The stone door sensed Qin Shu’s wooden identity tablet and immediately gave a muffled rumble as it slowly slid open on its own.
The defensive formation stopped flickering in and out of sight. Dazzling white light suddenly burst from it, flowing around Qin Shu’s body as it carefully examined his identity.
For one brief instant, the light seemed to pause. Qin Shu inexplicably had the illusion that the formation had seen through to his true form, and a needle-prick of pain stirred in his long-silent heart.
But it lasted only an instant. He passed through the stone door without incident and entered Heaven Cell No. 1.
Rumble.
The long wolf-fur tail trailing from his cloak was drawn inside as well. The stone door immediately sealed shut behind him once more, turning into a cold, solid black wall without a single crack.
The cell was pitch-black, without a trace of light, and more than a hundred times larger than Qin Shu had imagined.
Because although he could see clearly in the darkness, he could not see the end of the cell.
An infinitely vast dark chamber built to imprison an infinitely vast body. It revealed one chilling fact: Lord Zhaoyuan was a true dragon.
He had not gone mad, had not mutated, had not contracted the Blood Calamity genetic disease, and had not been beaten back into a frail juvenile state… He was injured and imprisoned, yet he remained a genuine pure-blooded true dragon.
His dragon horns towered like pagodas. His breath rolled like a sea of clouds. His long body wound onward like a mountain range, and when coiled, it resembled endless rising and falling peaks. Qin Shu tipped his head back until his neck nearly protested before he finally managed to meet those familiar yet unfamiliar golden slit pupils.
They were golden eyes, and yet not quite. Strange, ominous streaks of blood-red light drifted through those vast, icy golden pools, adding an incongruous dark vividness.
It was as if some terrifying, vicious weapon had slashed straight through the irises, leaving bloody vertical wounds. Crimson droplets remained deep within them, interfering with the outlines of the cold slit pupils in those golden pools, growing and tangling together until the two could no longer be distinguished.
Qin Shu felt like an ant. Even the heavy cloak wrapped around him, made from ferocious pelts stripped from the flesh of powerful yao, could not compare to the tiny scales on Lord Zhaoyuan’s snout.
His emotions were relatively steady, but his body was suffering a full-blown attack of megalophobia. The shen dragon’s overwhelming pressure strangled every breath in his throat. He had to readjust his vocal cords and muscles, exerting more effort and concentration than usual, before he could force out a few low-pitched words.
Before speaking, however, his gaze fell first upon the shen dragon’s faintly visible abdomen. Dense rows of bloodstained golden reverse scales had been pierced by countless slender iron chains that sank deep into flesh and bone, winding tightly around him and holding him fast.
Intricate patterns similar to those on the defensive formation drifted over the chains, but layered above them was another indescribably profound quality. Looking at it for too long made the mind grow dazed. It was precisely this strange power that made the chains unbreakable, ensuring that even a noble true dragon could not easily escape.
Qin Shu had no idea which immortal in Heaven had done this. He swept his gaze over the chains and instinctively suspected that several of them must have joined forces to achieve such an effect.
“…I’ve seen you before.”
Once he had looked his fill, Qin Shu forced the words out beneath the crushing pressure.
The shen dragon, enormous as a mountainside, lowered his eyelids and silently regarded Qin Shu. There was no anger in his eyes, no hatred or contempt, but neither was there joy or warmth.
It was indifference in its purest form, so absolute that it bordered on coldness. Not a ripple could be found in those red-gold slit pupils. Looking at Qin Shu was no different from looking at a grain of sand blown to his feet by the wind.
Even the terrifying pressure radiating from the shen dragon was not deliberate. He was clearly doing nothing at all, yet if an ordinary human dared approach, if their curiosity became even slightly too strong, even if they merely looked at him a few times too many by accident, the extremity of their own weakness could cause them to drop dead on the spot.
Qin Shu realized that, for some inexplicable reason, he had already started making excuses for Lord Zhaoyuan in his head.
They had originally been complete strangers with no grudges between them. Lord Zhaoyuan was not innately diseased or vicious, nor was he some adolescent whose prefrontal cortex had yet to finish developing. He had lived for who knew how many years. Why would he be bored enough to deliberately kill a whole pile of ants?
Maybe humans had trespassed into his territory themselves and were crushed by his pressure before they could even get close. It would hardly be the first historical disaster caused by a chain of misunderstandings and coincidences.
“…Ahem.”
Realizing that his mindset had gone off course, Qin Shu exhaled, quickly bit the tip of his tongue to clear his head, and looked up again at the shen dragon silently gazing down at him.
Man and dragon stared at one another in the dead air for a moment before Qin Shu seemed to understand what the other meant.
