Chapter 20 - 1#
It was deep in the night over Thornbriar Creek, moonlight pouring down in floods, blanketing the barren land in a layer of pale white.
Thorns crawled across every inch of visible ground, like rivers running overland, rushing and endless.
An Wuxue’s consciousness drifted along with the memories the Soul-Nurturing Tree Spirit had drawn out, gazing from a distance. He couldn’t make out his junior brother’s expression beneath the night, only the faint impression of a face even paler than moonlight.
Xie Zhefeng was still wearing the same clothes An Wuxue had seen on the day of his own death — but his hair was disheveled and his robes were covered in snags, nothing like the neat appearance he’d had that day.
The thorns’ sharp points could not harm the immortal body of an ascended cultivator. They only caught and tore at his clothes.
What was he doing?
The four seas had been pacified, the chaos between the two realms had ceased, and even An Wuxue — the “wayward,” “deserving of death” First Seat senior brother — had been put to death at the gates of Falling Moon Mountain.
Xie Zhefeng should have been seated high upon a dais, looking down upon all living beings, his word made law, playing the role of the immaculate, impartial, and revered Immortal Sovereign the world expected him to be.
But Xie Zhefeng had not.
Xie Zhefeng walked through Thornbriar Creek just like this.
As if wandering without purpose. As if searching for something.
An Wuxue had never seen Xie Zhefeng like this.
He had seen his junior brother at his most undone — that year when Langfeng City fell, when the city lord Xie Zhui was gravely wounded and his cultivation crippled, his spiritual roots shattered. Xie Zhui had set his sights on his own young son, barely ten years old at the time, intending to destroy the boy’s gifted soul and seize his body to start anew.
When An Wuxue and his master rushed to the city lord’s manor, the building was already engulfed in flame, black qi scorching the sky. The child stood amid the crumbling walls, blood spattered across his cheek, a sword pierced through Xie Zhui’s core.
The boy had turned to look at them, and the hand gripping the sword had trembled.
After that, the child grew into the Immortal Sovereign who commanded both realms, and An Wuxue never saw that person’s sword-hand tremble again.
Until now.
He watched Xie Zhefeng stumble and wander through Thornbriar Creek, drawing ever closer to the vantage point from which An Wuxue observed.
Gradually, he could make out Xie Zhefeng’s expression.
Xie Zhefeng’s face was etched with grief. Every few steps, he would reach out with trembling, desperately hopeful hands to pull apart the tangled clumps of thorns — only to move on in disappointment.
Spiritual energy was thin in Thornbriar Creek, making it difficult to extend one’s sense outward. Searching like this, one inch at a time — when would it ever end?
What was Xie Zhefeng searching for? Why did he look so frantic, so desperate?
There was nothing here. Nothing but a single wisp of An Wuxue’s lingering soul.
An Wuxue suddenly thought: Is he looking for me?
Impossible.
An Wuxue watched as Xie Zhefeng went on searching, for an unknowable length of time, his lips seeming to murmur something.
The thornbriar branches that no one had dared to touch in countless thousands of years were being snapped and broken by this man, falling in heaps across the ground.
Gradually, An Wuxue made out what Xie Zhefeng was calling.
Senior brother.
Xie Zhefeng was calling for senior brother.
The voice was soft, yet faintly trembling — and choked with something unsaid.
Catching the moonlight, Xie Zhefeng’s eyes looked faintly red.
He really is looking for me.
What does he want with me? I’m already dead.
And he’s crying.
What is he crying for?
I didn’t even cry.
While An Wuxue stood dazed, Xie Zhefeng drew closer and closer to where he watched.
Xie Zhefeng seemed to sense that he was near the wisp of lingering soul, and his expression grew more and more desperate with hope.
Like a mortal parched for days, catching sight of a single drop of dew.
But the moment Xie Zhefeng approached — An Wuxue’s line of sight suddenly snapped away. His perspective had drifted with his remnant soul as it fled.
He didn’t want to be found by Xie Zhefeng.
Xie Zhefeng’s movements stiffened.
But Xie Zhefeng did not leave.
Xie Zhefeng kept searching.
