Chapter 299: [The Top of Death and Life] A Lifetime of Difficulty in Stopping

""

Looking at Chu Wanning's instantly white face, Shi Mei laughed out loud in what seemed like sadness and madness as he repeated: "Yes, my father had eaten my mother alive. I was nearby, I heard the screams and I ran over to her, I didn't know what was happening, I was so anxious I knocked on the door and I asked my mother what was wrong with you and no one answered me. She kept screaming from a door away."

With thin lips, Shi Mei said, "The door is open."

Dead silence.

It is probably like the dead silence that followed the opening of the gates back then.

A father with a mouth full of blood. The mother with her arm torn and flesh blurred.

As if a child whose soul has been split open.

Nine years old.

Her father had gone mad, and the flesh of the Butterfly Bone clan can help one to grow in strength, he was dying of illness because of her, and this is what she deserved to pay him back

Together with this sinful seed before him that will bring him retribution sinful seed

He reached his sticky hand towards the child, who was as cold and speechless as a wooden sculpture, his eyes wild and twisted.

Shi Mei didn't react at all at that moment, he stared blankly at what was before him, sad and scared, as if he had been drained in an instant, an empty shell poking out of place.

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

He looked up, bewildered, at the strange, stern ghost.

"Dad."

"Run" behind him, Hua Gui's scream tore through the clouds, "Nan, run!"

One arm was torn open by the blade, the tendons in her legs and feet broken, and the woman was writhing like a maggot on the ground in a frenzied, ugly manner, but trying desperately to crawl towards her husband, trying to tug at the man's legs and feet.

"Run! Run! Don't look back! Don't come back!"

She was answered by the man snapping back and stomping his foot down hard on her face.

Hua Gui turned his head sideways, a golden tear dripping from the corner of his eye.

She said with all her might, "Run."

There was a click.

Broken larynx

Run, she said.

So after that day, Shi Mei kept running, every day, every hour, every day and every night, just as frantically as he had run out of the Tianyin Pavilion and across the vast mountain plains, he ran, he couldn't stand it, he was falling apart.

He broke down.

Wherever he fled, no matter how many years passed, he could hear his mother's shrill, horrible hiss, "Run, run!"

He ran from the deep streets to the vast wilderness, through the golden waves of wheat, from the depths of darkness to the arrow of dawn tearing the world apart, and the world was a gentle scarlet.

Like blood.

The blood gurgling out of her, the blood dripping slowly from the corners of his mouth.

"Ahhhhhhhh."

He howls out in a mindless, meaningless way, his shoes long since fallen off, his feet worn and rotten, gravel sticking in, blood blisters rising.

Golden tears finally wept down his cheeks as he wailed like a trapped animal, running through the decaying grass and reeds, dripping through the thorny scrub, his legs and feet all cut up.

He didn't dare to stop, he didn't dare to see which way was the comfortable one he just ran as hard as he could to the nearest one, he didn't dare to stop, he would die. If he stopped, he would die.

He did not stop.

It's been over ten years and never a day has dared to stop.

It will die, the Butterfly Bones will die if they don't go home.

"I was picked up by Master Xue and I was terrified. At that time, Master Tianyin Pavilion was looking for me all over the world and I didn't dare to tell the truth or cry. He asked me where I came from and where my parents were, so I lied to him" Shi Mei said softly, "Later, he took me back to the Top of the Dead and after a few years, one of the Butterflybones, whom my mother had saved, finally managed to find me. When she first entered the Pavilion she destroyed her face herself she escaped my father's eyes and passed on to me all my mother's belongings."

"My mother's years of searching for records of magic texts, the famous recipes of the Butterfly Bone Beauty Mat, the buds of the Eight Bitter Long Hate Flowers, and the methods she once delved into to open the gates of the Magic World, thick baskets of suitcases."

Chu Wanning closed her eyes slowly, "So you went the way she once wanted to go. Did what she once had to do."

"Yes, I continued to practise the path of Drug Clan, and in order not to arouse the suspicion of the Lord, I used the name Hua Binan when I went out on the mountain all those years."

