The Quest for Immortality - Chapter 1112 (Patreon)

Chapter 1112: Ominous Omen

Blood-laced grief and bitterness, anger and unwilling pleas—amid those voices, everything dispersed like a lifting fog.

Mo Hua awoke. He slowly opened his eyes and, brow furrowed, sank into thought.

The old man in the dream just now—face streaked with bloody tears, features blurred—but by his silhouette and voice, he should be that Second Elder of the Demonic Sect who vanished to ash together with the Great Wilderness Dragon Hall.

The clue to the Twelve Meridian Glutton Spirit Remains Array was given to him by that very Second Elder.

At the time, the elder had indeed made a single request: In the calamity to come, preserve a wisp of bloodline for the Great Wilderness clan.

Mo Hua had nearly forgotten this, yet after returning home from the Qianxue provincial border, the Second Elder—already dead—actually appeared in a dream to beg him…

But…

“Who, exactly, counts as the descendants of the Great Wilderness bloodline?”

“Why would the Second Elder send me a dream now—did some change occur?”

“The Great Wilderness faces annihilation; the Great Wilderness clan… will be wiped out…”

“Is this the Second Elder warning him that some great event is about to unfold?”

“If he ignores it, will the promise he made to the Second Elder become impossible to fulfill? Will the Second Elder be unable to rest in peace?”

Mo Hua’s frown deepened.

He had not taken that promise very seriously before.

Even if he broke his word, a merely dead Second Elder could do nothing to him.

Even if the elder could not rest and turned into a fierce ghost, he could crush him between his fingers with a casual squeeze.

That said, the Second Elder had indeed done him a great favor.

Without the elder’s guidance, he would never have obtained a second-grade, twenty-four-pattern lifebound array—the Twelve Meridian Glutton Spirit Remains Array.

What’s more, he seemed to have agreed to the request at the time.

In feeling and in reason, he ought to honor that promise and thus conclude a thread of karmic cause and effect.

But how was he to fulfill it?

Mo Hua pondered. “Do I… need to make a trip to the Great Wilderness?”

The Great Wilderness royal clan should lie south of Li Province, at the central hub of the Three Thousand Great Wildernesses.

Now that the Second Elder had come in a dream, it was obvious the Great Wilderness bloodline was facing a grave threat; a single misstep might bring clan-destroying, line-terminating catastrophe.

Yet if the Great Wilderness clan faced annihilation, it meant that in the days ahead the Great Wilderness would be an extremely ill-omened land.

And since it was an ill-omened land, the farther one stayed from it, the better.

Seek the auspicious, avoid the inauspicious—having studied Heavenly Mechanism calculations, Mo Hua could not fail to understand so simple a principle.

This Great Wilderness was a place he naturally should not enter…

Mo Hua shook his head slightly.

The rise or fall of the Great Wilderness clan—this cause and effect was too vast. As a mere Foundation Establishment cultivator, he lacked the power to shoulder it.

The urgent matter was still Core Formation.

Except… Core Formation…

Mo Hua started slightly; his gaze sank as he thought.

To form a core, he had to forge his lifebound array diagram.

And his lifebound array was the Glutton Spirit Remains Array.

This array itself was an ancient forbidden formation of the Great Wilderness.

He was not yet capable of learning it, and he did not know whether this Gluttonous Array hid secrets unknown to others.

If it did, those secrets would be concealed only within the Great Wilderness royal clan.

Should the Great Wilderness clan truly perish, it would mean the secrets within that ancient Glutton Array would be forever sealed in dust, even utterly erased.

He would never again be able to comprehend the Twelve Meridian Glutton Spirit Remains Array, much less refine it into his lifebound array.

Mo Hua’s gaze sharpened slightly.

Though this was only his conjecture, the likelihood was high.

Even if there were only one chance in ten thousand, he did not dare to gamble.

For if the array’s hidden knowledge truly vanished with the Great Wilderness clan, he might never achieve Core Formation in this lifetime.

Or else he would have to seek some lesser array and make do.

But Mo Hua would never be content with that.

Once one has seen the vast sea, other waters no longer satisfy.

With a twenty-four-pattern absolute array in hand, how could he lower his sights and use some other array as his lifebound array?

“Could this, too, be within the Second Elder’s calculations?”

He thought, “If I obtain this savage absolute array and leave it unlearned, there’s no problem. But the moment I try to study it and refine it into my lifebound artifact, I will inevitably have to go to the Great Wilderness—and naturally, I’ll end up fulfilling my promise to him?”

