Chapter 66
"Control your anger, Ling Xu," he whispered through telepathy, the vibration of his inner voice flat and calm, like a tour guide reminding his group not to feed the monkeys at the temple.
"You see them? The ones strolling leisurely along the road, smiling broadly as if the world belongs to them and no one would dare take it away, their robes made of silk woven from threads of gold and dead stars—they are ordinary humans, Ling Xu. Not cultivators, not Gods, not anything that possesses the power to harm you. They simply… exist. And because they simply exist, they do not deserve your anger. Save that fire for something greater. Save that hatred for those who are more deserving."
Ling Xu, who heard the whisper, did not reply.
She merely gave a slight nod, a nod so faint it was almost invisible, restrained by the awareness that around her, dozens of pairs of eyes had begun to focus on her—on her white hair streaked with veins of color, on the bandages wrapped around her head, on her sudden and uninvited presence at the outermost gate of the Second Divine Kingdom.
And within her heart, amidst the pulse of the Human Realm beating with an oddly calm rhythm, she murmured,
"I will restrain myself, Huan Zheng."
Huan Zheng, who just a second ago had been busy warning Ling Xu through telepathy, suddenly fell silent.
Not because he saw something terrifying, not because he sensed the presence of a threatening enemy, but because his lazy gaze, without him realizing it, had become fixed on the figure beside him—on Ling Xu, who stood with her arms folded across her chest, her head slightly raised toward the sky colored in a golden blue like a fairytale sunset, with white bandages neatly wrapped around her head covering the empty sockets of her eyes, and with the third eye on her forehead tightly closed like a flower bud sleeping through winter, leaving behind only a faint scar shaped like a puncture wound widened by a blade, subtle like a memory that would never truly fade.
"She… has changed," Huan Zheng murmured inwardly, and for the first time in this long journey filled with death and rebirth and blood and fire, he found himself at a loss for words.
Not because he did not know what to say, but because none of the words he knew were sufficient to describe what he now saw, what he now felt, what now made his chest tighten in such a strange way.
Not from pain, not from fear, not from anger, but from something he had never felt in thousands of years of living—something that might be called admiration by those who still believed in miracles, something that might be called awe by those still capable of being astonished, something that might be called… enchantment.
For Ling Xu, who once when he first met her was merely a frail goddess with tangled white hair and dim eyes filled with hatred, who once when they wandered from one city to another could only hide beneath a thick hood due to the trauma of her identity, who once when she lost both her eyes in that silent meditation chamber nearly collapsed with blood flowing from her empty eye sockets—now, after transforming into a cultivator of Humanity, after letting go of everything she had built and choosing to become empty, after dying eleven times and rising eleven times, stood before him with a beauty that could not be explained by words, because words were never designed to describe a child of a goddess who had become something more than a goddess, more than a human, more than anything that had a name.
Her once tangled and dry white hair now flowed softly over her shoulders like a frozen waterfall in the heart of winter, each strand shimmering with a dim light that changed color depending on the angle—sometimes ocean blue like the sea at midnight, sometimes sunset gold like a dying sun, sometimes blood red like memories of her mother that would never fade—and those colored veins that once appeared only faintly among her white strands were now clearly visible, pulsing gently in rhythm with her heartbeat, like small rivers flowing across untouched snow.
Her face, once pale and gaunt from years of surviving on moss and the same recurring nightmares, had now transformed into that of a twenty-two-year-old girl—not excessively beautiful like the goddesses of legend who made princes fall in love at first sight, but beautiful in a strange way, beautiful in a way that made people want to keep staring even though Huan Zheng knew that behind the white bandages covering her head, behind the calmness radiating from her every movement, there was something dark, something hungry, something ready to devour the world if given the chance.
And what shocked Huan Zheng the most, what kept him silent longer than it should have, was that Ling Xu—whom he had assumed all this time to be a cultivator of Humanity who had shed all her divine physical traits—now looked exactly like an ordinary human girl of twenty-two, with skin no longer pale like a corpse, with lips no longer cracked from dryness, with a body no longer emaciated like someone who had starved for years.
If not for her white hair streaked with colored veins—a trait no ordinary human could possess—and the bandages around her head along with the closed third eye on her forehead, she would easily blend into a crowd in the marketplace or along the paved streets of this city, with no one suspecting that she was the manifestation of the Cancer plague, that she had devoured an entire divine civilization in the blink of an eye, that she had died eleven times and risen eleven times just to stand here, at the outermost gate of humanity's dwelling, gazing at the golden-blue sky with eyes that could not see, yet with a heart—a heart that had become an ocean of consciousness—that saw everything, every heartbeat, every breath, every whisper of fear escaping from those who were beginning to realize that something was different in the air today, that something had arrived at their doorstep, that something would not leave until everything burned.
"You've been staring at me for too long, Huan Zheng," Ling Xu suddenly said, her voice no longer as clear as mountain spring water like when she first announced her successful transformation, but slightly playful, slightly teasing, with a tone that made Huan Zheng jolt like someone dozing off in class suddenly called by the teacher.
"Is there something wrong with my appearance? Or did you just realize that I now look like an ordinary twenty-two-year-old human girl, no longer that frail goddess with bandaged eyes and hair as messy as a floor brush?"
To be continued…