"Hua Binan's reputation grew so high that even Jiang Xi took notice of me, and when he reached out to me I did the same thing my mother had done back then. Even though the sect had treated the Beauty Seat like livestock, even though it had kept my mother in line for so long, I agreed to do so in order to have a place in the Xianxia community as soon as possible and to get everything I needed to return to my homeland. Since then there have been two identities, disciple of the Top of Death and Life and medicine man of Lonely Moonlit." Shi Mei paused, "Then, when Master Tianyin Pavilion died, Sister Mu took his place. She was looking for the murderer of her adoptive mother. At first I didn't dare to trust anyone, but after several attempts to find out, I finally decided to meet her at the Tianyin Pavilion and told her the whole story."

At this point, Shi Mei smiled slightly, although the bottom of her eyes were still bleak: "As my master saw I did not bet wrong, she is the one who is on my side."

""

"Although she is not a Beauty Seat, she sees my mother as her birth mother and the Beauty Seat clan as her mother clan. All these years, she has helped me."

Help Hua Binan. Help Shi Mei.

Helping her half-brother.

When Shi Mei had finished speaking, he put away the fragments of the remnants of the porcelain tiles and returned the mirror to his Qiankun pouch.

The rain outside, like the souls of butterfly-boned beauties who have died in vain for tens of thousands of years, pattered against the windows, mournfully and resignedly. There is probably Hua Gui there too, Shi Mei's mother. She is crying out, "Run, run, don't stop, don't look back!

"There is no way out." Shi Mei finally buried her face and rubbed it wearily, her voice slightly hoarse, "Master, there is no way out for us. It is the only choice between the destruction of the human race or our destruction. I can't always choose the latter."

As if it were the end of days, like a bayonet, lightning cracks the air.

The leaves of the trees were soaked with oil and shiny, falling to the east and west in the bright, blinding light of the rain.

Suddenly the door slammed open and a strong wind wrapped in frightening rain swept in.

Mu Yanli stood at the threshold without an umbrella, drenched to the skin, her eyes looking extremely confused.

"Nan, with the last thirty Zhenlong chess pieces to go, we've reached the entrance to the Devil's Gate."

Before she could finish her sentence, Shi Mei stood up abruptly, her fingertips shaking slightly, " Fairy Tramper: thirty Zhenlong chess pieces are just a matter of moments for him, let him do them all and then" he said, and stopped abruptly.

Mu Yanli entered the room and it was then that she could see that her face was covered with more fear than joy: "Fairy Tramper had suddenly fainted, somehow. And his heart was beating."

"Also"

"It's also extremely unstable, the auric stream is collapsing like it's never going to wake up again"

Shi Mei was steeped in shock and anger: "Impossible that's his own spirit core, I've deployed it thousands of times, how could it suddenly collapse, how"

Pause.

Suddenly he was blessed, as if some trick had been opened, and a thunderbolt rolled through the sky, and with a loud crash like the collapse of the world, he slowly turned his head back to Chu Wanning, whose hands and feet were bound on the couch, with a face as pale as if he had seen a ghost.

"Could it be," his lips quivered and he opened and closed them, "could it be that you did it?"

The sound of the storm outside made the house more and more silent, as still as a tomb, as dark and deep as an abyss. The light from the candelabra was like a beckoning streamer, dancing in a ghostly and treacherous manner.

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

"Right." He said, "It's me."

The earth shook as thunder seemed to blast the clouds to pieces. The heavy rain seemed to fall like a waterfall in a frenzy.

Shi Mei's heart trembled and she took a staggering step.

"You... you can still..."

"Now that you've told me about you. Chu Wanning's voice was low, "Then I'll tell you about mine too."

Shi Mei :""

"In my previous life, I was left with the power of Nine Songs and I didn't know who I was. That's why I was unable to fight against the Fairy Tramper." A golden light burst from his wrist, and with a clanging sound, the chains were broken and the talisman burned.

Chu Wanning rises from his couch and raises his phoenix eyes.

"But in this life, the days he kept me under house arrest were enough for me to bury the spell deep in his heart." As she said these words, Chu Wanning's face was devoid of any expression.

Grief, pain, pity, remorse, nothing, a dead calm.