“This Second Elder…”

Mo Hua’s eyes chilled. After a moment of reflection, he sighed softly.

Though the elder’s little scheming displeased him, on second thought, with death imminent, the Second Elder truly had no other path. This was his one sliver of chance.

To exhaust oneself for the Great Wilderness—to remain unwavering even in death, dissolved to ash.

Setting aside factional positions, Mo Hua felt a measure of respect for such a man.

Besides, even if this absolute array were a “bait,” he had willingly taken the hook.

Sometimes when one receives benefits, one must bear the corresponding responsibility.

Having gained the cause, one must shoulder the “effect.”

This, too, is the law of Heavenly Mechanism and karma.

“Given how things stand… then… I will make a trip to the Great Wilderness.”

After a moment’s deliberation, Mo Hua calculated his fate, sensed his karmic threads, weighed them, then finally nodded slowly, settling on a course:

“Go to the Great Wilderness, refine the Glutton Array, and seek the opportunity to form my core…”

Once the decision was made, he let out a long breath.

Though reluctance lingered, his mind suddenly cleared; at the very least, his goal had become clearer.

Only one doubt remained:

“What, exactly, is the clan-destroying disaster that the Second Elder fears will befall the Great Wilderness?”

Mo Hua’s eyes grew grave.

…

At that very moment, in the Qianxue provincial border, ten million li away—

In a remote and desolate mountain forest, seldom trodden by men,

A middle-aged cultivator dressed like a scholar was trudging alone.

This cultivator had a refined, scholarly face and genteel features. If Mo Hua had seen him, he would have been extremely surprised.

For this man was none other than Shen Xiuyan, an elder of the Shen family with whom Mo Hua had crossed paths back in Nanyue City of Li Province.

Yet Shen Xiuyan was a touch strange now. As he walked, his movements were slightly stiff. At a glance one might miss it, but look closely and one would see that with each step his footprint was faint with one foot and deep with the other.

A dazed glaze also hung in his eyes as he stared blankly ahead.

In this fashion, like a puppet on strings, Shen Xiuyan walked alone through the dead stillness of the woods.

No one guided him, yet he seemed to know where he was going.

Or rather, there was something in the unseen that was “calling” to him.

He did not know how long he walked before he arrived at a stone wall.

He reached out a hand in a trance and rubbed at the rock, grinding the tips of his fingers until flesh and blood blurred and white bone shone through.

Then, with bare bone dipped in his own blood, he drew a blood-colored array upon the stone.

This was a formation that transcended the normal category; one after another, the array lines were like ghoulish faces, howling and roaring in eerie fury.

When the array was finished, the stone wall dissolved at once, revealing a deep, pitch-dark cave.

Shen Xiuyan stepped into the cave. Blackness swallowed all—no lamp, no light—yet he could still find his way within it.

He kept walking, until he reached the end of the tunnel.

There, at the end of the dark, a blood-red glow pulsed.

Within that glow stood a dust-sealed altar.

After the Blood-Sacrifice Disaster of Qianxue, every demonic cave and evil-god altar across the Qianxue provincial border and its surrounding lands had been destroyed.

This altar, sealed in the shadows, was the sole survivor of the Dao Court Directorate’s purges.

The blackness in Shen Xiuyan’s pupils began to thicken.

He knelt before the altar and, one by one, bit open all ten fingers, then drew strange lines before the altar.

Blood-colored lines, shaped like long serpents, flowed into the altar.

In the dark, the blood-glow deepened with a chilling sheen.

Something seemed to “awaken.” Beneath the altar came the sound of flesh squirming, of something hatching.

When Shen Xiuyan had finished all this, he ignored what followed. He turned with wooden stiffness and left the altar.

Afterward, the blackness in his eyes only grew heavier, and his limbs more twisted.

Each step he took fell unevenly, one deep, one shallow, more obvious than before.

“Who am I?”

“Who… am I?”

“I…”

In a hoarse voice, Shen Xiuyan muttered, as if he had forgotten everything—even who he was.

Pitch-black eerie lines crept outward, spreading across his flesh, crawling over his face.

“I am… eerie…”

At the instant the word “eerie” left his lips, everything changed again.

The inky-black, previously rigid lines suddenly seemed to come alive; in an instant they sank beneath Shen Xiuyan’s skin and vanished.

