Chapter 51
"Everything that concerns you, Liu Xin—your character, your behavioral traits, your talent, all information about who you truly are, about what you have done in your life, about what you wish to do in the future—will vanish. Your name will never be remembered by anyone, will never exist in any record, will never be acknowledged as 'existing' by any entity, including your killer, including the entire infinite universe and all within it. You will become… nothing, Liu Xin. Not death, because death at least leaves behind a corpse, a name on a gravestone, memories in the hearts of those who loved you. But this—this is absolute nothingness. Like before you were born, but without ever having the hope of being born again. Like after you die, but without any certainty that you ever lived."
In the meditation chamber, silent like a womb unwilling to give birth, amidst walls of light pulsing with the rhythm of a dying universe's heartbeat, Huan Zheng and Ling Xu began the ritual that would determine whether they would be reborn as new Gods or vanish into dust never to be remembered.
Huan Zheng, with the laziness that had become his deadliest weapon, fused his first crystal with barely half-open eyes—and when his consciousness was cast into an unknown universe that strangely felt like a mirror of his own soul, where time flowed like spilled honey across a cold floor and gravity never truly bothered to pull anything downward, he merely yawned.
A long yawn, followed by a deep breath, and in that strange universe—dubbed by the elders as the Realm of the Indolent—the Qi radiation powerful enough to kill a thousand Vast Cosmos cultivators was absorbed into his cultivation axis like water falling into a bottomless well, without resistance, without pain, without the slightest visible effort.
"Ah, just this?" he muttered inwardly, scratching his stomach that did not itch.
"I thought it would be more interesting."
Meanwhile, on the other side of the chamber—separated by only three steps yet feeling like two entirely different worlds—Ling Xu bled.
Not from one or two points, but from every pore of his skin, from beneath his fingernails that clawed into the stone floor leaving bloody scratches, from the corners of his lips that he bit until they nearly tore apart in an attempt to endure pain beyond words.
The fifth and sixth crystals refused to merge, pulsing in his chest like two hearts that despised each other, and every time he forced them together, his eyeballs felt as though they would burst from their sockets, pushed outward by a pressure he could not control despite having endured ten deaths.
"It would be better for me to lose both eyes," Ling Xu whispered between restrained groans, blood flowing from eyelids he could barely keep open, "as long as I truly succeed in transforming into a cultivator of the Supreme Dao."
He drew a breath—a breath that felt like inhaling shards of glass—then continued in a voice nearly inaudible yet filled with unshakable certainty.
"My hatred toward humanity—especially the cultivators and mortal warriors who overthrew the Gods and defiled the honor of the Goddesses—will never fade just because I lose a pair of eyes. If my eyes must fall here, then so be it. I will hunt them with my ears, with my nose, with my skin, with every remaining fiber of my soul."
And at the peak of his despair, when both of Ling Xu's eyeballs truly tore free from their sockets—detaching with a sickening wet sound, falling into his lap like two red pearls that had lost their light forever—something that had never been recorded in any sacred text began to occur.
The empty eye sockets did not bleed, did not gape like ordinary wounds, but instead pulsed with a grayish-green light emanating from within his skull, like two wells suddenly discovered in a desert long thought dead.
The consciousness of the Cancer plague, which had long resided in the darkest corner of his mind, which had remained nothing more than a silent observer through every battle and every suffering, finally moved.
Not like a slithering serpent, but like lava flowing with purpose, creeping from the depths of his awareness toward his forehead, toward the point between his brows that had long remained empty—and there, with a silent explosion perceptible only to Huan Zheng sitting before him, an eye opened.
Not an ordinary eye of globe and lid and lashes, but a vertical slit pulsing with gray light, surrounded by black veins that stretched toward his temples like roots seeking water in barren soil.
"Don't be startled, Zhao Wei," Ling Xu whispered, his voice strangely calm even as two hollow sockets still pulsed upon his face, "I can still see you. Even more clearly than before."
As the third eye opened upon his forehead, a thin, pale-white strip—resembling a bandage used to wrap fatal wounds, its ends dulled by time and dried blood—moved on its own, wrapping around his head, covering the empty sockets neatly, like a nurse long experienced in tending a thousand similar injuries.
But what made Huan Zheng fall silent was not the bandage—it was the light that began to shine through it.
Two faint rays of gray-silver light emerged from Ling Xu's former eye sockets, piercing through the fabric as though it were nothing more than morning mist, reflecting upon the walls of the meditation chamber, casting shadows that moved without any clear source.
And beneath that bandage, in a place unseen by the naked eye, the consciousness of the Cancer plague had placed substitute eyes—perfectly concealed within the remaining folds of flesh, pulsing faintly like stars born in the darkness of the void, ready to be used whenever Ling Xu required them.
"You know, Zhao Wei," Ling Xu said as he touched the bandage on his face with trembling fingertips, "it feels strange. I lost two eyes, but I was given three in return. As if the universe is joking—or perhaps preparing me to see something that ordinary eyes should never witness."
The Trial of Concealment Within Corpses despite the loss of Ling Xu's eyes—and strangely, after the emergence of the third eye upon his forehead, the torment that had made him bleed from every pore for three consecutive days began to subside, like a storm suddenly running out of fury upon realizing its victim no longer feared it.
The crystals that had once despised one another and refused to merge now flowed into his cultivation axis with an almost suspicious obedience, as if they perceived something within Ling Xu that made them unwilling to resist—something older than the crystals, older than Longitude, older than Star, something that had resided within him since the beginning, merely waiting for the right moment to bare its fangs.
And when the tenth and final crystal finally fused with the Everlasting Prism in his chest—with a silent explosion that caused the entire meditation chamber to tremble like a drum struck by unseen hands—Huan Zheng, who had remained silent all this time, whose gaze had never left Ling Xu's bandaged face, let out a long breath.
"We succeeded," he said, his voice still lazy but carrying a tremor he could not conceal—a tremor born of relief, of admiration, of gratitude he never voiced because he was too lazy to pray. "You succeeded, Liu Xin. Even though you lost both your eyes, even though you nearly died eleven times, even though—"
"Even though I now look like a monster?" Ling Xu cut in with a faint smile upon his still-pale lips, and when he opened his third eye—the vertical slit on his forehead pulsing with gray light—Huan Zheng instinctively stepped back five paces.
To be continued…