After Transmigrating into an Evil God - Chapter 36

The mist surged toward them like an oncoming wave. In just two or three breaths, it engulfed Ding Qin, and her vision was instantly lost in a vast expanse of white.

Ding Qin’s eyes were sharp and her hands quick as she reached for Wen Qianzi beside her. Jin Yan also flew toward her. But before they could touch each other, they were swallowed by the mist. Ding Qin’s fingers swept through the space where Wen Qianzi had been, but grasped only empty air.

“What have you done?!” Ding Qin asked in shock and anger.

“……I’m sorry……” Mutou’s drifting, indistinct voice came through the fog. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. You drank the bitter vine juice, so you won’t be poisoned. This mist will only trap you.”

“I just wanted you to stay……”

“We already promised we’d come visit you in the future. What you’re doing now is not how one treats friends.” Ding Qin frowned as she looked around, but there was something wrong with this mist—even with her spirit eyes, she could see no more than ten feet ahead.

She seemed to have been moved to a different location. Ding Qin tried moving forward a small step. Her shoe soles scraped against the grass, yet she couldn’t hear even the slightest sound. All sounds seemed to have been devoured, with only Mutou’s low, drifting voice echoing around her.

The thick mist was vast, like a sea of deathly silence.

“Someone else made that promise to me before……” Mutou said faintly. His low voice was sorrowful and uneasy, and within its drifting quality lurked something that made one feel a chill. “That person lost his way in the mountain forest and I saved him. He said he wouldn’t be afraid of me, and asked me to guide him out of the mountain, promising that he would definitely come visit me in the future……”

“……I sent him out, but he never came back……”

The mist around Ding Qin suddenly cleared for about ten feet, revealing the verdant grass beneath. The oppressive feeling brought by the thick fog lifted somewhat, and Ding Qin breathed a slight sigh of relief.

Wisps of thick white mist transformed into small forest creatures—spirit deer bounding about, swallows swooping past, frolicking around Ding Qin in this small, tranquil world. Then they scattered back into mist and formed a miniature town, with pedestrians coming and going along the roads and bustling lantern markets. The little figures formed from white mist moved methodically as they shopped and played…… but there was not a single sound.

“……I could only stay here waiting and waiting, using mist to create forest beasts and the prosperous cities from his stories, but they were all just mist. None of them could make a sound, and in the end, there was still no one who could talk with me……” Mutou’s voice was low and mournful.

The prosperous misty scene suddenly scattered again, flowing across the ground in desolate streams across the grass.

Ding Qin’s voice softened somewhat. “That person took his promises lightly, but that doesn’t mean everyone is like that. If you truly want to make friends, how can you force it this way? What do you take us for now, treating us like this?”

But Mutou continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “……I waited for him for one hundred and fifty years before I finally realized that, given a mortal’s lifespan, he should have already died. He never came to find me once before he died……”

“Are you listening to me?” Ding Qin frowned. She hadn’t seen Jin Yan and Wen Qianzi for quite a while now, and worried, she asked, “Where are those two?”

“Are you worried about them?” Mutou said. “I won’t hurt my friends. I’m just lonely. I want someone to keep me company. I haven’t spoken to anyone in several hundred years……”

“They’re afraid of me, they find me repulsive—I know that’s not their fault. No one has ever spoken to me seriously. No one has ever told me that beauty and ugliness don’t matter, but you did, you said so…… You said it, so why do you want to leave me?”

“I just want someone to talk with me……”

“Mutou, regardless, you shouldn’t do this, and you especially shouldn’t separate us. If we’re suddenly separated, wouldn’t we worry about each other? If our hearts are uneasy with concern, how could we have any mind to pay attention to anything else?”

The mist fell silent for a while, then Mutou’s apologetic voice came through. “……I’m sorry, I’ll take you to see them now……”

The thick mist enveloped Ding Qin again, and when it dispersed once more, she had changed locations.

This time, there was no grass beneath her feet, but rather deep black rock. The surroundings were dim, the sun’s radiance had disappeared, but another light source had replaced it.

They were like fireflies—dots of pale blue and light green luminescence danced through the air, illuminating this underground cavern——which was truly as large as a mountain.

Ding Qin looked around in awe. The ground beneath her feet was at most thirty feet in circumference. Beyond the ground was a deep, vast pool, with light-emitting bubbles rising up from within. They floated to above the water’s surface and burst, releasing dots of fluorescent light that illuminated this enormous underground cavern.