Lord Zhaoyuan truly could not be bothered to speak. Perhaps it was the indifference ingrained in his bones, perhaps the slender chains buried deep in his flesh hurt too badly, or perhaps it was simple distrust… but he did not mind listening.
Lord Zhaoyuan was waiting for him to continue.
“I really have seen you. Not now, but several thousand years from now,” Qin Shu said after reorganizing his thoughts, his expression turning serious. “I saw you as you were several thousand years ago. You were teaching a soul technique called See Through. I don’t know who you were teaching because I couldn’t see them. I ended up secretly learning See Through too.”
Lord Zhaoyuan still said nothing, but he seemed to lower his enormous head slightly, allowing Qin Shu’s neck to return to a somewhat more normal angle.
Qin Shu hurried on. “I remember it was in this room. Everything was pitch-black. I could barely make out your head and the wounds around your reverse scales. You noticed me right after I finished learning it. You expelled my consciousness and told me… ‘Do not pry into the Nine Domains.’”
The dark chamber fell silent once more. Then Qin Shu suddenly felt a cool, ticklish sensation between his brows as some indescribably gentle force quietly flowed into his Purple Palace.
The sensation was actually extremely comfortable, instantly making his senses clear and his mind alert, but at the same time, it was terrifying.
Not only had he failed to notice when this power appeared, but even now, after becoming aware of the foreign presence, he had absolutely no ability to resist it. He could only helplessly feel that soothing sensation spread throughout his entire body… Even with the seat of his soul being openly examined, he could not summon the slightest trace of vigilance.
Still, as long as Lord Zhaoyuan was not the sort of violent being who slaughtered indiscriminately, allowing an existence like him to inspect Qin Shu’s true soul could instead become an entirely new form of proof.
Proof that the person he was now was not him, not the Warden Qin who had worked in the underworld several thousand years ago.
Sure enough, after the shen dragon personally confirmed this, strange emotions gradually surfaced in his enormous eyes as he looked at Qin Shu. Perhaps curiosity, perhaps surprise. In any case, his gaze was no longer filled solely with cold indifference.
Then a familiar voice sounded inside Qin Shu’s mind. It was the same voice he had once accidentally glimpsed in his memories, belonging to the shen dragon in the dark chamber.
Neither gender nor age could be discerned from it. It was like a handful of light, cold snow in early spring, drifting unhurriedly outward from within his Purple Palace.
“Repeat what I taught.”
At the shen dragon’s command, Qin Shu immediately began to recite from memory.
“This is See Through, a soul technique. Cultivated to its highest level, one may stand alone against ten thousand soldiers… In an instant, one may see through another’s vital weaknesses and quickly determine the path to victory…”
Carefully repeating it word for word, Qin Shu paused there and curved his lips into a smile. “I also overheard you telling that person, ‘If you can’t win, it’s because you’re too weak. Don’t blame the divine ability for being useless.’ That was when you noticed me and told me to stop spying.”
He deliberately emphasized that detail.
At first, Lord Zhaoyuan had been teaching the technique with perfect seriousness, only to shift seamlessly into a casual little reprimand at the end. Their relationship had obviously been rather close. Qin Shu was extremely curious whether the shen dragon already had someone in mind for the identity of that student.
That should be enough.
As for how Qin Shu had later pushed his luck after realizing the shen dragon had shown no killing intent, immediately blurting out compliments about how handsome he was and pelting him with a whole string of ridiculously basic questions…
Ahem. That phase when he had known absolutely nothing but possessed far too much curiosity could probably remain unmentioned for the time being.
The shen dragon fell briefly silent. He had clearly understood the little test hidden in Qin Shu’s words. After contemplating it for a moment, his voice sounded inside Qin Shu’s mind again.
“You glimpsed me through a fissure spanning several thousand years. If that is so, then the other party whom you could not see could only have been yourself.”
“…Huh?”
“Communication across time requires a reliable anchor. Anything capable of serving as an anchor must be connected to you personally, through a close bond that cannot easily be broken. The greater the distance in time, the stricter the requirements.”
Before Qin Shu could react, Lord Zhaoyuan slowly lowered his enormous, mountain-like head until it lay flat, covering his mangled, blood-soaked lower abdomen and making it easier for Qin Shu to meet his eyes.
Not only that, he proceeded with perfect calm and complete matter-of-factness to resume giving Qin Shu a lesson.
“Across several thousand years, the anchor could only have been you yourself. Your gaze passed through the eyes that belonged to you several thousand years ago and saw the past version of me.”
“The anchor…” After his initial daze, Qin Shu found that his mind was moving remarkably quickly. His extraordinarily clear consciousness absorbed every word and turned it over carefully, and he soon realized that something did not add up.
“Lord Zhaoyuan, if an anchor is absolutely necessary, if its existence is indispensable, and that’s why I was able to see you… then how were you able to sense me?”
