Chapter 7 — A Wall at the Brow Seals the Spirit Fetus

rrens were highly sentient, each with its own domain, and that they left marks: trees stripped of their bark, white bones thrust into the earth, beast heads hung on stakes, trails of urine, and the like. One need only watch for unusual marks and avoid them. On the cliff beside the underworld ape's territory there had been fist prints marking it as the ape's domain; Shen Mu had failed to see them and so blundered in. Now he was far more careful, and would not blunder into another beast's territory. Even so, blunder or not, many strange beasts still left their territories to hunt, making the Barrens a place riddled with peril. As Shen Mu ran past a marsh, he came upon a great battle between two lord-tier strange beasts: a cockscomb serpent-necked snow eagle and a marsh poison dragon python. One, a colossal thing, dove from the sky, its wings stirring up gales; the other coiled in the marsh, raising winds and waves, and their fighting shook the mountains and split the earth. Before Shen Mu could even charge into the marsh, the hurricane raised by the two monsters blew him away, and when he landed he ran into a herd of startled wild oxen and nearly got trampled to death. "I am getting farther and farther from the village..." Shen Mu's heart sank. The five behind him still pursued without letup, so that he could not turn back to the village at all. And more terrifying still — the sun was about to set. He and Granny Zhu had set out in the afternoon. Now the sun was sinking in the west, and darkness would soon fall. If he could not get back to the village before then, he would surely meet with terrible danger. "Senior Brother Qu, it is getting dark!" Behind Shen Mu, Senior Brother Qu and the other four had noticed the setting sun as well. The youth whom Shen Mu had kicked, his face uneasy, said: "Master once said the Barrens are a cursed land. After dark they become forbidden ground. We must get back to one of the villages protected by stone statues, or there is no way but death!" Senior Brother Qu shook his head: "It is too late to turn back now. We have come too far; there is no way we can reach the village we came from before dark. The darkness is as dangerous to us as it is to the little fiend. There is only one thing to do: see where the little fiend goes to hide!"