Chapter 399 - At The End of Mist
The mist rolled in and devoured the strange creature, its form unraveling and dissolving as if it had never truly existed. Yet in its final heartbeat, before it was completely gone, I felt its cold gaze lock onto me.
This strange, demon-like creature was very intelligent, so even its last gaze likely had some meaning.
I was flattered, since there were so many more impressive people in my company with regressors and monstrously talented individuals. But if I was reading this right, I might be the target.
The mist coiled around us in pale ribbons, brushing against my sleeves and my face, slowly slipping into my lungs with every breath. For a second, I thought the mist was going to solidify and rip me apart from the inside. Even the air tasted faintly metallic, like cold iron left too long in the rain.
Shapes blurred and reformed at the edge of my perception. Trees bent where they shouldn’t. Distance stretched and snapped back without warning.
Walking here felt like trying to run in a dream.
As a newly advanced Level 6 Array Conjurer, I could tell this was the effect of space being twisted and warped.
“I hate being manipulated. I’m going to skewer whoever made the prophecy for us to come here with their own leg,” Song Song cursed under her breath.
“Prophecies are a strange thing,” I said quietly, keeping an eye on the changes around us as we began walking.
The mist didn’t respond.
“They don’t force you,” I continued. “Not truly. It’s not mind control, nor is there an invisible hand gripping your skull and dragging you forward.”
I brushed my fingers against a drifting strand of fog. It parted easily.
“They adjust the path in front of you instead. They paved one road in stone that is very smooth, obvious, and convenient. The other roads? They leave them covered in grass to look slower and less certain, and sometimes even impossible to recognize as paths at all.”
The others listened to my explanation.
Of course, I was describing lower-level Prophecy Techniques, up to Sky Grade. Who knew what Immortal-grade techniques were like? They would probably resemble the prophecies found in Greek Mythology, where no matter what someone did or how cleverly they tried to change things, the outcome was already written in stone.
“You can still choose,” I said, continuing my explanation. “But when one direction looks effortless, and the rest look like thorns and mud most people don’t question it.”
“You have been teaching others for so long that you’ve started becoming like a nagging mother,” Song Song teased. “It would have been enough to just say that prophecies don’t work like that.”
“Actually, I want to listen to his explanation. It seems quite detailed, and he likely knows more than most people and definitely more than all of us about the subject,” Song San intervened.
“Yeah, but nobody cares what you want, dear brother,” Song Song said calmly, though her words dripped with venom.
“The Misty Mountains are that paved road,” I concluded, acting as if I hadn’t heard them bicker.
This wasn’t necessarily the best explanation, but it was enough to convey the general idea, and much of what was written in books about this needed to be verified anyway.
I glanced sideways at Jiang Yeming.
She walked slightly behind me. She was usually steady, but now her face had gone pale beneath the dim light filtering through the haze.
“Something on your mind?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
I waited.
She hesitated.
“…Maybe,” she admitted quietly. “Maybe we should try to preserve them.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Preserve what?”
“These entities,” she clarified. “If they’re bound to games… to rules… maybe there’s a way to contain them. Study them properly.”
A faint edge crept into her voice.
Well, well, well… it seemed like our little regressor had made another mistake.
I chuckled softly. “And where would we conduct that research? Here? In the middle of nowhere?”
She didn’t smile.
“I’m serious,” she said.
“So am I,” I replied.
Her suggestion wavered.
Perhaps in another timeline, I had already done exactly that. Perhaps the version of me Jiang Yeming remembered, who was older and had a stronger foundation in this kind of research, had found a method to contain these beings.
But that future me… he was another person entirely.
He likely encountered the Misty Mountains much later in life, without Jiang Yeming nudging probabilities.
Without being forced into games before I was ready.
I was fond of these creatures, in a strange way. They were fascinating. Bound by rules and incapable of violence in the conventional sense.
But their games were not innocent. What would have happened if I’d answered one of those riddles wrong? I already had a rough answer. They didn’t die from being struck, but perished from being defeated.
Which meant defeat, to them, was equivalent to death.
If I had failed… they wouldn’t have stabbed me or torn me apart. But I would have been ‘defeated.’ How would that affect me? My guess was that they would have absorbed me. My body. My soul. Folded me into whatever conceptual framework they came from.
Their world felt demonic in a way, with all the contracts, challenges, and annihilation upon losing. It was very devil-like logic.
We walked in silence for a while after that.
Then the mist thinned. Gradually at first, with light growing less suffocated, shapes sharpening. The air shifted, losing that metallic tang.
And then we stepped into something else entirely.
The trees were wrong.
At first glance, they looked ordinary in shape, tall, branching upward toward the dim sky.
But the trunks…
They looked more like large stems.
Thick, dark green, veined with faint red lines pulsing beneath the surface. Thorns jutted from them, each as long and thick as my forearm, curving slightly like hooked blades. Their tips gleamed faintly, wet with something that wasn’t dew.
Above, instead of leaves, massive roses bloomed. Their crimson petals layered in spirals so tight they looked almost sculpted. Each bloom was larger than a carriage wheel. Some were fully open. Others were half-closed.
The ground beneath them was littered with fallen petals. They didn’t rot, but dried slowly, curling inward like parchment.
I tilted my head back, staring at the towering roses that replaced the forest canopy.
The mist lingered at the edges of this place, but here, at least, we could see half a dozen feet in front of us.
