Consciousness kept sinking,
carrying with it a nauseating dizziness.
When Qin Yi's consciousness awakened once more, what his cheek felt was the constantly swaying icy touch of a metal surface, along with the sound of conversation that drifted hazily into his ears from not far away.
"@#￥%……&*"
"*￥*）%&*@￥"
"&*%￥#@%"
"........" Qin Yi.
Not again?
Qin Yi thought to himself silently, trying to open his eyes just a crack to observe his surroundings, but this time he found that he couldn't even move his eyelids, and the dialogue reaching his ears was completely unintelligible to him.
Still, no emotional fluctuations.When you've lived this kind of life long enough, you get used to the possibility of dropping dead the moment you open your eyes.
But this time, it seemed he couldn't even open his eyes.
Both parties in the conversation were men, but both voices were unfamiliar. Qin Yi listened to the dialogue beside him while beginning to try and identify the language.
After a dozen or so breaths, Qin Yi found a similar language in some corner of his memories.
The "Elegant Speech" used by the nobles of the Central Plains.
During the refugee tide, there were occasional aristocrats who would parade through the market, setting up stalls to distribute alms. Qin Yi had listened to the words they spoke, and they were somewhat similar to what was reaching his ears now.
Many of the combined syllables matched up.
So, why would someone be speaking Elegant Speech beside him?
Among all the currently known information, there was only one person with the channels and capability to place Qin Yi in this kind of situation, the mother-daughter pair surnamed Meng.
The Central Plains Elegant Speech ceased after only a few brief words, and Qin Yi continued trying to move his body. After failing again, he directly entered standby mode.
He had too little effective intelligence on that Meng mother-daughter pair, and what he did have was mixed with a good deal of false intelligence originating from that old sister surnamed Ruan.
The only thing he could be certain of was that the other party had been following the two siblings since the refugee tide.
Under these circumstances, even if he racked his brain, it would be useless. He could only adapt to circumstances as they arose, and if there was truly no way out, then he'd just wait to die.
Qin Yi silently counted numbers in his heart, calculating time. When a quarter of an hour had passed, he suddenly noticed that his body began to move on its own.
His hands and feet swayed, his mouth opened, and finally, the eyelids that couldn't move were slowly opened as well.
What's going on?
In an instant, countless thoughts surfaced in Qin Yi's mind, but when his eyes were fully opened and he clearly saw the scene before him, only one thought remained.
What met his gaze was a pair of infant's hands, small and rosy.
This was... his memory?
The segment forgotten due to his brain disease?
An infant's brain couldn't bear the massive information of a previous life, and Qin Yi's memories before the age of four were completely blank.
As he pondered, his field of vision began to sway slowly.
The surrounding environment gradually came into view.
A moonlit night, an official road through the forest, a collapsed ancient tree, a toppled carriage, corpses scattered everywhere.
It seemed an assassination had taken place here.
Infant Qin Yi's gaze locked onto the only living creature in his field of vision.
It was a man kneeling on one knee beside a headless female corpse, dressed in a sky-blue scholar's robe, embroidered with faint gold patterns of strange beasts in dark threads, not stained with a single speck of dust.
Ho... so that's where it was.
Qin Yi had always remembered that he seemed to have seen a man who could slash out over a dozen sword shadows with a single blade, but he could never recall where exactly he had seen him.
The man in the scholar's robe knelt on one knee on the official road, his state somewhat similar to that of the male ape from earlier, standing silently beside the headless graceful female corpse... well, not exactly headless, because the head was right there beside her. The veil she wore had been severed along with her neck, and the half of her face that could be glimpsed could be called breathtaking.
It should be winter, and the woman should have just died, as the large pool of blood flowing from the severed neck was still steaming with warmth.
Qin Yi rapidly absorbed the information in his field of vision.
From clothing to decorations, to the appearances of these people, but there was no usable information. Neither the surrounding corpses nor the scholar-robed man bore any kind of emblem-like mark that could prove their identity.
He couldn't even tell whether the decapitated woman and the scholar-robed man had come to save him or to kill him.
In the silence,
the scholar-robed man suddenly turned his head, his indifferent gaze looking toward him.
Qin Yi instinctively assumed the scholar-robed man was looking at the person holding him, after all, there was no way an infant like him could have decapitated the woman.
But their gazes met,
and,
the scholar-robed man carried overwhelming killing intent.
Although he didn't know why the other party was targeting an infant like him, it at least confirmed who was friend and who was foe.
In this memory, the person holding him was indeed an ally.
Qin Yi thought to himself.
After their gazes locked, before he could take a closer look, a nauseating, dizzying negative sensation, like his heart being squeezed, interrupted Qin Yi's thoughts.
His vision gradually became stained red, and liquid flowed from his mouth and nose.
It should be blood.
The infant version of him seemed to already possess that same indifferent calmness of his present self. Even in such pain, he didn't let out so much as a single cry.
Qin Yi, immersed in the memory, paid even less attention to this dying sensation, instead feeling a spark of curiosity.
With just a single look, he was reduced to a near-death state.
How did he do that?
Was this scholar-robed man also a Calamity Seed?
Considering the heretical scripture before he lost consciousness, and what the rich girl had said about him being able to cut down a tree, this might also be some kind of unknown mystical technique.
This information was important.
The martial power of this world was no longer limited to the physical plane.
The memory film continued playing forward.
Everything in his field of vision rapidly shrank, and a sense of weightlessness suddenly swept through his entire body. The man holding him had actually thrown him directly up into the night sky.
Ugh....
Both sides wanted him dead?
Looking at the distance of at least a hundred meters from the ground, Qin Yi reasonably doubted the situation in his memory, but as far as the eye could see, he could understand the motive of the man who had thrown him.
The man was burly, with long hair cascading behind him, clad in heavy black armor, but at this moment he only had one arm left. A broken sword had pierced through his armor and was embedded in his abdomen, and blood was uncontrollably gushing from the side where his severed arm had been.
The two had clashed.
Extremely fast,
so fast that even from his VIP observation deck in mid-air, Qin Yi couldn't see clearly, only catching a glimpse of that streak of sword-light that lingered in his memory even through his brain disease episodes.
The clear radiance of the full moon spilled over the forest canopy,
sword light flowed like winding streams, spreading outward in all directions with the scholar-robed man at the center, and at a certain moment suddenly diverging, ultimately diffusing into a brilliant forbidden zone of sky-blue.
Wherever the sword light touched, centuries-old ancient trees were sliced through like tofu, the ground began to sink from the sword marks, and the howling of the sword's cry even formed a visible ripple of sound waves spreading outward in all directions!
And just as this momentum was about to reach its peak,
Hmm—
Everything suddenly came to a halt.
The sword's cry,
the stream-like flowing sword shadows,
that spherical forbidden zone of sky-blue,
all froze and dissipated in an instant like an illusion.
At the center of the sunken road,
the blood-soaked burly man in black armor breathed rapidly. His only remaining arm, casually tossing away the body of the scholar-robed man whose head had been crushed, his body unconsciously swayed, but he still forcibly propped up his barely-standing frame and looked toward the infant that was rapidly falling toward the ground...