It was the grey death qi surging from beneath the temple that flooded into Zhang Ruochen’s body and completely extinguished the fire of life.
As he collapsed, his consciousness grew ever dimmer, dissolving into countless motes of light that scattered toward heaven and earth.
Yet the consciousness did not vanish.
Zhang Ruochen felt as though he had become billions upon billions, possessing billions of eyes that could perceive everything in the surrounding space.
The soil on the ground.
The cracked and weathered gravestones.
The skeletons hanging from the temple gate.
The grey death qi that now wrapped his body.
…
Further away, Lord Turtle King was leading the three gods of the Paradise Faction toward the four oases on the reddish-yellow plain.
He could hear their voices.
“Many thanks to Lord Turtle King for saving us. Without you today, the three of us would surely have perished in that old monster’s arrays,” Jialin Nan said, seething with rage and lingering resentment.
Yan Shen sighed deeply. “I had even begun to suspect Young Mistress Bai had deliberately set a trap to kill us. Now it seems I judged her with the heart of a petty man.”
“Should Young Mistress Bai ever have need of me in future, I shall repay this debt of life,” Kailan Feili declared.
Their gratitude toward Lord Turtle King and Bai Qing’er was utterly sincere.
Only after staring death in the face does one truly understand that the grace of a saved life is greater than the heavens.
…
His consciousness flew beyond the area, beyond the Yuhong Mountains. In First Goddess City, he saw Chi Yao.
Chi Yao wore a white veil that blocked spiritual probing. Tall and imperious with noble bearing, she stood in a vermilion-tiled garden, her divine majesty pinning Lu Yi to the ground, unable to move.
She pressed, “Where exactly did you meet that old man?”
Lu Yi could not discern Chi Yao’s identity and asked timidly, “Which old sir does the exalted god mean?”
“The very old man who slew Wuma Jiuxing,” Chi Yao replied.
Knowing she had no power to resist a god, and fearing soul-searching or utter annihilation if she angered her, Lu Yi answered, “Yunfan Star. Elder Zhang lives in seclusion on Yunfan Star.”
Upon learning the old man’s surname was Zhang, Chi Yao’s exquisite frame trembled. A mist formed in the starry eyes visible beyond her veil. She asked urgently, “Where is he now?”
After a brief hesitation, Lu Yi recalled that a Divine Master resided at the villa. If this god meant the elder harm, she would be walking into her own doom.
“Wuming Villa,” she said.
Chi Yao erased Lu Yi’s memories and sped toward Wuming Villa.
…
Zhang Ruochen’s consciousness continued outward. Even the profound arrays of the Heavenly Goddess Tower could not bar it.
This convinced him further that what remained was pure consciousness, not spiritual strength.
Deep within the Heavenly Goddess Tower, in a splendid and luxurious divine hall, his consciousness beheld Shang Hong.
Shang Hong stood at the centre, clad in purple robes, dignified and handsome, his divine bearing otherworldly.
“Empress Bai, seeing this token, why do you not come forward and pay respects?”
In Shang Hong’s hand rested a token bearing the character “Yi”.
The token radiated vast divine majesty. One glance made Zhang Ruochen’s vision spin, as though a ten-thousand-zhang divine giant loomed before him, about to crush the entire world.
“Even after all these years, Lord Yi still will not let me go?”
Empress Bai emerged from a blaze of divine light. Her figure was enchantingly perfect, draped in gossamer robes that revealed long, straight, flawless legs shrouded in sacred mist, preventing a clear view.
Yet it was precisely this hazy, sensual vision that most stirred the heart. Such sacred yet bewitching beauty was what truly shattered mortal resolve.
Moreover, Empress Bai’s voice was every bit as captivating as Yu Rumo’s.
Even Shang Hong, standing within the hall, seemed momentarily breathless, and Zhang Ruochen, reduced to mere consciousness, felt the same suffocating sensation.
Yet Shang Hong was no ordinary man. He quickly steadied his wandering thoughts. “A hundred thousand years ago, had my Shang Clan not secretly aided you, the Nishen Clan would have been utterly exterminated. That debt of grace can never be repaid. If your Nishen identity were revealed, how long do you think you would live? What fate would befall the Twelve Towers of the Goddess? Could Xinghuan Heaven still exist? Oh, and let us not forget your daughter and Divine Master Yu Rumo.”
Empress Bai revealed her face. It bore nine parts resemblance to Yu Rumo.
The difference lay in their aura: one radiated seductive charm from within, peerlessly alluring, able to bring even the most resolute man to his knees with a single glance.
The other was cold as eternal ice.
“Who dares spy upon us?”
Empress Bai sensed something. Her eyes, previously tinged with sorrow and helplessness, sharpened instantly. Her pupils became twin divine stars radiating blinding might.
Whoosh!
Zhang Ruochen’s consciousness retreated like a receding tide.
