【Imperial City Storm】She finally knew her sinful past
"Don't be led by the nose." The master's voice was very soft.
These words were like a sharp blade of ice that pierced through everything. It did not hurt Zhou Suyao's consciousness, but it suppressed the restless demonic power in her heart.
It was as if these words were not spoken to her, but rather... to the deep resentment in her heart.
"I understand." Zhou Suyao said.
The master said nothing more, but just looked at her deeply. There seemed to be a magic in that look that was enough to see through all her fears and confusion.
However, it was just a glance before he withdrew his gaze and looked back at the huge mass grave that exuded an ominous atmosphere.
But it seemed only for a moment.
"This place is filled with so much resentment! It's unlucky!" The master's fingertips picked up the dust from the edge of the pit, his brow furrowed even tighter. He then stood up and patted the dirt off his hands. "This place! Everyone is cleaning it. Are they waiting for people to miss it and not go through it?! This is too unlucky!"
He cursed, as if the heavy look just now was just Zhou Suyao's illusion, and her master was still that rude, unkempt old man who picked his toes.
But she still saw it clearly.
The moment the master turned around, beneath his greasy, messy hair, a flash of compassion, encompassing everything, flashed across his slightly lowered brows. That compassionate gaze, heavy as a mountain, was carefully concealed by a thick layer of dust.
She suddenly understood why her master had such a heavy sense of vicissitudes.
A hundred years ago, the woman named Ning Qinggui used the flesh and blood of her entire clan to carve an indelible mark on his master's body. From then on, he chose to sink into the mire of the market, using unkempt appearance to cover up his powerlessness in the cholera.
And are she, Mingluo, and the others caught in the vortex just a few new grudges added to this long tragedy?
Zhou Suyao sighed slightly.
In front, the master brushed off the dust on his fingertips and asked them to follow him.
But after taking a few steps, he stopped. In Zhou Suyao's eyes, this old man who never cared about his appearance seemed to have hunched over.
He stretched out his arm and pointed toward the mass grave they had just passed.
"You guys... take another look."
Zhou Xuqing's old voice sounded faintly after they were born, with a tiredness like walking through the dust of time, but it was like a key that suddenly opened the door to the past.
Zhou Suyao, Qi Jie, and Qi Shuobei couldn't help but look once again at the massive, unsettling mass grave. The bones at the edge of the pit and the blood clots deep in the soil seemed to silently tell of the horrific massacre that had taken place there.
The suffocatingly strong smell of blood was like an invisible ice cone, piercing deep into everyone's soul.
Qi Shuobei retched violently again. This retching affected his internal injuries, and seemed to make everything before him even more painful.
Qi Jie's hand pressed hard on the hilt of his sword, his knuckles a frightening pale. Beside him, the demonic spiritual energy within Zhou Suyao's body throbbed restlessly once again, as if striking a tragic chord with the resentment lingering within the pit.
In this nauseating silence, Zhou Xuqing slowly turned around. His body was still hunched, and his eyes beneath his messy hair showed no fear or grief, only a near-numb, all-seeing sadness.
He whispered:
"Three thousand years ago, the entire land was a thousand times more tragic than this mass grave before us."
"The spiritual path at that time was not called 'Tao', but a 'grave', a living, cannibalistic purgatory."
He slowly withdrew his hand, turned around slowly, his eyes empty, and continued to walk forward slowly.
"The Imperial Power of the Heavenly Dao views all beings as mere elixirs," he stated calmly, even seeming to have time to tell the younger generation behind him to follow him. "They set up a massive formation, using the pretext of cultivating immortality to trap those seeking immortality. Day and night, they absorb their luck and spiritual energy, transforming them into the purest spiritual energy of heaven and earth for the Heavenly Dao cultivators to absorb and cultivate."
"At that time, the Heavenly Dao was nothing more than a puppet supported by the Spiritual Dao. They enjoyed the wealth and honor of the human world and the offerings of humanity, but the price they paid was to sacrifice tens of thousands of 'human sacrifices'—the lowest common people, civilians, and even cultivators who showed even the slightest dissatisfaction, painfully sent into the furnace designated by the Spiritual Dao."
Zhou Suyao's stomach churned at the thought. The human world her master described seemed to overlap with the suffering endured by the demon race she had witnessed in her visions—those sallow-faced, skinny mortals, their eyes numb, like lambs to the slaughter, dared to enter this world of cannibalism.
Qi Jie's expression became increasingly ugly. Although Raotian Dao was known as the greatest Dao in the world, the history mentioned by Zhou Xuqing was only vaguely mentioned in the inherited records, and the word used was even "ancient chaos". As a result, she had never heard the true naked truth of this story.
