“!!”

     Seeing Chu Wanning’s face pale in an instant, Shi Mei laughed madly and sorrowfully. He repeated, “Yes, my father ate my mother alive. Alive… I was nearby at the time and ran over when I heard the screams. I didn’t know what happened. I was so anxious that I knocked on the door and asked my mother, ‘What’s wrong? What happened to you?’ but no one answered me. She kept screaming from the other side of the door.”

     His thin lips parted slightly, and Shi Mei said, “The door opened.”

     It went dead silent.

     It was probably just like the dead silence after the door opened that year.

     The father’s mouth full of blood; the mother’s arm torn to pieces and her flesh mangled.

     A child whose soul had been split apart.

     Nine years old.

     His father had already gone mad. The flesh and blood of the Butterfly-Boned Clan could nourish a person’s cultivation. He was about to die from illness because of her; this is how she deserved to repay him!

     Together with this evil spawn in front of him! The evil spawn that would bring him retribution! Evil spawn!

     He stretched his sticky hand toward the child—who was cold all over and speechless, like a wooden sculpture or clay figurine—his eyes fanatical and twisted.

     Shi Mei didn’t react at all at the time. He only stared blankly at everything in front of him, without sadness or fear, as if he’d been drained in an instant, leaving only an empty shell stuck in place.

     The man’s hand reached closer and closer, and a drop of blood fell, landing right on his cheek like a tear stain.

     He raised his head and looked blankly at this unfamiliar devil.

     “Father…?”

     “Run!” Behind him, Hua Gui’s scream pierced the sky: “A-Nan, run!!!”

     One of her arms was torn open by a blade, and the tendons and bones of her legs and feet were broken. The woman writhed madly on the ground like a maggot, in a frenzied, unbecoming manner, trying desperately to crawl towards her husband, trying to grab the man’s legs and feet.

     “Run!!! Run quickly!! Don’t look back! Don’t come back!!! AH—!!!!!!”

     She was answered by the man sharply turning back around and ruthlessly stomping his foot on her face.

     Hua Gui’s head tilted sideways, and a golden tear flowed from the corner of her eye.

     She said with all her might, “Run…”

     There was a crack.

     Her throat was crushed…

     Run, she’d said.

     So from that day on, Shi Mei had been running constantly—every hour, every day, and every night since he’d frantically run out of Tianyin Pavilion and across the vast mountains and plains, running away until he couldn't take it anymore and collapsed.

     He broke down.

     No matter where he fled to, no matter how many years had passed, he could still hear his mother’s shrill and terrifying screams: “Run! Run!!”

     He ran from the deep alleys to the vast wilderness, through the golden stalks of wheat, from the depths of the darkness to the arrow of dawn, tearing the universe apart as the sky and earth were bathed in a soft crimson.

     Like blood.

     Blood gushing out of her body and blood dripping slowly from the corners of his mouth.

     “AH… AHHH!!!!”

     He howled mindlessly, meaninglessly. His shoes had long since fallen off, his feet worn and injured; gravel had pierced into them, and blisters had formed.

     Golden tears finally flowed down his cheeks, and he wailed like a cornered beast as he ran through the withered grass and reeds, through thorny bushes, his legs and feet all cut up.

     He didn’t dare to stop. He didn’t dare to look which road was more comfortable and only ran as desperately as he could towards the closest one. He didn’t dare to stop, or he would die. He would die if he stopped.

     He didn’t stop.

     More than ten years had passed, and he’d never dared stop a single day.

     They will die. The Butterfly-Boned Beauty Clan will die if they don’t return home.

     “I was later picked up by Sect Leader Xue… I was so terrified. At that time, the Tianyin Pavilion Master was searching for my whereabouts all over the world. I didn’t dare to tell the truth, nor did I dare to cry. He asked me where I came from and where my parents were, and I lied to him…” Shi Mei said softly, “After that, he took me back to Sisheng Peak… A few years later, a member of the Butterfly-Boned Clan who was saved by my mother finally managed to find me. She had been acting as a disciple of Tianyin Pavilion. In order not to be suspected, she destroyed her own face when she entered the pavilion… She escaped my father’s eyes and passed all my mother’s belongings to me.

