A few cups of cheap but throat-scorching liquor,and the atmosphere inside the ramshackle shop came fully alive.
A flush crept across Old Ma's deeply lined face.Riding the liquor,the floodgates on a lifetime of bottled-up stories finally burst open.
He rapped the table with his knuckles,eyes bright,and launched into a sweeping account of his travels through the Southern Border in his youth.
"Kid,don't let this godforsaken mountain range fool you—the world outside is something else entirely!"
Old Ma breathed out a gust of liquor fumes and waved a withered arm with theatrical grandeur.
"You know Shang Clan City?A great city built atop a colossal mountain peak!Primeval Stones paved into the streets,trade routes running in every direction—what rare treasure,what peak-grade Gu worm can't you find there?"
"With enough money,the merchant caravans could pluck the stars right out of the sky for you!"
"And the Tie Clan—the so-called foremost righteous sect of the Southern Border!Now there's a true colossus!Their Divine Detectives hunt Demonic Path Gu Masters across the entire world—cold,relentless,utterly without mercy."
"Flee to the ends of the earth and they'll still drag you out and throw you into that legendary Demon Suppression Tower!"
"Tsk,and it's not just the Righteous Path—the Demonic Path has its own bag of tricks."
Old Ma dropped his voice and leaned in conspiratorially,a flicker of genuine fear crossing his eye."Have you heard of the Human-Beast Burial Gu?A vile,wicked thing—absolutely unconscionable!"
Old Ma talked until the words were practically flying out of him,spittle and all.
Across the table,Lin Mu tossed shriveled peanuts into his mouth one by one,widening his eyes at the right moments and offering perfectly timed exclamations—"Is that so?""What an eye-opener!"—a flawless audience for Old Ma's performance.
Beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat,however,his mind was as cold and clear as a block of ice.
As someone who had read the original work cover to cover,he already knew everything Old Ma was saying was true.
The splendor of Shang Clan City,the ruthlessness of the Tie Clan's Divine Detectives,even the depraved Human-Beast Burial Gu—all of it had been written about in vivid detail in the original story.
Things that would leave an ordinary Rank 1 Gu Master slack-jawed were basic knowledge to him.But he didn't interrupt,and he didn't let on that he knew any of it.
He simply listened with patient,practiced calm,sifting through the flood of rambling,half-exaggerated drunk-talk like a seasoned prospector panning for gold—filtering out anything locally useful,one piece at a time.
The wine doesn't intoxicate—men intoxicate themselves.
When the talk turned to the Rank 4 and Rank 5 powerhouses who had shaken the Southern Border,to those sweeping,unrestrained figures who had once roamed the world freely,Old Ma's voice gradually quieted.His mood visibly sank.
He grabbed the liquor jar off the table,skipped the bowl entirely,and tilted it straight to his lips for a long,gurgling pull.
The raw spirit hit his throat and sent him into a coughing fit.
When he set the jar back down,his single cloudy eye had filled with something—a deep,aching bitterness,the grief of a man who had once been formidable and was now diminished beyond repair.
"Bang!"
Old Ma slammed a palm down on the greasy counter,rattling the Primeval Stones across the surface.His voice lurched upward,cracking with something close to tears:
"Kid!You think I was born to rot away in this lightless hole,selling garbage and scraping by like some broken-down wretch?!"
"I'm telling you—back in the day,I was a genuine Rank 3 expert!A man who could walk sideways through these ten-thousand mountains and nobody would say a word!"
"If it weren't for that year—"
Old Ma's body shuddered violently.The bitterness in his eye was swallowed whole by a terror that went straight to the bone.
He looked as though he had glimpsed something unspeakable.His teeth chattered.
His voice turned shrill and raw:"If it weren't for running into that person back then—this old body of mine would've been gnawed down to nothing by wild dogs long ago!Not even bone dust left!"
Lin Mu,who had been quietly shelling peanuts,went still.
The eyes hidden beneath the hat's shadow sharpened to two needle-points.
Rank 3.That person.
Lin Mu set down the peanut in his hand.
Without any change in expression,he leaned forward slightly,his tone carrying a perfectly calibrated,unhurried curiosity:
"Oh?Old Ma,you're no small figure in the Southern Border yourself.What kind of person could leave you this shaken?"
The words landed like a bucket of ice water dumped over Old Ma's boiling drunk.
"Hssss—!"
Old Ma's whole body seized.His eyes snapped wide open.The liquor haze was driven out in an instant by a cold sweat.
"It's—it's nothing!I'm drunk!Drunk and talking nonsense!"
His face drained to a sickly white.He waved both hands frantically,as though he'd touched a live wire,and snatched up a rag from the counter to wipe at a nonexistent spill—a transparent attempt to cover his panic.