Qin Shu spoke slowly, one word at a time, his eyes fixed tightly on the shen dragon’s red-gold gaze. A strange dryness crept into his throat, and the muscles in his neck and abdomen quietly tightened with it.
“All right. Let’s say you’re a great immortal with an extremely high cultivation realm. Your soul is sensitive enough that you can clearly sense an outsider who doesn’t belong here watching you from several thousand years in the future… But you would still need a sufficiently reliable anchor to communicate with me across space and time, to actually speak to me and hold a conversation. Is that what you mean?”
Lord Zhaoyuan blinked.
This was the first time the shen dragon had ever closed his eyes in front of Qin Shu before opening them again. Those two beautiful, icy golden pools vanished for several seconds, plunging the pitch-black chamber into darkness several shades deeper before the light returned.
Qin Shu discovered, to his own surprise, that he immediately understood what the gesture meant: Lord Zhaoyuan was thinking.
Once he finished thinking, Lord Zhaoyuan gave him an affirmative answer. “You are correct.”
“In that case, Lord Zhaoyuan, if there has to be an anchor still closely connected to you several thousand years from now, then is it possible…”
Qin Shu took a deep breath, feeling the endless icy ghost qi of the Zhoujue Yin Heavenly Palace move through his chest and flow into every limb and bone, nourishing and filling his increasingly tense body.
He was nervous.
He was very, very, very nervous.
The mounting tension transformed into overwhelming fear and uncertainty, yet mingled with an even more suffocating sense of anticipation. It abruptly took Qin Shu back to elementary school, to the first time he had picked up a microphone before the entire school and been put in charge of hosting the flag-raising ceremony.
His brain, stomach, and heart all twisted into one trembling, sour, tightly wound knot, yet underneath it ran an excitement he could not suppress.
And precisely because of that, Qin Shu had no choice but to ask the question carefully, one word at a time. He had to ask.
“…Is it possible that your anchor was yourself?” Qin Shu heard his own voice, squeezed through his constricted throat with the faintest tremor. “The you who exists several thousand years from now.”
He saw his own face reflected in the shen dragon’s eyes, framed by the dim gleam of dragon scales. His pupils had impossibly dilated to their limits and were flooded completely crimson, while his complexion was deathly pale. Wrapped in that extravagant cloak, he looked exactly like a corpse awaiting burial after nearly suffering a nervous breakdown.
Lord Zhaoyuan did not refute his hypothesis. He took in every tiny reaction from Qin Shu, then remained silent for a moment before saying, “It seems my life will be a long one. I will not die in Zhoujue Yin Prison, a place one may enter but never leave. Is that right?”
“…I don’t know.”
Qin Shu answered quietly, looking momentarily dazed.
The conjecture that had swollen endlessly inside him and fermented into something almost unbearable had just been confirmed by the shen dragon with such effortless lightness that the taut string inside Qin Shu’s mind abruptly snapped.
That string was called self-control.
Qin Shu’s legs moved toward the colossal creature of their own accord. One step, then another, then another, steadily closing the distance between himself and Lord Zhaoyuan.
Then he gently raised a hand and pressed his palm against the shen dragon’s cold snout.
The bone-piercing chill brought an equally piercing pain, as though he had fallen into an endless sea on a midwinter night. The pale golden scales seemed to sprout fangs, tearing into his flesh with cold itself as their weapon.
But the sensation quickly faded. What replaced it was an impossibly smooth texture, so exquisite that even the finest silk could not have made Qin Shu more reluctant to take his hand away.
He was touching an immense yet supple body, powerful, living, and real.
The shen dragon stared directly at Qin Shu’s face. At such close range, his gaze seemed enormous enough to lose all boundaries, like a sun bleeding red.
Qin Shu could sense his faint astonishment and confusion.
The undisguised scrutiny and contemplation, the fleeting moment of blank surprise… Lord Zhaoyuan was unused to being touched this way by a human. He did not quite understand what Qin Shu intended by it.
But perhaps one’s fundamental nature was something that never truly changed from beginning to end.
He had countless ways to avoid Qin Shu’s hand. Even a simple command to “stop” would undoubtedly have worked. For a shen dragon as powerful as this one, it would have required no effort whatsoever.
Not refusing was the same as not objecting. He might be somewhat reluctant, somewhat confused… but for a true dragon, this hesitant acquiescence was already a form of agreement.
Qin Shu desperately searched for his voice inside a throat so tense it was nearly spasming. He stared at the uncontrollable tremor in his fingertips, then lifted his eyes to meet those familiar yet unfamiliar red-gold dragon eyes and studied them for a long, long time.
“…Zhaozhao.”
His voice came out hoarse.