His junior brother continued just as before, following every possible direction in pursuit.
The thorns had shredded the man’s robes nearly to rags; his hair pin had been caught away somewhere unknown. He looked utterly wretched — nothing like the junior brother An Wuxue held in memory.
An Wuxue didn’t understand.
When a cultivator’s soul was extinguished, they were wholly and permanently gone. He still didn’t know why he had become Suxue, but at the time, he had only this final wisp of a soul left — he had, by any measure, already died.
This last wisp of a soul amounted to nothing. If Xie Zhefeng had wanted him dead, it made no difference whether this wisp was destroyed or not. If Xie Zhefeng had wanted him to live, this wisp was equally useless — it would dissolve away into nothing over the long years.
What was there to search for?
You were the one who called me deserving of my fate. You were the one who used the Frigid Sword Breath to extinguish my life. And now you’re the one weeping at my grave.
He felt not the slightest trace of comfort.
He was clearly submerged in the memories of a soul — and yet he still felt as though something were tearing open in his chest.
Ten thousand arrows piercing through his heart, yet finding nothing to strike in the hollow space within.
He watched Xie Zhefeng repeat his same movements over and over again.
More time passed — how much, he couldn’t say.
A man in crimson robes came striding toward Xie Zhefeng with sword in hand, stopping directly in front of him, demanding: “Xie Chuhan, what do you think you’re doing?!”
It was Qi Xun.
“Everyone saw the tribulation clouds from your ascension and is waiting for you to use an immortal’s spiritual power to purge the world’s corruption — yet here you are, hiding away in Thornbriar Creek doing this pointless thing!” Qi Xun said sharply. “Even if An Wuxue were alive, he’d be running from you at the sight of this.”
Hm. Qi Xun’s not wrong about that.
But Xie Zhefeng clearly had no interest in hearing this.
Xie Zhefeng straightened, and in an instant summoned his natal sword. The blade of Chuhan cut through the air and drove straight toward Qi Xun — directly piercing through his shoulder and pinning him to the thornbriar behind him.
Qi Xun drew a sharp breath through his teeth, his brow barely creasing. He made no sound of pain. He only looked down at his blood-stained shoulder and let out a cold laugh.
“What’s this — you want to settle accounts with me over An Wuxue? I was the one who led people to find him in Thornbriar Creek, yes — but weren’t you the one who struck the final blow? If we’re settling accounts, Immortal Sovereign, perhaps you ought to start with yourself.”
“……”
The scene before An Wuxue went black once more.
When he opened his eyes again, his consciousness had returned to the ruined little mountain peak within Cloud Sword Sect.
Everything he had just witnessed was nothing but smoke and shadow from a thousand years past.
“An Wuxue” had been dead for a thousand years. His name now was “Suxue,” and he had come here alongside Xie Zhefeng’s incarnation to investigate the annihilation of Cloud Sword Sect.
He was still leaning against a boulder, the golden branch still in hand. The golden light flowing along it had dimmed slightly.
The Soul-Nurturing Tree Spirit had stopped working on him.
He sat there in a daze, staring at the small branch in his palm — something any high-level cultivator in the immortal world would fight over — his expression completely blank.
He had only intended to break the Tree Spirit’s effect on himself. He hadn’t expected to see what had happened after his own death, something he had never known.
What had Xie Zhefeng and Qi Xun been doing?
Who searches the ground in tears for someone who was their enemy in life?
Alive, he had been a great villain condemned by all. Dead — was he to become the fallen First Seat of Dropping Moon, the one people called “a shame he went astray”? A departed soul that old acquaintances would occasionally recall to soothe themselves?
He couldn’t make sense of it.
Forget it. There’s nothing worth making sense of.
Why make trouble for yourself.
He tucked the Soul-Nurturing Tree Spirit back into his spirit pouch and fastened it at his waist, then slowly rose to his feet, brushing the dirt from his clothes with a spiritual seal.
His life and death had flashed through his soul in only a few moments, yet he felt utterly drained by what he had seen. He was about to check whether Suxue’s spirit pouch held any suitable elixirs to help him recover.
