Chapter 43
"Twenty-three out of twenty-seven," he muttered as he kept moving, his once-lazy eyes now sharp like a scalpel dissecting corpses in an autopsy room. "Faces I don't recognize. But these four…"
He stopped in front of a tall, large-built man wearing a dragon mask—who thirteen seconds ago had been laughing loudly while imagining the depraved acts he would carry out on Ling Xu—and with his usual lazy motion, Huan Zheng removed the mask, then let out a long breath.
"Commander Xu," he said, his voice flat like a gravestone, "my former subordinate in the Supreme Court of Humanity before I was sentenced to death. So this is why you disappeared for three years—joining a mercenary force that preys on lesser goddesses in floating cities."
Hhhh!
Time resumed with a sound Ling Xu had never heard before.
Not a boom, not a hiss, but something like thousands of stained-glass windows shattering at once and then reassembling into the same window, like a river that had stopped flowing a moment ago suddenly remembering that it had an ocean to reach—and amidst that terrifying restoration, Ling Xu blinked.
Just a blink, just a fraction of a second in which her eyelids closed and opened—enough to brush away dust that nearly entered her left eye, enough to steady her breathing that had begun to falter under the pressure of twenty-seven headless corpses still standing around them, enough to realize that something deeply strange had happened to her own body.
Because when her eyes opened again, the back that had just moments ago been warmly pressed against Huan Zheng's suddenly felt cold, empty, as if something very important had been stolen from her without permission.
"Zhao Wei?" she called, her voice half questioning, half warning, and when she turned around, there was no one there.
Only corpses without heads on their shoulders, only dust drifting aimlessly, only a void as cold as death itself.
"Looking for me, Liu Xin?" came a voice from the opposite direction, and when Ling Xu turned forward, there he was, right in front of her, only an inch away from the tip of her nose—Huan Zheng with his usual lazy face, holding a stack of scrolls as thick as an adult's arm, his messy hair unchanged as if he had just woken from a nightmare about a past he never truly left behind.
Ling Xu did not ask where those letters came from—because she had been with Huan Zheng long enough to know the answer would be something like "I borrowed them from corpses," or "I borrowed time and took them," or "I just blinked, Liu Xin, and all the world's secrets opened before me," and she was far too tired to argue with a man who considered borrowing time as normal as borrowing salt from a neighbor.
She also did not ask why the twenty-seven Bright Sky Old cultivators—who thirteen seconds ago had been laughing loudly while imagining the vile acts they would do to her—now stood around her with their heads no longer on their shoulders, blood beginning to pour heavily from their severed necks like small waterfalls that were never meant to be born in the middle of a desert.
"You're insane, Zhao Wei," she finally said, not as an insult, not as a reproach, but as a statement of fact she had known since the first time she met him in that dark, damp cave.
"Read this," Huan Zheng said as he tossed one of the scrolls into Ling Xu's lap, his movement lazy yet precise as always, and when Ling Xu unfolded the paper—still slightly damp with ink that had not fully dried—her dim eyes suddenly widened.
Not from surprise, but from a terrifying clarity, as all the puzzle pieces scattered in her mind suddenly came together into a single, complete picture she had never imagined would be this horrifying.
"The fourth floating city," she whispered, her voice nearly inaudible among the pile of corpses still bleeding.
"Wuji City… has already fallen. Not today, not yesterday, but three weeks ago. Human cultivator forces attacked at dawn, when defenses were weakest because the guardian gods were taking turns meditating. They slaughtered all who resisted, drove out the survivors, and immediately claimed the entire territory under human control."
She lifted her face from the scroll, looking at Huan Zheng with eyes full of questions that did not need to be spoken, because the answers were already laid bare around them—the ruins of buildings, the masked corpses, the silence thicker than death.
"That's why we were immediately surrounded the moment we entered the outer gate," Huan Zheng continued, his voice as flat as ever, though there was a bitterness beneath it he could not hide. "Not because they recognized us, Liu Xin. But because they've been ordered to kill every wanderer, every traveler, every being that dares to step into a city they now claim as theirs. We were just a coincidence—a coincidence that nearly cost you your life."
Faaah!!
Four months passed in Wuji City like water flowing over smooth stone—fast, silent, leaving no trace, yet making the surface even smoother than before, more prepared to face whatever would come next.
Ling Xu and Huan Zheng chose to stay.
Not because they couldn't leave, not because they had nowhere to go, but because in this fallen city, in the midst of human cultivators who claimed power with arrogance and brutality, they found the richest hunting ground they had ever encountered in their long journey.
Night after night, beneath moonlight often hidden behind thick clouds, two shadows moved through the dark alleys of Wuji City.
Not to loot, not to kill indiscriminately, but to hunt, to gather, to absorb every Celestial Longitude they could seize from human cultivators who dared to set foot in what was once a sacred city.
"242 Longitude," Ling Xu murmured one night, after they had cleared five small villages on the eastern outskirts of Wuji City from the invaders. Her body, still stained with enemy blood, stood atop a pile of corpses, her breathing steady, her eyes fixed on her own palm faintly glowing with the remnants of transformation.
"Bright Sky Old. The peak of the first realm of Heavenly Longitude."
Huan Zheng, standing beside her with his hands in his pockets, only nodded lazily, but in his half-closed eyes, there was a satisfaction he could not conceal.
Not pride in himself, but because he saw how Ling Xu—the girl who once could only crawl on the ground covered in wounds—now stood upright over her enemies.
No longer a victim, no longer a helpless healer, but an executioner learning to enjoy her work.
The hunt continued into the ten great cities of Wuji City, where human cultivators of the Radiant Lantern realm gathered in their barracks, laughing, drinking wine, and telling stories of how easy it had been to conquer the city of weak gods—until one night, two shadows emerged from the darkness, and their laughter turned into screams, and their screams turned into silence, and that silence became the only sound left in those ten great cities when dawn arrived.
To be continued…