Garden of Shadows

by Tinalynge

  His hair was white from old age; his eyebrows large and unruly; and a long beard could be seen on his chin.

  “Welcome to the Garden of Shadows,” the slightly hoarse voice fell as the wizened man looked curiously at Xue Wei and the others.

  “I imagine that you are not average experts since you managed to get here through a trans-dimensional tunnel,” he continued. “I look forward to your performance!”

  Xue Wei nodded his head, not completely sure how to answer. He had not been given any real information about what it was they wanted from him. All of them were just putting their hopes on him, and truthfully, although he did wish to help them in exchange for a spot for him and his friends on the boat to the Demon Phoenix Empire, he was still somewhat annoyed by the lack of information concerning the things he had to do.

  “Headmaster, sir, could you please perhaps tell me what exactly it is you require from us?” he asked with a furrowed brow and a slight frown on his face.

  “We cannot explain it to you.” The headmaster shook his head in apology. “You will have to notice it on your own while staying in the academy.

  “In this academy the residential area is split up into districts for the outer students, inner students and core students.

  “Since you have come to save us, we will grant you the token to be core students. We have lectures every morning for spiritual energy class, and every afternoon for Qi refinement class.

  “You can attend them as you please.”

  Having said this, the man waved his hand and four badges appeared on the table. “These are your lasting student identity cards. Keep them with you at all time, and do not lose them.”

  Nodding their heads, Xue Wei and his friends took one each and waited for more to be said, but Elder Sun started leading them out of the room right away. They left the mansion and headed towards the core area of the northern district of the Garden of Shadows.

  The northern district was rather impressive. In the eastern district, the houses were all crammed together, but the further north they went, the bigger the residences became to even becoming pavilions.

  Every last thing was made from Black Nebula Stone and Xue Wei could feel the soul power rushing into his body, which his golden dragon ceaselessly refined into its own energy, becoming his spiritual energy.

  “Although there are classes twice a day, there are no rules about attendance,” Elder Sun explained. “You can study exactly as you please.

  “The Garden of Shadows is the only academy for spiritual energy students in the entire continent,” he continued. “Which is also why it is as massive as it is. Here you will meet many three, four and even a few five eyed experts. You will also encounter Primordial Beasts.”

  “Oh right.” he looked at Da Jia, who had followed them all along but said absolutely nothing. He had not taken a token either. “What is your plan for this guy?” he asked curiously. Xue Wei looked at Da Jia while contemplating.

  “You take him,” he said after considering for some time. “Send him to jail and give him a trial.”

  “I can do that,” Elder Sun said with a nod, and then Lin Xiao traded the ownership of the boar to Elder Sun.

  “This will be your home in the future,” Elder Sun said as he pointed at a courtyard in front of him. It was big enough to house at least ten people, but it seemed that the only ones who were going to live within it was the four of them.

  “I have already prepared servants to attend to your needs and everything should be ready for you to move into.

  “I hope that you will be pleased with our preparations,” he continued. “Originally, I would have stayed longer, but I need to deal with this big bandit leader now, so please make yourselves at home. Should you have any problems, feel free to come find me at any time.”

  Hearing this, Xue Wei did not forget to thank him and nodded his head before he turned around and looked at the courtyard in front of him.

  “This will be our home for the next year at least,” he muttered before stepping over the threshold leading into the courtyard itself.

  Chapter 6 - Death

  As they stepped into the courtyard, they quickly found that there were two servant children and a chef in the house.

  The two children and the chef were all two-eyed experts. They did not have much cultivation talent—or perhaps they never tried too hard to cultivate—so their strength was barely passable.

  “Greetings to the masters,” the two children said in unison as they saw the four friends enter. Their faces showed curiosity and reverence.

  “Who are you?” Xue Wei asked with a friendly smile on his face. The two children were both boys. They seemed to be ten years of age at most.

  They were both wearing simple white clothes and their hair was tied up with a wooden hairpin.

  “We are the servants in this courtyard,” one of the boys introduced them while stepping forward. “I am Mo Yi, this is Mo Er.”

  “Mo Yi, Mo Er, are you brothers?” Xue Wei asked with a smile on his face.

  “We are,” Mo Yi answered. Xue Wei nodded his head and then looked at the courtyard in front of him.

  The courtyard was rather large. There was a garden within the premises, and the building that towered behind the garden was rather magnificent. It was a full four floors high.

  Xue Wei began advancing down the road towards the house, and the others followed behind. Mo Yi and Mo Er stayed behind, looking at one another with a strange glance before they once more caught up with the group, walking behind them in a respectful manner.

  Xue Wei kept an eye on these two children. There were still many things he was unaware of after coming to the Garden of Shadows, but he had already understood that there was a lot of scheming in the royal family, so it would most likely be no different here.

  These two children might seem harmless, but who knows whether or not they’d one day turn out to be two monsters that had hidden all along.

  Not to mention, they would be the perfect spies. Even if the Headmaster had only sent them without ulterior motives, it was still troublesome, and thus Xue Wei was keeping an eye on them to see what exactly their plans were.

