Past moments of beauty fractured inch by inch before his eyes. Sang Hua’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he stood amidst a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, his knees rotting like dead wood, his hands trembling so violently he could barely hold his long sword steady.
Gazing upon the utter devastation before him, Sang Hua suddenly threw his head back and laughed aloud. Yet as he laughed, his voice failed him, and he raised an arm to block his eyes in a gesture of self-deception.
“A-Yi, even calling me Master has become a deception to you now.”
“Rather than fighting the Immortal Venerable, utilizing the identity of the Immortal Venerable’s cherished disciple makes things much more convenient.” Griping his long sword tightly, Duan Junyi stepped over the sea of crimson blood, standing amidst thousands of corpses. The icy, razor-sharp blade of his sword rested horizontally before Sang Hua, and he smiled with a malicious and playful air. “I have said it many times: I am the Lord of the Summit, the Scarlet Flame Demon Lord. Yet the Immortal Venerable insists on treating me as that foolish, weak little disciple, and you have only yourself to blame.”
With the long sword suspended horizontally before him, Sang Hua truly noticed for the first time that ever since coming out of seclusion, the weapon Duan Junyi carried had never once been the Liuchu Sword he had once bestowed upon him.
Instead, the sword currently grasped in Duan Junyi’s hand was named Wugui (No Return).
A swordsman’s blade was akin to their very life; the sword was gone, and the person was no longer the one of old.
Favorable affinities dispersed, strings of affection snapped, the Liuchu shattered, the vase plunged to the bottom of the water where it could never again be sought, and the jade cracked across the ground where it could never again be met.
Sang Hua raised a hand to grasp the blade of the Wugui sword, leaving a streak of bright red blood across its icy edge.
“Today, I weep blood to sever our affection. From this day onward, the rains cease and the clouds gather, the Leichang mirror splits in two; when you and I meet hereafter, there shall be no shared life, only shared death.”
Duan Junyi had witnessed Sang Hua’s retreating figure as he walked away countless times, yet never once had it been like this sleeves brushing past his eyes, remaining the moonlight of the horizon that he could never grasp again.
Gazing at the departing figure moving further and further away, Duan Junyi finally could no longer hold onto the Wugui.
Most plants and flowers have five petals, but snowflakes alone have six.
Ice and snow are pure and white, and Liuchu was a sword as pure and immaculate as flying snow; how could he bear to let its blade be stained with an unwashable debt of blood?
Clang…
The Wugui dropped into a pool of blood. A surge of sweet blood welled up in Duan Junyi’s throat, and he coughed up a mouthful of dark black blood, dropping powerlessly to his knees amidst the thousands of corpses.
“Heh, heh”
Duan Junyi let out a bitter, mirthless laugh, murmuring to himself, “No shared life, only shared death. Master… how could I ever let you die?”
“Duan lad!” The Xiquan wolf strode forward quickly, steadily supporting Duan Junyi as he was on the verge of collapsing.
Heh,
Suppressing his emotions amidst the bloody winds and raging seas, Duan Junyi weathered the turbulence in a mere blink.
Following the vulnerability of losing control, the aura enveloping his entire body grew even colder, while his gaze turned all the more resolute as he gritted his teeth. “I have plotted for years—how could I allow it to fail at the very last step?”
Seeing him stand up with a weak and unsteady gait, the Xiquan wolf still couldn’t restrain himself from reaching out to support him, asking with a face full of worry, “Are you heading back to the summit right now? Your vital energy is unstable right now; why not go to the Xuanyin Pavilion to recuperate first?”
Hearing this, Duan Junyi furrowed his brows tightly, his expression growing grave as various anxieties surfaced in his mind: “Within the span of a mere month, three cities have met with disaster. I fear we are not far from the day of its eruption. I must return right now to suppress it; being able to delay it by even one more day gives us an extra shred of survival.”
The summit hovered above the snowfield, situated in a region that ordinary people regarded as a forbidden zone of death.
