Night had deepened. A thin crescent moon crept silently up through the treetops.
In the middle of a ruin carpeted with poisoned blood and severed limbs, Lin Mu calmly found a patch of ground that was relatively flat and summoned two large Lotus Leaf Gu.
The broad green leaves unfurled in an instant, spreading out a clean, sheltered campsite in the very center of that hellish abattoir, cutting off the stench of blood entirely.
On the leaves sat several jars of premium liquor drawn from the Four-Flavor Liquor Worm, alongside a crackling fire over which several large cuts of wild game roasted and sizzled, fat dripping and fragrance rising.
The meat was not, of course, taken from the apes around them.
Those apes had been soaked through with poisoned liquor — their organs saturated, their blood laced with lethal venom. Eating them would mean death. Lin Mu understood that clearly enough.
The roasting meat was dried provisions they had packed before entering the mountains.
What was sitting on the lotus leaf in front of Lin Mu, however, was something that had indeed been sourced locally — the massive head of the peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King, its eyes still wide open in death.
Lin Mu had already split the skull open with a clean stroke of his knife, exposing the pale, glistening brain matter inside.
He remembered it clearly. In the original story, Fang Yuan had once eaten the raw brain of one of these liquor apes and praised it without reservation, calling it a rare delicacy beyond compare.
Driven by a peculiar spirit of inquiry, Lin Mu picked up a spoon and carefully scooped out a few mouthfuls, tasting them slowly.
A moment passed.
He set the spoon down with mild disinterest and curled his lip.
"The taste is... nothing special."
Lin Mu shook his head with faint disdain. The moment the Hundred Beast King died, its blood vitality had ceased entirely.
The brain matter lacked the extraordinary freshness he had imagined — instead, it carried a lingering, inescapable rawness that would not go away.
"It seems this sort of thing is only truly exceptional when the skull is cracked open while the ape is still alive, and the contents consumed while the blood vitality is still surging."
He raised his liquor bowl and rinsed his mouth, then turned to look at Lin Wuxie beside him.
Lin Wuxie was lying flat on his back across the lotus leaf, completely silent. Several large bowls of strong liquor had been more than enough — he had passed out cold, sprawled in every direction, snoring faintly.
Looking at Lin Wuxie's completely unguarded state, Lin Mu couldn't help letting out a quiet, dry laugh.
He hadn't expected that he would ever, in his life, win a drinking contest.
The moonlight was cold and pale. Lin Mu made no move to wake him, and instead shifted his gaze to the other side.
There, a mass of dark-red mud sat quietly.
Wrapped tightly within that layer of red clay, the dying Rank 2 Stick Insect Gu lay still, clinging to the faintest thread of life.
With the Hundred Beast King dead, the Stick Insect Gu that had lived as its symbiont had naturally lost all will to resist.
Lin Mu did not hesitate. He fed his Primeval Essence slowly into the red mud, gradually erasing the last remnants of wildness from within the Stick Insect's body, forcibly refining and taming it.
With a single shift of his intent, the newly refined Stick Insect's body — previously as thick and hard as a heavy club — began to contract and thin with rapid speed.
In the span of a few breaths, it had become an unremarkable grey-black strand, no different from a strand of hair.
It crept along his arm and settled at the ends of the hair at the back of his head, concealing itself there with perfect invisibility, blending seamlessly into his own hair.
"Not bad."
Lin Mu let the Wound-Mending Gu's green light flow gently through the Stick Insect's injuries as he turned the matter over in his mind.
This Gu worm was no small thing. It could expand and contract at will, and its striking power was considerable. In future battles, it would serve as one more hidden card.
After resting and recovering, Lin Mu dusted himself off and stood.
There were no other symbiont Gu worms on the Hundred Beast King's corpse.
But by common knowledge in the Gu world, places where large numbers of wild beasts gathered and lived over long stretches of time tended to develop unique environmental conditions — conditions that gave rise to naturally occurring wild Gu worms.
Under the pale moonlight, Lin Mu left the campsite and began searching the area around the clearing, paying particular attention to the stone pits the apes had used for brewing.
As expected.
In a mountain of fermentation refuse that reeked of sharp, pungent decay, Lin Mu caught a faint, barely perceptible glimmer of light.
He pushed aside the foul-smelling dregs and pinched free a strange Gu worm shaped exactly like a miniature liquor gourd.
Rank 2 — Liquor Aura Gu.