"Bah,ancient history,rotten old business—not worth bringing up!"
Old Ma forced out two stiff laughs.
To shut Lin Mu down,his eyes darted sideways and he immediately threw out a more tempting lure,wrenching the conversation in a new direction:
"Kid,since you're so interested in the Southern Border's hidden history—do you know the story behind the very ground beneath your feet?"
"Black Wind Ridge,Black Blood Stockade,and that White Bone Stockade next door that's always at each other's throats with you—do you know where any of it actually came from?"
It was a clumsy pivot.
But Lin Mu was a man of considerable restraint.He knew that pressing a spooked animal would yield nothing—only alarm and hostility.
If Old Ma didn't want to talk about it,then he would follow the man's lead.Besides,the origins of Black Blood and White Bone were something he genuinely wanted to know.
"Oh?"
Lin Mu leaned back in his chair and shook his head,playing along smoothly:"I don't,actually.I only know the two clans have been enemies for generations.Is there more to it than that?I'd like to hear it."
Seeing that Lin Mu wasn't pushing further,Old Ma exhaled with visible relief.
He cast a wary glance at the darkness outside the window,then lowered his voice.
A deep reverence settled into his dim,yellowed eyes—the look of a man recounting a myth sealed away by time:
"Kid,don't go thinking Black Blood Stockade and White Bone Stockade have always been here.Hundreds of years ago,there were no scattered clans in these mountains for a hundred li in any direction!"
Old Ma swallowed.
His voice dropped to something barely above a murmur:
"This entire region was ruled by a single absolute overlord.His title alone was enough to silence a crying child anywhere in the Southern Border of that era."
"He was a peerless tyrant who had reached peak Rank 5,half a step from immortality—the Black Bone King."
Peak Rank 5.
Lin Mu's eyelid gave the faintest twitch.He said nothing,and listened.
"The Black Bone King's Demonic Path cultivation was without equal.Immense strength,and rarer still—he dual-cultivated both Blood Path and Earth Path."
Old Ma's voice carried equal parts reverence and dread.
"But before he fell,to prevent his enemies from desecrating his grave,and to sift out a truly worthy successor,he used a ruthless and sweeping method—he dismembered his own life's work."
"He split his inheritance into several portions,sealed each one separately,and scattered them across the mountains within a hundred li."
Old Ma let out a low chuckle here,baring teeth stained yellow and black,his smile looking somewhat eerie in the lamplight.
"They say Black Blood Stockade and White Bone Stockade are built right on top of two of the Black Bone King's core inheritance sites."
"Though..."Old Ma shrugged and lifted his teacup to wet his dry throat."Nobody's ever actually dug anything up.Most people just take it as a legend."
Old Ma meant it as nothing more than a convenient piece of drunk-talk to change the subject.
But across the table, Lin Mu sat with the coarse ceramic bowl held steady in his hand, expression unchanged, appearing for all the world to be listening casually.
Inside his mind, a string that had been pulled taut across countless sleepless days and nights was struck by a hammer of immeasurable weight.
"HMMM——!!!"
A deafening crack detonated in the depths of Lin Mu's soul—like a magnitude-ten earthquake tearing through the bedrock of his mind.
The floodgates of memory blew open. Countless broken fragments began snapping together at a furious pace, piece after piece locking into place.
He remembered.
That name—he had glimpsed it once, in a blurred and fragmentary passage of the Records of Strange Men and Stranger Events:
In ages past, there was one called the Black Bone King, who wielded a spine as his staff, commanded ten thousand bones, and turned earth and stone into an army...
The memory surfaced in his mind with perfect clarity, vivid as a lantern-show: the crushing pressure of a Rank 4 aura descending, two forces arrayed against each other.
And in the hands of White Bone Patriarch Li Mang, that bone staff, the one that had commanded the mountain-protection formation, radiating an ancient, bone-chilling aura.
So that's it.
Every question that had gnawed at him dissolved in the instant those three words—Black Bone King—appeared.
Crack.
A faint splintering sound broke the stillness of the quiet shop.
Lin Mu's fingers had clamped around the rim of the coarse ceramic bowl with enough force to press several hairline fractures into the hard clay.
The tendons on the back of his hand stood out like gnarled roots. His heart slammed against his ribs like a war drum beaten without pause.
He kept his eyes lowered, burying the blaze threatening to ignite in them beneath the shadow of his bamboo hat. It was equal parts staggering shock and absolute, consuming greed.
From the deepest part of himself, a roar tore loose that he could not suppress:
Could it be—that Pitch-Black Bone Plate—
Is the inheritance token of the Rank 5 Demonic Path tyrant—the Black Bone King?!