Chapter 106 Yin Peach Blossom (36) "The sun... is shattered."...
The room was circular, without doors or windows, and had a hole in the middle of the roof that was blocked up.
Xie Tan guessed that this was usually the only place where natural light entered. A beam of sunlight pierced through like a pointer, sweeping across the small sun calendar stone slab in the center of the room.
A circle of tall black goat oil lamps was placed against the wall, and an obsidian mirror hung on the wall, since smoke mirrors are associated with witchcraft.
Bundles of herbs, dried tree roots, and fungi hang on the outer shelves. The aroma of resin and dried herbs in the room comes from here, along with the unique salty, fishy, and damp smell of the seaside.
But now, these smells are all tainted by the stench of blood.
The divination table had many ores and ground mineral powder, but no crystal balls or anything like that. Xie Tan opened the painted pottery jar, inside which was an exquisite ocarina.
He put the things back in their place, then lowered his head again. The wizard's mouth had been gouged out... Was it because he didn't want her to say anything?
Several divination bone fragments engraved with sun symbols were scattered around her.
In his future timeline, the young Miss Qi introduces herself as using animal bone fragments for divination, but he is a knowledgeable person and sees that the bone fragments of the person she is impersonating are probably human bones.
Moreover, there was more than one small footprint in the blood, indicating that someone had caught up with them before them.
The scene was bloody, and Xie Tan didn't let Xiao Liu get close.
But now she runs over, peeking out from behind the curtain, her eyes filled with an unshakeable worry, and even more complex emotions swirling within them.
"It was...him, wasn't it? He did it."
She seemed unsure how to address that person. By blood, he was her older brother, but they weren't close enough to call each other brother and sister. A more fitting description would be that they were temporary allies in a prison break, but that was still just a dream, and she hadn't had a chance to escape this time.
"I want to go and see what's going on."
After she finished speaking, she didn't know why she was chasing after him, but she wanted to see him.
"Okay." Xie Tan agreed without hesitation, and only after they continued walking along the coast did he ask, "Are you worried about him?"
“Saying I’m worried… that would be crossing the line. If I told him, he’d probably just laugh his head off, make a few sarcastic remarks, and brush me off. He wouldn’t take it to heart… he doesn’t need to.” Xiao Liu put on a smiling tiger look, then slumped down, looked out the car window, and after a moment of silence, said, “At most, we’re just… a little bit in the same boat, I guess. He believes that more.”
Their relationship ended there, which was just right. Adding a layer of blood ties would have made it awkward, like a cruel joke of fate trying to tie up two people who longed for freedom with a rope, leaving them in an awkward situation.
They are related by blood, but not by kinship. Xie Tan thought of this and inexplicably felt a sense of sympathy for her, saying, "Then you must be careful not to cross this boundary, otherwise it will become the sharpest blade that hurts you the most."
Let's just be strangers.
Xiao Liu was startled and turned to look at him, but Xie Tan was already looking out the window on his side, so she could only see his profile. In the darkness, his face was as pale as the jade that someone who died unjustly had nurtured in life. With these two extreme colors, his expression was not clear.
She took his hand.
Xie Tan paused, then grasped her hand in return.
The sky above the harbor outside the window is indeed different from other places.
This shows that it's not that the sun didn't rise, but rather that it did rise, but it wasn't the sun that people are familiar with.
It was a black sun.
Where the pitch-black circle meets the night sky, a ring of cold gold is scattered, hanging cruelly and intensely in the sky... The word "hanging" is not accurate; it's more like it descended from a higher dimension above the sky, looking down on all things and mocking the world.
Arriving at the familiar fork in the road, the car drove into the area illuminated by the cold, golden, murky light, and suddenly broke down, getting stuck in the middle of the road, almost overturning.
The front of the car suddenly burst into flames, and their dedicated driver was burned to ashes first, leaving no trace of his screams, his body and soul completely destroyed, never finding a chance to kill that damned little girl before he died.
Xie Tan, having honed his reflexes to an incredibly fast pace by the memories of the young version of the cult leader, grabbed Xiao Liu and rushed out of the car, shielding her in his arms as they quickly drove away.
Then, the car burst into flames in the darkness.
"Are you alright?" Xie Tan asked, looking down.
Xiao Liu obediently shook his head: "What about you?"
"I'm fine too."