"The spell erodes deeper and deeper, and eventually it will cause his spiritual flow to disrupt and his heart to stop. This divine weapon of yours will still be destroyed in my hands."

""

"I'm sorry, Hua Binan . I can't let you go home."

Shi Mei seemed unable to anticipate this turn of events, his face was whiter than jade, colder than ice, and he stared at Chu Wanning incredulously, his lips trembling slightly.

"It's over." Chu Wanning said, the light iterating in his palm.

"You're crazy" Shi Mei looked at the golden light and suddenly went mad, her eyes bursting with the wildness of a beast, "You're going to kill him you're actually going to kill him you can't bear it you can't bear it"

No one could see the emotions running through his dark eyes. Chu Wanning said, "I can't help it."

""

Although he was only a broken branch of the Yandi wood, he had a vague memory of many of the spells of the Heavenly Divine Wood. This includes the "Coffin of Ten Thousand People", which also originates from a vague outline in his skull.

He had thought it was a coincidence, but then realised it wasn't.

As a divine wood himself, he had been left with the imprint of many runes by the Shennong God, and if he tried his best to remember, he could recall many ancient secret arts, such as the Gate of Life and Death in Time and Space, or, at this moment, the Corpse Splitting Technique he was using for the first time.

The Corpse Splitting Technique is related to the Battle of the Gods and Demons in the Flood. It is said that after that battle, the human race on the continent suffered heavy casualties, and those who survived struggled in the sea of corpses and soon became infected with epidemics and maladies.

Then Shennong God thrust a heavenly Yandi tree into the East Pole Sea, a sacred tree that reaches up to the ninth heaven and down to the extreme abyss, with ten thousand kinds of branches and hundreds of millions of flowers and fruits.

"The divine wood, the coffin of ten thousand people."

At these words, the roots of Yandi's sacred wood spread from the bottom of the East Sea, spreading throughout the Xianxia boundary in an instant.

"Split the body and collect the coffin"

The roots wrapped a rotting corpse in the ground, crumbling it into ash and the rotting corpses of the world disappeared, turning the ash into fertile soil on which flowers bloomed. The Yandi wood has done its first work on earth, and then its billions of roots have retrieved the extremities of the East Sea.

This is the oldest record of the Yandi sacred wood in the history books.

Chu Wanning's eyes are illuminated by the searing light on his hands.

This is the spell of Shennong God. He will, for he is part of the Yandi wood. Now he presses the spell and the man will soon be ashes and nothing will be left.

It was just a corpse.

Chu Wanning thought, painfully, "What is there to give up?

"You Chu Wanning, you"

Shi Mei stared at him, anger and madness flashing sharply in her eyes. All that had been plotted in two lives was here, and he could no longer be at ease.

"Stop right there."

At the sound of the voice, Chu Wanning lifted his eyes and looked at him quietly, just as he had seen the child standing under the eaves of the schoolhouse at the top of death and life on that rainy day all those years ago.

Little did he know then that Shi Mei's identity would be that of a butterfly-boned beauty queen who had escaped with her life.

His first impressions of Shi Mei came from the words of others. He had heard that a new child had arrived at the Peak of Death and Life, a child who had always been very attentive to his schoolwork, but whose natural spirit core was so weak that he could not perform any spells well. Even Xuan Ji had politely rejected him after testing his spiritual roots.

That year, the rain dripped down the black tiled eaves, and the infant child, like a lotus flower, looked up helplessly, holding a pile of thick books in his arms.

Chu Wanning, slightly startled: "It's you"

He recognises the out-of-touch child and walks towards him with his oil-paper umbrella in his hand.

"Ah, Elder Yu Heng." The little man was startled and bowed low in a panic, the scrolls piled to his chin making him shake, "Greetings Elder."

"It's late and you're still in the schoolroom."

"No, no way, there was so much to see that I didn't have time to finish it."

Chu Wanning's eyes dropped to the Lonely Moonlit Drug Clan Bacopa monniera.

The child looked a little embarrassed by this, and his snowy cheeks were blushing: "I'm not qualified, I can only see what Drug Clan has to offer I don't think Lonely Moonlit is better"

Chu Wanning was slightly puzzled, a light frown on his brow: "I'm just reading a book, why are you nervous?"

