Chapter 147 – The Great Fire Rises
“How strange.”
Chou Bodeng repeated himself twice, then suddenly formed his fingers into a blade and stabbed towards himself.
Thud.
Snow bent the branches of a green pine, sliding off in a heap and hitting the face of a solitary rock.
The beautiful fingers hovered in mid-air.
The fingertips pressed against his chest. The nails, a faint plum-blossom pink, and the pale white finger pads were tinged with a silvery vermilion from the reflection of his brilliant robe. They looked slender, but were in fact sharp. If they hadn’t been seized by another long, powerful hand, he would have already cut open his own chest and dug out his own heart.
“Hmm?”
Chou Bodeng’s white hair fell over his shoulders, his dark pupils reflecting sparks of fire.
A light danced in his pupils.
The world was distorted by that light. It was the gaze of a madman examining the world, filled with the unique frenzy and intensity of a madman.
When ecstatic, he would laugh loudly. When suppressed, he would seek release. When enraged, he would render a hundred miles dustless. When he couldn’t understand his past self, he would tear out his own heart to examine it closely—to see if it was covered in dust, to see if it was full of scars. To see if it had betrayed him, if it had been cleverly replaced by someone.
Every thought, every idea, became action.
He didn’t care about hurting himself, nor about intimidating the mortal realm.
Cold, cruel, extreme, frenzied.
He treated all with the same indifference.
“There’s no dust anymore,” Shi Wuluo said, separating Chou Bodeng’s hand. “It’s perfectly clean, not a speck of dust.” His fingers, longer and broader than the youth’s, intertwined with his, guiding him to lay his hand flat over the place where his heart beat.
Shi Wuluo was composed, calm.
Not a hint of surprise.
It was as if everything the Divine Lord did was normal, no different from the past. He effortlessly understood all of the Divine Lord’s strange, bizarre actions.
…If I really go mad, I might become very, very terrifying. So terrifying that I won’t care about anyone, what relationship I don’t recognize… Vaguely, a calm voice echoed again in the snowy night. Behind the description of a bloody future was a hidden thread of despair and hope that could not be spoken aloud.
They had both been deeply caught in the whirlpool of madness before.
—The first time the Divine Lord became a demon in blood-red robes, and the thousands of years the Heavenly Dao waited for his return.
They were both well aware of the various frenzies and depravities that followed madness.
Behind all the futures described in a calm tone was a hidden, lonely, and desperate question:
…If I go mad, if I set myself on fire, will you stay with me?
When I sing with wild joy, will you ignore everyone else with me? When I tear myself apart, will you be the chains that restrain me? When I indulge in depravity, will you enter the filth with me?
Are you willing…
to be my final anchor?
“It’s all gone, all better. No need to dig it out,” Shi Wuluo said. “I’m not lying to you.”
Chou Bodeng looked into Shi Wuluo’s eyes.
Shi Wuluo placed a light kiss between his brows, which were like snow on frost.
He believed him.
A line of light, the rising sun, appeared on the eastern horizon.
Chou Bodeng’s attention was drawn to that line of light stretching along the ground.
The light spread left and right, stretched up and down. The ultramarine of the cold night was forced back by a light somewhere between orange-yellow and silvery vermilion.
The red sun leaped above the horizon.
“…Fire,” Chou Bodeng’s pupils reflected the red sun over the distant hills. “A great fire.”
He took a step forward, standing on the edge of the thousand-zhang solitary peak’s cliff.
The wind from the canyon below billowed his great sleeves. His entire being was bathed in a blood-colored light, presenting a kind of morbid, hysterical, and bizarrely beautiful sight. In an instant, the morning light, like a sacrifice, set the undulating mountain ranges ablaze, ignited the white snow, ignited the lingering miasma, and ignited the surging surface of the sea.
Chou Bodeng looked down upon the earth.
His pupils reflected the red sun, his eyes like burning coals.
Through the chain connecting their souls, Shi Wuluo shared his vision—he had completely opened up his senses, looking down on this world from a commanding, unprecedented angle.
The earth burned fiercely in the great fire.
Burning away the entire winter.
***
Fire.
A fire like none ever seen before.
Crimson flames licked the ground.
The frost-covered grass and low shrubs on the Glazed Sea’s marshland burned fiercely. The accumulated snow melted in the fire, revealing the dark brown ground, like someone’s ugly, scarred chest. The gray-white rocks of the sea city’s houses were roasted by the great fire, emitting unsettling cracking sounds from within. Black smoke left streaks on the stone surfaces.
Between the stones, there was blood, there was fire.
The cries of cranes echoed in the sky.
