Chapter 454: The Vanished Lights

Pockmarked Wang still could not make sense of it. “I know this area like the back of my hand. If I haven’t walked it fifty times, I’ve walked it thirty. I just don’t know what was wrong with me that night. It was like a ghost led me by the nose, and I ran straight here.” He then pointed east and said, “Wudou Town is that way. If I were going back to Shuangyi Town, there’s no way I should’ve ended up at the medicinal fields.”

Wudou Town and Shuangyi Town were not far apart. Going around to the official fields would have more than doubled the distance.

Even if it was raining, how could a local who was walking a route he had taken countless times stray that badly?

Soon, they reached Mount Niutou.

“So that night, you entered the mountains from here?” He Lingchuan took one look at the entrance and immediately understood why Pockmarked Wang had gotten hurt. This kind of valley was also called a rolling stone valley. It was filled with rounded stones, big and small. A single wrong step, and you would slip.

“Yes, I fell right here.” With the carriage unable to go farther, Pockmarked Wang rode the cliff ram and gestured for him. “When the drillwind beasts came, I rolled into that patch of bushes.”

“Where were the lanterns?”

“Up, up ahead.”

Following Pockmarked Wang’s directions, the cliff ram bounded higher and higher through the jumbled rocks.

Along the way, He Lingchuan spotted a small strip of torn cloth snagged in a crack between stones. There was no telling who had gotten caught there before. The tiger, meanwhile, found a few strands of fur on a branch, clearly not human.

General Ling leaned in and sniffed. Its voice turned heavy with grief. “It’s from my kids!”

“So they really did go up this way.”

At last, the cliff ram stopped about halfway up the mountainside. Pockmarked Wang said, “It should be... around here.”

He Lingchuan came up behind him and frowned.

The place where the cliff ram had stopped was just a tiny niche in the rock. There was barely enough room for four or five people, and it was completely open to the sky. If the tiger jumped up as well, it would be cramped; no one would even be able to turn around.

As for General Ling, it suddenly displayed a strange ability.

It drew in a deep breath, and its body visibly shrank before their eyes.

Only when it was about the size of an ordinary ram did it make a light hop into the niche.

“...” He Lingchuan was speechless.

So drillwind beasts can do that?

Then why hadn’t it used this trick back at the government office? Instead, it had smashed someone’s window to bits.

“This doesn’t seem right. There shouldn’t be anything. This is neither here nor there. There’s no ground, no open ledge. If there was light, it should’ve been shining from somewhere on the mid-slope.”

He Lingchuan looked up. The cliff face directly overhead was smooth as polished stone, not the kind of surface a human could stand on.

“But your group had thirteen people. And seven or eight drillwind beasts were chasing you.” He Lingchuan looked around the tiny niche again. “How could a place this small hold them all?”

Pockmarked Wang gave a bitter smile. “That’s what the constables said too. But I swear I’m not lying, Master He. I really did see light here!”

The valley was not deep. The constables had searched it as well, but found no traces of anything.

The tiger suddenly pressed close to the rock wall and sniffed. “There’s a faint scent of blood.”

He Lingchuan scraped at the rock with his fingers, brushing aside some grass, and saw a faint glint on a protruding section.

“There are traces of dried slime.”

Pockmarked Wang glanced at it too. “Maybe a slug crawled past.”

There were countless soft-bodied little creatures in the mountains. Wherever they went, they left slime trails.

Other than that, the place was spotless. There was nothing special to be seen at all.

The cliff ram gave two uneasy snorts. He Lingchuan soothed it. “I know. I remember.”

Not long after he had entered the State of Chiyan, someone had tried to steal the cliff ram at night and tried to push Peach off a cliff. There had been two thieves that night, one died, while the other escaped. The one who escaped jumped off the cliff and vanished, but down at the bottom there was the same kind of slime trail.

So whatever had been waiting below the cliff back then had also been here ten-plus days ago, and it had taken away more than a dozen villagers and seven or eight drillwind beasts.

If Peach had not coincidentally disrupted the thieves’ plan, his cliff ram would have disappeared the same way.

“Good, good, so this isn’t just public business anymore, it’s personal.”

Turns out the thing behind this all has already reached for my throat!

“I’ll get to the bottom of it.”

Public duty and private debt, he would settle both.

General Ling looked curious. “How is it personal for you?”

“Because the very night I entered the borders of the State of Chiyan, my cliff ram was almost stolen. It looks like it’s connected to whoever did this.”

General Ling looked him up and down, then seemed to realize something. “I knew something felt off. Where are you from?”

“The State of Fu.”

“That little backwater?” General Ling found itself perplexed. “Why didn’t the Eldest Prince send someone from Chiyan?”

This old brute really has no sense of timing.

He Lingchuan shot it a glance. “Maybe because he doesn’t trust them?”

General Ling instantly had nothing to say.

After that, He Lingchuan searched even more carefully.

There were no traces of blood, no severed limbs, nor even the faintest sign of struggle or fighting. He Lingchuan had to admit that the constables’ decision to pin it on Pockmarked Wang was not completely outrageous. In most cases, the one who survived was the most suspicious.

The tiger monster Jiao Yu suddenly said, “Why don’t we summon the local guardian spirit and ask? Wouldn’t that clear it up?”

He Lingchuan snapped his fingers. “Good point. Summon it.”

And so, the tiger raked the ground hard with its claws, faced southeast, and unleashed three long roars.

A tiger’s roar in the mountains, He Lingchuan felt even the solid rock under his feet tremble. The forest fell silent at once. It was as if the wind had stopped blowing, the leaves had stopped swaying, and the birds had stopped chirping. Even the tiny insects hiding in rock crevices went quiet.

He Lingchuan noticed that the bronze token on Jiao Yu’s neck was glowing again, boosting the roar and carrying it farther and wider than it normally could.