  However, although Xue Wei was keeping a keen eye on them, they behaved exactly as one would expect of a servant, and the two boys quickly led them to the kitchen to greet the chef, before they showed them to their rooms.

  “The fourth floor is the cultivation room,” Mo Yi explained. “It is the best place within the entire place to cultivate.

  “The third and second floors consist of living rooms, one for each of you, and the first floor contains the kitchens and rooms for us servants.”

  Xue Wei nodded his head and then went upstairs, followed by his four friends. All of them looked at Xue Wei curiously as it was clear that he was thinking about something, but he did not speak it out loud so they did not ask.

  Xue was not alone in glacing skeptically at the two Mo brothers; Bai Tianyi also gave them a passing glance, and both brothers also looked curiously at the white-haired young boy who seemed to be as old as them but was already a student despite being a two-eyed individual.

  In the end, Bai Tianyi and Lin Xiao ended up residing on the second floor and Xue Wei and Hei Gou took up residence on the third floor.

  Just as they were prepared to go out, Mo Yi and Mo Er arrived next to them. “Do you wish for us to draw a bath for you? Or perhaps you wish to use the hot spring bathhouse that is on the first floor?”

  “The hot spring bathhouse?” Xue Wei was confused.

  “On the first floor, leading out to the garden, there is a hot spring bath. It is rather large, definitely able to allow for all of you to swim in it at the same time,” Mo Yi explained.

  “It is a place to relax and gain strength. I can prepare it for you now if you wish.”

  “No thank you,” Xue Wei answered with a smile. “We will take a bath when we return.”

  Afterwards, Xue Wei, Hei Gou, Bai Tianyi and Lin Xiao all left the courtyard a
nd started strolling around the residential area of the core students.

  No matter where they went, all the courtyards looked the same. Four to six people lived in each courtyard, and they all had the same privileges.

  The people they passed by looked at them curiously, and Xue Wei and the other three returned the same glances at equal measure—or at least they would have if they each had more eyes.

  Although the majority had three eyes, there were also quite a few with four, but they did not come across anyone with five.

  “Guys, we have to be careful,” Xue Wei suddenly said to his friends. “Especially at home. I feel that Mo Yi and Mo Er are not as simple as they seem.”

  “They are just two small kids,” Lin Xiao said with a frown. “How can they not be simple?”

  “I don’t know,” Xue Wei shook his head. “There is something about them that makes me feel uncomfortable.”

  None of the other three laughed at Xue Wei for saying that, and even Lin Xiao, who had defended the two boys, frowned.

  “If that is what you think, then we must be careful,” Hei Gou said solemnly. “But what is their aim by getting close to us? For what purpose would spies be sent to be servants of insignificant two-eyed cultivators?”

  “I do not know yet,” Xue Wei sighed. “I neither know what their purpose is nor do I know whether it’s beneficial or harmful to us, but I do know that we will know soon enough.

  “I have a hunch that they are doing all in their power to build relationships with us so they can keep surveillance on us and give our information to a third party.”

  Hei Gou’s face was unsightly, Lin Xiao’s showed some disbelief, and Bai Tianyi’s had not changed at all.

  Xue Wei was pondering. It seemed that their mission was fairly easy on the surface. They had to solve a mystery within the Garden of Shadows, but that was where the simplicity ended.

  “We have no idea what exactly is expected of us. We do not know if someone is sick, or if someone has gone mad. We don’t even know if it is a person or a spirit. Heck, it could even be a tree considering the fact that we are in a place called ‘Garden of Shadows.’

  “We do not know the symptoms we need to solve. We do not know anything at all!” Xue Wei was frustrated.

  “To understand this issue, we have to slowly enter the rest of the academy and slowly gain an understanding of this place. That’s why I decided for us to start exploring it already.”

  With that being said, they resumed their stroll through the area, their eyes observing everything around them with great interest.

  All the core students of the academy focused on spiritual energy, and all of them were at least three-eyed with the majority being four-eyed. There were no Primordial Beasts or two eyed cultivators, but the sudden appearance of Xue Wei and his team caused a great shock to spread among them.

  It was impossible to enter the core section of the residential area unless you possessed a core emblem, and since these people had appeared here, it was clear that they possessed one each. But this was the first time in history that two-eyed experts were allowed into the academy’s core section. It was simply unbelievable and while many held curiosity towards these people, there was also a group filled with contempt.

  Fortunately, no one stepped out to bother them or cause them any problems. All of the students just observed them. Even if they felt contempt towards them, they did not find any trouble for them, something that stunned Xue Wei.

  Back in Chang’an, it would have been impossible to not be met with violence or confrontation from others in such a situation.

  “We have finished walking all the streets in the residential area for the core students, and I haven’t found anything amiss,” Bai Tianyi said with a frown.

  “Although the core students are looking at us as if we were monkeys in a cage, they have not caused us any problems, and nothing suspicious has happened either.”

  “Let us go to the Soul Tower,” Xue Wei decided, his words stunning the others. “Xiao and Gou go back to the courtyard and cultivate. You will have no benefit from the Soul Tower at all, so Bai Tianyi and I will go check it out.”

