61: Chapter 61 Finally, they dug up the right grave.

He was much older than you imagined; only in his early forties, his hair had already turned mostly white, and his empty left sleeve was tucked into his waist, tied off with a strip of cloth.

"Resemblance." He stared at your face for a few moments. "You look like him. The way your brows and eyes are set, you can tell at a glance that you're family."

You didn't waste words: "When was the last time he appeared? Where?"

Zhou Daniu's expression changed. He slowly sat back down on his chair, stroking a deep knife scar on the counter with his only remaining right hand.

"The seventeenth year of Yongping, autumn, White Wolf Pass in the Northern Frontier," his voice lowered. "That battle was brutal. The Gui Rong launched a night raid, and our thousand-man battalion was surrounded. Lin Hao... your brother, he led twenty or so brothers to cover our retreat, telling us to pull back first."

"And then?"

"There was no 'then'," Zhou Daniu lowered his head. "After we retreated, we went back to look, but those who stayed behind... not a single one was alive. The ground was covered in corpses. We searched for an entire day but didn't find your brother."

"Didn't find him?" You seized on this word.

"Right, we didn't find his corpse," Zhou Daniu raised his head. "At the time, everyone said he had been carried off by the Gui Rong, while others said his body might have been dragged away by wild dogs. Later, for some reason, the imperial court branded him a 'deserter.' We survivors protested, but we were just insignificant pawns. Who would care about our lives..."

You were silent for a moment.

"Is it possible he is still alive?"

Zhou Daniu opened his mouth, then closed it, and finally shook his head.

"Miss, that was over twenty years ago. In a place like White Wolf Pass, the winter hits thirty or forty degrees below zero. Even if he hadn't died by the blade, he would have frozen to death. Besides, the Gui Rong never took prisoners; they..." He paused, leaving the rest unsaid.

You knew what he wanted to say. You had seen the methods the Gui Rong used to kill captives in old military records.

You nodded, left an ingot of silver, and walked away.

The second person was named Fang Tiezhu, who worked as a blacksmith in a town in Youzhou.

He was a man of fewer words than Zhou Daniu. He looked up from the furnace, listened to your purpose, and remained silent for a long time.

"Lin Hao, huh," he quenched the red-hot iron in water, a hiss of white steam rising. "A good man. If it weren't for him that night at White Wolf Pass, my life would have been gone long ago."

"Did you see him one last time?"

"I did," Fang Tiezhu fished the iron billet out of the water tank and struck it twice on the anvil. "When we were retreating, he pushed me out. I looked back and saw that the spear shaft in his hand had already snapped, so he grabbed a Gui Rong scimitar and was hacking away. He had... been hit by at least three arrows."

He paused.

"All three arrows were in his chest; not a single one was in his back."

After saying this, Fang Tiezhu didn't speak again. He continued to forge his iron, the hammer falling on the billet, strike after strike, heavy and rhythmic.

You stood at the entrance of the blacksmith shop for a while.

Then you left.

You stood on the small path at the foot of the mountain, watching the undulating outlines of the mountains in the distance.

In truth, the answer was very obvious.

Over twenty years, struck by three arrows—even if someone had dragged him away and saved him, the probability of him lasting more than a few days was low. Even if he had miraculously survived, given his personality, it was impossible that he wouldn't have returned home to find you and Mother.

He did not return.

That was the answer.

You looked down at your palms, which still bore the fine lines from kneading dough in the shop all those years ago.

You remembered when you were little, your brother carrying you on his shoulders, weaving through the crowds on Yongan Street to buy candied haws. He was tall, and sitting on his shoulders, you felt as though the entire world was beneath you.

The corners of your mouth twitched, but you couldn't manage a smile.

"It's fine," you said in a low voice.

There are Immortal Cultivators in this world now.

Once you find that path and turn the heavens upside down, there will surely be a way.

You continued to wander through the ten provinces of Great Qing, searching as you walked, and digging as you searched.

Right, just digging—digging up graves.

To be precise, it was digging up every Ancient Tomb, relic, cave, and ruin that might be related to an Immortal Cultivator.

Your logic was simple: if you couldn't find a living Immortal Cultivator, the dead ones ought to have left something behind.

That winter, when you were thirty-four, you received news forwarded by the Cangyun Sect.

Xiao Wang had died.

The letter said it had passed away at the entrance of your courtyard, very peacefully, without a struggle. When your maid Xiao He went to feed it in the morning, she found it lying on the stone steps, its head resting between its two front paws, in the same posture as always, only it never lifted its head again.

After reading the letter, you sat under an old locust tree and took out the cloth tiger from your bosom—stiffened by saliva, then softened by your body heat—and stared at it for a long time.

You tucked the cloth tiger back into your bosom, stood up, and continued on your journey.

In the autumn of the fifth year, you finally had a breakthrough. You found a mausoleum deep within the Funiu Mountain range in Yuzhou Province.

Strictly speaking, it wasn't a mausoleum; it was more like someone had dug a den for themselves in the belly of the mountain and then died inside.

The entrance was hidden behind a waterfall and sealed with rubble. You used True Qi to blast the rubble away and walked into a narrow passageway. The passageway wasn't long; it reached the end in thirty steps.

A stone chamber.

In the very center was a stone bed, and on the stone bed was a skeleton that had been dead for who knows how many years.

The skeleton was relatively well-preserved, but the clothing had completely turned to dust. Scattered on the floor next to the stone bed were the remains of some artifacts: a few shattered porcelain bottles that no longer resembled their original shapes, a rusted iron sword with faint patterns on the blade that looked like some kind of Formation but were completely dull and lifeless, and a bronze mirror with a surface oxidized to a dark green, the back engraved with the same symbol you had seen before.

It was exactly the same as the symbol in the cave at Yandang Mountain.

Your heart rate accelerated, and you began to carefully search the stone chamber.

Unfortunately, too much time had passed. Over the course of a century or even longer, the dampness in the stone chamber had eroded most things to nothing. What those porcelain bottles had once contained was no longer identifiable. The patterns on the iron sword were also incomplete, making it impossible to piece together any complete information.

The only thing still clear was a passage of text engraved on the left wall of the stone chamber.

This time, it was text you recognized.

You leaned in close to examine it, reading it word by word.

"My surname is Tao, given name Wuji. I have entered the Dao for one hundred and eighty years. I have Cultivated diligently, and although my Spiritual Root is dull, it was not without hope for Foundation Establishment."

"Yet, the Heavenly Dao is unfair. Those with Spiritual Roots are one in ten thousand, and source fruit is an even rarer item. For Loose Cultivators like us, how is this any different from sentencing me to death?"

"I am unwilling to accept this! I have practiced for one hundred and eighty years, breaking through Aperture Opening and passing Qi Refining, yet without source fruit, there is no hope for Foundation Establishment. Now, my Lifespan is coming to an end. Trapped here, how am I any different from a Mortal?"

"Hate! Hate! Hate!"

The last three characters for "Hate" were carved extremely deeply into the stone. There were tiny cracks in the rock wall surrounding the strokes, as if the person who carved them had poured all their unwillingness and rage into these three words during the final moments of their life.

You stood before the stone wall for a long time.