     “My mother had collected a thick basket of magical text records over the years, including the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts’ name register, the buds of the Eight Sufferings Everlasting Hatred Flower, and the methods she once delved into to open the gates to the demon realm.”

     Chu Wanning slowly closed his eyes. “...So, you took the path she once wanted to take and did what she once wanted to do.”

     “Yes, I continued to practice the way of the medical sect. In order not to arouse the sect leader’s suspicion, I used the related name, Hua Binan, when I came out of hiding and took a prominent position in those years. Hua Binan’s reputation climbed higher and higher, so high that even Jiang Xi noticed me. When he reached out to me, I did the same thing my mother did; even though his sect once treated the Beauty Feasts as livestock, and even though it once confined my mother for so long, in order to have a place in the cultivation world and get everything I needed to return home, I agreed to it. Since then, I’ve had two identities: a disciple of Sisheng Peak and Guyueye’s medicine specialist.”

     Shi Mei paused. “Later, the Tianyin Pavilion Master died and Mu-jiejie succeeded him. She’d been constantly searching for her adoptive mother's murderer… At first, I didn’t dare to trust anyone anymore, but after her several attempts to find out, I finally decided to meet her at Tianyin Pavilion to see her and tell her the whole story.”

     Speaking to this point, Shi Mei smiled slightly, although his eyes were still cold. “As Shizun has seen… I didn’t make a mistake with my wager. She is the one who stands by my side.”

     “...”

     “Although she isn’t a Beauty Feast, she sees my mother as her birth mother and the Beauty Feast Clan as her own maternal clan. She’s been helping me all these years.”

     Helping Hua Binan, helping Shi Mei.

     Helping her half-brother.

     When Shi Mei finished speaking, he gathered the broken porcelain fragments and returned the mirror to his qiankun pouch.

     The rain outside was like those souls of the Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feasts who had died in vain for the past tens of thousands of years, knocking on the window, mournful and unresigned. Shi Mei’s mother, Hua Gui, was probably there too, shouting miserably, “Run… Run quickly… Don’t look back…”

     “There’s no way out.” Shi Mei finally buried his face in his hands and rubbed it tiredly, his voice slightly hoarse. “Shizun, there’s no way out for us. It’s only a choice between the destruction of the human race or us. This is the only choice… I can’t choose the latter.”

     It was like the end of the world, like a bayonet, lightning splitting the sky.

     There was the sound of the rapid rain, like the clatter of thousands of horse hooves. The leaves of the trees were shiny with rain, swaying from side to side in the dazzling flashes of light.

     Suddenly, the door slammed open, with strong wind and heavy rain blowing in.

     The bright white lightning illuminated the two people who had turned around in the hall. Mu Yanli stood at the threshold, without an umbrella, her whole body drenched and her eyes extremely at a loss.

     “A-Nan, we’re only thirty short for the remaining Zhenlong chess pieces before we reach the gate to the demon realm.”

     Before she could finish her sentence, Shi Mei stood up abruptly, his fingertips slightly trembling involuntarily. “Where is Taxian-Jun? Thirty chess pieces are just a matter of a moment for him. Let him finish, then…” He suddenly stopped at this point.

     When Mu Yanli entered the room, and only then, could he see clearly that, other than joy, her face showed more fear. “I don’t know what happened to Taxian-Jun. He suddenly fainted. And his heartbeat was also…”

     “Also?”

     “It’s also extremely unstable. The flow of his spiritual core is falling apart as if it will never awaken again.”

     Shi Mei was suddenly frightened and angry. “Impossible! That’s his own spiritual core. I have repaired it thousands of times. How can  it suddenly collapse? How…”

     He paused.

