"Finally back to land...even if it's just a small island."
She hummed with pleasure, squatted down, picked up a dry conch shell, and walked further into the island.
With a few light jumps, he crossed the complex hilly terrain outside the island and entered the forest.
"Is there some sound of flowing stream?" She walked towards the source of the sound.
After a while, they found a spring and saw a bunch of berries next to it.
Xi Heng picked a few at random, placed them near the spring to wash, and put them into his mouth.
Quite sweet.
"On this island, perhaps we can replenish our fresh water supplies and have some fruits to eat, so that the crew won't get scurvy."
If too many crew members died, it might affect her efficiency in searching for immortals.
"Just rest on this island for a while."
The girl used her lightness skills to leap to a high place, and when she looked around, she set her sights on the highest peak of the entire island.
After estimating the distance, he began to walk over using light skills and stepping on the branches.
After ten minutes, they arrived at the middle of the island.
Xi Heng was casually looking at the wild scenery, when he suddenly saw a long stone staircase appearing in the middle of the mountain from the dense forest, extending upward.
"Is there anyone on this island?" The girl stopped.
"But this is Chonghai, why are there human traces..."
She did not continue to use Qinggong, but stepped on the stone steps built by her predecessors and walked slowly upwards.
The smooth and even surface of the stone steps was covered with mud, dust and fragments of branches and leaves, and there were no traces of footprints, as if they had not been used for a long time.
Halfway through, Xi Heng squatted down and touched the stone steps, but couldn't tell when they were built.
Every few dozen meters on both sides of the stairs, there are faded red logs erected, covering the stone steps.
Due to the erosion of time, the surface of the red wood is full of corrosion marks, some are even broken, and dense mushrooms grow at the roots...
"It seems like no one has been here for a long time... Did the people on the island leave after they built the stone steps?"
Xi Heng guessed silently and continued to take small steps.
The long stairs are laid flat and straight on the hillside, with few bends or turns.
She looked up, wondering where this stone staircase led to or what was at the end.
Although there are no footprints on the stairs, it seems that no one has walked there for a long time. Logically, no one lives there, so there should be no danger.
But Xi Heng still made some preparations in advance.
She took out the blood stone, chanted a few spells, and drew a few spells on the back of her hand or arm.
Xi Heng took a deep breath and continued walking.
This was the first time she saw human beings since she set sail.
Maybe this place is the so-called fairy island in the legend, and the person who created these neat stone steps is a cultivator...
After all, an island that we have sailed for so long to finally discover must have something special about it.
With this thought in mind, Xi Heng went around the turning point at the end of the stone steps, came to the back of the mountain, and climbed the last few steps.
Then, we saw a dilapidated wooden house and white skeletons all around it.
……
Chapter 91: Secret Text on the Stone Tablet
At the end of the stone steps, there is only one place where you need to turn.
After that, the stairs are no longer straight, but take on a winding spiral shape.
Follow the stairs up a hundred meters and then walk behind the mountain that you had not seen when you looked at it from a distance.
Under the clear sky, the air on the island is much fresher than on the sea.
After stepping back onto stable land and discovering some rather novel human traces, Xi Heng felt a little better.
But this slight joy suddenly dissipated when they were about to climb the stone steps to the end and saw the scene above.
"..."
Xi Heng stopped and slowly placed his right hand on the sword at his waist.
At the end of the stone steps is a flat area surrounded by lush trees.
There is an ordinary wooden house built on the flat ground. It looks quaint, has been weathered by wind and rain, and has some damages on the surface.
Neat wooden boards with holes corroded on them are fitted together to form the walls, and faded beams stand straight against the roof.
From a structural point of view, the wooden house is quite complete. Each side of the wooden board is quite neat, fine, uniform and of high quality. It is obvious that it was built by a skilled craftsman.
It was not like her, a survivor who accidentally stranded on a desert island and built a crude house with logs.
Xi Heng meditates silently.
But as she walked along the island, she did not encounter any human traces other than the stone steps and the house in front of her.
It is more likely that a few people came to the island specifically and took the trouble to build these stone steps and houses.
Then he placed the house in this deserted place... and left?
Or, spend the rest of your life in this place?
Today, the people who once lived here have disappeared.
"Also...where did these skeletons outside come from?" Xi Heng wanted to ask.
In addition to the houses on the flat ground, there are also many pale skeletons of animals that cannot be identified. They are piled up on the ground in layers like grown thorns.
There was not a trace of flesh and blood on the skeleton, and the stark white color was horrifying to the eyes.
She made a rough estimate and found that there were at least thousands of skeletons piled up on the wide flat ground of dozens of meters in front of her.
After stopping and looking for a while, you can slowly distinguish that most of these large and small skeletons scattered all over the ground are fish and birds. There are also some small animals that cannot be identified by just looking at the skulls, including several large shark skeletons.
The girl continued to walk forward, looking around at the pale skeletons around her, and guessed quietly:
"Is it the leftovers from the people who built the house? But there are too many... Why are they placed in front of the yard?"
