NOVEL NEXT Chapter 86: One day, Far Away
~~~
"The world is vast and myriad in its mysteries. Do not ever assume you understand all under Heaven. The impossible has been made mundane. Nothing is certain any more.
"Not even death."
— Unknown Source
Feng blinked.
There was blackness everywhere. The arena he was in moments ago was gone. He was stuck in a featureless abyss, void of anyone or anything.
Save for one.
"Hm. This wasn't how I anticipated us meeting in the flesh again, so to speak."
Her voice was crystal clear. Rather than echoing in his head as it always had, the words spoken by her lips registered in his ear.
"You again," Feng sighed as he turned to face his wraith. Seeing her, his panic faded away. "I was in a fight. What is this? Why am I here? And why do you appear so…"
She looked… real. Corporeal. The Young Master was careful not to let his gaze linger on her for too long. His Heart Devil's maddening beauty was unspeakably painful to behold. His mind risked becoming undone with each glance he laid on her.
Incomprehensible. That was the word he would use to describe her. The effects were nowhere near as prominent when he was young, but as he grew older, it was as if a part of his waking mind woke up. Beyond the facade of humanity she wore, certain features of her became impossible to ignore. Worse, they were impossible to fathom.
Not Divine. Not human. Not even something of Mount Tai. Her existence could not be so easily defined in conventional words or categories.
But he could try to dismiss her, difficult as it was.
"The Young Master of the Funereal Whirlwinds had sent your consciousness to a pseudo-pocket dimension," the wraith explained. "Your real body is still in the arena. The reason we may speak like this is because your soul has temporarily assumed a state similar to mine."
Feng frowned. "I am trapped here? This… Is this the effects of a Domain?"
It was a ridiculous thought. Domains were the crafts of Immortals, or at least a talented cultivator who had developed a sufficiently powerful Dao. A Nascent Realm cultivator was powerful — within Feng's home of the 103rd Outer Province, there were likely fewer than fifty residing — but their cultivation should be nowhere near profound enough to sustain a Dao.
Yet, Feng recognised he was stuck within the confines of a spatial boundary foreign to reality. He could not help but wonder.
"Do not worry. The temporal sphere is powered by the corpse of the Funereal Whirlwind — the 'Howling Meadow', as the Young Master referred to earlier. A cultivator in the Nascent Realm has nowhere near enough qi to support a pocket realm, even for a transient moment."
The wraith waved her hands. The space rippled for a moment — as if fearful of her touch. "Time is stretched infinitely thin here. The Divine Art establishes only a brief connection between him and his dead God. In a few minutes, this will fade, and not a second will have passed in the physical world."
"Then why did they even send me here?" Feng asked, puzzled. The Divine Art sounded useless.
"You were supposed to be assailed by all manner of mental horrors in this space," she explained. Her amusement was clear and genuine. It was so unlike the haunting chuckles he had heard from her before that he almost smiled. "Doubts, fears, and the most depraved of guilts that fester within the depths of your subconscious soul would have been made manifest in this temporal realm. Visions of your past turned into monsters and nightmares."
"That sounds unpleasant," Feng remarked. He glanced around once more. There was nothing around, save for the two of them.
"It is. In the most extreme case, it would have led to a cardiac arrest in your real body," the wraith explained. "A rather effective tool for combat in the lower Cultivation Realms. The Divine Art assaults the practitioner's less developed mind and ego, rather than the cultivated physical shell."
"I'm not sensing much of an assault right now," Feng scoffed. "A horror you might be, but I can't imagine you hurting me like this."
The wraith smiled. The Young Master looked away. As usual, he could not look at her for long. There was something wretchedly painful about her visage.
"The Divine Art had successfully established a connection to your soul. However, it had utterly failed to comprehend it," she explained. "The memories and experience of your existence are far, far too vast for a fledgling Divine Art to manage. Perhaps if an Immortal performed the technique, it might have an effect. Alas for that Young Master."
Feng said nothing.
"I suspect the disciple will suffer quite an unpleasant backlash once you return to the physical space," she continued. "I recommend using that moment to your advantage."
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Who are you, really?" Feng asked bluntly, taking a step forward. "All this time, why do you haunt me? Why… all of this…"
She looked at him. The Young Master felt his skin crawl.
"You are asking that now? After so many years together? I am hurt," she jested lightly.
"We might not have a chance to talk candidly like this again. You have not even told me your name," Feng argued. "You were always just… there. Stifling my cultivation. Haunting me with nightmares in my sleep. I see visions of… Gods, battles, and…"
You.
She was quiet. Contemplative. Feng wanted answers, but he had asked them for years, and she never delivered them. Only more cryptic messages, only more dreams that threaten to deviate his Path to Immortality. He expected this time to be no different.
She walked towards him, and the distance between them shrank. Feng began to tremble. When she reached out to him, he flinched.