In an instant, he was back beneath the temple gate, gazing at his own aged corpse lying on the ground, wrapped in grey death qi that gnawed at the flesh strand by strand.
When Zhang Ruochen fell, the Nine Yin Evasion Arrays ceased operation.
Bai Qing’er transformed into a beam of white light and rushed to the aged body.
She seemed deeply wary of the grey death qi and dared not touch him directly. Origin divine light burst from her form. With one palm strike, she dispersed the death qi.
“Zhang Ruochen!”
She extended a slender, jade-like hand and placed it over his heart, then sighed softly. “Death, in the end, cannot be reversed. What a pity for a heaven-chosen genius of this age.”
Zhang Ruochen wished to speak but could not.
He tried to gather his consciousness and re-enter the body, yet failed.
Crunch!
Nearby, from beneath gravestone after gravestone, corpses began to rise.
They wore divine robes and divine armour, yet after aeons buried, or perhaps corroded by the potent death qi here, the robes had rotted and the armour rusted.
Even their once-radiant divine corpses now exuded decay; in places the flesh had rotted away, exposing bone.
With every step a divine corpse took, a shattered world appeared beneath its feet. The corpses themselves grew rapidly, some reaching heights of ten thousand li, larger than planets.
From their mouths issued indistinct murmurs. Thick resentment condensed into heavy yin clouds.
Bai Qing’er glanced at the divine corpses, then at Zhang Ruochen’s aged body lying on the ground, and sighed. “I am the one who harmed you. Had you not come here, the death qi would not have invaded you. You might have lived a little longer. Come with me. I will take you home to be buried among the fallen leaves in Kunlun.”
She lifted Zhang Ruochen into her arms and fled the area at top speed.
Boom!
The moment she left, a mountain-sized divine spear hurled by one of the corpses stabbed into the spot where they had stood, cracking the earth with countless fissures.
Zhang Ruochen’s consciousness followed the aged corpse, hovering always near Bai Qing’er.
“I truly underestimated her.”
Zhang Ruochen felt deep emotion. Though born of the Twelve Towers of the Goddess and seemingly heartless to the extreme, after his death, in this perilous place, she had not abandoned his corpse, nor immediately searched it for treasures.
She had no intention of exploiting his remains for maximum value.
Instead, she planned to brave even greater danger to carry him to Kunlun and grant him burial in his ancestral home.
Within his body he had refined the Heart of Truth, the Buddha’s śarīra, and the White Cang Bloodsoil. These were things difficult to conceal from Bai Qing’er, who possessed vast origin profound meanings. Any other woman would already be considering refining his corpse into pills.
“Hmm?”
Zhang Ruochen suddenly noticed, not far away, a circle.
The circle lay parallel to the ground, faintly visible like a halo, yet it vanished the instant he looked away.
“No, not one circle… countless circles…”
He discovered layer upon layer of circles extending outward, spreading to the ends of heaven and earth.
Like ripples on water.
He looked at Bai Qing’er and saw her expression perfectly calm, as though she saw none of these circles.
“What is happening? Are these circles connected to me? Only my consciousness can see… no, sense them.”
“Exactly! My consciousness has not dispersed. Could it be because of these circles?”
Zhang Ruochen made this guess because he realised his consciousness could only perceive phenomena within the first circle. When he tried to look into the second circle, the third…
After passing through countless layers, his consciousness reached hundreds of thousands of li away.
It grew ever weaker, the scenes ever blurrier.
Yet looking outward, the circles continued endlessly, infinite in number, as though they filled the entire universe.
Zhang Ruochen’s consciousness rapidly withdrew, returning to the vicinity of his corpse. The shock in his heart was beyond words.
“I am clearly dead, yet my consciousness endures. If consciousness endures, how can this be called death?”
In this world there exist the undead. The undead possess no fire of life, yet they have consciousness.
Suddenly, Zhang Ruochen felt he had grasped the true meaning of life and death.
Previously his understanding of life had been far too narrow. He had always believed only races possessing the fire of life truly lived.
Yet do mountains and rivers, wind and lightning not possess life?
The Corpse Clan, the Ghost Clan, the Skeleton Clan, they too have life. To regard them as mere undead, is that not the prejudice of other races? With such prejudice, viewing one another as alien, the living and the undead will forever be irreconcilable.
Life and death are like yang and yin. They should cycle endlessly, forming the greatest circulation of heaven and earth, not opposing sides.
Only when yin and yang circulate can heaven and earth endure eternally.
When life and death collide, the world inevitably falls to ruin.
At the moment of this sudden enlightenment, Zhang Ruochen discovered that the first circle had somehow contracted from afar and now hovered right before his eyes, within arm’s reach.
And his consciousness, previously scattered into billions of motes of light, had somehow condensed once more into human form.
He raised his hands and looked. They were the hands of a young man.
