Chapter 384: Imperial Nectar Paste

Right on cue, the wind changed direction. He Lingchuan flicked his wrist, scattering a stream of powder from a bamboo tube that sent thick waves of yellow smoke rolling across the web.

This was Willow’s custom poison smoke. It was great for driving off insects, birds, and people. He had gotten his hands on the formula for it a long time ago, and over the past few days, he had casually recreated several batches of his own.

His version definitely was not as pure as Willow’s, but he did not need it to be. As long as he could get about seventy percent of the original’s punch, which should already be enough to knock groups down or at least leave them half-paralyzed, then that would already be plenty.

Once the smoke spread, whole clusters of birds and bats wilted on the net, struggling to move and failing.

Speed and efficiency-wise, it beat throwing bamboo skewers by a mile.

He Lingchuan and the three mandrills went through them one by one, picking them up and tossing them off the web.

Another two hours passed, and the first bucket was finally full of imperial nectar. Grinning from ear to ear, He Lingchuan poured it into a container inside his storage ring, emptied the bucket, and set it back in place.

By the second half of the night, the flow picked up noticeably. Some of the syrup even carried faint red threads.

He was exhausted, but a single lick of the imperial nectar let him feel completely rejuvenated.

Thinking of Tian Shengzi’s theory from the Heavenly Evolution Sect, He Lingchuan suddenly realized the mirror had been quiet for a long time. He glanced down and saw that the cracks on its surface were almost completely gone. Only one hair-thin seam remained before it would be smooth as new.

Even a broken mirror could be made whole again. That told you everything about what imperial nectar could do.

“I want more!” the mirror howled from the depths of its soul. “I still want more!”

He Lingchuan could not be bothered with its theatrics. If anything, he had noticed that the raids were thinning out. There were only so many birds and beasts in the area. As for ordinary animals, they could not climb up to the net anyway; they could only howl from below in frustration.

Over the course of the night, He Lingchuan had dealt with seventeen or eighteen bird monsters. They had been whipped into a frenzy by the imperial nectar, attacking wildly with no coordination, so they were actually relatively easier to knock out of the sky.

At this moment, the eastern sky began to pale, and the imperial nectar rain slackened.

The forest’s agitation settled down, too.

After a full night of chaos, everything was running out of steam.

This mad, packed, wildly profitable night was finally coming to an end.

He Lingchuan stretched until his joints cracked. “Time to pack up!”

The mirror sounded genuinely baffled. “Pack up? The imperial nectar eruption isn’t over yet! You’re pulling the net now?”

The rain had not stopped, just weakened. After the haul he had made tonight, He Lingchuan had gotten rich beyond belief, and now he was acting like the remaining drizzle was not even worth his time.

The total amount of imperial nectar that fell during the entire eruption half a year ago might not even match what could still fall in the next hour.

However, He Lingchuan stayed calm. “If I don’t leave now, I’m worried I won’t be able to leave later.”

Cultivators and monsters had been collecting imperial nectar all night. Anyone with enough restraint not to swallow it on the spot was taking it home to refine.

Once the rain ended, there would be plenty of red-eyed bandits. After all, why sweat all night for scraps when robbing someone else was easier?

He Lingchuan was extremely clear about the fact that everything he had fought off tonight so far had been small fry. No greater monsters had shown up, and the most likely reason for that was that the real heavyweights were busy harvesting the rain on their own turf. In other words, they simply had not had time to come out raiding.

But once the rain ended, it was a whole different story.

The heart-protecting mirror backed him up. “Well, I guess that you’re actually doing the right thing. In past imperial nectar eruptions, the morning after was always when the real fighting began.”

He Lingchuan grunted in agreement and ordered the mandrills and the eyeball spiders into motion. It was time to reel the net in, and fast.

A sugarcane is never sweet at both ends[1]—you cannot have it both ways. He had already made a killing tonight; he did not need to squeeze out the very last drop of spirit rain.