     He suddenly felt enlightened, as if a certain trick had been exposed. With a rumble, thunder rolled through the sky. With the loud crash like the collapse of the world, he slowly turned around and looked at Chu Wanning, who was lying on the couch with his hands and feet bound, his face as pale as if he’d seen a ghost.

     “Could it be…” His lips trembled as he opened and closed them. “Could it be… that you did this?”

     The roar of the storm outside made the room even quieter—as quiet as a tomb, dark and deep as an abyss. The light and shadow of the candles were like silk banners that called upon the soul, dancing in a quietly bitter and treacherous manner.

     In the dead silence, Chu Wanning closed his eyes, then opened them.

     “...Yes,” he said. “It was me.”

     The earth shook as thunder seemed to blow the clouds to pieces. The heavy rain seemed to pour down like a waterfall.

     Shi Mei’s heart trembled, and he took a staggering step forward.

     “You… you can still…”

     “Since you told me your story,” Chu Wanning’s voice was very slow, “then I’ll tell you mine too.”

     Shi Mei: “...”

     “In my previous life, my spiritual core was destroyed. I only had the power of Jiu’ge left, and I didn’t know about my own history. That is why I was unable to fight against Taxian-Jun.” A golden light suddenly appeared on his wrist, and there was only a crisp clang sound as the chains broke and the spiritual talismans were set ablaze!

     Chu Wanning stood up from the couch and raised his eyes.

     “But in this life, the days he kept me imprisoned were enough for me to bury a curse deep in his heart.” There was no expression on Chu Wanning’s face as he said these words.

     Grief, pain, pity, regret—nothing; there was only a deathly calm.

     “The spell will continue eroding deeper and deeper, and eventually cause his spiritual flow and his heart to stop. This divine weapon of yours will still be destroyed by my hands.”

     “...”

     “...I’m sorry, Hua Binan. I can’t let you go home.”

     Shi Mei seemed to have never expected this turn of events. His face was whiter than jade and colder than black ice. He stared at Chu Wanning in disbelief, his lips trembling slightly.

     “It’s over,” Chu Wanning said, with light flashing in his palms.

     “...You’re crazy!!!” Shi Mei looked at the golden light and suddenly went mad, his eyes filled with beast-like savagery. “You want to kill him?! You actually want to kill him… You have the heart to—you actually have the heart to!!”

     No one could see the emotions flowing through his dark eyes. Chu Wanning said, “I have the heart to.”

     “...”

     The golden light grew brighter and brighter, but Chu Wanning’s expression became more and more unsightly—although he was only a broken branch of the Flame Emperor’s Wood, he had a vague impression of the divine wood’s spells, including Tianwen’s Ten Thousand Coffins, which also originated from this vague outline in his head.

     He once thought it was a coincidence, but later realized it was not.

     As divine wood himself, he had been left with the imprints of many talismans by the god Shennong. As long as he tried his utmost to remember, he could recall many ancient secret techniques, such as the Gate of Time, Space, Life, and Death and the Corpse-Splitting Technique he now used for the first time at this moment.

     ~ 

     The Corpse-Splitting Technique was related to the war between the gods and demons in primordial times. According to legends, after that war, the human race of the continent suffered heavy casualties, and those who survived struggled in the sea of corpses and were soon infected by epidemics and plagues… At that time, Fuxi was determined to exterminate all the demons, while Nuwa had fallen into a deep sleep due to her injuries. The only one left to save the world was Shennong.

     Hence, Shennong placed a towering tree of Flame Emperor’s Wood in the most eastern sea. The sacred tree reached the nine heavens and extended down to the great abyss, with tens of thousands of branches and hundreds of millions of flowers and fruits.

     “Divine wood, Ten Thousand Coffins.”

     As soon as the word fell, the roots of the Flame Emperor’s sacred tree extended from the depths of the east sea, and instantly spread throughout the entire cultivation world! Those coarse or slender, rough or soft roots rose from the ground as sand fell.

