) recorded items like Corpse Moss and Corpse Lichen, stating: "Beneath an evil pulse, there is no fortune. Corpse Moss ages and generates flesh; over years, it forms a human shape, pursuing and feeding on the vital energy of the living. When separated from the tomb, it brings great plague to the world." These are malevolent entities generated in burial grounds. In a sense, they are somewhat like the Nine Deaths Shocking Tomb Armor that guards tombs, only one is hard (gang) and the other is soft (rou), and the Corpse Moss is nearly without any discernible weakness.

The hanging coffins on the cliffs of Coffin Gorge and the ancient tomb's underground palace were covered in decaying moss, but only the moss buried within the Pangu Vein was the true Corpse Moss. I was blinded by the immediate scene, mistakenly believing Coffin Gorge's Feng Shui confinement was a treasure ground for noble, immortal beings, failing to realize that the legendary "Corpse Immortal" was actually the Pangu Corpse Moss.

Although I had discerned the truth of the "Corpse Immortal" on the sheer cliff face of the gorge, it was utterly futile. The Pangu Corpse Moss parasitizing the corpses was consistent with the legends of the "Corpse Immortal" from the Earth Immortal Tomb. At this juncture, it seemed all the deceased from the Bottom Line Village—their bodies housing the black Corpse Moss—were wriggling out to cling to the cliff face and crawl outward. Allowing them to escape the gorge would surely cause immense disaster.

Seeing that a direct fight would be ineffective, I took advantage of Shirley Yang pushing down a coffin board, which smashed two nearby Pangu Corpse Moss entities, and quickly moved myself over the Fatty’s head. Then, together with Shirley Yang and Yao Mei'er, we lowered the Flying Tiger Claw and pulled the Fatty back from the teetering hanging coffin. The Fatty, having just spun around the gates of hell, wiped the sweat from his face and breathlessly asked me, "Did Old Sun just kick the bucket?"

I nodded. "He might have been swept away by the river, or maybe he shattered upon impact in Coffin Mountain. We can't confirm it now. It's just a pity I had an important thing to tell him that I never got the chance to say..."

Shirley Yang and Yao Mei'er looked downcast at Grandpa Sun Jiu's disappearance, but Shirley Yang maintained excellent composure. She asked me, "Old Hu, it seems the corpses from the Earth Immortal Village are all infested with some kind of creature. We can't stop them. What should we do now?"

Shirley Yang was quick-witted and reacted faster. Upon seeing the true nature of the "Corpse Immortal," she arrived at the same conclusion I did. Though she didn't understand Feng Shui theories, she immediately judged that there were parasitic entities within those corpses. But trapped in this desperate situation, where even escaping seemed impossible, how could we possibly deal with the Pangu Corpse Moss in Coffin Mountain?

The Coffin Mountain bisecting the gorge was gradually disintegrating, but the dark, gloomy energy within the mountain lingered, as if endless black mist surged ceaselessly. Waves of ethereal, swirling gloom and tragic fog caused the light in the gorge to fade further. Faced with this situation, I could only feel anxious and helpless. If we continued ascending the precarious bird path, who knew when we would ever climb over this sheer, thousand-foot cliff face? Moreover, everyone was pushed to their physical and mental limits; we would likely be caught and killed by the rapidly proliferating Pangu Corpse Moss halfway up.

Seeing my hesitation, Yao Mei'er quickly pleaded with me not to consider jumping into the water to escape. He feared no mountain trek, but he was utterly unsuited to water and harbored a deep-seated terror of vast bodies of water.

I told him not to worry; the water route was out of the question. The currents in this gorge were too violent; even with superb swimming skills, one wouldn't survive the plunge. But I was burning with anxiety. The surrounding Pangu Corpse Moss would likely swarm close within a few minutes. In this predicament, unless one grew wings and ascended to the heavens, how could we escape this disaster?

The Fatty peered downward and remarked, "The water route is dangerous, but we stand no chance on foot. Right now, the only option is to follow Old Sun Jiu's example—jump into the water and escape into the Dragon Palace..."

I understood the Fatty better than anyone; he was all talk and no action. What he just said was likely to bolster his own courage. But though spoken carelessly, the words struck a chord, especially the terms "Old Sun Jiu" and "Dragon Palace." My heart stirred...

Grandpa Sun Jiu possessed numerous incomprehensible signs. While standing on the cliff face, he had evaded the Pangu Corpse Moss, leading me to suspect the "Corpse Immortal" had activated its Dragon Sight and, in that vision, could not perceive his non-human, non-ghostly existence. Though I had heard such legends long ago, the saying, "Man cannot see the wind, ghosts cannot see the earth, fish cannot see water, and dragons cannot see anything," was something I learned from Zhang Yingchuan. This was also the secret behind the Guixu Ancient Mirror and the two bronze hexagram talismans.

Every time I thought of the bronze hexagram talismans, the horrific sight of the one scorched by lightning and fire after the sheepskin corpse incident years ago felt as fresh as yesterday. The Pangu Corpse Moss was formed from decaying corpses in Feng Shui auspicious points. Since it activated Dragon Sight, it was certainly an object transformed from a corpse. Flesh moss and corpse lichen are the most morbidly dark and gloomy substances; ordinary flames cannot destroy them. Perhaps the bronze Dragon Talisman in my pocket was our only chance.

The thought struck me, and I immediately tore open the sealed pouch I always carried, pulling out the bronze Dragon Talisman. The Fatty beside me seemed to grasp my intention instantly and called out, "You can't do that! We barely managed to uncover anything real, and now you want to sacrifice a bronze hexagram talisman? Embezzlement and waste are huge crimes. Don't engage in such a losing business..."

I knew this bronze piece was profoundly important to us. Of the three bronze artifacts from Guixu we possessed, the other two had been corroded by fire pitch, leaching out their bronze essence. Only this Dragon Talisman, the foremost of the four, buried deep in the Hundred-Eye Cave for ages, had its copper quality permeated by the essence of the sea, which never dispersed. Weighing the pros and cons, I had to steel my heart and be prepared to sacrifice this item. Only by doing so might we completely destroy the Earth Immortal Village. Now, the life or death of these four of us rested entirely upon this decision.

With that resolve, I gritted my teeth. Seeing the headless corpse below the cliff was within immediate reach, I raised my hand and hurled the Dragon Talisman down. The bronze's sea essence, lingering for millennia, caused the Pangu Corpse Moss inside the dead body's remains to instantly wrap around the Dragon Talisman as it inhaled and exhaled black mist.

Almost simultaneously, the gorge was instantly swallowed by black mist, so dark that one could not discern the outline of a person face-to-face. A muffled thunder rolled within the clouds, signaling the imminent arrival of lightning and fire. I hastily pushed the others to the ground. Before I could fully duck, a bolt of lightning, swift as a startled dragon, streaked past, momentarily illuminating the space between the two cliffs in a blinding, sickly white glare. The thunder and lightning struck beside us, and amidst the deafening crack of explosive thunder, every one of the thousand caves and ten thousand coffins in Coffin Gorge trembled in unison.