From Earth to Heaven, From Heaven to Earth (TGCF HuLian)

Chapter 2 From Heaven to Earth

Finding Mount Tonglu is easier than Xie Lian expects. Usually his bad luck would mean that, no matter how obvious the rout, he should still have spent at least a few months completely lost before finding his destination, but not this time, this time finding the mountain is only a matter of a handful of weeks.

Maybe it's the fact that the mountain is so obvious that even with his luck it's hard to miss an entire mountain ....Or maybe it's just that mount Tonglu is such a horrifically deadly place that finding it is actually the worse luck.

Whichever the case Xie Lian sees the peak looming in the distance and he feels the oppressive aura of evil surrounding him and he knows that he has arrived.

He's been there not even half an incents time before the first ghost attacks him and then the second and then a group of five and so on. By the evening of the first day he's exhausted and there are small cuts all over his body, and he's limping a bit from where he twisted his ancle on a rock while fighting, but Fang Xin is still in his hand and the bodies of ghosts are a trail of destruction behind him.

Honestly he doesn't want to kill any of them and his heart hurts for it. He would rather comfort them and give them a peaceful passage into their next lives, but they give him little choice. Right now it truly is kill or be killed, and while it's true that death would not stick with him Xie Lian still refuses to lie down and die before he sees Wu Ming again.

A week into his time within the lands surrounding Mount Tonglu the numbers of ghosts he encounters seems to grow less. Perhaps, he thinks, they've all gone farther in, closer to the kiln. The kiln, he knows about it now and the reason the ghosts have gathered. He's managed to figure it out listening to the words of the ghosts he's fought and killed. And so their absence seems natural.

He cannot know that, throughout the land around Mount Tonglu a whisper is spreading, about a figure all in white, with a sword like midnight in his hand. He looks like a simple cultivator the rumors says, a human easy to end, but he moves with the speed of a martial god and to cross his path is death.

He cannot know that he is not the only rumor running through the mountains , that there is a second one, a rumor of a ghost all in black. Sometimes his face is covered in bandages. Sometimes he is masked. Sometimes he carries a weapon. Sometimes he kills with his bare hands. But always he is ruthless and feral and to cross his path is death.

He cannot know how the whispers fly about what could happen when the two finally meet, or about the secret wagers placed about which one will slaughter the other and which will emerge the stronger.

But there are things the whisperers can't know either.

Another two weeks pass before it happens. Xie Lian is roused from an exhausted sleep by the sound of screaming.

After the first week when he was stabbed to death in his sleep after collapsing from exhaustion, Xie Lian has rested more often but only for shorter bouts and always inside a warding circle made from both Rouya and Fang Xin, and he's trained himself to wake at the first sign of danger, so when the scream comes he leaps to his feet. Yet this isn't the normal blood curdling scream of ghosts to which he has become accustom, no this is a sound he never expected to hear on the slopes of the cursed mountain.

The cry of human voices.

Quickly Xie Lian returns Fang Xin to its sheath and calls Rouya back to his arm and rushes off to find whatever hapless human has luck even worse than his.

It turns out that it's not one human but a whole group of them, thirty, maybe forty, standing together in a circle, shaking and holding each other, trying to protect each other. Xie Lian sees them up a steep slope from him and as he rushes up to them, warn out and exhausted and afraid that he no longer has it in him to protect these people, he hears the sound of fighting.