Although these bones are now almost dried and have no smell, if residents in the past had placed the bones directly in front of their homes, they would have rotted and smelled.
"If it wasn't leftovers, maybe it was caused by magic..." Xi Heng thought.
She was also able to transform a large amount of flesh and blood into spiritual energy, leaving behind a pile of broken mummies.
Just pile up a large number of corpses here and use the Sea of Blood Technique to transform the flesh and blood into spiritual energy.
As time goes by, the remaining flesh and blood will gradually rot and disappear, leaving only a pile of bones.
"Who used the Sea of Blood or a similar spell to create the remains?"
Xi Heng saw the skeletons all over the ground blocking his way, so he drew his sword and easily cut a path through it.
Countless pieces of bones fell to the ground, and the girl stepped on the small pieces of bones and moved closer step by step.
Holding the sword firmly, he was always ready to deal with any enemy that might attack him.
After all, this place is too strange, so it is necessary to take an extra layer of defense.
But when I walked slowly halfway, there was still no sound around.
"No one?" she asked in a low voice.
She walked to the front of the house and stepped onto the rotten and brittle wooden steps.
A few gusts of sea breeze blew over, and Xi Heng walked into the room in front of him with a little nervousness.
There were many cracks on the wooden planks of the floor, and you could hear the squeaking of small animals.
As soon as I entered, an animal that looked like a weasel swooped out.
Xi Heng didn't care about anything else because there was an oval stone tablet that looked like a tombstone standing in the room, which attracted her attention.
The sun was shining brightly outside, and the colorful light shone into the room through the dilapidated roof of the tile house, falling right on the stone tablet covered with spider webs.
There are many words engraved on the surface of the stone tablet.
Xi Heng read quickly, ten lines at a glance, but found that although she knew most of the words on the stele, she could not understand them.
Compared to the square and orderly words in the book, the words carved on the stone in front of me are more like distorted words painted on talismans or amulets.
Many words seemed to be stretched to become slimmer, with various stripes added to the top, bottom, left, and right, or a line drawn in the middle that made it hard to tell what it meant...
The inscriptions were deliberately written in an extremely complex manner, some were written directly in cursive script, and the order of the words was reversed.
In short, the text on the stone tablet in front of me seemed to be encrypted layer by layer, and I couldn’t understand what it was saying.
"What is this?"
Xi Heng tilted his head.
Even if you don’t recognize the simplified or traditional Chinese characters above, you can still guess the meaning based on your sense of language.
But when these strange-looking words are arranged together in a strange way, they become completely incomprehensible.
"Red, sea, blood, ascending, cultivation, golden elixir?"
She read out the few fairly neat words she saw.
"Cultivating immortals? Golden elixir?"
Xi Heng had seen the word "golden elixir" in the Taoist books he had searched for.
In some alchemy books, the so-called golden elixir is a refined elixir that can make people become immortal and live forever after taking it.
There is also the theory of inner elixir and golden elixir, which is to use the essence, energy and spirit in the body as medicine to refine it into a holy fetus, which can transform one into an immortal.
The golden elixir is strong and indestructible, perfect, bright and pure without any flaws.
In some biographies about immortals and gods, if a mortal obtains the golden elixir, he can attain enlightenment and become an immortal.
From this, Xi Heng realized that the things recorded on the stone tablet in front of him might be some stories or techniques related to cultivating immortals.
"It would be nice if it was a technique..."
Unfortunately, she also knew that there was no way to store spiritual energy in this world now, so even if she obtained the immortal cultivation technique, it would be of no use.
"It is necessary to find a place where spiritual energy can be stored first."
Xi Heng grabbed the last perfect blood spirit stone from the inventory.
He held the spirit stone in his right hand and gently sent out a little spiritual energy, trying to absorb it into his body using the breathing method he had learned before.
But the result was still the same, the spiritual energy floated upwards unhindered.
"Tsk." Xi Heng shook his head.
He took back the spirit stone and tried to observe carefully to identify the words in front of him.
I read it for almost five minutes, but still couldn't understand it.
"The inscription looks like a talisman. There must be a lot of meaning hidden in the various lines around it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to make talismans, so I don't understand what these lines mean."
She finally took her eyes off the stone tablet and looked around at other things in the house.
After staying for such a long time, Xi Heng was sure that there was no one in the house.
The room was empty. Apart from the stone tablet in front of him, there was almost nothing else that could attract the eye.
There was a rotten wooden table on the side, with a rotten cattail leaf fan on the table, and two white candles covered with dust standing next to it. There was a pile of scraps of paper on the ground, which seemed to have been gnawed by something.
There were a few blurry footprints on the wooden floor, but they looked like they had been there for a long time.
Xi Heng walked around the room, then returned to the stone tablet and read it over and over again.
In the end, one could only roughly tell that what was written on the stone tablet was not a method of cultivating immortality.
"It's more like a record of some deeds... or maybe just a tombstone."
In any case, after wandering overseas for so long, she finally found the fairyland.