Xiao Liu then looked at the burning car, black smoke billowing towards the distant horizon, and then she saw the black sun in the distance: "Huh? The sun..."
Her expression turned serious: "The sun seems off; it's too far away, I can't see it clearly, we need to..."
She paused abruptly, and Xie Tan also fell silent. The car and the monster had barely entered the range when they were burned through by the sunlight, faster than a laser scanning tower. They were only lucky to be sitting in the back seat.
The end of the afterglow is not the real end, but a warning of their boundary.
Floating Water Town is the most coastal "peak" of Diqiu City, in the direction of the sun, a place no one can enter, and you can't go any further.
Going that way is suicide.
We can only go to the end of the afterglow to take a look; perhaps the distance there will be enough for Xiao Liu to see clearly.
But Xie Tan didn't expect there to be so many people at the end of the afterglow... A dozen or twenty Black Goat Tribe members were lying in ambush there, seemingly looking for someone. Upon seeing Xiao Liu, they hesitated for a moment, but compared the reflection in the mirror, another man was faster and immediately shouted, "This is the last batch, take him down!"
The man who shouted was Xiao Liu's guardian. Xie Tan remembered that this man had died in the Four Seasons Mountain. He was a member of the clan who was mistakenly killed. He had even confirmed it!
Upon closer inspection, among the group that chased him, there were many familiar dead faces. These were the accidental deaths they had witnessed along the way before they left. What was this? A final burst of energy before death, a collective resurrection?
Xie Tan teamed up with Xiao Liu again, taking on the task of catching a ghost off guard. At crucial moments, he helped Xiao Liu dodge damage and carried her away.
But the Black Goat outnumbered them and had too many tricks up his sleeve, managing to half-surround them and force them into a corner.
They were at the entrance to Floating Town, while the entire town was engulfed in black flames.
The caretaker of Xiao Liu suppressed the fear in his eyes at the flames and sneered, "The most promising one among you has already flown into the fire like a moth and burned to death here. Come back with us obediently, and don't forget what your surname is."
Xiao Liu sneered: "I don't have a surname, I'm 'Sacrifice Number Six'."
Another black goat shouted, "Why waste words with her? They're all useless... Several of our people were burned to death chasing that kid, especially Xiao He, the most promising child in the tribe. They deserve to die!"
Her brother and Su He both entered the sea of fire in Fushui Town.
Xiao Liu panicked for a moment, her heart pounding like a drum. The warmth of Xie Tan's palm gave her strength, preventing her from losing her composure.
Her eyes turned cold.
She may have many doubts and many uncertainties, but there is only one thing... she will never go back to the cage of the Black Goat.
Even if she dies here and is burned to ashes.
With the crisis looming, there was no time for farewells. She simply let go of Xie Tan's hand, gave him a hasty apologetic smile, and rushed into the small town that even the Black Goat dared not approach. It seemed as if she had something left unsaid before being consumed by the fire.
Xie Tan's pupils dilated, and he immediately followed, only to be blocked outside the town—a certain talisman in the tuft of hair in his pocket had activated!
Xiao Liu had stuck a talisman on him without him noticing. The talisman was originally drawn from a clump of his long hair, so it hadn't been moved, which was why he hadn't noticed it!
In an instant, Xie Tan's expression turned terrifyingly gloomy, as if he were being embraced by the darkness of night.
Before him stood a herd of black goats who had imprisoned her and driven her to the brink of despair, while behind him lay another plot to destroy her in the town.
He now thinks that the coffin might not have been useless... it just wasn't used in his future timeline. In some timeline he didn't see, she might have become one of the eyes in Observation 2.
The fire burned fiercely, more intensely than ever before, seemingly igniting a wicked fire within him, making him want to do something reckless.
The black goats never expected that even the most useless little girl would dare to commit self-immolation in order to escape her fate of returning to her family.
This is a disgrace to the clan members who regard their family as a faith.
They stood around the entrance to the town, not daring to approach, cursing Xiao Liu for being ungrateful. Suddenly, one of the tribesmen noticed a figure in the firelight, who appeared strangely detached amidst the blazing flames.
However, the figure that seemed so incompatible with fire became a bridge to the flames, instantly propelling the sunlight forward a few more steps. Before they could react, they were swept away by the overflowing fire.
At this moment, Xie Tan suddenly felt a distant gravitational pull. This was the gravitational pull that forcibly pulled him back to Xiao Liu's side after he had gone beyond a certain range!
