Rui Yifu's mind was lapsing into the distant curiosity so given to scholars. It was not that he did not care or feel moved by the impossibilities around them such as the massive body that lay within hills of ash, or the grand empty cavern that might as well had been an empty night sky given its size. No it was simply that this point that if he truly stopped to take in the fact he was right before the body of a god and slowly descending down stairs that should not exist, that he was going to places that had been described as 'celestial afterbirth', he was certain he would have another breakdown and die on the spot, his body laying on the stairs to join the other bones that had been appearing as they further descended downwards.

This would be very terrible since he was not entirely fond of the idea of his soul rotting away inside its pearl while stuck in such a place, especially after seeing the bodies in the entry tunnel, but also because it would leave Bo alone.

Looking over at the young man, who seemed to have aged ten years in ten hours, Rui Yifu was amazed he was still conscious much less upright. Even though most of that uprightness was currently due to Rui Yifu holding him up. Bo's face was pale and strained, like he was suffering a bad fever, and the fresh burnt flesh in his eye socket caught the strange lights in an eerie manner. As if there was a pallid light flame in the back of the ruined gore.

In Rui Yifu's many lives he had never been a doctor or a healer, truthfully he was unsure how much charring Bo's eye socket would help but he could only console himself that it had been better than letting him bleed to death. He tried not to look at the lump of red hair in Bo's free arm.

The new set of stairs descent was only colored by a scant few bones, all clearly human, that laid scattered about. Unlike the bodies in the entry tunnel these ones did not seem to be placed with their mates. He could only speculate that so much time had passed that what they were looking at were simply the remnants of whatever bodies had been there.

But who had placed them there in the first place?

Another curiosity, as they went downwards, was the small piles of incense ash that lumped together around the walls. He knew it was incense because it smelled of sandalwood. The fact the scent remained after all this time was odd, but it was better than the stench of the marsh.

The ending of this set of stairs stopped at a flat grey stone, cracked with age. The shriveled threads of grass turned to dust as they stepped past them. The grey stone itself ended abruptly on a nearly equally grey field, more dead grass vanishing to nothingness as they stepped on it. Looking behind himself, Rui Yifu's eyes were met with a smooth endless wall of stone with the single carve-out of the exit they just stepped out from.

While above was shrouded in darkness, the space they were in now was really more of a very dark grey. Somehow there was enough light that Rui Yifu could make out massive structures in the distance. Some of them climbed upwards, up and up, until they disappeared into the impossible greyness above. Some structures had long ago slumped over, sprawled on the ground. Others were still quite tall, and looked somewhat akin to skeletal trunks of strange trees. Rui Yifu felt less like he was walking under the earth and more that he was in the husk of some mummified animal.

Behind it all, was the massive shape of a root, or a serpentine body, coiling downwards and plunging into the ash covered ground.

There was a path towards the structures, although it too had clearly seen better days. Made of some sort of thick black cracked material that had given up against the advances of the grass, Rui Yifu steadied himself and Bo and began the trek upon it. Rui Yifu could hear the sounds of their footsteps crisply in the air, the rustle of fabric and hair. The grinding of bones and muscles. The expansion and contraction of lungs as he breathed. The roar of blood and the war drum of his own heart. It was beginning to hurt. It was too quiet. The silence was murderous, he ground his teeth and heard the crash of a thousand stones.

"The air... it's weird, isn't it?" Bo mumbled as they lumbered together. His voice somehow overpowered all the noises Rui Yifu could hear his own body making.

Rui Yifu could feel it as a stillness that stuck to his skin, "it's like the weather before a thunderstorm." He doubted this place had seen any weather in a very long time. It more likely had something to do with the ambient energy left.

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"Yeah, that's what I mean," Bo nodded. "But there's no clouds or anything. It feels like the time I was working on a farm and everything got very quiet and still. Even the bugs shut up. I remember the sky had been clear earlier in the day but when I looked up it was pitch black with clouds. There was no wind or anything either. It felt hard to breathe. The farmer's wife told me to come inside and then she closed the door and blocked all the windows. I was twelve I think. I was scared out of my mind, the thunder rattled the entire house and by the time it was over, the fields had been destroyed."

