The moment the drop of blood touched the lid, the coffin trembled faintly, as if breathing in. Wuji felt a deep tug at his heart, and his vision blurred as a sharp pang of loss filled his chest.
He didn't realize his lifespan was bleeding away again, but a primal urge screamed at him to pull back, to stop this foolishness and preserve what little time he had left.
Yet another voice rose to meet it: quiet, resolute, merciless. "What difference does it make? Three years now or three years later? Death will always come. It's only a matter of time."
His bleeding hand trembled, but he held it steady. He felt that if he stopped now, this chance would never return. Fate does not offer mercy twice, or perhaps this was never mercy at all.
Drop by drop, his blood fell. The soft thud of each strike against the lid echoed inside his skull, pounding in rhythm with his heart. He instinctively felt he was losing something vital, and fear bloomed within him.
It wasn't just the fear of dying that gnawed at him, but the fear of making the wrong choice, of this sacrifice being for nothing.
But he persevered with his gamble. Minutes stretched on. By the time seven had passed, his face was deathly pale, his breathing uneven. His vision swam, and his heartbeat slowed with each passing second.
Cold sweat soaked his back as he watched new numbers burn into his consciousness.
[Lifespan: 82/84]
The coffin had devoured one full year, bringing his destined death closer by another year.
His knees nearly buckled. Yet relief also washed through him as it hadn't taken all three. And now he also understood why his health had begun deteriorating. "So this is the cost," he mumbled hoarsely. "This is why I became sick two years ago. It's been slowly siphoning my lifespan all along. No wonder the old physician couldn't help."
Still, the discovery did not deter him. But his body was giving out. He might collapse before seeing the result of his sacrifice.
But fortunately the final drop of blood fell.
Thuck!
The coffin erupted with blinding gray light, engulfing the workshop and streaming through the windows like a flood of pale radiance. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light snapped inward.
Absolute, crushing silence followed. Wuji, completely exhausted, collapsed and struck the coffin with a dull thud. He lay beside it for several long breaths, his chest heaving, his lungs burning. He clung to consciousness by sheer will alone.
When his vision finally steadied, he pushed himself upright with trembling arms—the time for answers had come.
He placed his hands on the lid. This time, the heavy wood slid aside as if it had been waiting for him. Inside, there was no velvet or gold as he had once speculated—only bare wood inscribed with uneven, almost childish sigils.
Yet the moment his gaze fell upon them, a sharp clarity pierced his mind. He sensed these markings were anything but simple. He could instinctively feel the resonant frequency between them and his being. Deep down, he knew the connection was between his soul and the coffin.
Without hesitation, he climbed inside, lay down, and closed the lid himself.
He looked to the left in the darkness. The sigils glowed, bathing the interior in a pale, ghostly light, and for the first time, he felt at home.
He slowly extended his right hand toward the sigils and pressed his palm against them.
The world before him dissolved into an immeasurable, dark vastness. He tried to grasp anything, but all around him was a void. He calmed himself, realizing he was floating within the coffin's endless darkness.
As he steadied his breath, he looked around. Nothing but black. Then, from afar in the void, tiny glowing threads flickered into existence, the only color on this dark canvas.
As he focused on them, they slithered toward him, plunging into his body. Immediately, incomprehensible knowledge flooded his entire being—not in words or images, but in raw, abstract concepts: end, weight, debt, and the heavy cycles of existence that had no beginning or end.
Some were gibberish, a foreign language he could not parse. Others he could neither hear nor see.
His breath hitched as sharp pressure clamped around his skull, as if invisible hands were prying his thoughts apart. Something ancient, unknown, and vast beyond comprehension pressed against his awareness, threatening to shatter his fragile mind as he struggled to process it.
He realized with chilling clarity that if this continued, his mind would collapse long before his body did.
Suddenly, the pressure lessened. The coffin was shielding him, lifting the influence of that incomprehensible entity. However, the weight did not vanish entirely. It remained, watching from the depths of the darkness.
The threads of knowledge compressed within his soul as the coffin's infinite mysteries folded inward, shrinking into something narrower and more orderly—something a mortal mind could barely, just barely, grasp.
In the darkness before his eyes, the chaos of incomprehensible concepts aligned. Dynamic, unknowable threads slithered through the void, then straightened and arranged themselves into a language his mind could understand. A square glow suspended before him for a moment, then plunged into his body.
"So that's it," he murmured hoarsely, feeling as if heescaped the jaws of death. "It downgraded its complexity into a form I can comprehend."
He knew then that if he had tried to perceive the coffin's essence directly, his soul would have been instantly crushed into nothingness. The thought turned his spine cold, even in this void.
His body fell, and within the same beat, he found himself back in the coffin, his palm still pressed against the sigils. The experience—the dark void, the threads, the pressure from that entity—all felt like a dream. But the blue panel floating before him said otherwise.