Which, somehow, felt weirder.
“Well, the place is at least pretty,” Song San commented.
One of the small roses in the grass moved.
At first, it almost looked like the wind, though there had been none since we entered this place. The rose trembled slightly and bloomed, its thin petals unfolding wider than before, growing larger with each layer that opened.
Then the center of the flower split open, and by now, the small rose had grown to a human-like size.
Petals peeled back slowly, almost delicately, and something pale pushed outward.
A human shape emerged.
It stepped down from the blossom as though climbing out of a bed. Skin pale as wax. Hairless. Smooth. The body looked male in shape, with broad shoulders and narrow hips, but where anatomy should have completed itself, there was simply nothing. An unfinished detail where a male appendage should have been.
...He had no dick.
The part of my mind from my previous life wanted to make some joke about the appendage perhaps being microscopic, but now was really not a good time for something like that.
The creature looked around with mild confusion, stretching its arms as if waking from a nap.
“This was supposed to be the last challenge,” it said.
Its voice sounded perfectly normal. It looked at us again, eyes narrowing slightly.
He was good-looking too, but there was something behind those blue eyes that was just inhuman, like it lacked a certain glint... like it had no soul.
“Who broke the rules by letting you in here?” it asked.
Song Song smirked immediately. I knew that expression. That was a snarky remark already forming behind her teeth.
I raised my hand, and her words got stuck in her throat.
“Don’t,” I murmured quietly.
Saying the wrong thing here could be dangerous. These creatures revolved around words and rules.
I cleared my throat.
Talking might be dangerous, but someone had to do it. As the de facto leader of this group of misfits, that responsibility fell to me.
I stepped forward slightly, feeling the arrays hidden around the clearing react faintly to my presence. Their patterns shifted in subtle ways.
Despite being a Level 6 Array Conjurer, it was hard to tell what these arrays were actually doing. There were too many of them, reacting to the smallest changes.
“Are we at the end of the challenges?” I asked.
The creature tilted its head.
“Yes,” it said, and then sighed. But there was no emotion behind the action, it felt like bad acting. “There were supposed to be fourteen challenges. But it seems some of my kind enjoy breaking contracts when those contracts are forced upon them.”
Then it waved one hand lazily. “You can go ahead.”
I blinked. “…Go ahead?”
“Yes.”
“That’s it?” I asked, just to make sure we were not falling for some trap.
These creatures didn’t seem to be able to lie, but we might already be in a game like “spot the liar” or something along those lines.
The creature scratched its head thoughtfully.
“Well,” it explained, “I’m supposed to handle people who arrive after completing the previous challenge.”
It gestured vaguely behind us. “You did not complete all the challenges.”
“No,” I said slowly.
“You wandered in because one of the other administrators broke the rules. It was not in my contract to handle people that the other administrators let wander in.”
Another shrug.
“I read the imprint adequately,” it said, as if trying to prove that it had not broken the contract.
It stepped aside, making a small sweeping gesture like a polite usher.
The path beyond the roses opened.
I frowned slightly.
Everything about these creatures was strange, but one thing had become increasingly clear the longer we dealt with them.
Their words could twist, bend, and mislead in ways that would make a lawyer blush like a maiden, but outright lies seemed outside their nature.
Which meant if it said we could go ahead…
Then technically, we could.
I studied the creature once more, then stepped forward.
Behind me, the others followed carefully through the forest of enormous roses, thorns glinting faintly in the thinning mist.
Whoever had these creatures guard this place had made a mistake. Though it was no wonder, since the Misty Mountains had been around for thousands of years, and whether immortal or not, plans and situations could change over that time in ways even an immortal might struggle to predict.
As we walked forward, the roses the size of trees around us melted away into mist like they were an illusion, and I almost let out a breath when it seemed like we hadn’t been lied to.
The next scene we walked into was far more subdued, just muddy ground that squelched under our boots as we moved forward and saw an old man wearing a cloak, cooking something that looked like s’mores over a fire.
It looked almost normal, if it wasn’t for the fact that the fire was not burning wood or anything like it. It seemed like the wet ground itself was feeding the flames. Which didn’t make sense. And the strangest thing of all was that I couldn’t sense any Qi being used… which usually only meant one thing.
Fuck. Why did it feel like nowadays immortals were like NPCs I could meet every time I turned around a corner?
“Liu Feng. Now that is someone I’m willing to move my schedule around for,” said the old man, running a hand through the white stubble on his face. But his eyes never turned to meet mine, he just kept staring at the fire. “It almost brings a tear to my old, weary eyes seeing you so young and so… vulnerable. I wonder if you already planned at this age that someone would read the future and kill you before you can act.”
I just stood there, staring at the man, not knowing exactly what to say as this came out of nowhere.
“This is the gift the future you gave me,” I said, pointing at the wooden, pirate-like leg.
Wait. I thought he was someone who used some divination technique and saw a future where I harmed or killed him, so he was reacting before something like that came to fruition. However, now it seemed like his technique…
“The time-traveling rabbit,” I said.
“Huh?” The old man’s expressionless face finally turned, and he looked at me. And like with all immortals, everything about him seemed normal on the surface. “Oh, I get it. I should have expected it. With the Four Way Immortal guarding the past, and you guarding the future, others barely have a chance to breathe when approaching your little schemes.”
What the hell was that even supposed to mean?
I expected many things when going to the Misty Mountains… but not whatever the fuck this was.