Shen Xiuyan’s bewildered expression cleared at once.

He looked around; his face changed dramatically as shock gripped his heart: “Where… am I? What am I doing? What… did I do?”

But no one was there to answer him, only the dead stillness of the night.

“I can’t stay here…”

Panic churned within him. He fled in haste.

Though he did not know where he was, the path he had come seemed to be imprinted faintly in his mind. Though he ran in headlong fear, the road he took out proved correct.

In this way, Shen Xiuyan left the mountain forest and, upon lifting his head, saw a carriage by the roadside.

The surroundings were empty of people. The carriage seemed to be the one he had ridden in, though he had no memory of it.

But as things stood, Shen Xiuyan could not afford to care. He climbed aboard without hesitation, took the reins, and fled that nightmare wood in a panic.

In recent days, he could no longer distinguish dream from reality.

What felt like a dream might be real.

What felt real might be a dream.

At times, he himself drifted in a half-dream, half-waking haze.

Such spells had once been rare, but since the Qianxue blood-sacrifice affair, they had grown ever more frequent.

Urging the carriage along the mountain road, he sped out of the barren hills, traveled dozens of li, and only then did the scenery grow familiar enough for him to find the road back to his sect.

He was an elder of the Little Spirit Sect, one of the Hundred Sects of Qianxue.

As an elder, he naturally had to handle sect affairs.

If he slacked too much and neglected his duties, he would be punished.

Upon returning, Shen Xiuyan discovered it happened to be the tenday rest; the disciples were on break, and he, as an elder, did not need to teach. Only then did he breathe easier.

He entered the Little Spirit Sect’s mountain gate, passed the long steps, returned straight to his elder’s residence, locked doors and windows, sealed the array, shut himself in completely, and only then, wrapped in absolute quiet, did he feel truly at ease.

But what followed was a string of questions that chilled him:

Where did I go? What did I do there? What has happened to me? I…

The more he thought, the more confused he felt; his sea of consciousness throbbed with pain, cold seeped up from his heart. His vision went dark, his head grew heavy, and before he realized it, he fell asleep again.

Asleep, he dreamed once more.

It was the same dream he had been having for a long time.

The same little ruined temple. He, Old Wen, and Young Master Yun taking shelter there.

Opposite them sat a kindly-faced child and a Daoist shrouded head to toe in black mist.

The child was roasting sweet potatoes over an array while pursing his lips soundlessly, as if warning him to leave quickly.

Shen Xiuyan wanted to go, but in the dream he could not control his body.

He could not leave.

Just then, he saw that Daoist rise slowly, a coil of black mist about him, and step toward him one pace at a time.

Shen Xiuyan was terrified beyond measure.

He knew who that Daoist was.

He also knew that once the Daoist reached his side, something unspeakably horrific would happen.

He struggled with all his might.

At the same time, he chanted under his breath certain incantations learned from high-level cultivators—formulas to slay evil, expel hauntings, suppress dreams, and break nightmares.

He did not know whether they worked.

But the Daoist’s figure did indeed slow, and the black mist began to contract. It even seemed to gain a kind of sentience, gathering itself together.

“It works?”

Joy flared in Shen Xiuyan’s heart. He poured out all his strength, burning nearly all his divine sense, and continued to chant the formulas that suppressed the nightmare.

As he did, the heavy, suffocating weight pressing on his heart seemed, inexplicably, to ease.

Clarity returned to the nightmare.

The temple’s gloom drew back.

The once-dim firelight grew bright.

A weight lifted from Shen Xiuyan. He looked up and saw that the Daoist in the ruined temple was gone.

The child roasting sweet potatoes no longer mouthed warnings at him. He only looked at him with a pair of limpid, black eyes.

“This tribulation… has passed…”

Shen Xiuyan let out a long breath and managed a strained smile.

He had a faint premonition that from here on he would no longer be troubled by this nightmare.

He failed to notice, however, that the child across from him had not fallen silent by choice—but did not dare to warn him anymore.

The child’s gaze was fixed on the space behind him.

And behind Shen Xiuyan stood a living Daoist, stripped of his black mist.

…

Three days later.

At that remote altar Shen Xiuyan had visited, blood lines gleamed bright; the bricks split, and a mass of flesh and blood thrust forth.

The flesh coalesced into a humanoid demon.

The demon was deathly pale and bore a certain resemblance to the former “Mr. Tu.”

