Qin Shu could not share the white dragon’s anger, but right now, he was pretty angry too.
His emotions had not yet left the bedroom. His heart, his eyes, every cell in his body all carried the same four words: not nearly enough. And then, at exactly that moment, he discovered that he had been dragged into a ghost domain again.
No. According to what ancient texts recorded, he was currently watching the memories of his “partner in intimacy.”
But memories were not all the same. An existence as overwhelmingly powerful as Pei Zhao was especially different.
Any memory from life that had left too deep an impression on him… would turn into a ghost domain, large or small. Vast stretches of the past were forcibly retained in cracks between worlds, cycling again and again, difficult to scatter.
Qin Shu’s consciousness was dragged inside, moving from one ghost domain to the next and advancing continuously in chronological order, with no option to pause.
The feeling was a little strange. He did not get to watch Pei Zhao’s entire life, because everything he saw was himself. What he was seeing was… the entire process of Pei Zhao falling in love with him, beginning with their first meeting across the Nine Provinces.
The curiosity and yearning that had quietly gathered in Pei Zhao’s heart were confirmed when he first met the Xiezhi, but they did not spread much further, and the two had no more encounters after that.
That beast who had once slain a god merely left a mark in Lord Zhaoyuan’s heart. Deep, beautiful, black and crimson branded against a frozen snowfield.
For that young little dragon, becoming Dao companions with the Xiezhi was impossible. Even the tiniest thought of it, if spoken aloud, might have been treated as evidence of severe mental illness.
All the little dragon gained from it at the time was a preference, an extremely detailed standard for choosing a partner.
He had thought back then that if he ever found a partner in the future, it had to be this type.
Glossy black fur, blood-red eyes, a deadly horn that killed people as easily as chopping vegetables. Ideally, they would also be a being born of heaven and earth, ideally have yin-yang eyes that could see through falsehood, ideally have personally killed a god, and ideally… be a Xiezhi.
Ideally. It could only ever be ideally, because from that day on, the little dragon and the beast never met again.
Mundane affairs, great matters beneath heaven, struggles over fortune, schemes for clan destiny, study and cultivation, births and losses in the family… across memories far too long to hold clearly, they gradually blurred into great swaths of differently colored light and shadow.
Until Lord Zhaoyuan, the one with his absurdly detailed partner criteria, Lord Zhaoyuan who had never once tried to find anyone at all, was imprisoned in Zhoujue Yin Prison.
Qin Shu watched Warden Qin in his heavy cloak walk step by step toward Lord Zhaoyuan the first time they met, with absolutely no regard for personal space, stopping so close their faces were nearly touching.
With a smile that was not quite a smile, Warden Qin asked softly, “Just now, who took over my body?”
Lord Zhaoyuan looked into those crimson eyes, fell silent for a moment, and answered honestly, “You did.”
“Oh. No wonder. Only he would have the ability to fight me for control and steal such a special moment of reunion from me.”
Warden Qin’s hand brushed over the thin chains. He slowly gathered the wet, icy iron embedded and twisted through flesh, closed it in his palm, and gave an apparently careless tug.
“Tell me, do you think he’ll come back?”
Pain deep enough to scrape the bones swept through Lord Zhaoyuan’s mind. His eyes trembled slightly and, almost inadvertently, shifted toward the direction from which Qin Shu was watching.
“Perhaps. Better if he doesn’t.”
As the words fell, an intact reverse scale was casually torn free and dropped into Warden Qin’s pale palm. Then came the unhurried sound of chewing.
The heavy stench of blood spread through the freezing prison cell. This crimson-eyed man actually dared eat a dragon’s reverse scale like a potato chip.
“You like him more?” he asked between bites, his tone slow, as if he were still completely unconcerned. “That’s not very good, little dragon.”
“…You remember me.”
