NOVEL NEXT Chapter 70: The Blighted Bog
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4 years ago…
"Come on! We are almost there!"
Feng whispered encouragements to the struggling girl as he pulled her up a bulging plant root. The stolon was rotted through, pock-marked in countless pustules filled with grub-ridden slime. Rivulets of diseased bark wept from slick tissue. The globular bile-coloured flowers above them shook with the pair's movement, raining greenish pollen from tendrils lined with slits of human teeth.
The tongues within those tubular veins lolled out, sighing and quivering languidly as if to molest the pair. Feng blasted them with a gout of flames. The tongues screamed and soon retreated.
Even though Yunjin had regained some of her movement, the terrain was still horrid for traversal — doubly so for a mortal, and then double again when said mortal was crippled with toxic maggots.
"We are… in the Blighted Bog…" the girl gasped. "I cannot believe it… Father… He tore my room from the Sect and tossed me to the bottom of the valley…"
They had just escaped from her prison mere moments ago. The immediate vicinity of that single 'hut' was protected by a barrier of sorts, providing clean air and a degree of sunlight, but that protection extended no more than a few metres.
Beyond that, a putrid world awaited. Foul as Yunjin's cell was, even that pit of filth paled in comparison to the rotting brown hell they currently found themselves in.
The environment they were in could not be said to be pleasant. Throbbing fungoid, squelching vegetation, and mutated Spirit plant life thrived in mouldering abundance, each bearing swelling boils or running sores of necrotic infestation. The 'swamp' reeked of decay and rot, yet it would be inaccurate to say the woodscape carried the mere fetor of 'Death'.
Everywhere one looked, it was undeniable that the rotting receptacle was alive with some sort of ghastly vitality. There was a malignant instinct within the lifeforms here, from the sea of carnivorous insects that plagued the leaf-mulched undergrowth to the pillars of smothering, mildew-ridden trees whose mottling canopy blocked out the sun.
Driven to gestate endlessly upon its putrid decomposition, as if the entire marsh was awash in the perpetual exultation of obscene fecundity.
"We are near the Corpse of the Decaying Greyroots," Yunjin whimpered as she sat against Feng. "That Corpus… This entire mire was made by the Dead God at the bottom of the valley. No one ever comes here except the Elders. We will never make it out alive."
Both of them were resting upon a bough twice their height. Before them stretched a never-ending morass of bubbling muck and stagnant watering pools. Black clouds of flies swarmed over those noxious holes, the buzzing of their wings a prelude to death by a thousand desperate bites.
Feng could not fault the girl for her pessimism. She was not only heavily 'wounded', but mortal as well. The very air that surrounded them was poisonous. Clouds of mephitic vapours lingered wherever they went. The boy could barely draw qi from his surroundings without suffering the effects of ambient toxins.
For Yunjin, she would have almost certainly died from the pernicious air by now, were it not for the periodic sips of his blood he gave her. Somehow, they purged the toxins in her body and quelled the excited maggots within her into a deep sopor. Such a thing should not have worked — not for a mortal, anyway — but the pretty lady said it would, and so far, she was right.
"We will make it," Feng declared. "Don't focus on the present. Think about what you want to do once you get out. Where do you want to go?"
The girl bitterly laughed. "Get out? Don't be stupid. We are miles deep within the worst part of the Bog. The Spirit Beasts that dwell here… Some of them are in the Nascent Realm! You aren't even in the Shaping Realm. You are an Outer Disciple, at best!"
Rather than becoming despondent, the boy instead smiled brighter. "Yet I made it to you, didn't I?"
"You… you did." The girl blinked as if the thought just occurred to her. "How did you… That should be impossible. Someone of your standing should not have made it even past the exterior, let alone reach so close to the core…"
"I mean, it wasn't easy," Feng admitted. "Took me three days of sneaking and creeping through the marsh. Let me tell you, swimming within leech-infested sludge to hide from the fly swarms was unpleasant…"
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
"T-three days?!" Yunjin choked. "You lie! Even the Elders need at least a week to navigate a safe path through the Bog and reach the Corpus! The undergrowth here is hostile and attacks anyone from the outside. How could you possibly—!"
"The pretty lady told me!" Feng declared proudly. "She told me where the worst monsters are, how to avoid them, which paths are the safest… She's the one who led me to you!"
"The… pretty lady?" Yunjin echoed. "Is there someone else around?"
