Chapter 184 - The Procession and the Broken Outposts
And so, the procession moved again.
Su Bai walked at the front, while the red mist spread ahead of him in uneven layers.
Those who still could not fight properly were not allowed to stand at the front no matter how unwilling they were. They were assigned to medicine support, formation assistance, material sorting, and warning relay.
They sat obediently on Lin Weiyang’s disc platforms.
The two cocoon victims woke along the way. It happened not long after the procession left Outpost No. 3.
"They woke up," one support cultivator said in surprise.
Liu Meng’s eyes brightened.
"The Soul-Nourishing Origin Pill worked."
Her voice was not loud, but the pride inside it was impossible to hide.
The two awakened cultivators were still weak. Still, they were awake. That alone was already a blessing.
Several support cultivators explained what had happened in the simplest way possible.
The two newly awakened cultivators listened in silence for a long while.
Then one of them slowly asked, "How long were we unconscious?"
The support cultivator thought about it.
"Long enough to miss the terrifying part."
The other support cultivator corrected him, "No, they woke up just in time for the next terrifying part."
The two awakened cultivators looked even paler.
Su Bai did not stop the journey because of their awakening.
Stopping in the mist for too long was not kindness. It was giving the Sanctuary time to become creative.
He only ordered the support group to watch them carefully and told Liu Meng to check their soul stability whenever the procession paused.
The two victims remained on Lin Weiyang’s platforms.
At first, they looked dazed.
Then, Su Bai led the group into the first ruin.
After that, their eyes slowly recovered light.
Treasures had a remarkable effect on weak spirits. Especially when those treasures were being sorted openly, recorded clearly, and distributed fairly.
The first ruin was a collapsed weapon storage hall half-buried beneath miasma-stained stone.
Its gate had cracked long ago, but the inner shelves remained partly intact because several star-metal support beams had resisted corrosion.
Broken swords, spearheads, shield fragments, armor plates, and heavy black strips of unknown ancient metal were scattered across the floor.
The deeper they went, the more obvious one thing became.
The outer parts they had searched before were only scraps.
Here, the ruins began to contain real battlefield materials.
Lin Weiyang knelt beside a half-buried metal plate and stroked the corroded surface with the reverence of someone greeting an elderly ancestor.
"This section is not ordinary star-metal," she said. "It was refined with sealing intent. The outer layer is damaged, but the inner structure is still usable."
Chen Feng looked at the blackened plate.
"It looks like a burned door."
Lin Weiyang turned to him slowly.
Chen Feng immediately stepped back.
"I respect the burned door."
"That is better."
Zhuge Jing ordered several cultivators to record the locations and quantities, while Su Bai divided the gains according to the previous agreement.
Su Bai received a larger share than before, partly because everyone had agreed he deserved it, and partly because several cultivators solemnly insisted that robe expenses counted as battle consumption.
Su Bai tried to refuse that reasoning once.
The group looked at his sleeves.
He stopped.
Sometimes arguing with witnesses was useless.
The newly awakened victims watched this distribution from the floating platform with stunned expressions.
One of them whispered, "Is treasure distribution always this peaceful?"
A support cultivator shook his head. "No. Usually people fight."
"Then why is no one fighting?"
The support cultivator pointed at Su Bai.
The awakened cultivator understood immediately.
Peace was sometimes just another form of deterrence.
They continued moving.
Several miasma beasts tried to ambush them between two broken halls. Before the beasts even shifted from the ruins, Su Bai had already raised one hand.
"Left side. Three crawling under the broken wall. Two above the arch. One pretending to be a stone."
Everyone immediately moved.
Ji Ruyue froze the ground beneath the crawling beasts. Qin Baoshan led the shield cultivators to block the archway. Han Yuelin looked at the stone that was pretending to be a beast, or possibly the beast that was pretending to be a stone, and tapped once with his sword.
The stone collapsed.
A young cultivator near him stared.
"That one was actually a beast?"
Han Yuelin smiled. "It was tired of pretending."
The battle ended before it properly began.
After several more encounters like this, the procession gradually became more confident.
Traveling through the Fallen-Star Sanctuary with Su Bai at the front was completely different from stumbling through it blind.
Beasts were detected before ambushes formed. Miasma flow was avoided when it thickened strangely. Corrupted structures were approached from safer angles. Ruins with treasures were not missed. Ruins with traps were identified early enough that the traps could only feel lonely.
A sword cultivator from a smaller sect muttered, "So this is what it feels like to walk through a forbidden land with a living map."
