Wuji saw unfamiliar faces, felt unfamiliar pain, and experienced the final, suffocating panic of the young disciple—gasping for air, weakly striking the coffin lid with failing hands.
His unfocused gaze snapped onto Wang Da, who stood frozen, his eyes darting frantically between Wuji and the captain's cold demeanor.
Rage, fear, and a crushing sense of helplessness warred on his face. His fists clenched until his nails bit deep into his palms.
He was torn between the desperate urge to attack the captain and the humiliating, survival-driven instinct to kneel and beg for mercy, to stop the torture of his master.
Wuji's body convulsed one last time before the screaming stopped abruptly. The pain hadn't faded; it had finally surpassed his capacity to feel it. The world around him went unnaturally still.
Sound dulled to a low thrum from far away. The woman's sobs became distant echoes, and even Wang Da's frantic voice sounded as if it were calling from behind a thick wall of water.
His unfocused gaze drifted upward and settled on the top of Wang Da's head. There, blurry numbers and words of bronze light hovered in the air, pulsing with a dull, steady glow, indifferent to the chaos around them.
"Hallucinations." Before he could finish the thought, darkness swallowed him whole. His knees buckled. Fortunately, Wang Da caught his limp body.
Without sparing a glance for the captain or the gawking villagers, he hoisted the trembling old man onto his back and sprinted toward home.
The onlookers—the sect disciples, the villagers, and even the captain—stood in stunned silence.
"What was that?" the village chief muttered, his voice little more than a whisper.
"Did he go mad?" one disciple asked, his disdain edged with pity. "Did the truth about his sons finally break his mind?"
"What else could it be?" another disciple replied flatly, already dismissing the old man from his thoughts.
The captain remained silent. "Too pathetic," he mused, sneering privately. "If he's this fragile, he's of no further use to us."
His gaze slowly drifted toward the young woman. She had stopped crying, her red-rimmed eyes staring vacantly at the ground.
As he tucked the small array plate away, a predatory calculation flickered across his face, mixing with greed for the rewards that might still be claimed.
Minutes later, back at the house, Wang Da carefully laid Wuji on the bed. He checked for a pulse and felt relief at the steady, shallow rhythm beneath his fingers.
He removed Wuji's dirt-stained robes, pulled a thin blanket up to his chin, and tucked it carefully around his shoulders.
Then he sat on the small wooden stool beside the bed. As minutes turned into hours, Wang Da maintained a mask of calm, but a silent, corrosive rage seethed in his chest. His hands were clenched so tightly his knuckles whitened against his knees; his throat felt as if stuffed with stone.
He believed it was the captain. With their mysterious spells, those cultivators could kill them both without a second thought, and they wouldn't even realize it.
Moreover, the cold indifference on the captain's face hadn't been the look of a man who had witnessed an accident, it was the look of a man who had engineered one.
Yet as the silence stretched on, fear crept in, calming his fury. "Maybe this happened because I spoke out of turn," he thought bitterly. "Maybe it's a punishment. A lesson."
This realization struck him harder than any blow. Against a sect disciple, his life was worthless. No justice would ever come. In the end, he could do nothing but swallow his anger and wait for Wuji to wake up.
At the same time, chaos reigned within Wuji's mind as foreign memories burned continuously into his consciousness like hot irons, searing and consuming some of his own memories as if trying to replace them.
He saw—no, he experienced—the buried young man's memories: kneeling before a stern sect elder, his hands trembling with a mixture of terror and exhilaration.
Then came the softer, more poignant moments: stolen glances, hesitant smiles, awkward whispers under moonlight with her. He could hear her laughter, feel her disappointments, taste the salt of her tears.
Through these unwanted feelings, he sensed the young man's deepest insecurities: fear of not meeting expectations, shame of being unworthy of her love, and guilt of disappointing a family whose faces he could no longer clearly recall as the memories were fragmented.
And finally, his last fears: discovering the captain was a spy for the demonic faction, learning the purple orchid was a herb of immense value, and the final, helpless sensation of being pricked by a needle, watching the world move while he could not, watching her cry, her desperate protection. Wuji experienced all of this as his own.
These foreign emotions and fragmented memories merged with Wuji's own until his consciousness sank beneath the collective weight of two men's grief.
His hatred for the captain was sharpened by the young man's, yet Wuji knew he could not let emotion dictate him. He had no shred of desire to expose the captain.
No one would believe him anyway, and then again why should he? It was not his sect, not his business. His own situation was already too much to bear.
He simply buried the discovery deep within his mind. For three days, the world remained silent and dark for him.
