Chapter 65: Yellow Springs, Knocking on the Life Lock
The fierce winds, carrying the Yin Qi of the Nine Nether Earth Veins, carved fine blood marks on Lu Qingyang’s temples.
He crouched behind the broken stele of the Yellow Springs Platform, his fingertips caressing the newly fractured lines on the qingmu spirit pearl—the price of clashing head-on with a Nascent Soul Cultivator three days ago was the wilting of half the spiritual field within the pearl, and even the hourglass phantom moved as sluggishly as an old ox pulling a broken cart.
“Seventy-three steps left.” Su Li’s voice, a crisp clang of metal, resonated through their spiritual connection, the Phoenix pattern on her forehead flickering erratically under the erosion of Yin Qi.
The winding stone steps before them gleamed with a ghastly pallor, like corpse wax, each step carved with ancient nether script, and a single misstep could lead to one’s Three Ethereal Souls and Seven Corporeal Spirits being snatched away.
Lu Qingyang kicked the qing tong (bronze) puppets slumped at his feet; the Spirit Stones in the chest of this trophy, pilfered from a Soul Transformation Cultivator’s Immortal Cave, had now turned to dust.
He licked the scabbed wound on his tiger’s mouth, then suddenly tore open Su Li’s gauze sleeve: “Lend me some blood.”
“You!” Su Li’s indignant cry was swallowed by the roaring tremors of the Yellow Springs Platform.
Lu Qingyang gripped the blood-soaked cloth, wiping it across the surface of the spirit pearl, and a faint new shoot emerged from the withered dragon blood grass within the pearl.
He then wrapped the cloth around the Puppet’s neck, forming a hand seal and igniting the remaining essence of Li Fire in the Puppet’s Dantian.
Eerie blue ghost flames ignited in the qing tong (bronze) puppets’ eye sockets, and it mechanically stepped onto the seventy-fourth stair.
The rebirth talismans suspended on either side of the stone steps moved without wind, and the fierce ghosts painted in cinnabar on the talismans suddenly protruded from the paper, their fangs sparking brightly as they gnawed on the Puppet’s shoulder armor.
“Three steps to the Kan position, five steps to the Xun position!” Lu Qingyang pulled Su Li back, the rotten bone flower seeds shaking from his sleeve growing wildly into a wall, nourished by the Yin Qi.
The Puppet exploded with a boom under the tearing of the talisman ghosts, and the Qi wave generated by the collision of the Li Fire essence and the Yin Qi washed away the nether script on the surface of the stone steps, blurring it beyond recognition.
Su Li’s protective spiritual light cracked like a spiderweb, and she instinctively slapped the jade pendant at her waist, but the Taiyi Pavilion emblem was slow to appear.
Lu Qingyang chuckled, producing half a bronze fragment: “I sealed your communication talisman as soon as we fell into the Nine Hells, Fairy Su, surely you haven’t forgotten—” Before he finished speaking, he suddenly spun around and threw three pulse-sealing nails, and the chains attacking from the shadows snapped in response.
“The dogs raised by Ye Wuchen are quite loyal.” Lu Qingyang stepped on the skull at the end of the chain, grinding it underfoot, the qingmu spirit pearl reflecting the figures of three Black-Robed Cultivators forming a formation a hundred zhang away.
The Soul-Chasing Mark of Taiyi Pavilion was branded on each of their foreheads, and as they wielded their mourning staffs, thousands of wronged souls wailed.
Su Li’s Ice Soul Sword was about to be drawn, but Lu Qingyang pressed down on its hilt: “Use this.”
He tossed her a crimson pill the size of a dragon’s eye, its surface covered with hair-thin lightning patterns—it was precisely the Nine Tribulation Lightning-Struck Wood fruit, ripened by the qingmu spirit pearl.
As the first Black-Robed Cultivator stepped into the explosion radius of the lightning pill, Lu Qingyang crushed the illusion talisman hidden between his fingers.
Su Li’s Ice Soul Sword light, imbued with the power of thunder, swept across, and the three Cultivators’ protective Magic Treasures melted into molten iron under the supreme Yang and rigid lightning fire.
Amidst the shrill screams, Lu Qingyang, like a ghost, swept across the battlefield, his qiankun bag precisely snatching away the undamaged Storage Rings.
“Lu! Qing! Yang!” As Su Li’s sword tip pressed against his throat, a seven-colored glow suddenly descended from the top of the Yellow Springs Platform.
The incomplete rebirth monument projected a massive phantom, its inscription clearly the “Yellow Springs Knocking on the Life Lock Art,” found only in Taiyi Pavilion’s Forbidden Land.
Lu Qingyang squinted at a crack in the inscription, and the qingmu spirit pearl suddenly floated up on its own, the hourglass within the pearl resonating mysteriously with the monument’s phantom.
“So that’s it…” He ignored the bleeding wound on his neck, and the medicinal shovel that slipped from his sleeve slammed hard into his crown.
Amidst Su Li’s gasp, the medicinal shovel transformed into a stream of light the moment it touched his skin, triggering a hidden Legacy Restriction of the Yellow Springs Platform.
The overwhelming Yin Qi rolled back into a vortex, and the cracks on the surface of the qingmu spirit pearl healed at a visible speed.
An old woman leaning on a pigeon staff emerged from the monument’s phantom, her cloudy eyeballs rotating, causing ripples in space: “Three thousand years, and finally someone not afraid of death.”
The instant her withered claw pointed at Lu Qingyang’s brow, the withered dragon blood grass within the qingmu spirit pearl suddenly grew wildly, its leaves piercing the pearl’s surface and coiling around the old woman’s wrist, crimson sap seeping into her skin along the wrinkles.
The old woman’s gasp turned into a shriek, and the entire Yellow Springs Platform began to collapse.
Lu Qingyang dragged Su Li and leaped into the crack in the monument’s inscription, the Taiyi Pavilion Cultivators pursuing them behind crushed into a pulp by the collapsing stone steps.
As a sense of weightlessness swept over him, he glimpsed the old woman turning into green smoke and drilling into the spirit pearl, the hourglass within the pearl suddenly accelerating a hundredfold, and a twin-blossom dragon blood grass swayed gracefully in the center of the spiritual field.
Upon landing, foul-smelling mud splattered all over him, and Lu Qingyang wiped his face, only to realize he was in a mass grave.
Not far away, a young man in sackcloth knelt before a new grave, trembling as he carved words onto the tombstone—“Tomb of My Kind Father, Lu Qingyang.”
Su Li’s Ice Soul Sword clattered to the ground, but Lu Qingyang narrowed his eyes, counting the Spirit Stones offered before the grave.
When the young man finished carving the last stroke and turned around, he was met with the playful smile of the true Lu Qingyang: “Such a filial son and grandson, how considerate; Mr. Lu doesn’t even have to write the inscription himself.”