Its throat worked as it spoke with a rasping, dreadful voice: “Who… undid the seal on the third body of my demonic flesh?”

“Who set me free?”

“Mr. Tu” had no answer. As he puzzled over it, a vast mortal peril surged in his heart. Alarmed, he thought:

“This won’t do—I must flee!”

With the Divine Lord’s overwhelming wicked will no longer veiling him, his existence had long been exposed to the Heavenly Mechanism sight of many mighty figures.

The instant he showed himself, he would be erased.

“Mr. Tu” dared not delay. His pale demonic flesh transformed into a streak of blood light, drilled into the earth, and followed the lingering blood qi of the leylines to flee south of the Qianxue provincial border.

At that very moment—

At the Sword-Watching Hall,

An Elder of Tianshu Pavilion who lounged before a go board with eyes closed stirred from his doze. When he opened them, his gaze was unfathomably deep.

“There is still… a fish that slipped the net…”

He lifted a withered finger, pinched a stone, and dropped it heavily upon the board. Killing intent billowed.

Heavenly Mechanism locked on; the real and the illusory inverted; space began to warp.

In the leylines, as the fleeing “Mr. Tu” scrambled in panic, he was instantly shackled by Heavenly Mechanism. Then, as the void shattered and space twisted, his bones and flesh were crushed, twisted, squeezed dry—erased…

All of this took but a single heartbeat.

And in the very instant when “Mr. Tu” was about to be annihilated—life and death divided by a hair—

He gritted his teeth and employed the last of the Great Wilderness’ eerie techniques, burning a lifetime of divine will to block one thread of Heavenly Mechanism. Then he gathered his entire cultivation and split off a wisp of flesh, and beneath the casual, thousand-li-away killing finger of the Elder, he forcibly fought for a single sliver of life.

“Mr. Tu’s” demonic body was obliterated in an instant.

But that wisp of flesh slipped out of the void’s prison.

At the Sword-Watching Hall, the Elder arched an eyebrow, then placed a second stone.

If one stone could not finish the kill, then he would place the second.

This second stone was an absolute kill that “Mr. Tu” could not possibly withstand.

But at that moment, real and unreal shifted; a trace of eerie patterning manifested and, across a distance, shielded “Mr. Tu,” now reduced to a single filament of flesh.

The next breath, the eerie pattern was ground to dust beneath the Elder’s stone.

But “Mr. Tu” had seized life.

Borrowing the eerie pattern’s cover, he fled into the depths of the leylines, slipping past the fifth-grade Qianxue domain into second- and third-grade provinces, leaving Qian Province entirely and racing toward Li Province.

This was a retreat he had schemed for a millennium—long planned.

If the grand array had been completed, the great plan succeeded, and the Divine Lord descended, then this backhand would have been irrelevant.

But once the grand plan failed and life-and-death crisis loomed, the crafty rabbit with three burrows—this third demonic body—could follow the mapped route and, in the shortest time, escape the Qianxue provincial border.

To preserve a thread of life for himself.

And to leave behind a seed for the Divine Lord’s great design.

The problem was that his previous demonic body had died too cleanly, obliterated by tribulation lightning—nothing remained, not even ash.

This backup could not be activated for a long time.

Yet for some unknown reason, someone had found the altar, broke the seal, and released it.

“Mr. Tu” was stunned and bewildered.

But under overwhelming killing intent, he could spare no thought. Even reduced to a single strand of flesh, to serve the Divine Lord and rise again, he could only flee with all his might and grasp that single hope of survival.

The Elder’s killing intent had been checked for a heartbeat.

In that single heartbeat, karma shifted, and fate diverged.

The strand of flesh, mingled with the leylines, left the Qianxue provincial border and swam into the vaster earth. Within the Heavenly Mechanism, it sank like a stone into the sea—without a trace.

At the Sword-Watching Hall—

The Elder, briefly delayed by the inversion of real and unreal within the eerie pattern, fell still.

He stared at the stone between his fingers. His deep gaze grew solemn, his expression grimmer, and at last he murmured, voice cold:

“To break the real with the eerie… Do you intend to let a god molt into new form and become lawless?”

Thanks for reading! That chill at the end gave me goosebumps—hope it did the same for you. If you’re enjoying the ride, please consider supporting me on Patreon; even a small pledge helps me keep translating these long chapters. And if you have a moment, a rating or short review on NovelUpdates really helps other readers discover this series.

Next Chapter >