NOVEL NEXT Chapter 90: Persistent [Interlude]
Ru Yunjin opened her eyes.
Her consciousness waned on the precipice, made worse by the foulness that surrounded her. Darkness and wet flesh pressed in on all sides. The smell would have overwhelmed her to madness had her nose and tongue not already rotted off.
All around her, the sound of grinding and pulsating meat lumbered on with tortured persistence. She knew where she was: she distinctly remembered being lifted and dropped within the miasmic maw of the Plague Leech.
There had been a battle… Yunjin did not witness it, but — in her half-conscious, bleeding state upon the ground — she had felt the great tremors of the earth, the blazing heat of the air, and the frantic roars of pain…
The Plague Leech was badly wounded. Even within the bowels of its putrid flesh, she could sense it. Its movements were slow and jerky. There was the distinct sound of sharpened metal rubbing against each other, strange as it was. Every so often, a bellowing rasp of agony preludes the falling crash of meat and material slogging off the beast.
She strived to take some satisfaction from its pain. It might be the last thing she had worth savouring.
Yunjin was dying. No blood or flesh was going to save her this time. Fermented within the toxic divinity of her Sect's Dead God, the thousand maggots within her body were undergoing their final metamorphosis.
She did not know what would become of her corpse, what manner of defilement would befall her. She did not care.
Despite everything she had been through — all the horror she had endured and the efforts she had made to defy her fate — she was still going to die at the hands of putrid rot.
And Feng… the boy who tried so hard to save her…
He was going to die with her. She did not know if he was awake. Maybe it was better that he was not. Yunjin could feel his hand — his warmth — still wrapped tight around her feeble fingers.
Perhaps there was some comfort to take in that, selfish as it was. Yunjin was so dreadfully afraid. Without the assurance of him being with her in that toxic hell, her body and mind might have succumbed already.
Would they go to the afterlife together, hands held over each other? Somehow, the thought of that made dying almost agreeable.
Yet, even so…
I don't want him to die.
Not for her. Not for this. Someone who shone so brightly as he had no right to die in this place: surrounded by shit, rot, and her worthless carcass. Once again, her meaningless existence had dragged those she cared for to an ignoble death.
Such was her wretched purpose. Such was the hand fate had given her. Why fight it? In the last moments of her life, she could at least accept that with whatever dignity she had left. Her feeble fingers twitched, and the hand holding them squeezed faintly.
She had loved, and she was loved.
That had to be enough.
…
…
…
No.
…
How could that be enough?
She had lived for a mere eighteen years, nearly all of it spent in a room. How could that be enough?
She had yet to see all the sights her mother had told her about, all the wonders of the world she had read in books. How could that be enough?
She had not yet learned what it truly means to love someone, how to receive and reciprocate the hope he gave her. How could that be enough?!
None of it was enough!
She wanted more. Needed more. There has to be more to life than this miserable suffering!
Something burned within her. It was not the agony of her dying body, nor the fecund toxins within. Something raged and roared, an incendiary beast that called for her pride.
A mouthful of searing flesh, masticated with the essence of a Morning Star.
Pride demanded she live and die proud.
Nearly two thousand maggots — a number that exceeded the collective Dantian foundation of every single cultivator in her Sect — were condensed in an instant.
The furnace of her unawakened soul was flooded with boiling venom. Too much, far too much. There was more toxin currently within the space of her Dantian than any human — any cultivator — could ever bear. To concentrate such an amount into a single drop was a feat beyond human endurance.
Yunjin screamed in agonising rage, her cries echoing off the closed walls of the Plague Leech's gullet.
Within her fingers, she still felt the warmth of Feng's hand. She squeezed it tight, while her other arm reached out blindly, seeking the thing that would be her salvation or end.
Her spasming fingers latched onto a lump of crystallised death. Even in the all-encompassing dark, it almost seemed to glow with an ominous aura.
The virulent, God-killing amethyst of the Botulvorn Beast, cultivated within its corpses for one thousand years. Its potency was madness; lethality fit to end Immortals and Gods alike.
Yunjin pulled the jewel towards her and swallowed it without a second thought.
Where before the pain had nearly broken her mind, this time, there was no question to the survival of her sanity.
Agony became everything. She beheld a tide of encroaching venom, the likes perhaps never before equalled in all of Mount Tai. An ocean of fire upon her soul. She was floating…
It was torment beyond human comprehension — pain transformed into almost a mythical experience. Pass her instinct, pass her sanity, Yunjin's very soul screamed to surrender.