With the notorious floating island of the summit blocking the way, no one in the mortal world could set foot upon the snowy realm lying beyond the summit, and even the demonic army of the summit had never crossed past it to lay eyes upon the snowfield stretching out behind.
Upon returning to the summit, Duan Junyi headed straight for the snowfield lying outside the summit’s barrier.
The snowy expanse was a vast, blinding white. Not only was it devoid of human footprints, but even the traces of birds and beasts were nowhere to be found.
Floating above the snowy wasteland was a layer of invisible black mist that dissolved into the air, moving silently and formlessly with the wind.
A vast majority of the black mist was blocked within the snowfield by the summit’s barrier, yet because the mist was formless and could blend seamlessly into the air, even with the barrier stopping it, patches of black mist would still silently slip across the snowfield and drift to every corner of the Divine Land.
Things that ordinary people could not see at all were entirely clear to Duan Junyi, who had just died once and then been resurrected.
“Barely a month has passed, and the miasma has already increased by this much.”
Facing the ubiquitous miasma, Duan Junyi’s expression turned even more solemn. He pressed forward against the black mist toward the very source from which it rose.
Deep within the snowfield lay a massive fissure. Beneath the fissure was an endless abyss, and within the abyss lay the source from which all the drifting black mist emanated. Standing at the mouth of the abyss fissure, a wave of heat surged upward from the depths to meet him head-on, and Duan Junyi plunged body and soul into the sea of fire below the abyss.
“You’ve come again…”
Above the fiery red magma, countless dark ice chains bound a serpentine fire dragon. All the miasma crawled outward entirely from the body of the fire dragon; the endless snowfield and the dark ice chains existed solely to shackle the creature.
The moment Duan Junyi approached, the slumbering fire dragon opened its massive blood-red eyes, fixing its gaze upon the slowly approaching figure. As the fire dragon twisted its body and moved sluggishly forward, raging flames ignited across the surface of the magma. Its forked tongue flickered back and forth, hissing with an ear-piercing, ghost-like mockery.
“You’ve been abandoned abandoned by the Master you love most. You are truly utterly alone now, with no one in the world who cares about you.” Even though it was bound, the fire dragon still appeared incomparably excited. “Do you regret it? Your Master… he doesn’t want you anymore.”
Duan Junyi was not surprised in the least that it could perceive his inner thoughts. Facing the bound, inescapable giant dragon with a cold expression, he replied expressionlessly, “Do you take yourself for a creature capable of controlling my mind and turning me into your puppet?”
“Does your persistence hold any meaning?” The fire dragon writhed its colossal body, tightening the chains binding it and producing a chorus of clanging impacts, yet the giant serpent refused to give up. “You cannot stop me! Even if you lock me here, there will come a day when I break free and burn this filthy, dusty world clean to the very last speck!”
“Is that so? Then you’ll just have to see whether this seat has the ability to stop you!”
A massive array formed beneath Duan Junyi’s feet, enveloping both him and the giant serpent entirely within its boundaries.
Duan Junyi sat cross-legged on the spot, reversing the flow of the vital energy within his meridians. Using his own body as a vessel, he drew both the fire dragon and the miasma floating across the snowfield directly into himself within the array.
Hisss… hiss…
Formless miasma filled the abyss, forming a swirling vortex. The fire dragon began to struggle violently, its long forked tongue flickering at an accelerating pace. Uttering agonizing shrieks, the flames dancing upon the magma thrashed wildly in tandem with its struggles, sending waves of intense heat rolling throughout the entire abyss.
“You were never a soul belonging to this mortal realm to begin with—why bother managing their affairs?” The fire dragon’s struggles gradually subsided as it began to plead with Duan Junyi. “If you don’t stop me, you’ll still be Sang Hua’s most cherished little disciple. As long as you release me, I guarantee I won’t touch Sang Hua; you can fly wing to wing with your Master, and you’ll witness an entirely brand-new mortal world.”
Suddenly, Duan Junyi opened his eyes. Beneath the dark fog shrouding his eyes, a brightness remained that the black mist could not erode: “In your dreams!”
