On the snow plain, the wind cut like a knife. Xie Zhuo wrapped me completely in a large black cloak, carrying me on his back, and bound me tightly to him with a rope around my waist so that we were tied together.

The howling wind sliced like blades. I buried my head firmly against Xie Zhuo’s shoulder, not daring to lift it, only feeling the rhythm of his footsteps as he pressed steadily forward.

“Where are we going?”

When we reached a spot where the wind briefly subsided, I finally shouted against the wind into his ear, “Why don’t we just fly there?”

“Spirit energy must be saved for more important matters.”

He answered me, but I was somewhat confused.

Once spirit energy is used, couldn’t one simply breathe and absorb more from heaven and earth? The way he spoke made it sound as if the spiritual energy here was extremely limited…

I fell silent, then tried to breathe and absorb the spiritual energy from the howling wind around us. But with the malevolent energy now in my body, as soon as I tried to absorb spiritual energy in my usual way, a sharp pain shot through my chest, and I coughed violently a couple of times.

Xie Zhuo turned his head to look at me. “You cannot use your former techniques now.”

I caught my breath and told him, “I understand.”

“This place has little spiritual energy to begin with, and the deeper we go, the less there is. Don’t waste effort trying to sense it.”

“The less the deeper we go?” I asked curiously. “Where exactly are we?”

“The Northern Wasteland, beyond the sea.”

I was startled. “Your homeland?”

Xie Zhuo’s homeland, according to legend, was not a pleasant place… I remembered that Xie Xuanqing had personally admitted to me before that he had killed his closest kin and exterminated his clan…

“Why have you brought me here…” My voice involuntarily grew quieter.

He glanced at me. “To remove the malevolent energy.”

After that, I fell silent.

With this malevolent energy in my body, if it weren’t removed, I would eventually die. I didn’t know how I had regained consciousness the last time—perhaps because of Xie Zhuo, perhaps just luck—but if there was a next time, neither luck nor Xie Zhuo might be able to help me.

Xie Zhuo continued forward with me on his back. After about a hundred paces, the sound of the wind suddenly disappeared, so abruptly that it was startling.

I lifted my head from Xie Zhuo’s shoulder and looked ahead. Heavy fog concealed the path ahead, while behind us…

I turned to look back and saw the fierce wind still carrying heavy snow, but it was blocked by a towering invisible “wall” behind us. This wall, without form or color, was like a transparent dome that kept out both the snow and the sound of the wind.

“Is this… some kind of barrier?”

I hadn’t felt anything when we crossed into it…

I reached out to touch it, but Xie Zhuo continued walking forward with me on his back, taking me farther and farther from the transparent wall.

“Fu Jiuxia,” Xie Zhuo said, “you have many questions about me…”

I turned my head back and tried to see Xie Zhuo’s face from the side.

His expression was serious, his lips slightly downturned, exactly like the many times he had instructed me “don’t drink,” “don’t wander off,” or “don’t stay with strangers at night.”

His voice was slow and heavy: “In this city, perhaps you will find all the answers you seek.”

City?

I looked ahead, but saw nothing except fog.

“What city?”

“The Undying City.”

This name was completely unfamiliar; I had never read about it in any book at Kunlun.

“There’s a city by that name in the Northern Wasteland beyond the sea?” Just as I voiced my confusion, a dull, eerie creaking sound came from within the fog, like an ancient, massive door being pushed open.

From within the mist, an energy began to stir.

Xie Zhuo tightened the rope binding me to his waist. “Trust no one.”

Xie Zhuo finally looked at me. “Except me…”

I was startled, still pondering the reliability of his words, when suddenly I heard stumbling footsteps coming from the foggy snow ahead.

My ears twitched, immediately identifying: “Two people…”

Xie Zhuo’s expression grew stern. “Don’t expose any skin. Don’t let anyone see the black veins in your body.”

Though I didn’t fully understand the situation, I immediately checked my sleeves. Seeing that Xie Zhuo’s black cloak covered me completely, I relaxed a little.

The footsteps in the fog grew more urgent. Listening to determine their position, I realized they weren’t coming toward us but were heading… to the left…

There was a thud as someone fell.

I had just turned to look left when, with a dull sound, a drop of foul blood pierced through the fog and splattered directly onto my face.

The blood was still warm as it trickled down my cheek.

I stared blankly in that direction and saw, dimly through the fog, the silhouette of a person with a slender figure—a woman.

But this woman held a sword in her hand, and the sword was plunged into the body of a person on the ground. She hadn’t noticed me and Xie Zhuo yet, and was simply pulling her sword out of the body on the ground—or rather, the corpse.

The Undying City…

I hadn’t even seen the city yet, but I had already witnessed death.

As the woman in the fog swung her sword to clean the blood from its blade, the corpse on the ground dissolved into a wisp of black malevolent energy and vanished.

She had killed… a malevolent spirit?

The fog surged. Xie Zhuo, carrying me on his back, leaned slightly toward the thick fog, seemingly unwilling to disturb the person and wanting to leave quietly. But as soon as he shifted his body, before he could take a step, the woman in the fog suddenly became alert.

“She’s seen us,” I whispered in Xie Zhuo’s ear.

Before Xie Zhuo could respond, in the next instant, a blade cut through the fog. The woman, without even asking a single question, immediately attacked us.