At that moment, a cold wind swept past, carrying a sinister voice from behind him: “What blind little immortal cultivator has wandered in here…”
An Wuxue turned around.
Standing there was a figure, body already gone rigid, face mottled with dark greenish-black. The person wore something resembling the Cloud Sword Sect disciple robes that Yun Zhou and Yun Yao had worn — but whether from the corruption emanating from the figure or the way it spoke, this was clearly no Cloud Sword Sect disciple.
A demon creature that controlled other people’s corpses.
This demon’s cultivation was shallow, nothing like the one that had been controlling the corpse of the Cloud Sword Sect master earlier.
Had it been drawn here by the spiritual energy fluctuations caused by the Tree Spirit’s activation?
He sized it up without any change in expression and raised an eyebrow. “There are several kinds of demonic cultivators in the two realms. The first is cultivators who shifted into demonic cultivation midway through. The second is spirits of heaven and earth born from corrupt energy. The last is treasured objects that have become demons.”
“Spirits of heaven and earth cultivate at extraordinary speeds and are anything but ordinary — they don’t appear easily. And you need to borrow another’s corpse, so you’re not a cultivator gone demonic. That means…”
“What is your original form?”
The “person” paused, then pressed its voice lower: “A little immortal cultivator in the Bigu stage, and yet you know quite a lot. That thing in your hand has such rich spiritual fluctuations — what kind of treasure is it?”
It studied An Wuxue’s face again, running its tongue over its lips. “What a lovely face — much better than the body I’m wearing now…”
The demon creature stepped toward him.
An Wuxue stood where he was, completely unruffled.
Xie Zhefeng was not here. There was no one else around. He couldn’t be bothered to put on a performance.
The moment the demon creature was seven feet from him —
He shifted his stance slightly, and with the speed of thunder, snapped a thick branch from the small tree beside him.
What remained of Suxue’s spiritual energy was nearly spent; he poured every last drop into this single strike, condensing it all into the branch.
The demon creature didn’t take it seriously. It sneered and effortlessly deflected An Wuxue’s attack. “You don’t even have a spirit sword — AHHHH!!”
The branch snapped. An Wuxue’s spiritual energy was now nearly bone-dry.
His face went white and his whole body swayed.
But the demon creature was in far worse shape. It collapsed to the ground clutching its head, shrieking without stop.
“You — you — you’re not Bigu stage!”
“I’ve been wronged,” he said. “I really am.”
What cultivation could Suxue’s useless body possibly have?
The single strike of spiritual energy had been a feint. The moment he had moved, his soul-sense had already pierced into the demon’s spirit consciousness.
He drew a slow breath and steadied himself, then withdrew his soul-sense slightly and asked, calm and composed: “What kind of demon are you?”
The demon creature asked instead: “Who — who are you?”
Truly uncooperative.
An Wuxue let out a sigh.
He gathered what little spiritual energy remained in Suxue’s body into his fingertips, lifted the demon creature, and dragged it to face him directly.
The creature stared at him in terror.
He said: “As a rule, I don’t like asking questions twice.”
His soul-sense plunged into the creature’s spirit consciousness again — but this time it did not strike and withdraw. It became a blade, cutting through the creature’s soul bit by bit.
“AAAAAAAHHH——!!!”
An Wuxue had heard screams like this more times than he could count in his last life. He felt nothing.
He watched in silence, his dark eyes still, his expression composed.
He had intended to take his time — but the mirror-demon’s screaming was grating on his ears. He tilted his head slightly and, with a deft motion, severed a corner of the creature’s soul and ground it to nothing.
The agony of a fractured soul was a thousand, ten thousand times worse than any pain of the flesh.
“AHHH! AH AHHHH!! I’ll talk, I’ll talk!”
“I’m a mirror-demon…”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m just a minor demon. Many cultivators died here — there’s so much resentment and corruption. So I came in with the other small demons, following the highest-cultivation mirror inside.”
So that’s it.
A mirror-demon.
No wonder it could create illusions and control the corpses of the dead. It must be using mirror-image spiritual techniques of some kind.
“This high-cultivation mirror you mentioned — what realm is it at? Was it the one that annihilated all of Cloud Sword Sect and turned this place into a stronghold for demonic cultivators?”