     “Split the corpse, collect the coffin!”

     The roots wrapped around the rotting corpses on the ground, crumbling them to ashes… The rotting corpses between the heavens and earth disappeared, and the ashes became fertile soil, on which flowers bloomed. The Flame Emperor’s Wood had completed its first task in the mortal world, and after this, its hundreds of millions of roots retracted back to the bottom of the east sea.

     ~

     This was the oldest record of the Flame Emperor’s Divine Wood in history.

     Chu Wanning’s eyes were illuminated by the radiant light in his hands.

     This was Shennong’s magic. He knew how to do it, as he was part of the Flame Emperor’s Wood. Now that he had activated his technique, that person… would soon be reduced to ashes, and nothing would be left.

     It’s just a corpse.

     Chu Wanning thought painfully, What is there… that I can’t bear to part with?

     “You… Chu Wanning, you…”

     Shi Mei stared at him, with shock, rage, and madness flashing rapidly in his eyes. All the plans of two lifetimes were here, and he could no longer remain calm.

     “Stop it!”

     Hearing this voice, Chu Wanning raised his eyes and looked at him quietly, just like the rainy day many years ago when he’d seen the child standing under the eaves of the schoolhouse at Sisheng Peak.

     He never imagined at that time that Shi Mei’s identity would be that of a Butterfly-Boned Beauty Feast who escaped death.

     His initial impression of Shi Mei was entirely based on the words of others. He heard that a new child had arrived to Sisheng Peak and that the child had always been diligent in his studies, but his spiritual core was very weak and because of his poor qualifications, no elder was willing to accept him as a disciple; even Xuanji Elder rejected him tactfully after testing his spiritual root.

     That year, rain dripped down the black tile eaves, and the young child, youthful as a lotus flower, looked up helplessly, holding a pile of books in his arms.

     Chu Wanning was a little taken aback. “...It’s you?”

     He recognized the unsociable child and walked over to him with an oil-paper umbrella.

     “Ah, Yuheng Elder.” The young boy was startled and bowed his head hurriedly in a salute, the books stacked to his chin causing him to stagger. “Greetings, elder.”

     “...It’s so late, and you’re still at the school?”

     “There’s nothing… nothing else I can do. I needed to look at a lot of things, but I didn’t have time to finish reading.”

     Chu Wanning lowered his eyes, his gaze falling on the “Guyueye Medical Sect's Hundred Herb Collection.”

     The child looked a little embarrassed, his snowy cheeks flushing. “My talent is lacking, so I can only look into the medical sect… It’s not that I think Guyueye is better…”

     Chu Wanning was somewhat puzzled, and his brows knitted slightly. “It’s just reading a book. What is there to be nervous about?”

     The child lowered his head even further. “This disciple was wrong.”

     His slender body was bent low, not wanting to attract attention, and looked very pitiful. Chu Wanning couldn’t help but think of the conversation that had taken place between the elders before—

     “That Shi Mei is very obedient, but he’s too untalented. What a pity.”

     “In fact, he’s unsuitable for cultivation. Ah, I don’t know what Sect Leader was thinking; why bother to accept a person without the intelligence basis to cultivate? If you pity him, it would be good for him to go to Mengpo Hall and find a job washing vegetables and cooking.”

     “But he seems to have some interest in the medical sect. Tanlang, would you consider accepting him?”

     Tanlang Elder said carelessly, “His character is too soft, so I don’t like him. I won’t accept him.”

     An umbrella was extended over, and raindrops fell like pearls onto the oil-paper surface.

     White-jade knuckles gripped handle of the umbrella, the bones evenly structured. Chu Wanning said lightly to the boy, “Let’s go. It’s too late. I’ll send you off.”

     A small white wildflower in full bloom trembled on the eaves. Shi Mei was stunned for a moment. He first bowed and saluted, then hid under the shadow of the oil-paper umbrella.

