Wu Yun closes his eyes involuntarily when he crosses the barrier separating the mortal world from the underworld. He almost expects to feel some palpable difference in the air, but he can breathe as well as he did before.
He turns around and sees the shimmering gate, showing a distorted Lian Feng and Zou Qiao on the other side.
"What is that?" Lu Meng says, coming besides Wu Yun an Lan Tian and pointing ahead at a bridge over a murky river, where several gathered people are waiting in front of tall wooden gates.
"I think we're supposed to go there too," Lan Tian says, walking ahead and pulling Wu Yun with him by their joined hands.
The landscape is dismal. The ground is grey and ashy, and each footfall kicks up a cloud of dust. A few sad leafless trees with twisted trunks dot the bare hills surrounding the dark river.
The bridge is old and dilapidated, and creaks with each step, burdened by millennia of carrying the dead.