“I don’t know about that — I only came in to get a share of the spoils…”
An Wuxue was about to ask more when his soul-sense, spread open slightly, detected several people approaching.
But there was no demonic energy on them — only one was a Minor Completion cultivator. The others were barely past the threshold, in the same Bigu stage as him.
Immortal cultivators?
There were still immortal cultivators alive inside Cloud Sword Sect?
His brow furrowed.
Without giving anything away, he loosened his grip and withdrew his spiritual energy.
Suxue’s body was at the end of its rope. The moment he let go, he stumbled backward and came to rest against the boulder behind him.
The demon creature had barely managed to stagger back a few steps before the group of cultivators closed in.
A female cultivator cut off the demon’s line of retreat. One of the male cultivators called out: “Senior Sister, there really is someone here!”
The others came to support An Wuxue.
They were all wearing Cloud Sword Sect disciple robes — tattered and worn, but with no trace of corruption on them. They were running on immortal cultivator spiritual energy.
…Surviving disciples of Cloud Sword Sect?
The one supporting him asked: “Fellow Daoist, are you all right? How did you get in here? Are there others with you? And this demon creature — ?”
The mirror-demon had just had a piece of its soul severed and was still dazed and exhausted from the ordeal, not yet able to react.
An Wuxue coughed a few times and said weakly: “I came to investigate the strange occurrences at Cloud Sword Sect — but the moment I entered, I ran into this thing and nearly lost my life to it. Thank goodness you all arrived in time…”
Mirror-demon: ???
It hadn’t even had a chance to protest its innocence before the lead female disciple swept her spirit sword through the air and extinguished the mirror-demon’s life in a single stroke.
The mirror-demon collapsed. Without the corrupt energy sustaining it, the corpse that should have long since rotted began to bloom with livid patches in an instant, and within moments had dissolved into a heap of putrefied flesh and bleached bone, filling the air with a foul stench.
The female disciple stepped back a few paces, her nose wrinkled, and said with some surprise: “Why was it so easy to kill?”
An Wuxue: “……”
He quickly coughed a few more times.
The group’s attention snapped back to him at once.
The lead female disciple strode forward in a few quick steps, took hold of his wrist, and probed his meridians.
Her expression gradually grew serious. She pressed an elixir into his hand to replenish his spiritual energy, then said gravely: “His spiritual energy is completely empty — get him back, quickly.”
Back?
An Wuxue said nothing.
He had forced Suxue’s body to fight a demon, and the strain had genuinely taken a toll. His meridians were throbbing painfully throughout his entire body.
He simply let himself appear half-conscious, leaning on the support of the disciples around him as they led him along, following those young Cloud Sword Sect juniors.
They brought him to a crumbling little courtyard not far away.
On the outside of the courtyard stood a spiritual formation that concealed their presence and blocked out the corrupt energy. Inside was a main yard and quite a number of rooms.
Once inside, a few more disciples who appeared young and of low cultivation gathered around — six in total.
As An Wuxue followed them, listening to their conversation along the way, he gradually pieced together what had happened.
These were the surviving disciples of Cloud Sword Sect. When the sect was annihilated, a Great Completion elder had hidden them away in a small, inconspicuous courtyard on one of Cloud Sword Sect’s peaks and erected a concealing spiritual formation around them, and that was how they had survived.
But the highest cultivation among them was only that young Minor Completion female disciple, Yun Wan. Even combining all six of them, they couldn’t break through the illusions — and they were no match for the great demon at the helm. So they had been hiding here, clinging on.
When An Wuxue had ended up here, they had detected another immortal cultivator, and they could tell the mirror-demon was only of Minor Completion — which was why they had dared to show themselves.
Yun Wan had wanted to ask An Wuxue something, but seeing his deathly pale complexion, his breath barely a thread, his spiritual energy completely hollow, and his consciousness seeming unclear — she hesitated several times before eventually deciding to simply settle him into an empty room first.
“It’s no good — his spiritual energy is still completely empty…” Yun Wan probed his meridians, frowning, and began rummaging through what remained of their elixirs.