“Mm. Saying flattering things to please me now doesn’t mean much anymore. You’re going to suffer.” Warden Qin narrowed his eyes slightly, a chilling smile rising at the corner of his lips. “Fickle in affection, deficient in private virtue, unrestrained in lust. One more count added to the sentence.”
What a pervert!
Qin Shu felt that once he got back, he really needed to find Xu Min and have a private conversation. He could not bear to watch what came next. His mental health felt severely damaged.
More importantly, though, he had discovered that if he had no morals, he really did seem capable of turning into exactly this kind of bastard.
Because of some inexplicable understanding of his own fundamental nature… Qin Shu could guarantee that Warden Qin genuinely liked the dangerous, troublesome felon in front of him very much.
It was not merely the terror and intimidation he deliberately created, not merely an attempt to establish dominance and oppressive authority over the person he was interrogating, not merely a job tinged with a little personal emotion.
He really did like Lord Zhaoyuan. He had poured the full quota of personal feelings into it.
But Warden Qin had no bottom line.
Warden Qin removed one of the blood-soaked thin chains, steeped it in his teapot with brown sugar and spirit herbs, and drank it as an everyday beverage to soothe his throat.
Qin Shu desperately wanted to keep his eyes closed through the entire thing and could not stop thinking that memory playback really ought to come with a fast-forward function.
Unfortunately, there were key pieces of information he had to see. For example, where the first signs of Fengdu’s collapse began, and how the smell of demons had already seeped in even then.
In this world of extreme inequality, all the “lowborn rabble” reduced to forced labor made perfect nourishment for evil to breed.
Qin Shu had personally experienced it. He knew very well just how enormous the class divide in Fengdu had been, and in that same era, the underworld could almost be called one of the most rule-bound places. At least there had been multiple ways to rise in status… cultivation, work performance, military merit, overall contribution, a superior’s trust. Astonishingly, all of those could actually matter.
At the same time, the world of the living was even more like hell, where social inequality could only be more extreme. Many dead souls whose allotted ghostly lifespan had not yet ended arrived in the underworld and would rather remain in Fengdu and work honestly than readily reincarnate.
Warden Qin thrived in Fengdu. He adapted perfectly and enjoyed his freedom in the center of a prosperous golden age without the slightest guilt. Of course, that did not mean he was oblivious to the world’s collapse.
Through Lord Zhaoyuan’s memories, Qin Shu watched him too. He watched Warden Qin notice long ago the resentment accumulated across generations, the evil thriving inside hidden cracks, the class divisions growing ever more rigid.
Once, while chatting with Lord Zhaoyuan, he mentioned almost casually, “A world built wrong deserves to end. I don’t have the power to overturn heaven and earth, and neither do you. If you were some little Dragon King, I could try ruling from behind the curtain, steal your territory, seize your subjects, siphon off some incense offerings, and do something useful with them. But…”
Listening to this vicious-sounding declaration, Lord Zhaoyuan seemed to smile. “I don’t like incense offerings.”
“See? A detached hermit like you living in troubled times is only going to get occupied by some savage who breaks into your house. You won’t keep your property, you won’t keep your ass, and you definitely won’t keep your life.”
Warden Qin gave a cold laugh as well. “War is never one person’s business. You and I are both terrible at getting along with people, so what’s the point of fighting ourselves to death? Better to enjoy ourselves first and watch for the possibility of destruction giving way to renewal. If the chance truly comes, then we can add a little more firewood to the newborn flame.”
“You’re the only one enjoying yourself, Warden Qin.” Lord Zhaoyuan sighed and spoke faintly. “I’m in pain. Dragons don’t have pipa bones. Stop looking for them. You can’t hook me from behind. You’ll only tear off a few broken scales.”
“Hahaha. Poor little dragon.”
Qin Shu: …
What a pervert!
Perverted or not, though, somehow the feelings really did develop. Naturally, logically, almost inevitably, and there was even a hint of flirting in it.
From then on, Lord Zhaoyuan’s divine sense remained attached to Warden Qin, refusing to disperse even after Warden Qin left Heaven Cell No. 1.