  Lin Xiao and Hei Gou hesitated for a moment before they nodded their heads and left, heading back to their courtyard. Before they left, Xue Wei warned them to be careful of the two Mo brothers and to withhold discussing delicate matters around them.

  Looking at the two guys who vanished into the distance, Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi sighed. Those two were good friends, but they were quite dense and also rather naive.

  “I feel an oppressive aura around here,” Bai Tianyi said as they reached the Soul Tower. His brows furrowed into a deep frown.

  “The aura is different from the soul power and spiritual energy that we need. It is much more similar to my sword energy; so to say, what I can sense is in the family of the daos.”

  Xue Wei also frowned when hearing this. The dao was something he was not completely unfamiliar with, but at the same time he had not personally come into contact with it. All he knew was from what Bai Tianyi and Lin Xiao had told him.

  “There is a dao around here? Can you sense which dao it is?” he asked Bai Tianyi. Although Bai Tianyi only had the dao of sword now, it used to be different when he was a human.

  “If I am not mistaken, it is the dao of death,” Bai Tianyi’s face was grim, his eyes solemn. It was clear that something serious was happening within this Garden of Shadows since the dao of death had appeared.

  “Is it coming from the Soul Tower, or is it coming from outside of the tower?” Xue Wei continued to ask.

  Bai Tianyi took a moment before he answered, “I think it comes from the top floor of the Soul Tower.”

  At that moment, it felt as if a mountain had been dropped on Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi’s shoulders. An invisible pressure wrapped around them like a blanket, pressuring them more than they had ever been pressured before.

  Unable to handle the pressure, Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi both quickly retreated a few steps, and the pressure quickly dissipated again. If it was not for the shock they saw in one another’s eyes, then they would never have believed it to be true.

  “Do we enter?” Bai Tianyi hesitated as he looked at the gate to the Soul Tower. Many students were walking in and out in succession, none of them having sensed the heavy pressure that Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi had been subject to just moments before, and all of them were happily cultivating.

  “We enter,” Xue Wei clenched his fists and made a decision. “If the owner of this power wanted us dead, then we would already be dead,” he said reasonably.

  Bai Tianyi hesitated for a moment, but feeling that Xue Wei was probably right, he nodded his head. “Let us see what makes this Soul Tower so famous then!” he exclaimed excitedly. Without further ado, he followed Xue Wei over to the entrance.

  There were no guards, there was just an open door, and anyone could enter and leave as they pleased. While everyone else seemed casual and carefree, Xue Wei and Bai Tianyi both moved forward with caution. Soon, they had entered into the actual Soul Tower.

  Chapter 7 - Soul Tower

  The moment he stepped into the Soul Tower, Xue Wei felt a heavy pressure once again bearing down upon him, but it was much different from what he had sensed earlier.

  This pressure came from the sheer concentration of soul power inside the tower. It was dense energy that poured into his body like a flood through a broken dam.

  The steps Xue Wei took were heavy. His entire body felt as if it was being pressured downwards, as if the gravity within the tower had been amplified manifold compared to outside.

  The first floor did not have that many students on it. Those that were on this floor were mainly students coming down from the second floor, those who had just finished cultivating, and those who were on their way to cultivate.

  Xue Wei was astounded that the students were this used to the heavy pressure, but although it was heavy and making it hard for Xue Wei to move, it was not enough to crush him.
With a glance at Bai Tianyi, who looked like a cat that had just caught a mouse, he shook his head and moved towards the stairs up to the second floor.

  Xue Wei did not rush there like all the other students within the tower. He took his time to get used to the change in pressure.

  Bai Tianyi was walking easily as if the pressure was nonexistent. He flashed a great smile and he was happily glancing in every direction of the first floor in the hopes of understanding how they had managed to amass this much soul power.

  One has to remember that soul power was the power of one’s soul. When one dies, the energy that is left in the soul will be released. If one died young from an accident or disease, the subsequent release of soul power is greater than what would be left behind from the death of an old man whose lifespan runs out.

  But one thing was certain: soul power came from the dead. To have generated this much soul power in one place, how many people had to have died to make it possible? Not to mention that the atmosphere outside of the tower was permeated with dense soul power because of the Black Nebula Stones.

  How many people had to have died to make this happen? Xue Wei frowned. He felt that this Soul Tower, which was great for cultivation, was not as simple as it seemed.

  In fact, although the speed of cultivation was much faster here than outside, he could not help but feel that there was something wicked about it.

  He was not the only one who had this thought, as the thought also surfaced in Bai Tianyi’s mind, but the latter did not care. He had lost his humanity and alongside it his empathy. He did not care if the entire continent died as long as he and his friends were fine.

  Since this was the case and, exhilarated about all the soul power that was rushing into his body, Bai Tianyi was not polite and refined it into spiritual energy as fast as he was able.

  Xue Wei pondered for some time. He looked around the area and found that there were many unrecognizable runes inscribed on the wall of the tower.

  They were clearly some sort of formation, but they were different from all the formations he had practiced in the past. Frowning, Xue Wei was unaware of what exactly he should think, but after considering it for a moment, he decided that it was time for him to head to the second floor.