The immortal cranes had gone mad.
No.
They were no longer immortal cranes; they had become crane demons.
“Xiaoxiao was right… there’s something wrong with that crane food.”
The junior brother crouched on the skylight of Crane City’s central stone tower, observing the situation outside.
The white cranes that used to dance in the clouds had changed their appearance. Their white feathers were stained with an ominous blood-red, and their black feathers had a metallic sheen. They gathered in flocks, swimming through the fire like a tide of blood, continuously attacking the barrier that enveloped the entire city.
The rumbling sound was incessant, and the light of the barrier flickered.
All sorts of cries were locked within the barrier.
Lou Jiang, dressed in green, stood at the center of the barrier, with thirty-six cold swords floating around him, fighting against a group of “people” shrouded in black mist, preventing them from destroying the formation.
The junior brother’s knowledge was limited; he couldn’t tell if the people hidden in the black mist were poison masters or puppet masters.
A day and two nights had passed since the fire in Crane City.
That night, after the junior brother and Lu Xiaoxiao discovered something was wrong at the crane field from the sea tower at the port, they had wanted to go down and warn the Beast Taming Sect disciples. However, they were stopped by Lou Jiang, who had tracked the mastermind behind the boat hijacking here… If Lou Jiang hadn’t appeared, they would have likely died in the bloody, poisonous mist from the self-detonating merchants, just like most of the Beast Taming Sect disciples in the crane field.
When the merchants self-detonated, the earth fire of Crane City was triggered, and it erupted.
The earth fire raged, unquenchable day and night.
Fortunately, the immortal cranes were one of the Beast Taming Sect’s most important tamed immortal beasts, so there were many disciples stationed here, as well as an elder. Although they were caught off guard by the cranes’ mutation and the earth fire at first, with the unexpected help of Lou Jiang and the other two from the outside, the remaining Beast Taming Sect disciples quickly gathered at the city center. Together with the elder, they activated the city’s central barrier, blocking the tide of cranes that had gone berserk and turned into demons in the sky.
In the sky, the light of the sword formation crisscrossed.
The junior brother watched for a while. With his current cultivation, he couldn’t make out the intricacies of the fight. He could only tell from the stalemate that there wouldn’t be any major problems for the time being… Little Martial Ancestor also knew that something had happened in Crane City, so someone should be coming soon. With that thought, the junior brother jumped down from the stone tower.
“How is it?” Lu Xiaoxiao asked. “Did you find him?”
The junior brother shook his head.
They suspected that the current situation was related to Zhuang Jiuzhu—Zhuang Jiuzhu had fled to Crane City, and trouble had followed right on his heels. Only a fool would believe there was no foul play. The fact that Zhuang Jiuzhu was not among the people who disembarked from the crane grain transport boat further confirmed this. However, Zhuang Jiuzhu was also not among the “people” currently attacking the barrier.
“Where did such a big living person go?” Lu Xiaoxiao frowned and glanced around.
All around, the Beast Taming Sect disciples, along with the city-guarding elder, sat cross-legged inside the tower, continuously channeling their spiritual power into the formation that activated the barrier to maintain its operation… This was the only thing they could do at the moment. Letting an outsider like Lou Jiang fend off the attack was a move of desperation.
For the members of the Beast Taming Sect, their strongest means was to “command a hundred beasts, drive demons and expel monsters.”
However, when the immortal cranes mutated, they were shocked to discover—
all the blood contracts with the beasts they controlled had become invalid.
The junior brother felt in his heart that they were getting what they deserved. If it weren’t for the many ordinary people in Crane City besides them, who would also die if the city’s protective barrier failed, she would absolutely have pulled Uncle-Master Lou aside to watch the show with her junior brother. But now…
“…O, divine spirits, why do you turn away?
We sing and sacrifice to the winter seasons, not daring to be presumptuous…
O, divine spirits, are you angry…?”
Flames, black smoke.
The people of Crane City knelt and kowtowed, the City Diviner with his hair unbound cried out in grief.
They were trying to awaken the consciousness of the immortal cranes outside the barrier, hoping to calm them down through sacrifice.
The junior brother pulled his gaze back from the billowing smoke and was about to discuss it with Lu Xiaoxiao when he turned his head and was suddenly shocked—in the time it took to say one sentence, that great-aunt Lu Xiaoxiao was already flying out on her sword, about to charge out of the barrier.
“Hey! Where are you running off to?” The junior brother hastily jumped on his flying sword, caught up, and grabbed her. “Don’t cause trouble for Uncle-Master Lou!”
Lu Xiaoxiao pointed outside the barrier, her voice urgent:
“There are two children over there!”