Its function was entirely singular. It had no offensive or defensive capability whatsoever.
Its sole effect was to completely alter the scent of the Gu master carrying it, replacing it with a thick, overpowering smell of alcohol — pungent enough to be almost suffocating.
It sounded almost comical at first glance, like something made specifically for drunkards.
But in certain harsh and specific environments, it was an exceptionally useful concealment tool. A heavy enough smell of liquor could mask a human's natural body odor and the scent of blood entirely.
"Useful enough. Even a small mosquito is still meat."
Lin Mu refined it without ceremony and stored it in his Aperture.
He continued searching, picking up a few more Rank 1 Gu worms of limited use along the way, before his steps eventually brought him to the base of the largest and most massive tree house at the center of the colony.
This had been the Hundred Beast King's personal dwelling.
Creak——
Lin Mu pushed open the rotting, half-collapsed wooden door.
The moment it swung open, a wave of thick, nauseating stench — raw and putrid, the smell of decay layered over something feral — hit him like a physical force.
Lin Mu's brow furrowed slightly. He pressed a hand over his nose and stepped inside with careful, measured wariness.
By the faint moonlight filtering through the gaps in the leaves overhead, Lin Mu swept his gaze across the interior.
The furnishings were crude in the extreme. Beyond a massive sleeping platform piled with thick layers of beast hide, there was almost nothing of note.
But when Lin Mu's gaze passed over the darkest corner of the tree house, his pupils contracted sharply.
There, piled like a small hill in complete disorder, lay dozens of bleached white bones.
From the shape of the skeletal remains and the scraps of rotted clothing still clinging to them, these were not the bones of animals. They were the remains of human Gu Masters. Scattered around them were rusted weapons, broken Gu pouches, and various other human belongings.
It was clear enough. This colony's territory had been the end of the road for countless Gu Masters — those who had wandered in by mistake, or those who had come deliberately, confident in their own strength.
Every one of them had ended up as food for the peak Rank 2 Hundred Beast King. Their bones had been kept as trophies and discarded carelessly in this corner.
Men die for wealth. Birds die for food.
Lin Mu looked at the pile of bones with cold, flat eyes. Not a trace of pity moved through him. In the ten-thousand mountains, the roles of hunter and prey had always been interchangeable.
He walked to the pile and used the tip of his short knife to carefully sort through the scattered debris.
After a thorough search, he found nothing of particular value — only a few shattered Primeval Stones and several pieces of leather armor too broken to be repaired.
"Looks like these poor souls weren't wealthy to begin with."
Lin Mu let out a mildly disappointed sigh.
He kicked the last fragment of bone aside and turned to leave the foul-smelling tree house.
Then the corner of his eye caught something.
In a gap between two rotting, mold-covered planks half-buried under overgrown weeds, there was a faint irregularity in color.
It was a human carrying basket, woven from green vines — old enough to have gone brittle and ragged with age. It had been pressed down into the lowest, darkest layer of the debris, covered in a thick mat of cobwebs.
If Lin Mu's kick hadn't cleared the obstruction, it would never have been visible.
Hm?
Something stirred in Lin Mu's mind. He stepped forward immediately, used his knife tip to clear away the cobwebs, and pulled the old basket free from between the planks.
A stale smell of mildew drifted out.
Lin Mu reached inside and rummaged through it. The basket held several texts — waterlogged, badly deteriorated, their writing faded to near illegibility.
But when Lin Mu moved those ruined texts aside and his palm touched the very bottom of the basket, his fingertips registered something unexpected — a sensation that was distinctly cold and unusually tough.
His interest sharpened. He turned the basket over without ceremony and emptied its contents onto the ground with a clatter.
Among a few splinters of rotted wood lay a scroll, its edges ragged and torn, made of a material that felt unlike anything ordinary.
The surface of the scroll was covered in intricate lines and the contours of mountains and rivers — it appeared to be a partial route map of some kind.
Lin Mu picked it up and turned it over to examine it more closely.
On the back of the scroll, something was stuck to the surface — a sheet of paper-silk, badly yellowed, riddled with the marks of insect damage.
Across that paper-silk, written in a cramped, unsteady hand with what had once been blood — now dried black with age — were several lines of small characters.
Lin Mu held the scroll under the moonlight and fixed his eyes on those blood-written words.
They read:
"Written in the final moments of the wandering Gu Master — Lu Xingyun, before death."