Endless black vapor was sucked into his body. Across Duan Junyi’s fair skin, dense black serpent markings began to emerge. From his wrists concealed beneath his wide sleeves to his neckline, the serpent markings multiplied rapidly, spreading across his face and even up to his forehead. Every single inch of his skin was blanketed entirely by serpent markings.
Concurrently, Duan Junyi grew weaker and weaker; his consciousness began to blur, and hallucinations started creeping before his eyes.
The scene of being burned to death by subterranean fire in his past life resurfaced in his mind.
During the apocalyptic end of his previous life, following the sudden surge of hordes of zombies, the survivors remaining were exceedingly few. Later on, all the zombies transformed into piles of dry bones within a brief span of time; back then, they had still believed they had outlasted the apocalypse and managed to survive.
Afterward, a ball of fierce fire surged upward from beneath the earth, incinerating everything completely in the blink of an eye.
They had survived the jaws of the zombies, yet they still failed to escape the burning of the subterranean fire; from beginning to end, they could not escape the ultimate outcome of death.
As the raging fire swept over them in his memory, that burning sensation scorching skin down to flesh reappeared with terrifying reality upon his own body, jolting Duan Junyi completely awake.
The fire dragon before him lacked the strength to struggle any further, and the flames burning upon the magma in the abyss had extinguished by a considerable margin.
Yet the black serpent markings upon Duan Junyi’s skin showed no signs of fading away, sprawling across his entire body like an unmolted black giant serpent, leaving only his eyes bright and clear.
Once the majority of the miasma had been absorbed by Duan Junyi, the flames coating the fire dragon’s scales extinguished entirely, leaving it utterly weakened. The more enfeebled it grew, the more the giant serpent’s terrifying slit pupils filled with a sinister malevolence: “You attempt to defy the world-destroying heavenly tribulation with the mere strength of a mortal—it is sheer, unmitigated folly! Before long, I will cultivate dragon horns, and at that time I shall shatter your seal and burn everything you hold dear into flying ash!”
Weakened to such a degree, Duan Junyi who bore the miasma with his own body fared no better. The miasma raging within him corroded his body and scrambled his wits; having not yet recovered from the memories of his own death, he simply lacked the spare energy to pay attention to the fire dragon before him.
Duan Junyi’s dark robes were soaked through with sweat. Beads of sweat the size of peas rolled down continuously from his forehead, tracing his jawline and the tip of his nose to drip one by one onto the rock beneath him. Struggling mightily to suppress the rampaging miasma within his body, his slender fingers curled forcefully into the stone, leaving several deep claw marks behind.
The weak fire dragon flickered its long forked tongue, its slit pupils glaring at Duan Junyi—who sat before it covered in serpent markings, his consciousness too hazy to regain lucidity. Even in its enfeebled state, the dragon appeared exceptionally excited: “Miasma is formed from the resentment of the dead and the greed of the living. You wished to shoulder the miasma with the strength of a single individual; as you are now, you clearly can no longer endure it. Very soon, you too will turn into an evil spirit a puppet driven entirely by my will.”
Duan Junyi drew the dagger from his waist, hitched up his wide sleeve, and drove it mercilessly into his own black serpent-marked arm. The pain cleared away a considerable portion of his hazy consciousness.
Bright red blood trickled down his arm, igniting into a cluster of flames upon the rock that attached itself to Duan Junyi’s skin, enveloping his entire person within.
Beneath the flames fueled by his own blood, the black serpent markings began to recede bit by bit from Duan Junyi’s skin.
Hah… hah…
Breathing heavily in massive gasps, the moment his consciousness regained even a sliver of lucidity, Duan Junyi sneered coldly toward the fire dragon: “You want to control me? You failed in the past life, and it’s even more impossible in this one. Let’s wait and see whether you turn me into a puppet first, or I wipe you from this world first.”
With that, Duan Junyi immediately began forming hand seals.
Gather water to form shapes, condense cold to transform into ice, seal!