“Strange… Kishor is nowhere in sight,” Flaxseed muttered, scratching his sparse beard. “He didn’t leave without us, did he?”
“No,” Jared replied, voice quiet yet stone-sure. “if something delays him, so be it. We proceed alone.”
He had complete trust in Kishor’s loyalty. With that verdict rendered, they veered straight for the black-mawed entrance of Darkwind Gorge.
Darkwind Gorge looked like a corner the world itself had renounced. Ink-dark gales whipped through the ravine, carrying sand as fine as ground obsidian that crackled against the stone like skeletal applause, a chorus of wronged spirits grieving in secret.
Flanking the entrance rose twin night-black statues, ten-story high, carved as snarling yakshas. Greenish flames smoldered in their hollow eyes, fixing every trespasser with a hunter’s patience. Dried blood streaked their torsos, the iron tang still clinging to the wind.
Beyond them, sheer basalt walls clawed upward, their fissures exhaling a shrill lament that shifted from a woman’s sob to a beast’s roar. Above, a ceiling of charcoal clouds crushed the sky, allowing only a bruised, reluctant light to seep through.
The instant Jared’s spiritual sense brushed the interior, a syrup-thick stench of blood slammed into him. Demonic aura swirled with the scent, coalescing into a wine-red mist that drifted between the rocks like something half liquid, half nightmare.
No grass survived upon that soil, only sponge-soft loam dark as coals. Every other step revealed a jagged splinter of bone, pale and obscene against the pitch. It felt as though the ground itself remembered every scream it had swallowed.
Further in, a silhouette of ruined buildings emerged, erected from black stone and roofed with tiles the color of bruises.
Rusted weapons and shredded tunics littered the courtyard, fluttering up whenever the gale passed, exposing a crusted floor of dried gore. The wind carried more than sand now, it carried an almost playful crunching, as if unseen teeth were working on something soft just beyond the next broken wall.
From time to time, a strangled scream leaked out, only to be severed mid-note by the gale. The demonic aura here felt hot, adhesive, greedy, every strand clung to skin like blood-heated tar.
Jared and Flaxseed hunkered behind a jagged outcrop at a neighboring saddle, spying on the mouth of the gorge.
A dozen black-armored demonic cultivators paced the threshold, blades gleaming. Even the weakest radiated late-stage Earthly Immortal power; two stood stronger still.
“Sweet heavens,” Flaxseed breathed, tongue clicking. “That’s tighter than I feared. With just the two of us, we’d be carved open before we took three steps past those statues.”
Jared answered with silence; only his narrowed eyes moved as unfurled his spiritual sense like an invisible net, inching it deeper into the valley’s diseased heart.
The valley did brim with a demonic aura, yet it felt nothing like the Malevolent Path Hall’s icy brand of soul-melting darkness.
Here the energy beat like a war drum, wild, blood-hungry, and primitive, straining against the air as though it could not wait to lap at living veins.
Jared stretched his spiritual sense across the ravine, skirting each roving patrol, hunting for the slightest trace of the Malevolent Path’s emblematic sigils.