The child then bowed his head even further down, "It was the disciple who spoke wrongly."

With her slender body crouching desperately, not wanting to attract attention, Chu Wanning was reminded of a conversation that had taken place between the elders

"That Shi Mei is well behaved, but a bit too untalented, unfortunately."

"He is not really suitable for Xianxia, and I wonder what His Holiness thinks of him, why he would take in an unwise man to practise. If he had mercy on him, it would have been good for him to go to Mengpo Court and get a job washing dishes and cooking."

"But he seems to have some interest in Drug Clan, Greedy Wolf, wouldn't you consider taking it?"

Elder Greedy Wolf slouched, "Too soft-natured to like, not to accept."

An umbrella pokes through and pearls of rain crackle down on the oil paper surface.

Jade knuckles squeeze the handle of the umbrella, bones trimmed and even. Chu Wanning said lightly to the boy, "Come on, it's too late. I'll see you off."

A small white wildflower in full bloom trembled on the eaves. Shi Mei froze for a moment, bowed and then ducked into the shade of her oil paper umbrella.

In the slanting wind and rain, they go far away.

Shi Mei's eyes were bloodshot, his whole body was tense as if a bowstring was about to break, and he shouted angrily: " Chu Wanning, why are you stopping me?

"Those who should be killed have been killed, but only the last thirty lives just as long as thirty lives, so many butterfly bone clan can live, thousands of years can finally go back to the demon domain, why you what are your credentials ah"

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

"If you destroy the Fairy Tramper, the dead monks will not come back to life, and if you destroy him, this earthly world will be hopeless, you you."

Chu Wanning said, "This earthly world cannot be saved, but the other can still be preserved."

"I just want thirty more lives."

"Not one should be any less." Chu Wanning closed his eyes, the light in his palm instantly brightened to the extreme, "Heavenly question, the coffin of ten thousand"

As if once Shennong God had bound the corpse, with his stern cry came the muffled sound of the earth in the distance.

The palm suddenly closes

In the remote backcountry, an unconscious Fairy Tramper has been tightly bound by willow vine.

Shi Mei's lips turned white and her pupils shrank to tiny size: "Why are you so cruel?"

""

"Not to give us the last chance to live. To kill your own apprentice I just I just need thirty lives"

One red earth is full of corpses, another is in turmoil. The devil's domain was opened up and there was no telling what kind of changes would occur. The ancient devils were warlike and bloodthirsty, but when Gouchen rebelled, Fuxi fought a fierce battle to drive them out of the world.

Chu Wanning is well aware that this is not 30 lives

Even if it is only thirty lives, who deserves to die and who should pave the way for the return of the Butterfly Bones, and who should be sacrificed.

The golden light in his palm blazed brighter and reflected in Shi Mei's eyes.

He couldn't get through.

Without the Fairy Tramper, Shi Mei is like a butcher without a blade, left with only a pair of meaty palms, and neither he nor Mu Yanli is a match for Chu Wanning.

In despair, Shi Mei's eyes were red as if they were dripping blood. What should he do? What should he do?

Suddenly, he remembered something with a jolt. It made it seem like a butcher facing a fierce beast, staggering to his back pocket and drawing his last sharp weapon. He threw it at the man who was determined to destroy his life's calculations.

"Good, good. Master, you're the one who's mean. You go ahead and do it."

""

"You go ahead and do it."

Chu Wanning did not know why he had changed his attitude, but he suddenly tilted his forehead and laughed out loud, then looked down hard into Chu Wanning's face and bit off more than he could chew: "Do it, Master. You can break him into pieces. In the end, neither of us will get the benefit of the doubt, and neither of us will lose."

Mu Yanli, looking at his frantic state, could not help but feel a hidden pain in his eyes and said softly, "Nan."

Shi Mei, who could not hear any of her words at this point, said with the madness of a fighting beast on the verge of death, almost grimacing, and fierce.

"You kill him kill him."

""

Venom and blood spit out as Shi Mei's dead black eyes stare through the cracks in her fingers at Chu Wanning. One word at a time.

"Along with the last wisp of his body, the last wisp of his conscious soul that is infatuated with you."