That was because Warden Qin was always stained with dragon blood and always carried Lord Zhaoyuan’s reverse scale around with him, hanging it from his wooden identity tablet like an ornament. When he was in a bad mood, he could even pick it up and bite it, terrifying everyone nearby to death.
Because of that, Heaven Cell No. 1, which should have sealed soul power, was completely useless against Lord Zhaoyuan. His divine sense simply draped itself openly over Warden Qin, following the pull of the reverse scale and blood as it leisurely toured the interior of Fengdu.
The prison, treasury, Scripture Pavilion, spirit-herb fields, formation research center… even the borders quietly falling apart. Lord Zhaoyuan saw them all. There was no way Warden Qin could fail to notice, but he simply did not care. Lord Zhaoyuan even hinted that he should make a few extra trips to the Scripture Pavilion, and he did.
Qin Shu reaped enormous benefits from the opportunity. Every case file Warden Qin had read, every book he had opened, the breathing rhythm he used while meditating, even the protective measures he chose when no one was guarding him, Qin Shu learned every single one.
Anything Lord Zhaoyuan could see, Qin Shu could see. Lord Zhaoyuan did not pay much attention to the techniques, but whenever Qin Shu found something useful to himself, he could follow that inattentive divine sense toward it and hurry to memorize the material.
While increasingly convinced that he needed a therapist… Qin Shu also gained benefits beyond description from Lord Zhaoyuan’s memories inside Zhoujue Yin Heavenly Palace.
He even began to suspect that Lord Zhaoyuan could sense his presence, and perhaps Warden Qin could vaguely sense him too. Yet both of them behaved as though nothing was unusual, interacting exactly as they always had, merely going out of their way to read a few extra “irrelevant” books. That was all.
The collapse arrived even faster than Qin Shu had imagined. He had already grown used to watching by then and, without realizing it, became completely invested in the development of this relationship. One glance was enough to tell him that Warden Qin liked Lord Zhaoyuan more and more. Qin Shu even started thinking it was about time for the man to confess… If he waited any longer, he would cease to qualify as human.
And yet Warden Qin stubbornly refused to say a single word about liking him. Nothing direct, no clear hints either. If he liked someone too much, he would instead become inexplicably violent.
What a pervert. The most perverted part was probably what happened when Fengdu collapsed. The collapse had not formed in a day or two. It began with the Scripture Pavilions across Fengdu cracking apart.
Formations failed for no apparent reason. Spiritual energy began being consumed faster and faster. Arguments, brawls, and ghost-killing incidents suddenly surged. Luxurious pagodas built from gold inexplicably fell into widening fissures, where molten lava scorched them into streams of liquid gold and carried who knew how many lost ancient texts down into the abyss.
The emperors of the various palaces issued orders to repair the damage, salvage the books, rebuild formations, reinforce prisons to prevent dangerous inmates from escaping, and temporarily suspend reincarnation… Fengdu was frantic from top to bottom, as if this were a disaster human effort could still repair.
Only in Zhoujue Yin Heavenly Palace did Warden Qin live much as he always had. If anything, he became even more outrageous.
When prisoners tried to use the chaos to escape, he would deliberately let them run first. Then, just when they believed they had reached freedom and were about to leave Zhoujue Yin, he would directly kill them… strip out their yao cores and Nascent Souls, skin their beast hides into carpets, and toss everything left over into an alchemy furnace to stew together.
Under the old rules, he could not simply kill them whenever he liked. Now that there were no rules, killing them became easy, and he might as well make full use of the remains while he was at it.
Of course, knowing what Ao Guang had previously revealed, Qin Shu could now see what Warden Qin was actually trying to do.
He was not doing these things merely because he had no bottom line or because his personality was a little twisted… More importantly, he intended to kill every sufficiently powerful, vicious felon and, once Fengdu collapsed completely, throw them underground to fill the holes.
