Within seconds, their vitality was drained. Then, just as in all the other cases, a foul mass began to form where their blood had pooled. Lin Mu destroyed it with a combination of sword intent and Buddhist aura, reducing it to ash.

By the time they reached The Misty Foothills in the third month, they had grown used to the pattern.

But here, the cause was different. No robed man appeared in the memories Elyon extracted. Instead, the blizzards themselves seemed alive. From the darkness, they saw faint outlines of the missing people being caught in the storm, their bodies stiffening before fading away as if devoured by the snow itself.

Cattaleya struck the ground, revealing another buried blood mass, this one so massive that it seemed to pulse in rhythm with the wind. Once destroyed, the blizzards ceased immediately, and the skies cleared, proving that the storm had been directly linked to it.

When they gathered after finishing their twentieth site, Lin Mu looked at the jade slip map hovering in the air before them. Each red mark pulsed faintly, representing a place they had cleansed. It was a haunting sight.

"They were everywhere," Elyon said quietly. "And we still don’t know what they were trying to achieve."

Daoist Chu’s brows furrowed. "These masses are not ordinary formations. They are living things, born of Qi and resentment. Perhaps sacrifices given form."

Monk Hushu nodded gravely. "Their purpose must be ritualistic. I fear the Ephemera Sect is gathering strength for something far greater."

Lin Mu’s expression hardened. "And if these masses are spreading, then it means they are testing something... experimenting on smaller scales before attempting something larger."

Meng Bai looked at the ground nervously. "We still don’t even know what these things are for," he said. "They don’t seem to be collecting energy, and they vanish completely when destroyed."

"Which makes them all the more dangerous," Lin Mu said. "Something that feeds on life, spreads corruption, and leaves nothing behind. Whatever the Ephemera Sect is planning, it involves these masses as catalysts."

As the sun dipped below the horizon, casting the plains in deep amber light, Lin Mu tightened his grip on the jade slip map. "We will continue," he said firmly. "Until we find where this all leads. The Ephemera Sect’s true lair must be connected to these events. We will not stop until we uncover it."

The others nodded in silent agreement.

They had seen too much devastation to turn back now. The blizzards might have ceased in the places they had visited, but Lin Mu could feel it in his bones, this was merely the beginning.

The following days saw Lin Mu and his companions adjusting their approach.

Instead of wandering from site to site blindly searching for traces of the Ephemera Sect, Lin Mu decided to change their focus entirely. The key, he reasoned, lay not in finding more missing people, but in understanding the dark masses and the specters that emerged from them.

These twisted entities seemed to be the heart of every incident. If they could uncover what they truly were and what purpose they served, perhaps they could finally begin to unravel the greater mystery.

They set up a temporary base within one of the abandoned hill villages that had once been buried in snow. The surrounding mountains were quiet now, stripped of the eerie chill that had once blanketed them.

Lin Mu often stood on a cliff at dusk, overlooking the thawed valleys, as he pondered the strange power that had gripped these lands for so long. The others left him to his thoughts, for they knew he was diving deep into study, trying to find an answer that could explain the inexplicable.

They had understood by now that Lin Mu worked the best when left to his own devices.

Inside the ring’s library, Lin Mu spent entire days surrounded by ancient scrolls and jade slips, sorting through knowledge gathered over years of cultivation and adventure.

The collection he had amassed was vast: tens of millions of records from ruins, sects, and long-forgotten kingdoms. He now poured all his focus into texts related to spirits, death, and phenomena tied to soul remnants.

Daoist Chu and Monk Hushu often saw faint light shining from Lin Mu’s hand during the night.

Whenever Lin Mu woke up, it was with a weary expression but eyes that shone with resolve. The material he studied was not easy to parse. In the cultivation world, the line between ghosts, spirits, and soul remnants was blurred.

There were countless classifications and contradictions, some written by scholars, others by survivors who had witnessed unspeakable horrors.

"The problem," Lin Mu muttered one evening, looking through a glowing jade slip, "is that too many kinds of malevolent spirits exist, and their differences are minute. Some can only be distinguished by how they react to spiritual fire or holy light. But these ones... they react to neither."

He set the jade slip down and rubbed his temples. "Which means they are something else entirely or a variation of an existing type."

Cattaleya leaned against the wall nearby, her expression calm but her tone curious. "Could they be the same kind of things you saw back in the Shadow Whisper Valley? The hollows?"

During their journey, she had heard many stories of Lin Mu and his past actions from the mouths of Meng Bai and Daoist Chu. She had not expected Lin Mu to have begun working on eradicating the Ephemera Sect before they even knew the scale of their operations.

Lin Mu’s hand froze midway through a motion.

Her words triggered a chain of memories: the oppressive darkness, the shrieking of malformed spirits, the marks that had been etched into the valley. The Hollow Eye Sect, which they later discovered was part of the Ephemera Sect, had used strange rituals involving broken souls.

He had seen how those rituals created entities that thrived on negative will and devoured each other to grow.

His eyes sharpened. "Perhaps. The energy feels similar. Those hollows were chaotic in form but had that same hunger for life force. It might not be a coincidence."