Poison Genius Consort

iscovered that every leaf and flower had been depicted with meticulous details.
Moreover, all the plants bore a unique fruit! Long Feiye and the rest soon followed and noticed the same details.

“This couldn’t be another illusion, right?” Gu Qishao asked.

Han Yunxi’s gaze grew complicated.
“Quickly, let’s split up and look at all of the things on the walls in case we miss something.”

So many murals had to contain plenty of information.
Perhaps a clue to what they were seeking was here as well.
Everyone agreed and immediately split up.
Long Feiye and Han Yunxi remained studying the west wall and its painting of the altar.
Gu Qishao headed for the south, while Gu Beiyue and Xu Donglin took the north.
Baili Mingxiang didn’t dawdle, but quickly calmed her emotions and went for the east.
Everyone took a long while studying their murals before they made sense of it. 

The western wall showed the Poison Sect’s sacrificial altar and the origins of its forbidden grounds.
Medical City had existed even before East and West Qin united Cloud Realm Continent.
After the two dynasties were destroyed, Medical City’s power grew.
However, its own history and that of its Poison Sect stretched back a long time.
Still, the Poison Sect’s forbidden grounds were even older than that.
In ancient times, it was the gathering grounds for a group of people who worshipped poison wolves.
They called themselves the Snow Wolf Clan and worshipped the poison snow wolf because it never died or decayed.
Only one kind of mysterious power could cause their downfall.

The original Poison Sect forbidden grounds supported a pack of poison wolves in the lands surrounding the Skypit.
Later on, someone with mysterious powers killed them all off, leaving a single pup that survived by escaping into the Skypit itself.
The Snow Wolf Clan feared the person with such power, so they changed their names and hid themselves in the forbidden ground’s forests while rarely coming out.
In the western part of the forest, they erected the wordless stele as a memorial for the snow wolves, then built an altar around it for annual sacrifices. 

Snow Wolf clansmen all possessed the ability to open a poison storage space.
Through cultivation of the space, they could develop high level poison abilities.
The poison fruits in the color glazed wall were dug out from the Skypit by the Snow Wolf Clan under instructions from the snow wolf pup.
There were ten of them in total, each of which needed 300 years to blossom and bear fruit.
300 more years were needed for the fruit to mature and ripen. 

Later on, as numbers of the Snow Wolf clansmen dwindled, Medical City began claiming more and more of the Poison Sect’s forbidden grounds.
Once Medical City was officially established, it created the Poison Sect that took over these grounds.
Back then, the women of the Snow Wolf Clan secretly married the Poison Sect head as both sides shared the forbidden grounds equally.
With the Snow Wolf Clan’s assistance, the Poison Sect began cultivating all sorts of toxic plants in the grounds.
Soon enough, the sect was flourishing.

Han Yunxi couldn’t help but exclaim when she got this far.
“The Poison Sect hid all information about the Snow Wolf Clan from Medical City, ah!”

Long Feiye was more surprised about something else.
“Could Lil Thing have been the snow wolf pup who survived?”

That was all too possible! Lil Thing didn’t age or die, so Heaven knows how old it was.
As expected, Han Yunxi and  Long Feiye’s reading took them all the way to the records of the snow wolf pup growing up to be the Poison Sect’s poison beast.
Snow wolves and Snow Wolf clansmen could join their hearts and cultivate together via the clansmen’s poison storage space.

So it turned from a figure of worship to a pet by the end?

What would Lil Thing think if it recalled its memories?

Long Feiye told Han Yunxi, “Looks like you have Snow Wolf Clan blood in you too.”

“No wonder Lil Thing recognized me and was so friendly,” Han Yunxi smiled.

As the two kept looking, they found the pictures and words began to describe the Poison Sect’s Poison Gu humans.
When the members of the Poison Sect saw that the snow wolf neither aged nor died, they began to search for reasons why.
Later, they discovered a large patch of withered poison plants in the Skypit that had lost all of their fruit.
There was a total of 49 distinct types, of which 10 had been trapped in the color glazed wall.

Han Yunxi grew alarmed.
“So the Poison Sect suspected that the snow wolf gained its immortality by eating those poisonous fruit?”

Long Feiye was taken aback as well.
He thought the snow wolves were immortal from the start, not from their diet.
As they kept reading, they discovered that the Poison Sect had collected specimens from each of the 49 plants to research their toxic properties.
Combined with studies from the 10 still living plants in the color glazed wall, they discovered a pill for everlasting life.

For the sake of baffling the public, they renamed their research into a study on Poison Gu humans so people would think it was manmade.
Actually, there was nothing to be made at all as long as one ate the right pill.
That was the end of the west wall’s summary.
Han Yunxi and Long Feiye couldn’t resist moving on to the closest wall in the south to see what happened next.[1]

This secret room of four walls recorded the entire history of the Poison Sect!

In the south, Gu Qishao was all agape as well.
He looked towards the couple and cried, “I know the origins of the Perplexing Butterfly Illusion!”

1. Closest wall in the south – I’m assuming they’re going by Chinese writing, which went from right to left in the past.
Thus, after finishing with the west wall, they would end up closest to the south one.