Lord Zhaoyuan should have been able to understand that much too. But what Lord Zhaoyuan certainly did not realize was that the material Warden Qin planned to use to fill those holes included more than other people. It included Warden Qin himself.
“Add a little more firewood to the newborn flame.”
Lord Zhaoyuan did not finally understand the meaning hidden in that sentence until the day of the collapse.
By the time the abyss had swallowed most of the ancient buildings and earth veins, the boundary between Fengdu and the human world had been completely torn open by collapses occurring everywhere.
Qin Shu almost seemed able to hear the cry of a phoenix bird from the distant south.
A question suddenly occurred to him. How exactly had the phoenix clan declined?
Why had Chen Li Chi back in Phoenix Village needed to stake his life and rely on such an extraordinary moment just to barely revive a single young bird?
Lord Zhaoyuan’s memories finally provided a clear answer. Not only had those beings needed to move mountains and seas to fill the collapses, they also had to endure one mad dragon after another chasing and tearing at them from behind.
The world was close to collapse, and the Blood Calamity had erupted everywhere. The Vermilion Birds and White Tigers were nearly wiped out as they rushed from disaster to disaster. The Black Tortoise on Penglai Island silently revealed its true form as well, turning into a massive stone barrier over one fracture and never waking again.
The old story of immortals crossing the seas to save the world had already been repeating itself for thousands of years.
Watching the chaos from the underworld, Warden Qin pointed toward the still-fading Heaven-and-Earth Dharma Manifestation left behind when the White Tiger fell.
He stared at the White Tiger’s vicious claws and its ears with great interest. “Very cute. Fluffy. I’ve spent most of this life surrounded by grim, cold, hard things. Boring… I’ll go touch something like that in my next life.”
Following Lord Zhaoyuan’s gaze, Qin Shu looked over and felt his heart jump.
That was the direction of Jiangcheng.
Lord Zhaoyuan froze as well. He had heard about that place from Qin Shu. But before he could answer, before he could even think, the chains embedded in his flesh trembled and pulled, bringing wave after wave of bone-deep pain.
Warden Qin never announced what he was about to do. With one hand, he dragged the enormous dragon, vast as a mountain range. With the other, he seized the alchemy furnace stuffed full of corpses and leapt from the remaining ruined platform, heading straight for the abyss.
The formations had already failed. The countless thin iron chains began snapping one after another during the high-speed fall. In the end, the only thing left restraining the giant dragon and dragging him downward… was Warden Qin’s hand.
His entire forearm plunged into the dragon’s chest and lodged above the seven-inch vital point. Through the gap beneath the reverse scale, through the wounds twisted open by the chains, he thrust without hesitation deep into flesh and blood.
“Your heart is too big. I can’t get a grip on it.” Warden Qin murmured softly and pushed his arm several inches deeper. With a slight exertion of force, he actually flung the dragon’s tail straight into the void.
Lightless chaos surged upward, wrapping around the dragon at terrifying speed as it tried to devour the foreign object that had intruded and blocked its path.
Under that incomprehensible agony, Lord Zhaoyuan nearly lost the strength to speak. His molten-gold slit pupils became two trembling pools of gold. His gaze lost all focus, his blurred vision barely managing to stay on Warden Qin’s face.
Since he could no longer speak, everything that followed could only become Warden Qin’s monologue.
“I treated you badly.”
He said it, then gave a soft laugh, his manner turning mean and teasing. “Honestly, I don’t want to treat you well either. You look cute when you suffer. Like a sealed gourd. I have to knock on you several times before you’ll finally make a sound for me.”
“You had a pretty good first half of your life, didn’t you? Otherwise you wouldn’t have grown into this kind of temperament. In that case, suffering a little more during the second half is perfectly reasonable. It’s called the way of balance.”
“You should thank me. After enduring suffering this far beyond balance, when you reincarnate you can go argue with that old bastard Heaven’s Dao… Once it sees what I’ve done to you, it’ll have to cover its face with its sleeve in shame and never dare make things difficult for you again.”