Since the Smoke Mirror appeared, its range has been growing larger and larger. Now, his soul seems to have swept across the entire town, catching a glimpse of a group of skeletons struggling painfully in the fire—it was the herd of black goats.
When he landed, he found himself on the beach, where the seawater, scorched by the black sun, was boiling. It was no longer washing over the shore, but rather shattering it. The seawater crashed against his calves.
He glanced at Xiao Liu beside him and saw that he was unharmed, and breathed a sigh of relief.
Xiao Liu stared blankly at the sky: "The sun... is broken."
Xie Tan was taken aback. Following her gaze, he saw it too.
At this distance, the black sun resembled a shattered, pitch-black mirror, with fragments falling downwards. Each fragment that fell into the sea stirred up a thousand waves, and a shadow of the sun appeared in the water.
His intuition told him that he should return once the sun had completely sunk into the sea.
He wanted to ask Xiao Liu what he had said outside the town, but he didn't have the chance right now—there were two people fighting on the beach.
One of them is Su He, who is injured.
The other person being chased was completely blackened by the fire, making it impossible to recognize his original appearance. The fire on his body was still burning, seemingly about to burn him down to his bones.
Only his mouth remained intact, laughing wildly.
Xie Tan thought that Xiao Liu was fine, probably because he was bound to this "blank space," but why wasn't Su He burned as well?
Xiao Liu had just run here when Su He saw her. Her pupils dilated, and she snapped, "Get lost! Is this a place for you?!"
The boy being chased looked over with a sinister gaze. His eyes had been burned away, leaving only two black holes, but you could still feel that he was staring straight at you.
He smiled at Xiao Liu and said, "Oh, you're here too."
The next second, he suddenly appeared behind Su He, and the words he spoke were condensed into physical form by the black smoke, spat out from his mouth, and then disintegrated into sharp blades that pierced Su He's vital points.
However, a strand of long hair suddenly emerged from a piece of red cloth on Su He's body, blocking all the attacks for him. Su He was stunned for a moment, then immediately counterattacked. A fierce wind cleaved through his hand, and with the help of the strong wind at sea, it lifted the young boy up and suspended him high above the giant waves.
The sun's shadow, which fell right into the sea, would surely have vanished into nothingness, but the young boy, still in mid-air, had the leisure to do a somersault, and so they saw... him smiling.
Those perfectly intact lips curved upwards in a distinct arc, just like Xiao Liu had taught Xie Tan.
The wind carried his words, crystal clear: "I've heard that trying to catch the moon in the sea will kill you... Is it the same if you try to catch the sun? Let me see, hahahaha!"
Black smoke once again emerged from his lips, dismantling the words and re-weaving them into a cage that tightly enveloped him.
At the same time, countless strokes emerged from Xiao Liu's body, ignoring being severed by Su He's wind blades, and grew at an even faster rate, enveloping Xiao Liu.
But someone was faster. Xie Tan pushed Xiao Liu toward Su He, and the next second, a black blade enveloped him and then retreated. He appeared out of thin air above the sea and fell straight down.
The young boy had already switched places with him and appeared on the beach. Seeing that he hadn't succeeded, he turned and ran away.
This time, Xie Tan saw the sun in the sky more clearly. The pitch-black mirror was full of cracks, and each small fragment reflected different scenes. Some of them were scenes he had seen in the Four Seasons Mountain, and some he had never seen before, as if they contained different worlds.
The broken hole revealed a tomb chamber, the very place he had come from.
The black-haired youth stared at him from behind the hole in the mirror, his beautiful amber eyes unfathomable.
Xie Tan's vision blurred. The burning town, the boiling seawater, the white bones struggling and twisting in the fire, and the people on the shore all seemed to be melted by the darkness, twisted into a ball, like a swirling, beautiful vortex.
He heard the ticking of the clock and the sun's shadow falling into the sea.
The seawater wasn't cold at all; it was warm and scorching, like a familiar embrace.
That mocking voice, like a veil of mist, rang in his ears again, thoughtfully saying, "So you prefer someone like her..."
Xie Tan was lost in the torrent of time, unable to distinguish east from west. He vaguely wondered, what kind of person? Someone like Xiao Liu... or someone like Jin Zhao?
When he opened his eyes again, he was back in the underground tomb, landing right in Lu Jinzhao's arms, meeting his eyes.
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