Chapter 25
Outside the cave, the waves crashed against the cliff with a sound that resembled anger long suppressed, and Huan Zheng tightened his grip around his knees, because for the first time in decades, he felt afraid.
Not afraid of enemies he could see, not afraid of death he had faced thousands of times, but afraid of the mystery standing right beside him, smiling, with white hair that glowed in the darkness.
On the other side of the cave, Ling Xu sat silently with her back against the cold stone wall, her eyes watching Huan Zheng, who had suddenly fallen into silence while staring blankly at the sea—and within her own mind, she let her inner voice murmur, not with restless tremors like Huan Zheng's, but with a calm, warm tone, like someone who had just won a long battle against herself.
"I'm very fortunate," she murmured, and for a moment, she felt the pulse within her chest—the pulse of eight hundred thousand fragments of the Humanity Star rotating slowly, and between those pulses, she could feel something else: the remnants of the Cancer plague flesh that had long settled within her consciousness, piling up like snow in an endless winter, silent, unmoving, unused, merely waiting.
"From the very beginning—since the first time I received the intact Humanity Star from that old man in the cave—those remnants of Cancer flesh had already existed within my consciousness. Not one or two pieces, but piled endlessly. Every day, every hour, every minute, they kept appearing, like weeds that could never be uprooted completely."
She smiled—a smile no longer as bright as before, but deeper, more complex, like someone who had just realized that the curse she had carried all this time could be turned into a weapon.
"And for months, I simply let it be. I didn't know what to do with that heap of decaying flesh accumulating in the corner of my consciousness. I didn't know whether it was dangerous, useful, or merely trash I could never discard. But then—"
She exhaled, recalling the long nights in that kingdom, in the land cities, in the makeshift tents where she treated dying soldiers.
"… Then I began to experiment."
With her cold fingers, Ling Xu touched her own chest—right where the eight hundred thousand fragments pulsed—and in her mind, she saw again all the experiments she had carried out in silence, while Huan Zheng snored asleep atop an ox cart, while her patients slept soundly after she had bandaged their wounds, while the world was quiet and she alone remained awake.
"I tried to summon it. I tried to command it to move. I tried to shape it into something—threads, whips, shields, anything that could help. And every time I failed, every time the flesh only pulsed without direction, every time I nearly gave up and threw everything into the darkest corner of my consciousness…."
She closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of the pulse in her chest, feeling the vibrations of the remnants beginning to move.
Not wildly like in the tavern, but orderly, obedient, like a well-trained dog.
"I kept trying. Until finally, in that tavern, when Huan Zheng was about to blow himself up, when there was no choice left but to die or act—I succeeded. I managed to summon all that accumulated flesh out of my consciousness. I managed to turn my body into a medium of the Cancer plague. I managed to unleash it—not to kill, but to save."
She opened her eyes, and before her, Huan Zheng was still staring at the sea with an empty gaze, unaware that within Ling Xu's heart, a silent celebration was taking place—a celebration of a girl who had always only been able to heal others' wounds, who had only been able to kill her enemies with trembling hands, who had only been able to run, hide, and hope, finally realizing that her greatest strength did not lie in the Humanity Star, nor in her white hair, nor in the burning resentment within her chest, but in something she had always considered a curse, a burden, something to be hidden from the world—the Cancer plague that had always been a part of her, that had always been waiting to be acknowledged, to be accepted, to be used not as a tool of destruction, but as a shield for those she chose to protect.
The sky above the world that had once served as a refuge for the Goddesses was never truly clear—there was always a thin mist lingering on the eastern horizon like remnants of sorrow that refused to fade, and within that mist, Ling Xu and Huan Zheng shot forward, two shadows moving too fast for ordinary eyes to catch, too low to be detected by Qi networks, too cautious to be called fugitives even though that was exactly what they were.
Two weeks had passed since the destruction of Pearl Dragon City, two full weeks of recovery within the cold and silent cave, and now—with bodies restored without any trace of pain or soreness, with wounds completely healed without leaving scars—they flew side by side through clusters of gray clouds, occasionally glancing at one another with gazes no longer filled with suspicion as before, but with the look of two beings who had passed through fire together and knew that only each other could be relied upon in a world that suddenly felt far narrower than before.
"Are you sure about your new name?" Huan Zheng asked, his lazy voice now slightly muffled by the black cloth covering half of his face—a simple yet effective disguise, for what the gods in the sky cities were truly searching for was not his face, but the aura that had once shaken the universe.
Ling Xu, flying beside him in a dark blue robe she had never worn before—a robe taken from the treasury of the ocean city before its destruction—gave a small nod, her white, vein-patterned hair now hidden beneath a thick triple-layered hood, so that only its tips occasionally showed when the wind grew bold enough to lift the fabric.
"Lin Xue," she replied, the name she had chosen after nights of wrestling with memories—Lin from the dense forest where she once hid as a child, Xue from the snow that never fell in the valley of her mother's death, two syllables that felt foreign on her tongue yet strangely fitting, like gloves on cold hands.
"And you, Huan Zheng? Or should I start calling you by your new name from now on?"
"Zheng Huan," the man said, his tone like someone tasting a foreign fruit for the first time—sweet or sour, he had yet to decide—and within those words, Ling Xu could hear a faint tremor that revealed the lazy man beside her was not entirely comfortable with the new identity he had crafted, an identity that merely reversed his name yet was enough to deceive overly confident hunters.
For news of the destruction of Pearl Dragon City had spread faster than the Cancer plague itself—from the depths of the ocean to the heights of the clouds, from the dirtiest taverns to marble palaces in sky cities, everyone whispered of a white-haired goddess who unleashed an ancient curse, of a man who turned out to be one of the three Wheels of Cultivation long thought to have vanished—and simultaneously, without coordination, without a single command, driven only by the same instinct for survival, the gods of every region, whether land cities or sky cities, placed targets upon those two names.
To be continued…