Lord Zhaoyuan had never feared death, and such things had never frightened him. As the pain of being devoured gradually became a constant sensation he could adapt to, he quietly listened to Warden Qin’s casual murmurings, and his emotions unexpectedly calmed with them.
His gaze slowly moved downward and landed on Warden Qin’s waist and abdomen, already wrapped in darkness. The power of the void had spread upward and long since begun consuming Warden Qin’s flesh as food too.
But from beginning to end, Warden Qin gave no reaction at all, as if the pain burning through bone and heart did not exist. Yet it hurt. It hurt terribly. Lord Zhaoyuan knew exactly how much pain he was in.
The enormous dragon’s pupils slowly contracted as he stared at every tiny change in Warden Qin’s expression. Only after a long while did he ask quietly, “You still aren’t leaving? You intend to die with me?”
“What else? What use am I alive? Stand up and command the situation? Unite the surviving forces and clean up the rest of the mess?” Warden Qin laughed aloud. “Sounds exhausting. I can’t get along with any of them. I was born without that talent.”
…Fair point. Qin Shu had those abilities. Warden Qin had received precisely none of the interpersonal skills.
But the answer was enough to coax Lord Zhaoyuan, and coax him very well. His tense body slowly relaxed, and he simply allowed himself to hang from Warden Qin’s arm.
Then Lord Zhaoyuan silently spat out his dragon pearl and sent it high above the ruins of Fengdu. It transformed into an enormous ring of magical light that dragged back the spreading chaotic power, preventing the contamination from continuing to leak outward.
Several ghost horses that had nearly been swallowed by the void were saved because of it. Carrying underworld officers scared senseless, they fled at top speed and barely reached safety.
Without his dragon pearl, the giant dragon’s aura instantly weakened severalfold, and his vitality began draining away just as quickly. Only the dragon body itself, so deeply favored by Heaven’s Dao, remained capable of serving as an impassable barrier between the abyss and the human world.
“So kind,” Warden Qin murmured. “You always make me look like some vicious criminal drowning in sin.”
Lord Zhaoyuan fell silent for a long while, then unexpectedly laughed, slow and unhurried. Even with his vitality nearly exhausted, his voice still seemed to carry strength, echoing through the valley like a dragon’s call. “If there is another life, I’ll be the vicious one for you. The way of balance.”
“You really want another life with me?”
Warden Qin tilted his head to look at him. After a moment, he too revealed an ugly little smile, like a bloodthirsty shark staring at a fragile heart.
“Don’t get sentimental.”
The instant the words fell, eerie light flared inside those crimson eyes, while abyss-thick darkness rose around the black beast horn. He knew the Heaven-and-Earth Dharma Manifestation too. The horn’s image of heavenly punishment transformed into a savage scythe wrapped in black feathers and rose into the sky, aiming precisely at the dragon’s seven-inch vital point.
Lord Zhaoyuan did not close his eyes.
He waited seriously for the end of this life, feeling his heart clenched tightly by the person in front of him until the strange calm of approaching death swept through his entire body, his vision filled completely by fierce black-and-red light, and not a trace of pain from the void remained.
The scythe came down and pierced through both of them.
A tremendous force erupted from his chest. The bewildered dragon soul was abruptly knocked free of his body. It had been immersed in the filth of void-chaos for only an instant when the blood-maddened scythe pierced through it again. Bone-deep cold swept over him, and burning pain branded itself into his soul at the back of his neck.
The scythe tip flung him away, fast and far. The ruins of Fengdu blurred in his vision, while the firelight of that hell on earth swept past like a revolving lantern.
The newborn dragon soul, stripped of its dragon pearl, had no strength to resist. He did not even have time to stop, or take one last look at the void.
He landed on the White Tiger’s remains, cold and fluffy.
He had been thrown into Jiangcheng.