……Wu Guizhen.
This was Wu Guizhen.
To be honest, Wu Guanyue had heard his name countless times. He was deeply connected to her, omnipresent in her life, and yet he had never once appeared before her.
But now, at long last, the soul of Wu Guizhen had appeared before her.
He was a man composed entirely of soul fire. Pale-blue flames flickered and danced, making his features waver constantly. His face was somewhat indistinct, but it was not difficult to see that he was old. The wrinkles on his face ran deep, and his back was slightly stooped, frail and bent.
He was not Wu Guanyue’s biological grandfather. They shared no blood relation, so she felt neither filial affection nor any particular sense of closeness toward him.
Even so, she could tell that his gaze was calm and entirely free of malice.
Indeed, there was even a deep sorrow and pity in his eyes.
Wu Guanyue gazed at him in silence. Her heart was bursting with a thousand questions she wanted to ask Wu Guizhen, but when she opened her mouth, she asked the one thing that mattered most to her at that moment.
“Will Brother Ying get better?”
Wu Guanyue looked at Wu Guizhen with anxious, pleading eyes.
Wu Guizhen suddenly let out a long, heavy sigh.
“The soul fire is keeping him alive, so he won’t die,” Wu Guizhen said. “But he won’t wake up, either. The Soul-Devouring Art still has him under its control. His consciousness refuses to awaken, because if it did, he would hurt you.”
Wu Guanyue’s fingers twisted painfully, and tears nearly spilled from her swollen eyes.
Yet her voice remained clear. She had no idea how long Wu Guizhen would be able to remain here, so she had to ask everything she needed to know as quickly as possible.
“If we defeat Perfected Renhua, will that break the Soul-Devouring Art?”
Wu Guizhen silently regarded this girl whose eyes were swollen like peaches, yet who remained so composed and clear-headed.
He answered, “Only the person who cast the Soul-Devouring Art can undo it. You don’t need to defeat him. You need to capture him alive and force him to release it.”
Wu Guanyue nodded calmly. “I understand. Then my next question: why does he want to capture me? Why did you summon my soul here? What do you want me to do?”
Wu Guizhen gazed at her in silence. Then he told her a story about placing her trust in the wrong person.
Wu Guizhen had not been born into a prominent family. He had originally been nothing more than a commoner from a village in the Wu Mountains. The village stood atop the ruins of the ancient city of Wuxian. It was said that every shaman who had once lived in that city possessed the ability to communicate with Heaven and Earth.
The Wu Mountains were indeed famous for their witchcraft, divination, and poison arts. Everyone knew how to cast divinations; everyone knew how to pray for rain. Such abilities were hardly remarkable throughout the Nine Provinces and Eighteen Lands.
But Wu Guizhen had encountered a fortuitous opportunity in his youth. As a boy, he had wandered into a dense forest and accidentally fallen into a sinkhole. There, he had discovered the tomb chamber of an ancient shaman. By studying the murals on its walls, he had unexpectedly comprehended the long-lost secret art known as the Taiyi Divination Method.
That secret art granted him the ability to see through the future.
Later, he left his homeland and traveled throughout the Nine Provinces, where he met Perfected Renhua, who was equally fond of wandering the world. Although Perfected Renhua came from the Yan family of Yuntai, one of the foremost aristocratic clans in Divine Firmament Prefecture, he was amiable by nature and seemed to care nothing for distinctions of birth or status. Thus, the two soon became friends and traveled together.
It was only much, much later that Wu Guizhen realized the truth: Perfected Renhua had never been free of class prejudice. He had merely coveted Wu Guizhen’s abilities, believing that one day they would prove useful to him…
Because he had done something unforgivable. Something truly, catastrophically unforgivable.
By the time Wu Guizhen finally discovered what he had done, it was already too late.
Once Perfected Renhua had gotten what he wanted, he discarded Wu Guizhen without the slightest hesitation. He struck him squarely in the back, unleashing every ounce of his deadly spiritual power. He had intended to shatter Wu Guizhen’s heart into eight pieces with a single palm strike.
If Wu Guizhen had not possessed a unique life-saving technique, there was no way he could have survived the fall from the cliff.
But even with that technique, Perfected Renhua’s attack had been vicious beyond measure. Wu Guizhen had suffered irreparable injuries, and his life was like a guttering candle in the wind, liable to go out at any moment.
Was there a miraculous elixir in this world capable of saving him?
Perhaps there was. But such things were locked away inside the treasured paradises of the great clans and sects. An ordinary person could not hope to see them; they might not even have heard of them.
Wu Guizhen possessed the extraordinary ability to communicate with Heaven and Earth and see through the future. Yet he was naïve by nature. For all those years, he had been content to live the life of a hermit, drifting freely like a cloud or a wild crane. He had never once used his arts to obtain power or wealth for himself.
But as he lay beneath the cliff, struggling to remain alive, Wu Guizhen suddenly understood something.
Power, lineage, and wealth were, in fact, precisely the things that could protect a person. If he had been bound to many people through shared interests, then when Yan Shouyi had turned against him, the man might have thought twice before striking.
But he had understood this vulgar truth far too late.