If she gave in, she would be granted death. The mere thought of it was almost pleasurable…
But then — distant and fleeting — her fingers felt him once more. She was holding him. He was anchoring her still.
"Live…"
Divine toxicity coalesced, an impossible threshold was passed…
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And the Dantian in Yunjin's soul awoke.
~~~
In a place beyond time or space, two inhuman beings watched on.
A woman with a single, unknowable eye… and a beast who had seeped its existence in poison borne of rot.
"I must admit, I did not think my gambit would fail," the beast first said. Despite its words, its tone was pleased.
"You should not have wagered against her," the woman replied, voice neutral. "After all, she was someone my foolish god picked."
"Yes. You are right, of course. He was right." The beast's chuckles were melancholic. "And yet… How was I to know? That even after a millennium of Humanity's cultivated degradation, the will to make such a choice still persists?"
The woman did not speak. She did not need to.
The beast's consciousness waned. Too much of itself had gone into that gem — cultured within the festering pools of its very soul — to fulfil an agreement made with a Hierophant a thousand years before.
Soon, the beast would return to sleep, and this time, it might never wake again.
The very thought itself was horror, yet it was a horror that Humanity faced with each rising dawn — as they had for the last thousands of years, as they would for thousands more.
To be acutely aware of one's mortality, and to dare boldly live life regardless…
"Yes," the beast smiled for the final time. "Humanity is persistent."
~~~
The Plague Leech stopped.
Its languid shuffles — slow and agonising they might have been — gave it speed over its desperate, fading pursuer. It had been mere moments away from a complete escape, for the fires of the ardent angel were seconds away from flickering out like a wind-blown candle.
And yet, the Avatar had stopped. It would not move.
It could not move.
A paralytic poison spread within its body. The toxin was breathtaking in its destructiveness. Unequal in its unquestionable lethality. Flesh was rendered first to numbness, then to complete cell death within milliseconds. The entire body of the half-transmuted beast was turning into black sludge. Meat and metal alike disintegrated into the same sticky foulness, the malignant taint within the beast indiscriminate against all material, biological or otherwise.
The headless form of the ardent angel did not question the why of it. The dying light of her blade seared across the pooling mass of sludge, desperately looking for the survivors within. At last, the fiery edge cut upon the once-infectious gullet of the plague corpse, parting the liquefying flesh to reveal the two children within.
They slumped out from the opening, their fall arrested by the sheer mountain of black slurry beneath them. Lin Daiyu swoop down before them. Her fires were now by an ember, but she still had one last duty to fulfil before she might rest.
Yunjin coughed, weak but whole. She looked to the angel.
"Save him," the girl pleaded before her.
"Move… aside. You are… killing him," Lin Daiyu whispered, her voice a dying rasp as she collapsed to her knees heavily beside them. Yunjin shuffled back with wide eyes.
"My poison, I don't… I can't stop it!" the Young Miss said in panic. Whiffs of purple miasma flowed from her skin like the cold mists of melting ice.
"Your Dantian… Awakened by Divine toxin," Daiyu noted weakly. "Gemstone venom… Divinity tamed your poison… It should have killed you…"
"I… didn't know what to do," Yunjin replied, looking away. "I didn't know why it worked, either. I just…"
"Desperate… I quite… understand…" Daiyu coughed, positioning herself to kneel before Feng's unconscious body. She had seconds left. "Don't touch… him after I… finish."
Before the Young Miss could ask what she meant, Daiyu plunged her flaming sword arm into her lord's sternum.
Yunjin screamed, but the ardent angel ignored her. Daiyu executed all her remaining consciousness in absorbing the foulness within her lord's body. The Phoenix flames, in turn, took to healing the wounds he suffered and went some way to revitalising his mangled spiritual systems.
Her arm grew heavy, swelling from the caustic filth plaguing the purity of her steel. The pain was unpleasant, yet it was the infestation of the Botulvorn Beast's divinity that irritated her. It mixed with her essence, turning her metal foul.
Although… A radical idea took hold. Using the remaining flames she had, Daiyu tempered the Divine toxicant in her blade arm to new purpose.
Divine fire. Divine steel. Divine toxin. With these combined, the maddened maiden wrought forth an alloy most unnatural and unholy. Forcefully forged with her final exertion of effort, Daiyu raised her other arm and sliced off the blade buried in her lord's chest.