As the white blade approached, Xie Zhuo dodged, using no weapon but striking the woman’s wrist with his palm. Her wrist seemed to instantly go numb, and Xie Zhuo easily took her sword.

The entire exchange took only an instant. The woman spun like the wind and quickly retreated into the fog, then… ran away without looking back.

“Uh…” I was somewhat stunned watching from Xie Zhuo’s back. “That’s it?”

With such a fierce attack, I thought there would be at least a few more exchanges…

“After crossing swords, she knew she had no chance of winning.” Xie Zhuo wiped the sword and handed it to me. “Put it on your back…”

After I woke up, my weapon had disappeared, probably lost during my unconscious fight with Xie Zhuo.

I obediently took the sword from his hand and hung it on my back.

“She killed a malevolent spirit before, so it seems she’s doing something similar to our Kunlun Defense Force. Why did she attack us? Did she sense the malevolent energy in me?”

“As long as no one sees the veins beneath your skin, no one will detect your malevolent energy.”

“Then why did she attack us?”

“In the Undying City, there is no trust. Everyone is an enemy.”

“Why?”

Xie Zhuo glanced at me and continued forward. “Because anyone in the city could be a malevolent spirit.”

I was startled, not yet realizing how terrifying this was. “Can’t malevolent spirits… be recognized?”

In all my years, every malevolent spirit I had seen, or people infected with malevolent energy, had very obvious characteristics. Some, like me, had black veins under their skin; some, like Xie Zhuo before, had completely black eyes; others leaked black energy and were mentally confused, appearing insane.

The only one difficult to identify… had been that person from Jingnan, and previously, everyone at Kunlun had believed he was an immortal, which was why he could conceal his identity for so long.

“Here, malevolent spirits cannot be identified until they are dead.”

I fell silent…

If that was the case, in this city, trust was indeed impossible.

No one could be certain who was a malevolent spirit and who wasn’t. Everyone would be suspicious and guarded against each other… and worse, there would be all kinds of bloody killings.

Malevolent spirits would kill people; those who hunted malevolent spirits would kill people; those suspected of being malevolent spirits would kill in self-defense…

Thinking about it this way, it made sense that the woman from earlier had killed a malevolent spirit, then immediately attacked me and Xie Zhuo upon seeing us, obviously treating everyone she encountered as a potential malevolent spirit…

But how could I be sure that the woman herself wasn’t a malevolent spirit?

With this thought, a chill suddenly ran through my heart.

I had only just arrived and was already thinking this way. What must it be like for the people who live in this city every day…

I couldn’t help but touch the rope Xie Zhuo had tied around my waist, pulling on it. The feeling of the rope against my flesh gave me a strange sense of security.

“Xie Zhuo,” I told him, “we absolutely cannot get separated.”

I thought of the person in my dream who had said he was everyone. Once we entered this city, if I were separated from Xie Zhuo, I might not be able to be certain that the Xie Zhuo I met again was still the same Xie Zhuo.

Xie Zhuo looked down at my hand, clutching the rope around my waist. “You can always trust me.”

He emphasized again what he had said earlier: “Trust no one except me.”

What did he mean? Was Xie Zhuo so confident that only he would not become a malevolent spirit?

As Xie Zhuo walked, I could gradually make out the outline of the high walls of the “Undying City” through the fog.

The walls, hundreds of zhang high, loomed like imposing mountains, pressing down on me with overwhelming pressure.

As we got closer, I vaguely saw some small black dots on the city wall. Squinting to look carefully, I discovered that those black dots were all corpses nailed to the wall!

On the hundred-zhang-high wall, some corpses still dripped with fresh blood, while others were reduced to skulls or tattered clothes…

At the base of the wall, countless white bones lay uncollected, piling up block by block, layer by layer, already burying the foot of the wall.

My heart trembled. “Are they all… malevolent spirits?”

“When malevolent spirits die, they only dissolve into black energy and disappear.”

This was something I knew.

I just didn’t want to believe that these corpses and white bones were all…

“These are all people wrongly killed in the Undying City.”

My heart and courage both froze.

“Why… why nail them to the city wall…”

Xie Zhuo fell silent and didn’t answer.

I thought he would, as before, refuse to answer my question. After all, moments like today, when he answered my questions, were exceedingly rare in our past life together.

I didn’t press him. Before such a horrifying scene, my mind was already numbed.

I had never imagined that thousands of years after the Evil God had been sealed in the deep sea by the gods, there would still be such a place in the world where such things happened, and that I would be completely unaware of it.

“The malevolent spirits nailed them there.”

“What?”

Xie Zhuo carried me to the base of the city gate. The fog and shadows made Xie Zhuo’s expression even more obscure. His voice was low, seemingly calm and undisturbed. “The true malevolent spirits in the city nail the wrongfully killed people to the city wall.”

“The malevolent spirits are humiliating them…” I murmured.

I looked at the massive city gate before me. One door was wide open, swaying slightly with the thick fog and wind—the source of the sound I had heard earlier in the fog.

The other door, though still tightly closed, was broken and decayed. The two doors no longer served as a barrier, but the characters carved on them were still clear:

“Exterminate All Malevolent Spirits, Unrelenting Until Death.”

Eight characters, still seemingly shouting the oath made when this city was established.

The people in the city were perhaps once exactly like my Kunlun Defense Force…