Throughout those days, Wang Da tended to Wuji tirelessly, changing his clothes, trickling water into his mouth, and speaking softly to the silent void. Wuji could sense this care as a distant warmth, a faint light filtering through layers of heavy earth.
Yet his body remained a stone prison. By the second day, the agony had shifted; his skin now felt as if thousands of ants were crawling beneath it, biting and gnawing at the bone.
He tried to scream, to scratch, to move a single finger. But he could not move an inch.
As he endured this limbo, something deep within his body and soul began to coalesce. It synchronized and resonated with the dangerous, rhythmic purple glow emanating from the coffin in the workshop.
Two more days passed. The light within the coffin faded, and the storm in Wuji's mind stilled with it. The fragmented memories ceased their clawing and sank deep, cataloged and absorbed. Now, they were a quiet part of his soul—unsettling, but still.
His closed eyes moved, faintly struggling to open. Minutes later, he finally succeeded. The sunlight from the right window struck him like a physical blow, pain lancing through his skull.
He winced and raised a trembling hand to shield himself from the harsh white glare pouring through the open window.
He lay there for several breaths, waiting for the light to soften into the familiar shapes of his room. Moments later, he slowly turned his head.
As his vision cleared, he first saw Wang Da, slumped against the wall, his hands folded loosely in his lap and his head bowed in heavy, exhausted sleep.
The lines of fatigue were etched deep into his young face. A complex warmth stirred in Wuji's chest: gratitude, affection, and a stinging sense of shame.
"Who would have thought," he thought, "that when I reached my end, it would be the simple laborer who stayed, while my own sons—"
He cut the thought short. Even thinking about them soured his mood, dredging up a bitterness he no longer had the strength or desire to confront.
That was when he noticed it. Above Wang Da's head, faint but unmistakable bronze characters hovered in the air. Wuji's gaze sharpened, focusing instinctively on the floating words.
[Lifespan: 24/90]
He stared, the words feeling heavy in his mind. "So those hallucinations were this." He paused, focusing on the left number. "Lifespan: twenty-four," he mumbled hoarsely, his voice a raspy whisper. "Destined death... ninety."
His lips twitched into a grimace, a mixture of bitter smile and weary sigh. "So little," he thought. "A mortal's life is barely a blink. Compared to a cultivator, we are no different than mayflies living in the shadow of a mountain."
A quiet resentment bubbled up within him, cold and sharp, fed by the knowledge from the coffin and the young disciple's fragmented memories. "Why do some live for centuries, even millennia? Why do some have the opportunity to live longer while others vanish before they can truly begin? What can a man accomplish in mere decades? What sights can one hope to see?"
The thought lingered, turning inward like a blade. "Or am I simply greedy?"
He paused, a faint, dry chuckle escaping his throat as he answered his own question. "But what's wrong with greed? Wanting more days? More chances? More life?" He looked back at the glowing numbers. "Isn't that what every living soul yearns for?"
His gaze shifted inward, and another line of text appeared in his mind.
[Lifespan: 82/85]
"Just three more years," he mumbled, the words heavy. "Just three more years, and my destined death will come."
He let out a slow, measured breath. Relief washed through him, yet it was tempered by the chilling reality of his fragility. "Death nearly claimed me," he thought. "And it will try again. It always does."
Bottling his fear, he forced himself to sit up; his body protested with stiffness but obeyed. Moving with practiced silence so as not to disturb the sleeping Wang Da, he rose and stepped out into the open air.
The midday sun bathed him in a warmth that felt foreign after days of submerged darkness. He stretched slowly, his joints creaking like old floorboards. Then he felt the heavy constriction in his chest lift, just a little. He smiled as he felt it: a pull.
It was a subtle yet insistent tug, like a tightly wound thread around his heart. His gaze drifted toward the workshop. A small, knowing smile formed at the corners of his lips as he turned and walked toward it, his steps unhurried yet purposeful.
As always, the massive coffin dominated the room with its silent presence. Without hesitation, he grabbed a small knife from the shelf. This time, he did not question whether the blood refinement would work.
He knew exactly what he had to do, even though it was risky. He had learned that his perseverance had indeed paid off, over the months of wasting blood on it.
He looked at his thin hand. "Perhaps I should wait until I'm in peak condition," he thought. "This is risky now."
But he stopped the thought. Regardless of the risk, he knew what was required. Hesitation, he felt, was one of the causes of lost opportunities.
He pressed the blade to his index finger. A thin line of crimson welled up and fell, a single, heavy drop splashed onto the coffin's lid.