"What you're feeling, the words you use are relating them to experiences you've already had," Rui Yifu explained as they walked. Were those structures getting closer on their own? They were increasing dramatically in size with each step, and now he could occasionally see dark humanoid shaped shadows meandering in some of those skeletal trunks. "Someone who studies this sort of phenomena would say that this area's got an ominous power in it."

"Are you saying I'm dumb?"

"No," Rui Yifu shook his head and winced at the noise of his hair brushing against his skin, "I'm just saying what others would call it. Ominous, misfortune... this is a place-" he paused as his eyes met the blank white lights of one of the dark shadowy figures. The skeletal trunks loomed over them all, some of them dotted with more of these shadows. The one in front of them was the size of a child and hovered in spot for a few moments.

"Rui-"

"Shhh..." He was unsure if it could hear them, but he knew it could see them. It was staring at them with dim curiosity, before it turned around and flowed away like smoke on the wind.

They moved into a large space between the structures and the roar of his own body ceased, becoming the much more familiar subtle background noise he was used to.

There was ash here too, incense ash that continued to carry a wift of a scent of sandalwood, but now it was joined by a strange oddly toxic smell, and the scent of burning things. The human shaped shades seemed content to stay afar, following them mostly with their eyes rather than by movement.

"Rui, I think... I think these are buildings," Bo said, pointing to one of the structures near them. This structure clearly had a door at some point, since its warped remnants laid on the three steps that lead into it. There were windows as well, empty wide things that Rui Yifu wondered how they could possibly exist with the great weight of the rest of the structure above. It must have an excellent support inside of the structure itself.

"I think you're right," Rui Yifu agreed. For a brief moment he wondered what all of these strange buildings were doing below the ground, but then his mind quickly began to spin into other possibilities. They were already in an impossible space, so who is to say they were under the mountain still, perhaps they were not under the mountain at all anymore? If humanity had been destroyed and remade several times before, what would the gods do with the remnants of the old humans? It was said it was buried within the moon, but what if there was a space between there and here, tucked past the firmament of the mortal world.

Were they looking at a tomb for the prior humans?

Or was this area merely the vestiges that had not been consumed in whatever cataclysm the gods had doomed the earlier world to?

Khenbish had spoken of a city beneath the mountain, maybe this was what he was speaking about. But if so, where had all the maddened bodies gone? This city only held harmless ghosts and agonized souls trapped in their warped bodies.

They were getting closer to another structure, this one radically different from the shorter buildings. It was a tower of white stone that continued upwards until it disappeared with a single door attached. The stone itself looked somewhat like petrified wood, yet caked with ancient dust and ash like a cheap whore trying to hide the imperfections of her face.

All around the tower were piles of dust swathed bones or black tarry sludge lumps that only vaguely held the shapes of humans. These things squirmed very slightly, pitifully. They were just like the warped bodies in the palace, stuck forever. He pulled Bo along quickly, trying to muffle out the tiny sounds of them crying out for help.

"How long have they been there?" Bo mumbled.

Rui Yifu did not want to think about it.

They had somehow entered into a narrow alleyway, the dark shades that had been standing in it quickly scattering away like frightened birds. Clear flat crystals cracked under their feet as they walked out to the other side where part of the wide path had been blocked off by a fallen building, its body sagging in on itself.

The remaining pathway had a single figure standing there.

It was not one of the shades, or even the shambling figures from far above. It was a man in armor Rui Yifu recognized as being from the later Ancient Dynasty. But the more he looked at the man, he more he saw there was not much 'man' left in it. There was no face beneath the helmet, just a swirling mass of energy that two amber sparks floated in, the way the armor hung sat it seemed more like it was suspended on a wooden dummy than an actual human body. Was this the man Khenbish spoke of?

"You carry the head of a member of the royal family," a harsh voice spoke, pointing at Zhu'er's head that Bo clutched tightly to himself. The apparition's hand moved downwards, clutching the hilt of a sword. "Why have you come?"