     In the slanting wind and rain, they disappeared far into the distance.

     Shi Mei’s eyes were bloodshot, and his whole body was as tense as a bowstring about to break. He shouted angrily, “Chu Wanning! Why do you stop me?! What’s the point of stopping me now that it’s come to this?! All those who should be killed have been killed. It’s just the last thirty lives! With only thirty lives, so many of the Butterfly-Boned Clan can live! It’s been thousands of years! They can finally return to the demon realm. Why? Why are you doing this?”

     The wind and thunder stirred, and he looked like a blind dragon with broken claws. There was no trace of the gentleness of the past on his face.

     “Even if you destroy Taxian-Jun, those dead cultivators can’t come back to life. You destroy him, and this mortal world will be beyond saving. You… you…”

     Chu Wanning said, “Before the punishment of the heavens arrives, the Gate of Time, Space, Life, and Death will close. This mortal world is indeed beyond saving, but the other one can still be saved.”

     “I just want thirty more lives!”

     “...None of them should be lost.” Chu Wanning closed his eyes, and the light in his palms instantly brightened significantly. “Tianwen, Ten Thousand Coffins—!”

     Just as Shennong once bound the corpses, with his stern shout came the muffled sound of the earth from the distance.

     His palms suddenly closed!

     Far away in the back mountain, the unconscious Taxian-Jun was already tightly bound by willow vines.

     Shi Mei’s lips turned pale, and his pupils shrank. “...Why are you… so cruel…?”

     “...”

     “Not giving us our last way to survive. To kill your own disciple… I only… I only want thirty lives…”

     One mortal world was covered in corpses, while the other was in turmoil. After the demon realm opened, there was no telling what changes would occur. Since ancient times, the demons had been warlike and bloodthirsty, but Gouchen rebelled and fought fiercely by Fuxi’s side to expel them from the mortal world.

     Chu Wanning knew very well that this wasn’t just thirty lives…

     Even if it were only thirty lives, who would deserve to die? Who should pave the way for the return of the Butterfly-Boned Clan? Who should be sacrificed?

     The golden light in his palms blazed even more magnificently and reflected in Shi Mei’s eyes. It seemed as if Shi Mei’s heart and lungs were about to be ripped out by this light. He was so furious that he wanted to move forward, but an enchanted barrier rose in front of Chu Wanning.

     He couldn’t get through.

     Without Taxian-Jun, Shi Mei was like an executioner who had lost his sharp blade, leaving only a pair of fleshy hands behind… Neither he nor Mu Yanli could ever be Chu Wanning’s opponent.

     In his despair, Shi Mei’s eyes reddened as if they were about to drip blood. What should he do? What should he do?! He—

     Suddenly, he remembered something with a jolt. It was like a butcher facing a fierce beast, staggering to his back pocket to draw out his last sharp weapon. He pointed this weapon at the man who was set on destroying his life’s strategic planning.

     “Okay, okay. Shizun, you’re cruel. You… just do it.”

     “...”

     “You go ahead.”

     Chu Wanning didn’t know why his demeanor suddenly changed, but he had suddenly put his hand on his forehead and laughed out loud. Then he suddenly lowered his head and stared at Chu Wanning’s face, his words bitten to pieces. “Go ahead, Shizun. Just cut him to pieces. In the worst case, neither of us will benefit, and both of us will lose substantially!”

     Mu Yanli looked at his crazed expression and couldn’t help but feel pain in her eyes. She said softly, “A-Nan…”

     Shi Mei could no longer listen to any of her words. He carried the kind of madness of a beast fighting on the verge of death for its last chance, and said fiercely, almost baring his teeth:

     “Kill him—kill him.”

     “...”

     Venom and blood flowed as Shi Mei’s pair of dead black eyes stared at Chu Wanning through his fingers, pausing at every word.

     “His body, together with the last wisp of his conscious soul that is enamored with you!”