Haggling with Kyung-sun proved to be a miserable experience, but Yuan still managed to walk out of the Golden Gate with a canteen filled with water, a bag of rations big enough to last three days, some rope, and a gasoline canister.

  And his revolver, of course. Couldn’t forget the revolver. Kyung-sun refused to surrender any ammo—it was worth more than water around these parts—so he would have to use his own carefully.

  Six bullets to last for an entire stretch of Thunderlands. Not the best odds, but Yuan had beaten worse ones. It wasn’t his first time trekking across one of these regions. It wasn’t that different from a journey through the wilderness; just way weirder.

  After some thoughtful consideration, Yuan decided against joining the caravan. Revolver warned him that Gunsouls worked differently from other cultivators, so he doubted its members could teach him anything. He had spent enough time serving the Stoneskin Sect to learn the basics of qi cycling anyway.

  And last but not least… Yuan simply wasn’t a social person. He worked well with Jaw-Long and Mingxia because they had his back, but he couldn’t say the same of hired guns paid to escort merchants from one place to another. It wouldn’t be the first time one of them would turn out to be a marauder scouting information on caravans to attack. Courier jobs paid well because very few people were both trustworthy and professional nowadays.

  Yuan would rather deal with the outback than keep looking over his shoulder for days. Having been his team’s scout, he knew his way around the wild.

  With his goods stored in his bag, Yuan left Gatesville without looking back. The frontier with the Thunderlands was a few hours away, but he kept a steady pace to reach it before nightfall. The spiritual veil around the region would shield him from the Moonburn.

  Yuan immediately noticed how little exhaustion he felt from the trip. Walking under the brutal sun of the wasteland should have left him winded in short order, especially after rising from the dead, but Gatesville had long become a distant mirage by the time he started to feel any exhaustion.

  My body has become slightly stronger. Or had he simply grown better at breathing and managing its energy now that he could sense qi? No wonder I’ve never seen a Second Coil getting tired.

  The idea of joining that select club and never resting again encouraged Yuan to hurry up his own cultivation. The noise of distant thunder grew stronger with each step, as did the glow of golden auroras in the distance. The wasteland slowly began to change around Yuan the closer he got to the border. Dunes rose up around him like jaws closing in on prey. The sand shifted and undulated as if moving under its own will.

  Then Yuan crossed the veil.

  There were no lines drawn on the ground with Thunderlands, no guard post to inform a visitor of when he had left the material world and stepped into a brand new realm of spirits and madness, but the shift was unmistakable. Yuan felt like a man stepping through a water shower and then jamming one’s hand into a power outlet. A faint jolt of lightning coursed across his body, immediately informing him that he had walked into a realm of pure power.

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  Reality snapped around him. The blue sky turned golden and the sun began to ripple like a ring of liquid mercury. Multicolored lightning struck the earth without black clouds to sustain them. The dunes collapsed around Yuan, revealing a grand stretch of strange and primeval badlands overtaken by a faint yellow haze. Towering rock formations oversaw immense stretches of rust dunes and the cadavers of great metal beasts from the Lost Age. The air was colder here, each inhalation jolted Yuan’s throat, and it carried so many disparate smells: oil, rusting metal, and rot.

  Entering a new patch of Thunderlands always left Yuan awestruck. Having overcome the First Coil only heightened the experience. The Thunderlands breathed qi. He could feel it everywhere around him, in the stones and in the wind. He felt closer to the Dao each time he opened his mouth.

  To think we have the Spiral Dancer to thank for such regions. Each breath reminded Yuan of the Spiral Dancer’s monumental achievement. And these places are nothing more than her traces.

  Each of the Wayfinders had become one with the Dao; and like a hurricane left devastation in their wake, as one’s ascent to the highest of heavens shook the world forever. When the Spiral Dancer merged with the universe, it adopted her Path as a karmic law. That was the goal of all cultivators seeking to ascend beyond the Seven Coils of Infinity: to merge their existence with the cosmic axiom, escape the cycle of reincarnation, and see their will define reality. To make one’s Path part of the Way.

  The Spiral Dancer once danced to enlighten the dissolute and faithless men of her time. The Thunderlands were her legacy: places where the veil between matter and spirit had grown thin enough for one to cross over into the other. Her ascension, the first of many, opened the way to the Dao to future generations.

  If only the Sky-Biter hadn’t followed her and bitten the world on his way out of it…

  The ground shook beneath his feet, so softly that most would have missed it. Not Yuan though. Years of surviving on his own had sharpened his reflexes enough to notice such tiny details, and what they meant.

  Yuan caught the mandibles aiming for his throat in a flash of speed.

  The monster, a brown centipede as long as a man, surged out of the ground in an eruption of dust. Yuan grabbed its two fangs with his bare hands and held firm as they tried to close in on his neck. Two sets of black compound eyes glared back at him with a glint of malicious intelligence.

  A centidead. Their kind always went for the throat. Always.

  The centidead screeched and tried to free itself from Yuan’s grip, to no avail. Though he considered himself a gunslinger first and foremost, Yuan was no stranger to brawls. He was strong and tall, his skin bearing the scars of the many fights he had lived through. This centidead was a young larva, its jaw soft and underdeveloped.

  Yuan used his superior strength to forcefully widen the gap between the monster’s mandibles, slowly cracking the head open, as all the while the centidead’s tail coiled around his chest in a last-ditch attempt to choke him to death.

  Too late. Yuan snapped the creature’s mandibles like twigs with one last push of strength. Thick black blood erupted from the monster’s head and stained his skin. The centidead released its grip on Yuan as it fell to the ground choking on its own body fluids. Yuan promptly finished it off by stabbing it in the eyes with its own broken off fangs. The centidead shrieked and thrashed on the ground for a good minute until its body finally turned inert.

  “One step…” Yuan clenched his teeth in annoyance. “I take one step into this place and I’m already ambushed.”

  Kyung-sun was right. No caretaker spirit in their right mind would tolerate a centidead infestation in their dominion. Their entire lifecycle involved possessing corpses and animating them as undead vessels. They served no purpose and their flesh was poisonous. They were vermin.

  At least their body plates made for pretty good armor.

  Yuan quickly checked his hands to make sure the fangs hadn’t penetrated his skin—since centidead were venomous—and then put the broken mandibles in his bag. He would sharpen them into blades later. Afterward, he carried the dead monster over his shoulder for future harvesting.

  Taming a spirit-car and leaving the region in one piece might prove a little more difficult than expected…

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