Within the light curtain, after the array let out a low, deep hum, the violent flickering finally ceased.
That layer of light, though visibly dimmer, had after all settled steadily over the skies above the stockade.
Quite a few low-level clansmen let out long breaths of relief, slumping down onto the ground.
But they soon discovered that this was far from over.
Though the array had held once more, in order to compensate for the gap left by that broken array eye, the entire array's defensive range had visibly contracted inward by a large margin.
The several dozen zhang of territory that had originally formed the outermost edge of this area was now completely abandoned beyond the light curtain.
A few Black Blood Stockade clansmen stood at the new edge of the light curtain, staring blankly outward through that faintly glowing barrier.
Out there were the homes they lived in, the courtyards they knew, the storehouses where they piled their odds and ends, and countless things there had been no time at all to move.
Only a few hours ago, those places had still belonged to Black Blood Stockade — homes that had sheltered them from wind and rain.
Now they were separated from them by a chasm between life and death, forever beyond reach.
"My things… my mother's jade bracelet is still under my pillow!"
In the crowd, a haggard middle-aged man suddenly remembered something, his face changing drastically.
Like a man gone mad, he spun around and made to charge straight out beyond the light curtain.
"Are you insane?!"
Several clansmen nearby who knew him reacted quickly, throwing themselves at him and clamping down hard — he dragged them several steps through the mud.
The man's eyes were bloodshot as he thrashed desperately and screamed, "Let go of me! That's the only keepsake left in the family! I'll just go grab it, just this once!"
"You're about to lose your life, and you still care about belongings?!" An older clansman slapped him viciously across the face and cursed, "You go out there now, you're just meat on White Bone Stockade's chopping block!"
Struck dumb by the blow, the strength seemed to drain out of the man's body all at once. He collapsed in despair into the muddy water, covered his face, and began to wail.
In the end, he was dragged forcibly toward the rear by several men.
But not everyone could keep a clear head.
Before another stretch of the light curtain not far off, a young clansman — taking advantage of the fact that the White Bone Alliance's main force had yet to press in — actually gritted his teeth and charged headlong out of the array's protection.
He did not run far; he only meant to dash into a shop a short distance beyond the light curtain to retrieve something.
"Come back! Come back, now!"
Behind him, clansmen shouted frantically through the array's glow.
But he did not listen. He plunged straight into that familiar building.
When he came charging back out, a small bundle clutched tightly to his chest, his face flushed with wild joy, ready to flee back inside the light curtain—
Two White Bone Alliance Gu Masters on roving patrol had already spotted him from behind the rubble in the distance.
"Hiss!"
Two vicious bone spears tore through the air, so fast that there was no time at all to react.
One pierced through his thigh. The other, with exceeding precision, punched through his throat.
That young clansman could not even get out a scream. His body pitched forward and crashed heavily down, no more than a dozen or so zhang from the light curtain.
Blood flowed slowly along the seams of the bluestone slabs on the ground.
Inside the light curtain, there was dead silence.
No one dared to cry out, and even less did anyone dare to open the array to save him.
Everyone could only watch helplessly as he lay there.
The corpse was so close to them — close enough that they could clearly make out the weave of his clothes, even the terrified expression on his face at the moment of death.
Yet that dozen or so zhang had become the most unreachable abyss in this world. Not a soul could cross it to bring him back.
The whole of Black Blood Stockade was like a tide recoiling in fright.
Crowds that had originally been scattered across a vast expanse were forced by invisible pressure to contract inward, layer by layer.
The further in they withdrew, the more people there were. The roads grew more and more congested, clamor and weeping tangled together, while the space left for anyone to rest grew less and less.
Small courtyards that had once housed a single family were soon crammed with two or three refugee families and all their dependents.
Both sides of the narrow streets began to fill up, densely packed with wounded who had nowhere to be put.
Hastily erected tents were often no sooner staked down and steady than they had to be torn down again in a rush, because new defensive lines at the perimeter were in crisis and the order had come for the array to pull back further.
In the morning, several families might still be quarreling bitterly over one comparatively intact empty house.
But by the afternoon, an order carrying the stench of blood would spread through the streets and alleys:
"This area can't be held either! The array's contracting — everyone, keep falling back inward!"
Those who had just set down their bundles and caught half a breath could only pick their baggage up again, faces blank with numbness.
Children wailed amid the crush.
Old men cursed as they walked into the wind.
Gravely wounded Gu Masters were hauled along by the arms, feet dragging over the ground, leaving streaks of blood through the mud as they inched forward with difficulty.
Some in the flow of people looked back with every other step.
Those houses they had lived in for decades, that carried countless memories, had just like that become spoils of war for the enemy.
At the highest point of the main stockade.
Lin Cang stood with his hands behind his back, like a silent tower of iron.
His cold, hard gaze looked down upon the streams of people retreating ceaselessly inward below.
His complexion was pale, but his eyes remained sharp.
Every soldier he could deploy, he had already deployed.
At this point, facing the White Bone Alliance's methodical, step-by-step encroachment, there was less and less he could do.
A Clan Elder covered in blood strode up the steps and stood at his side, waiting anxiously for the next instruction.
Lin Cang was silent for a long while.
The night wind stirred his long hair. He merely closed his eyes and spoke with unusual calm:
"Tell them below…"
"Keep falling back inward."
...
Black Blood Stockade in reality was losing ground ceaselessly amid blood and fire, while in that illusion realm, time too flowed placidly onward.
Lin Mu had truly grown old.
His parents passed away, one after the other.
The acrid smell of disinfectant, the ghastly white bedsheets in the hospital, the black clothes at the funerals and the white flowers pinned to chests. Relatives gathered together, speaking in low voices about the natural order of birth, aging, sickness, and death.