People who thought they could wring out the final copper coin before leaving often ended up losing even the money for their own coffin.

Ideally, he would bolt immediately, but the web was still beaded with droplets of imperial nectar. He had to get the brocade back into his storage ring before sunrise, or it would all evaporate into nothing.

He did not realize it, but he had changed.

The old He Lingchuan would not have thought like this. Being able to resist temptation—and one as strong as imperial nectar, the kind of gift every living thing craved—was proof of a steady Dao heart.

Knowing what to take and when to retreat was how one lived long.

The net had only been reeled in halfway when something suddenly dropped from high above and thumped onto the brocade, sending a shudder through the entire web.

He Lingchuan looked up and froze. It was a solid chunk of natural imperial nectar paste, the size of a baby’s fist.

He had stood guard all night and had not seen anything like it. His heart skipped a beat. He stepped toward it to grab it, but at the same time, a messy storm of whistling air tore down from above.

Competition had arrived.

After fighting on the web all night, He Lingchuan had rhythm now. Without even looking up, he grabbed one of the mandrills and flung it skyward, then launched himself at the paste like a starving tiger pouncing on prey.

With the azure-rabbit jade pendant[2] he had gotten from Tu Zhongli, his Swallow’s Return movement technique was faster than ever, and the web’s springy tension gave him an extra boost. To the enemies above, all they saw was a blur.

And then the paste was gone. It had been snatched up.

They erupted into furious cawing.

He Lingchuan spared a glance back and saw exactly what they were: a whole murder of white-browed crows[3].

Each had a white dot in the center of its forehead, like a third eye. Three or four were clearly larger than the rest, and those ones were obviously crow monsters.

When they dove, the mandrills blocked them, forcing them to circle and come at him again. Their claws were tipped with curved hooks over three centimeters long, and they were clearly sharp enough to tear someone open.

He Lingchuan’s eyes were sharp enough to catch something else, too. A few hooked talons still had blood on them. However, it was difficult to tell what they had just finished ripping apart at a glance.

Crows were born raiders. When imperial nectar was involved, they went completely feral. Two of them went straight for his eyes.

He Lingchuan almost laughed from sheer irritation.

With a casual backhand slash, he took down three crows.

One of them was still about a meter and a half away, and even it was split cleanly in two by the arc of his blade, its blood spraying across the web.

“Tch.” Now he had contaminated the imperial nectar on the net. Extracting it later would be even more work.

Their companions did not back off. In the blink of an eye, four or five more dove in. And they were not completely mindless like those earlier raiders, some of the crows pecked at his face while others went for his fingers, trying to snatch his ring.

Damn, these things are actually quite coordinated.

Well, good thing the wind’s perfect right now.

He Lingchuan pulled out a flask of strong liquor, took a big swig, flicked open a fire striker, aimed at the crows, and—

Whoosh.

He blew out a mouthful of flame!

Six or seven crows caught fire at once and flailed in terror, beating their wings wildly.

He Lingchuan cut them down calmly. Feathers exploded into the air, and the flock thinned until only four or five remained.

Only then did they finally regain their senses and climb higher. One of them barked in human speech, “You dare steal what’s ours and kill our kin? Just you wait, we’ll pull your tendons and eat your flesh!”

He Lingchuan answered with a bamboo skewer to its face.

The crow monster jerked aside in panic, then led the rest of the murder higher, screeching as they fled.

So even monsters know how to toss out tough-sounding threats before running?

He Lingchuan shook his head. But their appearance only proved that he had been right. He could not stay here any longer.

Still, the prize he had just gotten was an unexpected delight.

This was the first time he had ever seen imperial nectar in a solid lump. It looked like gelatin, wobbling when he shook it, but it was not transparent, and its color was not even. It was pale yellow streaked through with thin, dark-red strands, like threads of blood.