The cultivator beside him nodded. "No wonder people in ancient stories fought over guides."
"Our guide also absorbs miasma."
"Then Brother Su is a map with purification function."
"Do not say that out loud."
"I know."
And throughout the journey, the procession continued showing proper respect for the dead.
Whenever they found fallen cultivators, Su Bai would pause.
The Vanguard’s Entropy-Detonator allowed him to catch scattered memories from the dead.
Broken flashes entered him.
Su Bai gathered these fragments silently and adjusted the route.
Zhuge Jing watched.
He watched Su Bai pause before remains, watched him choose paths afterward, watched the procession repeatedly avoid danger and find useful sites with impossible precision.
For a while, Zhuge Jing said nothing, then his eyes flashed faintly.
He had realized something. The pattern was too clear. Brother Su’s route did not only rely on spiritual sense. It also changed after encountering the dead.
’Interesting. Very interesting.’
Zhuge Jing’s fan opened slightly.
He smiled beneath his fan.
He did not ask.
Some people hid secrets poorly. Some hid them by silence. Su Bai hid his secrets by doing something absurd enough that everyone forgot to ask the correct question.
The more Zhuge Jing thought about him, the less he understood.
That made things more interesting, not less.
By the time the procession approached Outpost No. 2, the mist had thickened again.
The mood changed before they even saw the outpost.
Several survivors from Outpost No. 2 who had joined the procession grew tense. Their hands tightened around weapons. One of them swallowed hard, staring into the haze ahead as if expecting the place to remember him.
Su Bai slowed his steps, then the ruins appeared.
Outpost No. 2 was broken.
The boundary line that should have shimmered faintly around the outpost was gone. The defensive formations had collapsed into blackened scars across the ground. Stone walls had been torn open. Formation pillars lay shattered. The place where the Boundary Pillar should have stood was empty.
It was... uprooted.
The base of the Boundary Pillar had been ripped from the earth, leaving behind a deep circular wound filled with dried red-black residue.
The procession fell silent.
At that moment, the enemies moved.
Miasma beasts emerged from broken alleys and collapsed halls. There were more than expected, and their bodies were harder, denser, more swollen with Ashen-Blood power.
Behind them stood several Soul-Bloom Returnees, their human-shaped figures half-hidden by the mist.
And at the center of the ruined outpost, where the Boundary Pillar had once stood, there was a makeshift altar.
A flesh fragment sat upon it.
This was the first time most of the procession had seen one clearly.
During the attack on Outpost No. 3, Su Bai had taken the flesh fragment away too quickly. The others had felt its effects, but they had not truly looked at the source.
Now they saw it.
It was not large. That made it worse.
It beat slowly, like a heart that belonged to something too large to fit inside the world. Every pulse released a faint wave of Ashen-Blood Miasma that spread through the beasts and Returnees nearby.
The young cultivators felt dread settle over them. Fear of realizing how much damage something so small could cause.
Su Bai’s eyes cooled.
He did not wait.
Frictionless Phantom Step.
His figure blurred across the broken ground.
Several Returnees turned at once.
But they were too late.
Su Bai appeared beside the makeshift altar. Nether Threads cut through the bone nails and wrapped around the pulsing fragment.
The pulse faltered.
Su Bai seized the fragment. The flesh twisted in his grip.
Ashen-Blood Miasma tried to erupt.
The Petrified Calamity-Magnet appeared in his other hand.
The miasma curved toward him and vanished into his body.
The procession watched with complicated expressions.
It was one thing to know Brother Su could do this. It was another thing to see him steal the heart of the enemy’s altar before the battle had properly begun.
Before entering Outpost No. 2, Su Bai had already said to Zhuge Jing, "If the human figures follow me, let them. Hold the rest."
At that time, Zhuge Jing had only nodded.
Now everyone understood why.
The Soul-Bloom Returnees moved.
Most of them abandoned their positions immediately and rushed toward Su Bai.
Their mouths opened, releasing overlapping curses and commands that did not belong together. Some used sword footwork. Some formed miasma seals. One tore its own shoulder open to release red-black threads toward the flesh fragment in Su Bai’s hand.
Su Bai turned and ran into the mist.
He looked like a thief who had stolen the enemy’s ancestral tablet and expected to be chased.
The Returnees chased him.
Zhuge Jing’s fan snapped open.
"Let them go. Do not chase Brother Su’s side."