And in the center of the ground where she stood grew an ancient vine as massive as a wall.

The ancient vine was gnarled and towering, extending all the way to the cavern ceiling. Its densely spread, massive tendrils practically held up half the cavern.

Perhaps because of the lack of light underground, the vine’s roots were the same black color as the ground. The higher it went, the lighter it became, quickly transitioning from a deathly pale gray-white to an almost translucent lustrous white, with the faint traces of leaf veins visible upon it.

Dots of fluorescent light wove between the vine’s leaves, beautiful like a hazy dream beneath a starry sky.

Ding Qin forced herself to look away and asked, “Where are those two?”

“On the opposite side.” Mutou’s voice sounded muffled.

In the cavern, his voice was no longer drifting and indistinct as it had been in the thick fog above ground. Instead, it became a low rumble that echoed here.

Hearing this, Ding Qin turned around toward the opposite side of the ancient vine. Before she’d made it even halfway, she heard Jin Yan’s chattering calls. “Ding Qin? Ding Qin? You’re here too?”

Wen Qianzi was also here. He had encountered Jin Yan first, and was currently clinging to Jin Yan’s claws, flying shakily through the air while craning his neck desperately to look in this direction.

“I’m here.” Ding Qin breathed a sigh of relief. “Are you both all right?”

“We’re fine, we were just lost for a while.” Jin Yan said.

Wen Qianzi couldn’t find the right words for a moment and just kept squeaking away.

Mutou remained silent the whole time.

Jin Yan turned his head to look around, exclaiming in wonder. “Where is this? It’s really quite beautiful!”

“This is a hollow within the mountain.” Mutou’s muffled voice sounded.

The clear pool beneath their feet was filled with highly toxic poison, and the dancing, flowing fireflies were decay fireflies born from the putrid poison. Though this place was beautiful, poison was everywhere, and no one had ever been able to appreciate it before.

“I will remember this place, and I will remember you, and I will come back to visit. But right now we have urgent business—take us out of here.” Ding Qin said. “Once we’ve promised something, we won’t go back on it. While there’s still time, don’t continue making mistakes.”

Mutou said nothing.

Ding Qin pressed her lips together tightly, her slender brows furrowing. “Friends don’t deceive each other, and there’s no need to force them. Friendship develops through spending time together. You can’t force us to stay this way. I will definitely find a way to leave.”

She said nothing more, only channeling her spirit eyes to focus intently on finding a way out.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re angry. Back then, when I discovered that person had lied to me, I was angry like this too.” Mutou said faintly. “But later I gradually accepted it. What’s the point of being angry? He was already dead. I just want someone to keep me company…… You can’t get out…… You’ll accept it too……”

Jin Yan also grew annoyed. “Why won’t you listen? We’re in a hurry to save someone. What do you mean by trapping us here? You want us to accept this—how can we accept it?”

“You all have friends, you all have family. Once you’re together, you won’t think of me anymore. That person also said he was going back to let his family know he was safe, and then he never came back. When people have better things, how could they think of the ugly Mutou? Once you leave, you’ll never think of me again, you’ll never come back.”

“This place is so beautiful, yet there’s only me, an ugly monster, here for thousands and tens of thousands of years, looking at it all alone.”

Mutou’s voice echoed endlessly.

Ding Qin ignored him, only channeling divine power into her eyes, intent on finding an exit from this place.

There was no mist in the underground cavern, and Mutou seemed to have no further intention of concealing things. She quickly saw the changes in spiritual essence.

This underground hollow had formed strangely. The four walls were sealed tight with no entrance or exit, yet the poison in the pool had been formed through decay. If there was no entrance or exit, what had decayed in the pool to form the poison? Surely it wasn’t the original mountain rock and earth?

And moreover…… Ding Qin shifted her gaze to the ancient vine. How had this old vine come to be here, and how had it grown?

She looked upward along the old vine. The lustrous white branches and leaves clung to the rock cavern like pale blood vessels.

Vines have no trunk and can only creep and climb, yet this old vine grew in the center of the pool with nothing around it to climb. So it climbed itself. Vine tendrils are soft and cannot stand tall. When they fell, they piled up, and stepping on its own accumulated body, it continued upward, again and again, stacking itself into a tower until it finally reached the rock wall at the top of the cavern.