Those people who, in his youth, he had always felt would stand behind him like mountains forever, sheltering him from wind and rain, had in the end departed before him.
Later, it began to be the turn of his former classmates.
The high school class group chat, which usually only came alive around holidays, one day suddenly had someone post an exceedingly grievous piece of news.
A classmate who had once been on quite good terms with Lin Mu had fallen suddenly ill and died.
The group was silent for a long time. Then, one after another, a few lines appeared.
"Rest in peace."
"Wasn't he perfectly fine at the reunion a while back…"
"So sudden. Life really is unpredictable."
A few more years, and there was one more such piece of news.
The class reunions they could still occasionally organize drew fewer and fewer people.
When they were young, dozens of them would book out a restaurant's large private room, filling several tables, drinking and talking big, full of spirit.
Later, only a dozen or so remained.
Later still, perhaps only seven or eight gray-haired old men were left, seated around a single table, sipping health teas.
Some had heads of fully white hair and wore reading glasses; others walked with an unsteady shuffle and needed to carry canes with them.
They would dig out those yellowed, pathetically low-resolution old photos on their phones, huddle together, and argue over trivial old matters as they looked.
One would point at a photo and say, "This table — you were the one who got drunk and kicked it over that year!"
Another would immediately glare and curse right back: "Bullshit! That's a rotten account from how many years ago, and you still remember it? You tripped over it yourself, you brat!"
Then the whole group of old men would burst into unrestrained laughter, as though all of it had been let go of.
Lin Mu sat off to the side, holding his thermos, laughing along with them, deep crow's feet crinkling at the corners of his eyes.
This kind of life had no flashing blades, no extravagant hope of immortality — just the most ordinary birth, aging, sickness, and death of common people, three meals a day.
Lin Mu's own body, too, began its inevitable march toward decline.
That once straight spine of his slowly bent.
In the past, running a few kilometers or staying up all night had never tired him; now, if he walked too long when he went out, his knees would ache faintly and he would need to find a bench to sit and rest a while.
When he had free time, he would sometimes sit alone in the rocking chair on the balcony, brew a pot of clear tea, squint in the warm sunlight, and watch the young people hurrying about in the complex below.
They seemed no different from himself when he was young.
Sometimes the sunlight was so warm that it left him slightly dazed.
And half-dreaming, half-awake, he would recall those things from very, very many years ago.
Those memories still existed, vividly and truly, deep in his mind.
It was only that they had grown too far, far away. So far that it was like looking through a thick layer of frosted glass; so far that it was like recalling the turbulent half-life story of some other young man.
Over these years, he had seen many people off, and had also watched many new lives come into this world with loud, ringing cries.
Gradually, as the years settled, he began to accept from the bottom of his heart one utterly ordinary thing.
Namely — that he too would die one day.
Death itself did not seem as terrifying as he had imagined.
He even came to feel that walking quietly and slowly to the end of life like this did not, in fact, seem bad at all.
...
Under the White Bone Alliance's relentless, successive waves of assault, the Mountain Protection Grand Array endured several more rounds of upheaval.
The main stockade's core region, which had once been able to barely hold a large number of clansmen and supplies, was now packed so tight there was no room to breathe — scarcely even a place to set one's foot.
The number of wounded was growing at a terrifying rate.
Grain, Primeval Stones, and supplies of every kind were heaped everywhere in disorder, like refuse.
Those clansmen who had originally lived at the perimeter had retreated again and again, and now had nowhere left to retreat.
They could only wander like headless flies, continuing deeper into the stockade in search of somewhere to shelter.
In the end, great masses of people were, out of sheer necessity, assigned to the rear mountain.
This place had originally been the fringe of the clan's forbidden grounds — thick with trees, sparsely inhabited, its very paths rutted and uneven.
But now it had become one of the last few reasonably spacious refuges in all of Black Blood Stockade.
Ragged tents, exceedingly crude and barely able to keep out wind and rain, were pitched densely along the rugged slopes.
Groans of pain rose and fell one after another. The elderly and young children were sheltered tightly in the innermost positions.
Some were boiling water over fires of damp firewood, the thick smoke choking; others frowned grimly as they tallied the pitiful scraps of food their families had left.
And some Gu Masters who had fought for days and nights on end had only just found a patch of relatively dry, level ground to lie down on, not even closing their eyes yet.
When from beyond the mountains in the distance there came another round of dull, thunderous roars, rattling even the pebbles on the ground into motion.
The people grew more and more numerous.
Densely packed tents and figures stretched all the way from the foot of the rear mountain, climbing up to the midslope.
By night, a cold wind howled. Countless scattered fires lit up the hillside, like stars filling the heavens, yet carrying endless desolation and despair.
No one knew how much longer this last stretch of land could keep them safe.
They could only wait numbly for tomorrow's sun — or for the next order to keep retreating.
But if they fell back again, where was there left to go?
Moving slowly downward from this clamorous, despairing rear mountain.
Passing through layer upon layer of thick, solid earth.
In the depths far below the surface, inside the secret chamber of the Black Bone King Inheritance, a deathly silence still held.
On the rear mountain above, hundreds upon thousands of refugees had already gathered.
From overhead, dull tremors came from time to time.
But Lin Mu still sat quietly within that darkness, eyes shut tight, his breathing steady to the utmost degree.
In reality, his physical body remained young, his skin taut, his blood and qi abundant.
Yet in that long illusion realm, he had already walked through the better part of a lifetime.
At this moment.
In this deathly silent darkness.
The corner of Lin Mu's mouth curved upward, ever so slightly.