[Name: Ye Wuji
Path: Bearer of the Heaven Burial Coffin
Lifespan: 82/84
Stored Lifespan: 3/3
Coffin Arts: Lifespan Plunderer, Eye of the End, Husk]
He understood the information at a glance. The numbers were brutally simple, especially the "Stored Lifespan." Those were years held in reserve within the coffin, not yet his own.
Upon further review of the panel, only the words "Path" and "Bearer" gave him pause. "Bearer of the Heaven Burial Coffin..." He tasted the words. From the title alone, and the bizarre, dreadful experience thus far, he sensed this was not merely a treasure—it was a mantle, a role that could be inherited, abandoned, or worse, stripped away.
"Bearer,"he thought. "Who owned the coffin before me? Where are they now? Are they dead, or are they watching from some high palace, using me as a pawn?"
He forced the paranoia into a dark corner of his mind. Speculation was a luxury reserved for those with more than two years to live.
He shifted his focus to the first Coffin Art—the core of his survival.
[Lifespan Plunderer (Rank 1): When the bearer causes the death of a being—directly or indirectly—whose life ends before its destined time, and completes its burial, the Heaven Burial Coffin claims a portion of the unlived years.]
Wuji stared at the text until the words blurred. "So it feeds on years that no longer belong anywhere," he thought. "Years that should have been lived but weren't. Scraps torn from fate. Leftovers, the heavens couldn't reclaim quickly enough."
The idea unsettled him, but then he remembered the young disciple he had buried alive. In the absorbed memories, he could still hear the muffled thuds, the screech of fingernails against wood, the frantic, wet gasps for air.
"So that counted as indirect," he mumbled, clenching his hands into bloodless fists.
In both his lives, he had never taken a soul. Yet his first kill had been neither clean nor quick. It had been claustrophobic and slow.
Just remembering the terror, the panic, the suffocating dread of knowing death was inches away flooded his chest—as if he were the one in the coffin, forced to relive the murder from the victim's perspective.
He finally understood why these memories were there at all. The coffin didn't just steal lifespan; it harvested the most potent fragments of experience. It made sure he felt the weight of what he was stealing. Perhaps it was a warning. Or a tax on his soul for using something so perverse.
For a moment, silence filled the coffin as he lay there, breathing shallowly. He knew kindness had no place in this world. He had learned that lesson twice over. Yet knowing death this intimately made inflicting it harder, not easier.
The description of Lifespan Plunderer was clear: slaughter would no longer be accidental or by choice. It was an expectation. A necessity, if he wanted to live.
"No," he mumbled, shaking his head. "I'm spiraling." Hesitation was a death sentence. That much was certain.
"Surely it can't be limited to humans, right?" he said after a long moment, his voice regaining faint confidence. "WildBeasts die before their time every day."
The nearby forest was a stage for their premature deaths. I'll experiment later, he decided, turning his eyes from the art.
Whether he liked it or not, he had already begun down the path of slaughter. The coffin did not care about his protests of conscience. What would inevitably come to pass would come to pass.
His gaze focused on the second art.
[Eye of the End (Rank 1): Allows the bearer to see the destined death of living beings.]
He didn't need to test it; he already knew its power. He recalled the glowing numbers above Wang Da's head.
This coffin art didn't concern itself with how or when death would occur. It simply revealed the point beyond which said life could no longer endure. No amount of struggle, prayer, or fortune could overcome this quiet certainty—except holes in the river of fate.
A man might laugh tomorrow or labor for decades, but his limit had already been etched in glowing numbers if nothing unexpected happened. And if it did, the universe would auto-correct itself.
This frightened him more than Lifespan Plunderer did. There was no negotiation, no moral ambiguity, only the visibility of the inescapable.
"This isn't some eye technique," he mumbled to himself. "But a judgment." Or perhaps it was worse, he couldn't know, for now. "What would it show if I increased its rank?"
He forced his mind away from the thought before it could take root and rot his resolve. That would come later. Now, he turned his attention to the final art—the one that remained dark.
[Husk (Rank 1) Locked — Insufficient Stored Lifespan and Husk: By expending stored lifespan, the bearer can imbue a corpse with false vitality and shape it into a husk—an obedient avatar born of death.]
Wuji's breath caught. "False vitality, huh, so not life or resurrection." he contemplated. The husk would be a mockery, assembled from what was.
He immediately understood why the art was locked away. Three years of stored life was a pittance, a handful of scraps far from unlocking it. Furthermore, reanimating a body into a husk had to be done with the Heaven Burial Coffin; no normal coffin would suffice.
And he wouldn't foolishly use his stored lifespan on one husk when he was only two years away from becoming one himself.