Because of this, the vine’s root base was far wider and thicker than a tree’s. It had compacted its own soft branches into such a broad foundation in order to support itself in climbing to the cavern ceiling.

Why such persistence?

Ding Qin touched the old vine’s rough bark and climbed upward along it.

Jin Yan stayed protectively by her side, and Wen Qianzi followed along with her. Mutou never spoke.

When they climbed near the top, the vine tendrils beneath their hands and feet transitioned from jet black and gray-white to lustrous, translucent branches and leaves like white jade.

With the decay fireflies’ flowing light all around, Ding Qin couldn’t help but pause for a moment. It was as if these jade branches had lifted her into a flourishing night sky.

She looked up toward the cavern ceiling. At the tips of the white jade-like tendrils, some emerald green color showed through. In the gaps between that verdant green, dots of light filtered downward.

That wasn’t the cold blue and cold green of decay fireflies—it was the warm, pale golden color of sunlight.

Ding Qin tried to pull apart the vines, but they were incredibly tough and dense. Ding Qin frowned slightly. Sword qi emerged from her fingertips, and she tried slashing once. Several vine tendrils snapped and fell into the pool water, splashing up water and cold-colored flowing light.

A pained, muffled groan suddenly echoed through the hollow. Several white jade-like vine tendrils simultaneously climbed upward, filling the position of the severed vines in the blink of an eye. Upon touching the sunlight, they curled up as if burned, emitting pale white mist. Under the sunlight diluted by the mist, they gradually turned emerald green.

Ding Qin stopped her hand. “What’s going on?”

“This vine grows on my true body.” Mutou’s low voice sounded.

“I’ve been at the bottom of this pool, soaked and corroded by poison for who knows how many years. The bones of other wild beasts around me, the weeds and random wood—all of them were corroded into this pool of clear poison over endless years. Only I, continuously soaking in the poisonous liquid, never decayed.”

“Then one day, I suddenly gained spiritual awareness.”

“It’s too cold and dark here, and too lonely. Apart from myself, there are no living creatures. No one talks to me, no one makes a sound. I often wondered, why is it only me? Why did everything else dissolve while only I remained? If it’s only me, then why did I develop spiritual awareness?”

“Later, somehow, I suddenly felt as if I had nurtured a breath of qi, so I urged it to grow and grow, and finally it produced a vine sprout.”

“I don’t know how long it took before I raised this vine sprout to climb up the stone wall. And I don’t know how long after that before I drilled a hole through that thick mountain wall.”

“That day, I saw sunlight for the first time.”

Ding Qin dispersed the sword qi from her fingertips. She could no longer speak.

Mutou paused for a moment, then continued, “But there was still no one in the mountains who could talk with me, not even a single animal that had developed spiritual awareness. It took me a long time to take human form. I can’t leave this mountain very far, but I forced myself to go down the mountain to find people I could communicate with……”

“That’s when I learned what ugly meant.”

“Please don’t leave, all right?” Mutou pleaded. “Stay. I’ve waited too long already. I can’t endure waiting anymore.”

Ding Qin sighed and shook her head. “We will come back to see you.”

Mutou was silent for a long while. “These vines feed on my vital essence. If you sever one branch, another will grow to replace it. Once you sever all the vines, you’ll be able to get out.”

“Must you do this?” Ding Qin frowned.

Once all the vines were severed, Mutou’s vital essence would be exhausted, and he would die.

“I know you have this ability. You carry a very powerful aura. But I won’t let you go.” Having said this, the vines in the cavern moved, wrapping the top of the mountain wall even thicker and more densely.

No matter how Ding Qin and Jin Yan tried to persuade him, he refused to speak again.

Because he had never seen light, he could endure darkness; because he had never felt warmth, he could endure cold. But he had already seen light, had already felt warmth—how could he endure being locked back into that cold, dark prison?

To hold onto that bit of firelight, he no longer cared about dying.

The clear pool’s floating light, the flowing decay fireflies—they gathered on the crystalline jade-like branches, dancing silently around the person and demons among the tendrils. It was both like a threat and like a plea.

This beautiful yet deathly silent hollow within the mountain was like a tomb soaked in poison.

Ding Qin looked at them sorrowfully and shook her head. She closed her eyes, and the divine seal on her forehead lit up like the sun.