Because Jiao Yu held an official rank, it could channel origin energy in a way that might formally summon the guardian spirit.

So they waited.

Half an incense stick passed.

A quarter hour passed.

He Lingchuan stood up and brushed plant bits off his palms. “Looks like the guardian spirit doesn’t plan to show itself.”

The goshawk spoke from the side, “Summoned by a superior and still refusing to appear, does it want punishment?”

With a roar as loud as Jiao Yu’s, there was no way the guardian spirit had not heard the summons.

He Lingchuan asked, “What kind of creature is the guardian spirit here?”

“It’s a giant earth sloth,” General Ling answered. “Its domain includes Mount Niutou, the official medicinal fields, and several thousand hectares of forest.”

He Lingchuan blinked. “A sloth? Aren’t those things ridiculously slow? And it can be a guardian spirit?”

“You’re thinking of a tree sloth,” the goshawk corrected. “An earth sloth is bigger than a bear, and its claws are about two-thirds of a meter long. It’s slower than some, but its hide is so tough that blades and arrows can’t pierce it. I’ve heard the guardian spirit here has three hundred years of cultivation, and the locals even built a shrine to it.”

Hearing that, Pockmarked Wang asked timidly, “Um, are you talking about the Wushuang Guardian Spirit?”

“Wu...” He Lingchuan paused.

I’m guessing Wushuang is just a combination of Wudou and Shuangyi? These people were lazy with names. Still, the guardian spirit was fine with it?

“Probably, why?”

“I heard some fellow prisoners say that the spirit tablet in the guardian spirit shrine snapped a while back.”

“The Wushuang Mountain Spirit is dead?” He Lingchuan froze.

He had precedent for this. Back when the old turtle monster of Immortal Spirit Lake had been killed by the Crocodile God, the tablet in the Water Spirit Shrine had snapped as well.

So whoever was behind this had the nerve to kill even a guardian spirit. Calling them “sheep thieves” would no longer make sense.

Jiao Yu realized it too. “No wonder we couldn’t summon it.”

He Lingchuan asked, “Does the town know about this?”

Pockmarked Wang scratched the back of his head. “I don’t know.”

General Ling rumbled, “I haven’t heard either. The officials are idiots! They’re good for nothing!”

They sit in their posts, eat their salaries, and yet they’re not even able to gather useful news.

“If alive, then you should see the person; if dead, then you should see the corpse.” He Lingchuan stared down into the valley. “More than twenty large living beings don’t just vanish into thin air without even leaving a single trace.”

Over the last few days, he had also reviewed the case notes Fushan Ji had left behind.

To be honest, there was not much. With the habit of digging and cross-checking he had developed in Panlong City, he finished reading it all in less than an hour.

Fushan Ji had far more manpower than He Lingchuan did, so he had ordered northern commanderies and counties to compile statistics.

There were no direct leads on the missing courier, but once they compiled everything, a pattern emerged. Scattered disappearances were cropping up all over Chiyan.

In Mount Du County, two people had gone missing, and so had three monsters.

In Mount Bai Springhead, one monster had gone missing.

In Kuli, a young girl had gone missing, and three monsters were suspected of being missing, apparently, one whole bat monster nest.

There were another fourteen or fifteen places not listed in detail.

But next to some entries, there were later notes like “brawl” or “found,” clearly added afterward.

Even so, the tally still came out to at least ten missing humans and at least twenty-three or twenty-four missing monsters, but because they were scattered across the state, they had not drawn much attention.

Beijia law punished conflicts between monsters and humans harshly, but fights among monsters themselves were still rampant despite repeated bans.

It was simply in their nature and hard to suppress.

In the margins, Fushan Ji had circled a line in red and left a short comment: “Monster disappearances do not necessarily coincide with human disappearances.”

At first glance, it looked like a random note. But in the compiled statistics, it was true. There were places where monsters vanished, but no humans did.

In other words, more monsters were disappearing than humans.

Why had Fushan Ji ordered statewide statistics like this?

He Lingchuan had not fully understood before. But now, after hearing Pockmarked Wang’s story and learning that the Wushuang Guardian Spirit’s shrine tablet had snapped, how could he not understand?

Including the eastern imperial eagle courier from Lingxu City, what was the connection between all these missing individuals within Chiyan?

Unfortunately, Fushan Ji had been killed by his older brother before he could uncover the answer.

Pockmarked Wang chimed in anxiously, “Yes, yes! They just vanish! Gone, just like that! I don’t know how!”

“All of them?” He Lingchuan’s gaze sharpened. “There are other disappearance cases too?”

Pockmarked Wang swallowed. “Lord, can you really save my life?”

“The more true information you give me, the higher the chance I catch the real culprit.”

Pockmarked Wang dropped to his knees again. “You were sent by the Crown Prince’s estate, please just exempt me from death directly! I’ll be your ox, your horse, anything!”

The tiger was fierce, the gohawk was magnificent, but it was obvious that He Lingchuan was the one in charge.

General Ling kicked him with a hoof, flipping him onto his back. “Bah! You think I’m not here?”

But it controlled its strength. Pockmarked Wang only smacked his head hard enough to yelp. If the ram had actually used force, it could have killed him with a casual kick.

He Lingchuan remained unmoved. “That depends on how you perform.”

Pockmarked Wang wracked his brain. “There’s one thing... I don’t know if it counts as a disappearance case, but it’s really strange.”

He Lingchuan noticed the hesitation on his face. “Tell me.”

“More than a year ago, I heard something happened in Zhitian Township, fifteen kilometers from here.” Pockmarked Wang licked his lips. “People around here don’t leave their home townships much. If I didn’t have a lot of acquaintances, I probably wouldn’t have heard it at all.”