Pain.
The searing pain in his chest pulled Cen Yuchi’s memory back to the moment a sword had pierced through his chest. His head was groggy, his consciousness blurred, and for a while he couldn’t even tell where he was.
It took a long while before Cen Yuchi slowly regained his senses, and the scene before him gradually came into focus—he was in that strange mountain shrine on some nameless hill.
Cen Yuchi slapped his own face, fully waking himself up.
I won the bet, Cen Yuchi thought. Otherwise the Young Immortal would have had a good laugh at my expense.
Earlier, Cen Yuchi and Yin Xiaoyang had tracked the boy to a shrine, only to discover that what was enshrined inside was a piece of withered wood, while the boy himself had vanished without a trace. Through careful observation, Cen Yuchi judged that the shrine’s feng shui had been arranged by a master, and the Soul Bell had been ringing incessantly at the shrine’s entrance, while the talisman paper inscribed with the boy’s birth characters swayed along with it—which drew Cen Yuchi’s attention. The eight characters on it read “Guichou, Yimao, Jiayin, Jiaxu.” Cen Yuchi calculated on his fingers, muttering to himself, and discovered a remarkable coincidence.
The boy was born in a wood year, wood month, wood day, and wood hour—and the shrine enshrined a piece of withered wood. What connection lay between the two?
Cen Yuchi examined the shrine again: the four different guardian objects at each corner, the orientation of the entrance, the item offered on the altar… Suddenly he realized what had felt so strange to him all along—everything was too deliberate. Every object existed exactly where it could only exist, and each even had a corresponding counterpart in the opposite position. Yet if any single item were moved, the entire shrine’s feng shui would be ruined. And if all these objects were swapped… Cen Yuchi closed his eyes, the shrine’s entire structure surfacing in his mind, and then he rotated it, inverted it…
Cen Yuchi’s eyes snapped open.
That’s it! If the entire shrine were mirrored across its entrance, all this so-called feng shui would be thrown into chaos—auspicious ground turned into cursed ground, the divine altar transformed into a demon altar! If a corpse were placed on that altar, it would surely become an evil corpse; if a god were enshrined there, it would become a heretical god!
All of this design must exist solely for this inverted space. And judging from the state of the Soul Bell, the shrine’s entrance was its gateway—and the boy must be inside this space.
As for why only that boy could enter—probably because this space was attached to the shrine’s physical form, and only objects the space recognized as corresponding to something within the shrine could enter. For instance, this child born in a wood year, wood month, wood day, and wood hour corresponded to the withered wood inside the shrine. So when the boy ran into the shrine and then tried to walk back out through the entrance, he stepped into this inverted space.
Cen Yuchi had gambled on this. He sealed his own heart meridian with a withered wooden staff, tricking the space into mistaking him for withered wood, and thus let it carry him inside.
Cen Yuchi surveyed the space. It was exactly as he had imagined—a mirror image of the shrine, only the surroundings were pitch dark and vast, seemingly far more spacious than the shrine itself, though its edges were impossible to make out. Only the altar glowed with a pale, shimmering white light.
He had expected that the first thing he’d see upon entering would be the boy sitting cross-legged on the altar like a god, but the altar was empty. Cen Yuchi slowly approached to investigate, only to find many plants and vines growing around it, with what appeared to be traces of tearing. Just as Cen Yuchi was about to lean in for a closer look, a bead-sized drop of liquid suddenly fell from above, splattering onto the altar with a slap. At the same time, a strange sound seemed to come from above his head. He jerked his head up—only to see a figure suspended by several vines from the temple ceiling, hurtling down toward him!
Startled, Cen Yuchi hastily backed away two steps. Several vines shot out, flying at him like arrows loosed from a bow. Cen Yuchi leapt to dodge, but the vines pursued him relentlessly, attacking again and again. He jumped beside a wooden table and took up a defensive stance, a dark crimson glinting in his eyes.
Yet when the vines drew near him, they abruptly stopped.
They stretched out their tendrils, tentatively touching him a few times like antennae, then swiftly coiled around the table beside him instead and retracted.
The vines carried the table back up above the altar, where several more vines extended from all directions and wrapped around it as if sharing a meal. In an instant, it was “digested” without a trace.
Only then did Cen Yuchi get a clear view of what was above the altar.
Countless vines extended from the edges of the space up onto the altar, suspending a person in midair. The figure hung with head bowed, hair loose and disheveled, wearing not a single stitch of clothing—faintly recognizable as a young man.
The space itself seemed to have changed in that instant as well, growing more cavernous and darker, with the altar as its only source of light, illuminating the young man like a god wrapped in darkness.
Then, a pained moan escaped the young man’s lips, and at the same moment, the space seemed to expand a little more.
Cen Yuchi understood now. What the designer of all this had been raising was not an evil god, but the haunted house itself.
