8: C8 Huo Yuhao:
“He…
will he be alright?” Snow Lady pointed at Huo Yuhao, who was lying in a pile of snow, and asked the Ice Empress.
“Don’t worry about me!” Huo Yuhao’s voice came from where he lay on the ground.
“Ice Empress, follow my instructions and guide Snow Lady’s spiritual consciousness over here.
The snow lotus was damaged earlier, and the portion of her soul that had transferred into it has been injured.
I can repair it.”
Within his spiritual sea, as Huo Yuhao gazed at Snow Lady’s fair, delicate face, he was momentarily stunned.
“Hey…
what’s wrong with you?” Snow Lady’s crisp voice, almost like a coquettish whine, echoed through Huo Yuhao’s spiritual sea.
“Nothing!” Huo Yuhao snapped back to reality, suddenly aware of his awkward position.
He began using his divine sense to guide spiritual energy in repairing Snow Lady’s soul origin.
Huo Yuhao’s fundamental nature was one of mother-longing—not in the sense of having any improper feelings toward his mother Huo Yun’er, but rather an instinctive affinity toward women with an overflowing maternal disposition.
In his previous life, the reason he had ended up with Tang Wutong was purely because, when she had disguised herself as a man and gone by Wang Dong, her display of toughness had left the deepest impression on young Huo Yuhao’s heart.
So when Tang Wutong revealed her true female form, what Huo Yuhao perceived was a woman who became strong for the sake of motherhood.
In this life, however, Huo Yuhao had come to understand: he had been deceived by that woman Tang Wutong for so many years simply because he had been deceiving himself.
In his previous life, even after reaching great heights, he had always maintained the mindset of an overgrown child, unwilling to shoulder many responsibilities.
With this realization, Huo Yuhao’s aesthetic sensibilities naturally shifted.
Just as he had done with Ilex, Brother Tianmeng, and the Ice Empress, Huo Yuhao held nothing back from Snow Lady, recounting his situation in full.
“Yuhao, when did you first realize that your cultivation session at the Haotian Sect back then was a murder plot orchestrated by your previous life’s father-in-law?” Snow Lady’s clear, cold voice rang through Huo Yuhao’s spiritual sea.
After hearing Huo Yuhao’s account of his previous life, Snow Lady spoke in a somber tone.
“Realizing that didn’t require much thought.
Tang San first schemed to destroy Elder I’s spiritual consciousness in my spiritual sea, and then destroyed the relics Elder I left for me.
What else could he have been trying to do?”
Huo Yuhao shook his head with a dim expression.
“It’s just that in my previous life, I was a perpetual overgrown child…
living as that dog, Dai Yuhao.
In truth, that existence was nothing more than me burying my head in the sand like an ostrich.”
At this point, his tone had turned completely cold: “In my previous life, I ultimately became the God of Emotions.
My power was the divine power of emotions, and both the medium that drove that power and the core of that power were embodied in the image of Tang Wutong.
I accepted that Princess Tang as the sublime Other to which I devoted myself, the entirety of my external existence.
With Tang Wutong by my side in that way, I could deceive myself into ignoring many things I already knew.”
“Did none of us who were by your side at that time say anything to you?” Snow Lady’s voice was filled with concern.
“If that’s the case, then that Tang San truly is a terrifying figure.”
“You all?” Huo Yuhao looked at this one who had become his soul spirit in his previous life, a mischievous smile appearing on his face.
“My mother Huo Yun’er was in his hands.
Even if you all wanted to say something to me, and even if I truly intended to act, what do you think I could have done?”
Though Brother Tianmeng, the Ice Empress, and Snow Lady—these soul spirits of his—had lived for tens of thousands of years, their unworldly minds were truly only at the level of children or young maidens, perhaps even less mature than his own past self in the end.
Tang San only needed to project a certain fatherly authority to prevent them from daring to harbor thoughts of resistance.
And in the Douluo Divine Realm, Tang San, as a Divine King, was the emperor.
Opposing Tang San was rebellion.
They dared not, and furthermore, they could not.
Huo Yuhao understood Tang San’s true character best of all, because the personality of Dai Yuhao, which had been induced into his consciousness, was itself a shadow that Tang San had projected into him.
“If that’s the case, then if the Sea God discovers that you have deviated from his predetermined trajectory of fate, he will certainly spare no effort to correct it, stopping at nothing to deal with you.
What will you do next?” Snow Lady suddenly recalled something.
After finishing the repair of her soul, which had been damaged by the snow lotus’s breakage, and sending her soul out of his spiritual sea to return to the snow lotus, Huo Yuhao said to Snow Lady as she departed: “I’ve anticipated that as well.
That’s why the main purpose of this trip is to return to the White Tiger Duke’s mansion to take care of some matters…”
“However, I’ll need to lie here for a few days.” The backlash from the Ice Empress’s Ice Explosion, channeled through his current two-ring Great Soul Master body to severely wound three Rank 9 soul engineers, had inflicted grievous injuries on Huo Yuhao.
Even as a Divine King who had lived two lifetimes, he had only barely managed to keep this mortal shell from collapsing.
After her soul recovered and returned to the snow lotus, Snow Lady did not immediately busy herself with transforming and resuming cultivation.
Instead, she channeled the snow lotus’s power to heal Huo Yuhao’s body.
As he secretly circulated his divine sense within his body to treat his injuries, Huo Yuhao watched Snow Lady slowly take form according to the white runes he had provided, and asked Ilex:
“Elder I, how confident are you that this technique will appear to the divine realm as merely a clever exploit of the plane’s rule loopholes, rather than as power from beyond the plane?”
The runes Huo Yuhao had given to Snow Lady were a resurrection spell he had cast using his divine sense through Ilex’s necromancy.
After this resurrection spell, the Snow Lady who took form would be a true human, not a snow lotus soul beast.
This method of completely abandoning a beast body to obtain a human form would obviously appear to the Douluo Divine Realm, especially to that “Tang the Pure” sitting before the divine realm’s central hub watching the mortal world, as a great heresy.
Though he had left no trace of his divine sense in this resurrection spell, Huo Yuhao remained extremely vigilant when performing it, because this was indeed power that did not belong to the mortal realm.
Hearing Huo Yuhao’s question, a smile appeared on Ilex’s face.
“Little Yuhao, you told me that the Plane Lord possesses the authority of resurrection…
With my help, what’s so unusual about you, the favored child of this plane, resurrecting a person?”
Half a month later, Huo Yuhao had recovered.
By then, Snow Lady had fully transformed into a human—a girl of about fourteen years of age.
After efficiently packing his belongings, Huo Yuhao gazed into the distance, ready to set off for the White Tiger Duke’s mansion.
“Yuhao, will this trip of yours be dangerous?” Snow Lady asked with some confusion.
Of course, there were many things she couldn’t voice aloud at this moment.
According to Huo Yuhao’s account, in Tang San’s process of creating Dai Yuhao, controlling Huo Yun’er’s soul was a critical step.
In other words, the White Tiger Duke’s mansion had always been under the watchful eye of a certain pair of eyes.
“Snow Lady, don’t worry.
I’ll explain it to you when the time comes.
This trip back to the White Tiger Duke’s mansion will be safe.”
After calming Snow Lady, Huo Yuhao looked in the direction of the White Tiger Duke’s mansion with a smile that was not quite a smile.
In this life, he hadn’t gone to Shrek, hadn’t met Wang Dong.
The Tang family hadn’t yet begun cultivating him as a son-in-law, and their schemes against him hadn’t even started.
Why would they bother orchestrating the fate of his mother Huo Yun’er’s soul—a lowly servant girl in their eyes?