The order was calm, but several cultivators still needed half a breath to accept the sight of their strongest person running away with a pulsing flesh lump.
Zhuge Jing continued, "Shield line, block the beasts. Formation cultivators, isolate the remaining human figures. Sister Ji, freeze the left passage. Sister Tang, poison the right corridor. Sister Lin, mark anything trying to rebuild the altar."
The procession moved.
The miasma beasts were still stronger than ordinary beasts, but without the flesh fragment on the altar, the strengthening slowed almost immediately.
Their movements lost part of their coordination. The Returnees that remained behind were dangerous, but fewer in number. Binding groups moved with far more confidence than before.
Tang Clan threads flew.
Ji Ruyue’s frost sealed movement.
Qin Baoshan’s shield line pushed enemies away from the wounded.
Lin Weiyang’s mechanisms crushed the altar’s remaining formation marks with the enthusiasm of someone breaking a rival’s poorly designed machine.
Meanwhile, Su Bai’s side vanished into the red mist.
The Returnees chased, then the mist shook.
Several overlapping screams and curses rang out in the distance.
The procession pretended not to hear too carefully.
After a while, the mist quieted.
A little later, Su Bai returned wearing a fresh robe.
His expression was calm, and slightly satisfied.
Several cultivators looked at him, then at the mist behind him, then at the robe.
No one asked. Again.
By then, the battle inside Outpost No. 2 had also ended.
The beasts had been cleared. The remaining Returnees had been bound, stilled, or dealt with under Zhuge Jing’s command.
The makeshift altar had been broken apart.
But then, Outpost No. 2 could not be repaired.
The Boundary Pillar was gone.
No amount of temporary formation work could turn the place back into a safe zone without replacing what had been uprooted. Even Bai Zhi’s lotus barrier could only create short-term protection. It could not become the outpost’s foundation.
Thankfully, after Su Bai took and dealt with the flesh fragment, the miasma around Outpost No. 2 thinned noticeably.
The pressure lessened enough that Bai Zhi could maintain a lotus barrier while the others finished collecting records and materials.
"We cannot stay here," Zhuge Jing said.
Su Bai nodded. "We take what can be taken and leave."
No one argued. Outpost No. 2 was not a place to rest.
Su Bai led them away.
Not far from the ruined outpost, hidden behind two collapsed stone ridges, they found another structure half-buried in the mist.
It was an old storage hall.
The outer wall had cracked, but the inner chamber remained sealed by a faint formation that had not completely died.
After Lin Weiyang, Zhuge Jing, and several formation cultivators worked together to open it, the procession found weapon materials, sealed boxes of formation stones, several intact jade slips, and corrosion-resistant cloth rolls.
The last item made everyone look at Su Bai.
Su Bai looked back.
No one spoke.
Lin Weiyang quietly moved the cloth rolls into the group distribution pile and wrote a note.
Special priority candidate: Brother Su.
Su Bai pretended not to see it.
They rested there instead of Outpost No. 2.
The structure was not a true safe zone, but it was enclosed, defensible, and no flesh fragment was pulsing at its center.
After the day they had experienced, that was enough to feel luxurious.
The awakened cocoon victims sat near the support group, staring at the piled treasures with expressions that suggested their souls were recovering faster than expected.
One of them whispered, "Did we wake up into a rescue mission or a treasure expedition?"
The support cultivator beside him thought about it.
"Yes."
That answer was apparently acceptable.
The procession rested, treated injuries, recorded gains, reinforced the storage hall, and prepared to move again.
After that, the same rhythm continued.
Su Bai led.
The procession followed.
Ruins appeared through the mist one after another. Some held only broken stones. Some held records. Some held materials.
Whenever beasts remained, the procession handled them.
Whenever a ruin contained treasures, the group sorted them.
Whenever they found skeletons of dead cultivators, Su Bai paid his quiet respects, and Zhuge Jing smiled a little more behind his fan.
The method was strange.
It was also effective.
By the time they approached the area where Outpost No. 1 had once stood, even the newer cultivators had begun to understand the rhythm.
Find the danger.
Let Brother Su steal the worst part.
Do not ask what happens in the mist.
Clear the rest.
Collect treasures.
Respect the dead.
Outpost No. 1 waited ahead, deeper in the red haze.
Its boundary had failed long ago. Its ruins were older, darker, and quieter than Outpost No. 2.
Su Bai stopped at the edge of the broken road.
Behind him, the procession slowed as one.
No one laughed this time.
Even the robe jokes faded.