It made more sense if there was a more experienced cultivator guiding him, though why they would bring a mere boy along into the Bog beggared reason. However, no matter where she looked, Yunjin could not see anyone else.
"The pretty lady is… Well, you can't really see her," the boy sheepishly said. "Only I can see and talk to her. It's okay if you don't believe me; no one does. But I promise we will get you out of here safely."
Pretty lady… A woman. Yunjin remembered hearing a woman's voice when she first drank the boy's blood. That voice…
Strong. Pure. The woman drove the grubs within her body into stillness, talked back against that… that Thing within her without fear.
Yunjin knew what it was. What it represented. Horrifying as the thought was, the Dead God of Decaying Greyroots had spoken through her to that woman. The God had treated the female wraith as if it were an equal — or perhaps even greater than itself.
"I believe you," the girl whispered. The boy's eyes widened, so Yunjin elaborated: "Just now, when you fed me your blood in my cell… I heard two voices. One of them was a woman's. The other…"
The first voice, the woman, had called it the 'Botulvorn Beast'. She had never heard the Dead God of the Sect referred to as such before, but it undoubtedly fit.
Botulinum Toxin, Ròu dú (肉毒), was the hallmark poison of their Sect, cultivated within the Divine flesh of their God before being passed into the maggots that grew fat on those succulent roots.
This woman, whoever — or whatever — she was, was powerful. Ancient. Enough so that even a Dead God from the time of the Celestial Court respected her. Yunjin felt a faint glimmer of hope blossom in her chest.
"Is she here with us now?" The Young Miss asked. The boy nodded.
"The pretty lady is always with me," he said, before cocking his head. "She also told me to tell you not to make too many assumptions about her nature, lest you… erm, find yourself disappointed."
"I will try my best, honoured fairy," Yunjin spoke reverently. Though it pained her, she did her best to prostrate and bow. "Please… See me to safety, to freedom. Worthless as it may be, I will gladly offer you my life if I could just glimpse the world beyond my Sect. Just once…"
The boy grimaced before helping her up. "Pretty lady says you can keep your life. Whether we can get out of here depends on me." He grinned. "And I will get us out. Just you watch."
Yunjin looked into his eyes. For a moment, she thought the sapphire blue within those orbs flickered gold.
No matter how he looked, he was no mundane child.
Yunjin clasped his hands shakily. He squeezed hers back.
They were warm.
"I will not lie to you on this," he told her softly. Something stirred within her. "I will see you free."
Not mundane at all…
Yunjin bowed. "I place my life in your hands, then."
The Purple Bloom Mountain, Part 1
The Purple Bloom Mountain looms as one of the four great mountains positioned within the centre of the 103rd Outer Province. A paradox of beauty and horror, the mountain boasts vistas of scenic nature alongside blights of menacing rot.
At the top of the mountain lies the monastery of the Decaying Greyroots Sect, home to gentle wisteria trees that bloom with lilac beauty. Nature blesses the cultivators with clustering cascades of purple, lavender, blue, and white. The air is clean and sweet. Cheerful butterflies dance amidst waterfalls of draping flowers.
It is a vision of paradise — provided one does not glance over the mountain ridges and look to the valley below.
Free of the miasmic clouds that gather beneath, far above that roiling sea of hellish purple and brown, it is easy to forget the nightmares that haunt the base of the mountain.
At the bottom of the valley lies a horrid mire that defies description, ill-named the Blighted Bog. Home to nightmarish creatures of revolting mass and poisonous swamp things of all sorts, it is often cited as one of the worst places to live within the Province.
The atmosphere teems with parasitic spores and poisonous vapours. The hanging murk is near impossible to see through in morning or night, for asphyxiant clouds of choking fumes block what little remnants of celestial radiance from ever reaching the earth. The concept of dry land ceases to have meaning, as one finds only an endless morass of festering mud and sinking decay, no matter where they step.
Woe to the myriad marsh settlements that live in that quagmire, then, for several towns and villages still persist within the harshness of the Blighted Bog's perimeter. They play supplicant to the cultivators who live far above them, for what is a Sect without the desperate toils of the downtrodden and weak to support them?
It must be reassuring to those practitioners: to look at the mortals, see the difference in their standing, and be affirmed of their cultivated superiority.
— Excerpt from A Citizen's Guide to the Flesh-Grafted Empire