It also gave off a scent several times stronger than ordinary imperial nectar. He Lingchuan did not even dare lean in for a real sniff, afraid that he would lose his mind and gulp it down whole.

He did not want to test his self-control, so he simply shoved it right into his storage ring.

* * *

Five kilometers away, in a valley, more than a dozen people stood guard. The trees here had been cut down to clear a wide open space, and the ground was covered in palm leaves.

Each leaf was like a folding fan magnified seven or eight times over. Lay them flat in the open, and they caught imperial nectar easily. Gathering it into bottles afterward was just as easy: fold the leaves up, and the nectar flowed naturally into the containers.

The group stood around the perimeter, keeping watch. Their leader was a young man in black, sitting up in a tree with one leg stretched out and the other swinging lazily.

Half an hour more, and the imperial-nectar rain should stop, right?

He was mid-stretch when several crows swept overhead, screaming as they flew:

“Three-Heart Lake has tons of imperial nectar!”

“Three-Heart Lake has a huge chunk of imperial nectar paste!”

As the bustling hands of the group stilled at the sounds of the crow, the crows neither stopped nor slowed; they just kept shouting as they disappeared into the distance.

The black-clad youth watched them go. “Looks like those nasty things took a beating at Three-Heart Lake.”

Otherwise, why wouldn’t they keep it for themselves instead of broadcasting it to the world?

He also noticed two of them had scorched wings, like they had been hit with fire.

“Young Master, do we go to Three-Heart Lake?”

“What’s the rush?” The youth looked east. “If those crows are yelling that loudly, we won’t be the only ones who heard. Let someone else go check it out first.”

In truth, they were not particularly close to Three-Heart Lake. Even if they rushed over now, they might still miss the first bite. It was thus a much more rational choice for them to stay here, squeeze out the last drops of imperial nectar they could, and then go see if they could pick up scraps, maybe catch a little autumn wind.

Hearing that, the others settled back down and kept guarding the clearing.

* * *

About a kilometer and a half east of Three-Heart Lake, two tigers lay sprawled on a boulder, licking dew from their fur, when they heard the crows overhead.

Their ears twitched. They exchanged a look, slid off the rock, and vanished into the forest.

As the crows flew farther, more and more humans and monsters received the news.

* * *

Back at Three-Heart Lake, He Lingchuan was rolling up the net when the heart-protecting mirror suddenly said, “There’s a crow perched on the treetop to the west. It’s been watching you the whole time.”

He glanced that way and sure enough, about fifty meters away, an old pine had a white-browed crow perched on it. It was neither cawing nor moving; it just stared at him like a statue.

A lookout, eh?

He made a show of reaching for his bow, and the crow immediately ducked into the pine’s canopy.

“Looks like those things hold grudges,” He Lingchuan muttered, thinking of the village-slaughtering, man-eating crows the Coordinating Army had run into on their march north through Xia Province. If he wanted to make it back to Fufeng City safely, he would need a way to shake them.

They had only just finished packing up the brocade net when mandrill screams rang out nearby.

The sound was sharp and ghostly enough to make your skin crawl even in daylight.

He Lingchuan’s heart tightened. The mandrills he had placed on the perimeter were sounding the alarm. Something was approaching fast.

He sprang down from the tree in a few bounding leaps, mounted his horse, and started back.

But the crow on the pine flapped up into the air and began screaming as it flew, “Over here! Caw, caw, imperial nectar is over here!”

Its voice was thick and loud, and somehow it carried ridiculously far.

He Lingchuan desperately wanted to shoot it out of the sky.

But the thing was slippery. It stayed dozens of meters up and always circled behind the treetops, never giving him a clean shot.

1. This is a common Chinese proverb, a brief explanation is right after the em dash. ☜

2. This should be the azure jade pendant from Chapter 353. ☜

3. I assume that a lot of the native English readers are familiar with this, but for those who are not, then the group or collective noun for crows is murder, and this one is a lot more commonly known than some others. ☜