This inverted space could be imagined as a tree, and the vines as its root system, laboring to draw nutrients for the tree’s growth. And the greatest source of nourishment within this space was this wood-attribute young man.
At this thought, Cen Yuchi picked up a block of wood from the ground and threw it at the altar. Immediately, several vines detached themselves, coiled around the block, and absorbed it completely in moments.
So he couldn’t rush forward carelessly, Cen Yuchi thought. In the eyes of these vines, he was nothing but a dried wooden stick—once he stepped into attack range, he would end up like that block of wood, dying without even knowing how.
Cen Yuchi picked up a small bronze statue from the ground and threw it at the vines. At first they swarmed it madly, but upon discovering it was not a wood-attribute object, they instantly lost interest, all retracting to continue wrapping around the young man, while the bronze statue fell to the ground with a clatter.
So the vines didn’t cling deathlessly to whatever they touched.
Cen Yuchi had also witnessed the ferocity of the vines’ earlier attack—his current body was in no condition to withstand it, and forcibly cutting them was utterly impossible. At this juncture, the only option was to make the vines release the young man of their own accord.
But how could he make them give up such a huge source of nourishment? What method could make them believe the boy was not something of wood attribute?
Cen Yuchi racked his brains but came up with nothing. Just then, the boy let out another whimper, as if he could no longer hold on. Cen Yuchi was frantic with worry, pacing back and forth inside the temple, when he accidentally tripped over something and stumbled. He turned to look—it was a chair that had been beside the wooden table just taken by the vines, now fallen to the ground. Looking at that chair, Cen Yuchi suddenly had a flash of inspiration: when those vines had attacked him earlier, they had treated him as a mere dead wooden stick, but once a larger wooden table appeared beside him, the vines seemed to have judged the wood attribute in his body too weak to be worth a bite, and so they chose the larger table and abandoned him. And judging by how desperately those vines had coiled around the table, it was as if they were fighting over food. Didn’t that prove that if an object’s wood attribute was large enough, the vines would abandon objects with comparatively smaller wood attributes and instead fight over that fattest morsel?
Cen Yuchi thought it over. Objects are dead, people are alive—a person naturally carries far more energy than an object. And in this space, the only one who might be stronger than the boy was himself, a cultivator.
Cen Yuchi’s five elements belonged to fire. Fire relies on wood to be born—when wood is abundant, fire blazes; wood can generate fire, but when fire is excessive, wood is consumed. Among the five viscera and six organs, the heart belongs to fire, and this piece of dead wood on his chest happened to seal his heart meridian—was this not precisely the sign of the five elements in reversal?
And what he needed to do was use a spell to draw the vines’ attention.
Seeing that the boy was already at his last breath, Cen Yuchi activated his Dharma power, pouring all his Spiritual Power into the dead wood at his chest, and slowly walked toward the altar. The vines seemed to be slightly drawn, but they quickly returned to the boy.
Still not enough.
Cen Yuchi steeled himself and pressed the wooden stick another inch into his chest.
At this, the vines finally seemed to notice Cen Yuchi as a source of nourishment, and they split off nearly half their branches to coil him up into midair.
Cen Yuchi’s Spiritual Power flowed ceaselessly toward his chest. Pulled by the vines onto the altar, he finally saw the boy’s face clearly.
It was a very young face, perhaps several years younger even than Yin Xiaoyang, with a terribly thin frame, as if he had gone hungry for years.
More and more vines coiled around Cen Yuchi’s body, while those on the boy grew fewer and fewer, his body slowly sinking as the vines’ pull released him. Cen Yuchi used his last strength to draw a talisman on the boy’s forehead with his blood, then pushed out with one palm, sending the boy toward the position of the temple gate he remembered in the darkness.
Cen Yuchi thought: Young Immortal, you must catch him.
More and more vines greedily coiled around Cen Yuchi’s body, plundering the hard-won nourishment as if starved mad with hunger. Some of the finer tendrils even slipped into his half-open mouth, excitedly blooming into eerie, demonic flowers. The Spirit Altar still glowed with a soft white light, and Cen Yuchi hung suspended upon it, wrapped in vines, as if the radiance came from himself.
But his consciousness was gradually fading, and in his eyes, all he could see was the distant darkness at the far reaches of the temple ceiling.
Suddenly, a point of golden light appeared before Cen Yuchi’s eyes, directly above him. The darkness before him split into countless cracks, as if something had pierced through the temple roof and shattered the darkness.
The golden light grew more and more dazzling, the cracks widening ever further, until at last he saw a figure within the golden light, hand gripping a precious sword, breaking through the darkness and plummeting down toward him.
The blade pointed downward, the sword’s momentum unceasing.
The expected agony never came. It seemed a sharp blade had severed the vines coiling around Cen Yuchi’s body, while he himself fell into an embrace.
In the moment before his consciousness slipped away, Cen Yuchi made out the newcomer’s face by that shimmering white light.
“Senior Brother…”