He was simply unwilling to accept it. He could not bear to die such an obscure, unjust death, while that cowardly and vicious bastard Yan Shouyi continued to live in splendor.
And so, he burned away the last of his life and used the Taiyi Divination Method to divine the future once more.
He discovered that, in the end, with evil karma weighing upon him, Yan Shouyi would make one final desperate gamble. He would break the seal left behind by his ancestor, Sword Lord Taibai, releasing the infamous Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord, a great demon cultivator.
But, fortunately amid the misfortune, the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord had indeed died over the course of a thousand years. There was no possibility of his returning to the world, and the people of the realm would not have to face such a savage demon again.
Yet amid that fortune lay another misfortune…
The Meritorious Virtue Jade was still there.
It was a supreme treasure formed from the accumulated merit of Sword Lord Taibai’s entire life, and who knew how many people under Heaven coveted it?
Yan Shouyi obtained the jade and immediately circulated the spiritual energy within his body, raising his cultivation realm. Heaven and Earth sensed that someone was attempting to ascend to the upper realms, and so they sent down eighty-one bolts of heavenly lightning.
Amid the thunderbolts, the Meritorious Virtue Jade transformed into a lustrous white jade marrow. It firmly shielded him, allowing him to pass through the tribulation unharmed.
He ascended.
He ascended.
He escaped that karma-ridden body of his, becoming utterly free and joyous. From then on, he would share the lifespan of Heaven and Earth, becoming a celestial god high above the heads of all living beings, gazing down forever upon the land where he had once lived—the land where he had once caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
His ascension had been anything but honorable. But how could the Yan family of Yuntai allow such disgrace to become public knowledge? Would that not be tantamount to slapping themselves in the face?
The illustrious sects and aristocratic clans were like a magnificent quilt pulled over a bed. Everyone could see the embroidered peonies gleaming upon its surface, but no one knew how much filth and stench lay hidden beneath it.
Later, Yan Shouyi came to be revered as the Golden Immortal Renhua. Throughout the lands of Yuntai, temples were built in his honor, where people offered incense and the power of their prayers.
Yan Shouyi… had achieved an exceedingly fine outcome, while his ancestor, Sword Lord Taibai—the true Sword Lord Taibai, Yan Chongyang, who had genuinely been qualified to ascend—had long since perished, body and soul destroyed.
It truly was a case of “those who rob and kill grow rich, while those who build bridges and roads leave no bones behind.”
After divining this outcome, Wu Guizhen began coughing violently. He vomited up measure after measure of blood, consumed by such grief and fury that he wished he could cough up half his own entrails along with it.
In the end, the Heavenly Dao had still left Yan Shouyi a thread of life.
There were fifty paths in the Great Dao, yet Heaven could only deduce forty-nine.
All the punishments the Heavenly Dao had imposed upon Yan Shouyi lay within those forty-nine paths, but it had nevertheless left him one thread of hope.
The Heavenly Dao was a set of rules. Even as it established every law, it left a sliver of possibility for all things in existence.
Yan Shouyi had never been willing to give up. He had never been willing to accept his fate. He seized that sliver of possibility, and so the Heavenly Dao could only watch in silence as he ascended. His ascension was something it permitted.
In truth… it was difficult to say that the Heavenly Dao was being unfair, because the future likewise contained a sliver of uncertainty.
That uncertainty lay in… the key that would unlock the seal.
Sword Lord Taibai had once sealed the Hundred-Eyed Demon Lord within the rift at the boundary between two worlds. To open the passage leading to that other realm, one had to use a lost wandering soul from the foreign world.
Souls like that were exceedingly rare. Yet Yan Shouyi had actually found one.
It belonged to a young girl named Wu Guanyue.
Her soul had become lost in this world during the brief moment when the two realms intersected. From then on, it wandered endlessly, searching for a way home. Meanwhile, her body in the other world had lost the ability to walk forever, leaving her to lie in a hospital bed day after day, year after year.
Yan Shouyi seized that fragment of her soul and used its power to break the seal.
But a mere fragment of a soul could never withstand the backlash of opening the seal to another world. Thus, after barely managing to unlock it, that fragment of soul completely dissipated.
Yan Shouyi, of course, did not care. And the girl named Wu Guanyue, lying in her hospital bed, suffered terribly as the permanent destruction of that fragment of her soul took its toll.
She felt pain and terror like needles stabbing into her heart.
Afterward, her body grew even weaker. She struggled desperately for several more years, but in the end, she died unwillingly. Before her death, her body was covered with all kinds of tubes. Her family grieved for her, yet beneath that grief was also the feeling that at last… she had been freed.
What a pitiful child… What a truly pitiful child.
Until the day she died, she never understood why she was dying. Countless times, she had tried to uncover the cause of her illness. Countless times, she had comforted herself…
Since Heaven had given her a body like this, all she could do was live bravely and strive as hard as she could.
She did not know that she had died because of a sanctimonious bastard. She did not know that this bastard would ultimately gain eternal life, while she had become nothing more than a stepping stone beneath his feet.
She and he had both become stepping stones for Yan Shouyi.
They had both wanted to go on living.
He was already beyond saving… but Wu Guanyue’s life could still be saved.
So why not let her come to this world herself and try to save her own life?