"Those humane people once set foot on the soil of this imperial city." Master snorted coldly, "Their flesh, blood, souls, along with their longing for life and fear of death, all eventually became refined 'spiritual energy of heaven and earth.' And the residue left after their refinement is what is in the pit before you."
At this point, Qi Jie could no longer hold on and suddenly bent over and made a vomiting sound. However, there was no more food left in his stomach, and all he vomited out was sour and acrid bile.
Born into a noble family, he knew well the cruelty of acquiring power, but he had never imagined that the land beneath his feet had been watered in such a horrifying way.
"But." Beside him, Zhou Suyao frowned and said something even more terrifying, "I saw the bones in the mass grave. Some of them were even wearing clothes from the same dynasty. They didn't look like they had been dead for a long time."
When Qi Jie heard this, his throat couldn't help but tighten again, and the urge to vomit came even more violently than before.
"That's it...that's it." The master didn't answer her directly, but smiled faintly. He asked Zhou Suyao, "Then do you know...when this spiritual path will end?"
Zhou Suyao shook her head, her neck was cold and creaking because of fear.
"The human race back then was not like this. They were like pigs kept in a pen, waiting to be dragged to the altar at any moment. The imperial power of the Heavenly Dao was obsessed with the desire to rule, willing to act like hawks and dogs, hunting their own kind. The Spiritual Dao, on the other hand, sat in the clouds. They didn't care about this endless sacrifice. They only cared about how to maintain it."
"Until..." His old voice softened a lot, "A fairy appeared in the spiritual path."
"No one knows her exact origins. Some say she's a high-ranking deity of the Spiritual Dao, some say she's a celestial being descended from ancient legends, and some say she was just another cultivator within the Spiritual Dao. She witnessed mothers and children being thrown into a furnace to die, witnessed children being transformed at birth, and witnessed the source of the countless spiritual energies of heaven and earth that nourished her. So, at that moment, her Dao heart... was shattered."
"She understood and saw clearly that the root of all these cycles was this 'Spiritual Path'."
"So, she did something that shocked the world and made the gods weep."
The master took a deep breath.
"It was an unimaginable confrontation... She alone defied the will of the entire spiritual path's upper echelons, defied the millennia-old 'orthodoxy' and so-called 'rules.' The elders of the various spiritual paths, those vested interests under the original spiritual path's rules, tore her body apart almost instantly, burning her soul—but these selfish individuals had never imagined that someone would actually..."
"Her □□ unexpectedly, during this battle, borrowed the spiritual power cast upon her by countless spells and transformed it into a flower. This flower was buried deep underground, becoming an unbreakable law."
"——All things have spirits, and they live and die together. Those who cultivate with the spirits, souls, blood, and flesh of living beings will destroy their own foundations and suffer the consequences!"
He paused, his gaze slowly falling on the faces of the three young people in front of him who were shocked beyond words, his eyes were complicated and difficult to understand.
"So... Suyao, do you know what those bones in the mass graves are for?"
After hearing this, Zhou Suyao closed her eyes and nodded slightly.
The thousand-year-old flower that had destroyed its physical body seemed to have completed its mission, and the spiritual path, which was no longer bound by mandatory magic power, had already changed.
Or...
Zhou Suyao suddenly opened her eyes.
Just as she was trying to continue communicating with her master about the legendary flower, countless palace maids and eunuchs like puppets suddenly appeared before their eyes.
Qi Jie suddenly drew his sword and said coldly, "Let's talk about the legendary flowers and fairies later. Now doesn't seem to be a good time to discuss these things."
"Of course." The master nodded, and gently pressed down Qi Jie's drawn sword. "Young man, you'd better step back first. If I can't do it anymore, you can take my body and escape."
After saying this, he chanted a spell with one hand, and the world quickly turned into a warm golden color. In the blink of an eye, these strange puppets quickly fell to the ground. Looking at the master again, there was not even a trace of dust on his body.
He slowly lowered his hand, as calm as if the warm golden light between heaven and earth just now was not emitted by him, but an illusion.
Just as the three juniors were about to applaud, Zhou Suyao noticed that the puppets seemed to have started shaking wildly. They were trying to get up from the ground in a strange and twisted posture.
She couldn't help but shout, "Master! Look!"
Before he finished speaking, the puppets stood up with their bodies twisted. The skins on their bodies were slowly taken off like clothes, revealing the horrifying white bones underneath.
After a rough count... there were at least two hundred corpses.
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