The mixture of melting steel and boiling venom fused and cooled with supernatural haste. What formed from the healed torso of the young boy was a naked blade, long as his arm and bearing an unnatural, purplish sheen.
A Divine Sword.
The boy's fluttered open. "B-big sis?"
Lin Daiyu — no, Hei Xingyu — smiled sadly, though no one could see it.
"Take care… of yourself… Boss…"
Her fire faded, and the ardent angel tarnished into motes of weeping embers.
Feng felt tears prick at his eyes, but he forced them away. He blinked, pushing himself to stand. The Divine blade fell off his healed chest and embedded itself into the soil. "Did we… win?"
"I think so…" Yunjin said, her voice quivering. "I don't know how… Are you—"
Something rumbled. The ground shook faintly, and a heartbeat later, the mountain of sludge behind them exploded.
Feng instinctively moved to protect Yunjin. The moment he got close, however, his skin started burning as if struck with acid splashes. When he touched her bare arm, he yelped and jumped back, her fingers immediately numb and rotting from contact toxins.
"Don't touch me!" Yunjin yelled in alarm, eyes wide. "I'm poisonous! I can't control—"
Her voice was interrupted by a guttural roar of pain. Raw and uncontrollable, the melted and tortured form of the dying Plague Leech behind them rose for the final time. Its hide was riddled with blackened wounds and transmuted meat. Its vital organs were dying of poison, and its flesh was awash in agony, amplified without the presence of the Decaying Greyroots to dull the pain.
With a desperate, jagged intake of breath, it strained itself free of the blackened remains of its once-bloated body. What emerged was but a tenth of its original size as it shredded every last ounce of diseased meat it could afford, and more still was expelled when that proved insufficient.
Its dying wail hung in the air, lingering echoes of suffering, helplessness, and the raw reality of being pushed beyond one's limit. Still, more than its fear of death, it was anger that drove it to exert this last, final effort.
The dying Plague Leech turned its bulk towards the pair and shrieked, lumbering forth to bury them beneath its weight, determined to crush its tormentor before it expired.
"Get up!" Feng shouted, already scrambling to his feet.
"I…" Yunjin struggled to move, but her body was weak, and her missing right leg — though no longer bleeding — was a mess of crystallised poison. "Just go, Feng! Run!"
The Young Master looked back. The beast was severely wounded, but it was still in the Nascent Realm. None of Feng's attacks would do much to it, even with its body reduced to such an extent.
The despair he thought defeated crept back again. After everything, was this how they would die?
Then he saw it: glimmering in the soil, the ardent angel's final gift.
A sword forged with tripartite Divinity.
Feng leapt for the naked blade. The mere touch of it sent a chilling numbness to his fingers and arms as poisonous rot took hold. He had only enough qi for one swing.
It would be enough.
The injured leech stampeded forth. Even reduced as it was, it was still strong enough to crush the pair with ease. Feng breathed out.
[Fiery Comet Step]
He shot forward, blade swinging in a massive arc. The metal slashed across the beast's cultivated flesh with shockingly little resistance. It was as if the blade were parting water. Feng plunged the sword across the entire length of the creature's grasping maw, screaming as he did.
The blade thrust impaled itself into the Plague Leech's neck right as Feng's Divine Art activated.
One swing — that was all he could do. Yet, when combined with the blade, that singular swing did more damage to the beast than a cultivator of his standing should ever be capable of doing.
The malevolent form of the Plague Leech gave one last guttural screech before its decapitated 'head' fell to the earth.
Feng felt something enter his soul — the underlying matrix of his Sect's Divine Patron interlacing his spiritual system with the Spirit Beast's blueprint — before he collapsed.
He tossed the blade aside, his fingers tumbling and rotting off from accelerated decay.
"Oh, that's not good," the Young Master mumbled. His lips were numb, and his arms were shaking, but the wounds were not fatal.
"Feng!" Yunjin tried to limp over but hesitated when she saw his wounds. "You're…"
"Baby scratches, don't worry," he replied. When he tried to wave his diseased arm, he winced. "Okay, maybe they are a bit worse than that… Father is going to have a fit when he sees me."
Yunjin said nothing, her mind half-reeling from shock and adrenaline.
Feng got to his feet. Though his lips were half frozen by venom, he still managed a smile. "C'mon. Let's get out of here."
It was over. They had survived.