Her outstretched hand vanished, as if ripped apart by some invisible force. She retreated, and her hand appeared again.
"Even now, you still refuse to suffer my touch." Her smile was still present, but the light in it was gone. "I do not blame you. It must be difficult to forgive me. That hate of yours for me… It is something I have well-earned."
"Forgive what?" Feng staggered back. His Heart hurt. He remembered… something, but the memory was fleeting, and it was gone before he even beheld the shape of it. Failed… "I… failed? What did I fail?"
"Do not try to remember it," the wraith gently warned. "It will do you no good. Instead… Take this."
She reached behind her ear and pulled something. Whatever it was floated off her hand and flew towards him.
As if by instinct, his hand reached up and snatched the object from the air. It was warm, barely the length of his palm. Lighter than a feather, and yet still heavy enough for him to notice its weight. An eerie sense of repetition and familiarity resonated in his mind. He opened his hands.
Nestled fitfully within his hand was a single golden needle.
"What is this?" he asked numbly.
"A piece of ourselves we once wrought together with a promise," the wraith answered, cryptic as always. "It holds a part of me. But more importantly, it holds a part of you as well. Use it well."
"It's a needle, and not a very long one either," he protested. "What do you want me to do with it? Poke someone's eye out?"
Her smile turned more genuine. "If it helps. Perhaps it might make little difference to your current opponent, given your present body's paltry cultivation. If you wish to survive, you will still need to unleash that little souvenir you collected from the swamp years ago."
"Using that thing holds irreversible consequences," he resisted.
She shrugged. "So does dying."
He couldn't find an argument against that, so he simply sighed.
The world around them was beginning to collapse. The abyss was fragmenting, and Feng felt his consciousness beginning to fade.
"This is not the end," Feng declared. "I will understand you one day."
"You will," the fading form of the wraith agreed. "And when you do…"
The world broke away. He was falling, and still, he heard her final words echo in his head.
"I look forward to hearing your Heart beat for me once more."
~~~
Feng woke to screams.
He was lying with his back to the arena's sand. His glaive was still clutched in his hand. His ribs felt sore but intact.
The screaming wasn't coming from Feng, but rather from the cultivator in front of him. Bihui — head half-torn from their neck — was clutching the smoking remnant of their fist. No longer was the image of a handsome Young Master even remotely present. In his place was a writhing sludge of twinkling blackness, swarmed with eyes all over its slimy mass.
"What have you done?!" They screamed, sounding not even remotely human. Their voice was like a hundred distorted lips speaking over each other at once. "How is this possible?! No metal should have been able to harm my flesh! And you! Your soul was— GAAAHHH! "
More of their arm ruptured into pools of star-flecked oil. Across their body, boils and cysts of hardened resin enlarged and burst. The cultivator's agonised screams were spoken in a hundred haunting voices, each overlapping the other.
Yet, with each grease-gushing wound that appeared on them, a pair of eyes within the weave of that midnight tar blinked out, and the echoing screeches began to reduce in numbers.
Feng could now almost hear a singular voice — distinct and human — coming from within the oozing blackness.
"N-no! Not this! M-my face! MY FACE! MOTHER, GIVE ME BACK MY FACE!"
An eternity and a second had passed. Bihui's attempt at using his Sect's Divine Art had backfired on him horribly, while Feng had made it out comparatively unscathed. The strike against his chest barely hurt.
That did not mean he was completely unaffected. Feng was suffering severe whiplash from having his consciousness forcefully removed and then slammed back into place. He could not attack, no matter how perfect the opportunity was.
Thankfully, neither Disciple Shao nor Elder Dai suffered such afflictions.
[Arts of the Beheaded Phoenix – Severed Heads Apostles]
[Arts of the Split-Headed Carnivores — False Primaeval Glory]
Monsters sprang to life in the arena. The raging flames transformed into a menagerie of headless Spirit Beasts woven of fire and light, while Shao turned into a hulking nightmare made flesh by titanic muscles and black-boned scythes.
At once, they pounced upon the disoriented foreign cultivator. Flaming claws and serpentine bodies first assailed Bihui's melting form as countless summons of varying sizes lunged and wrapped themselves around the cultivator's deteriorating robes. Liquid darkness spilt between the seams, immiscible against the fluid flames.
Shao stampeded forth. Like a barn of horrors come to life, her whirling scythes came down in a dozen strokes, hacking chunks of the sable mucilage protecting the cultivator within.
The screaming was dying down; clamorous volume fading as more voices were silenced, sheared off by Shao's and Dai's combined effort. The bubbling fountain of eye-speckled tar was ebbing until, finally, Feng saw it.
Hiding inside was a hint of greyish skin, along with an eye of pure terror.
And then, it all went to hell.
"MOTHER! SAVE ME!"
[Arts of the Howling Meadow — Tempestuous Procession of Dead Chrysanthemums]