Li Yuan looked up at the old man, his voice tinged with confusion. Dead was dead. A spirit crystal coffin could ensure the body did not rot, but it could not save someone who had already lost their soul.
Furthermore, if the faith and vow power collected annually by the City of Divine Grace were truly intended to repair this body, it was a complete waste of effort. Vow power could only be absorbed by the corresponding deity; it was useless to a soulless shell.
The old man slowly shook his head and chuckled softly. The sound was light, as if he were laughing at Li Yuan’s hasty judgment. He looked up at Li Yuan, his tone firm to the point of stubbornness.
“She is not dead. She is just... sleeping for a while.”
Having said that, he turned back to the coffin and reached out his right hand, pressing his palm gently against the surface of the lid. His gaunt hands were so pale they were almost bloodless.
But what truly caught Li Yuan’s attention was the old man’s gaze.
He stood by the coffin, leaning over slightly. His clouded eyes watched the girl inside, his eyelids reddening slightly, yet a faint smile played at the corners of his mouth.
Li Yuan had never seen that kind of look on any other evil cultivator. It was a gaze filled with humanity—a rare sight indeed for one of his kind.
Li Yuan remained silent for several seconds. The old man had previously claimed that collecting vow power was to awaken the God of Light, but Li Yuan had just carefully examined the girl’s condition again. A fragment of her soul was sealed deep within her body; it was extremely weak, but it had not completely dissipated.
However, a soul remnant of this level was far from being considered “asleep,” let alone capable of waking up. Vow power could keep the body from decaying, but it was absolutely impossible for it to awaken a shattered soul. It wasn’t a matter of quantity; the nature of the energy was simply wrong.
“Using faith and vow power to keep the body from rotting is one thing,” Li Yuan said, his tone calm but blunt. “But if you want to awaken her soul, these things are useless. It wouldn’t matter if you collected a thousand times more.”
The old man did not argue. He simply nodded gently, his fingers still tracing the surface of the coffin lid as if he were caressing the girl’s face. After a long while, he spoke, his voice so soft he seemed to be talking to himself.
“I know. But as long as I can keep her going for one more day, I am willing to endure for one more day. I will hold on until the day she can finally wake up.”
Looking at those gaunt hands and those clouded yet tender eyes, Li Yuan momentarily found himself at a loss for words. He had seen countless evil cultivators, but every single one of them had been hideous and ruthless—the kind of people others wouldn’t even want to mention.
Yet this old man before him had actually spent hundreds of years collecting faith and vow power at such a great cost just to make a woman wake up again. This bordered on the incomprehensible for Li Yuan.
It simply didn't make sense—it was fundamentally impossible for an evil cultivator to do something like this.
“...For her, I would willingly do anything,” the old man added, his tone flat, as if he were stating a simple, obvious fact.
There was no passionate declaration, no tearful accusation. It was just a simple statement, as if this were as natural as life, death, or illness, requiring no justification.
Li Yuan’s expression shifted several times as he listened. He looked at the lifeless girl in the coffin, then at the old man who was so thin he was little more than a skeleton. After a long silence, he finally chose to ask the question weighing on his mind.
“What is your relationship to her? Why do you care so much about someone who should be a stranger?”
The old man slowly lifted his head to look at Li Yuan. His clouded eyes were the same as before, but his tone was more serious than it had ever been.
“She... is my lover.”
When those words reached Li Yuan’s ears, he felt a buzzing in his head, as if something had suddenly exploded. For a moment, he couldn't even process the thought.
He opened his mouth, struggling to find the right words before he finally managed to speak, his tone filled with unconcealed shock and denial. “That’s impossible! Never mind a lover—even an evil cultivator’s own family or flesh and blood would eventually become nothing more than materials to increase their cultivation.”
He wasn’t trying to provoke the old man; he was merely stating a fact. On the Kyushu Continent, evil cultivators were classified as such precisely because their Dao Hearts were twisted.
When a person’s Dao is built upon plundering the lives and souls of others, the way they view the world is fundamentally different from a normal person’s from the very beginning.
They might retain a shred or two of humanity at first, but as they progress, that humanity dissolves and drains away like a slowly melting glacier until nothing is left. Emotions like love were out of the question.
The old man did not argue after hearing this. He lowered his head, a faint, slightly helpless smile slowly appearing on his lips.
“If you do not believe me, then listen to a story.”
He gestured for Li Yuan to sit on a nearby tree stump stool while he slowly sat on another low stool beside the coffin, one hand still resting on the edge of the lid, gently stroking the surface.
He fell silent for a while, as if pulling out memories that had been buried for countless years and arranging them in order. Then, he began to speak in an old, steady voice.
“I come from a place called the Weihai Realm. It is a cultivation world, much like your homeland must be. But my homeland was very barren.”
He paused here, his lips curling into an enigmatic arc.
“...And I stayed there for over three thousand years.”
Li Yuan’s brow twitched slightly. Over three thousand years... that time span made him instinctively re-evaluate the old man.
On the Kyushu Continent, any cultivator who could live to be over three thousand years old was an expert standing at the very peak. Although the blood fiend energy remaining in this old man was thin, its quality was indeed extremely high—on a completely different level from any evil cultivator he had encountered before.
The old man did not notice the change in Li Yuan’s expression and simply continued.
In the beginning, he was just an insignificant low-level cultivator. Lacking talent, he was treated as a servant in his sect. Later, in his quest for power, he gradually stepped onto the evil path. Starting from the most basic blood fiend energy, he slowly developed a set of cultivation techniques that belonged only to him.
During those long three thousand years, he killed many enemies. In the end, he even sacrificed countless trillions of lives to finally earn the chance for ascension.
“And then?” Li Yuan asked.
“I didn’t survive the lightning tribulation during my ascension.” The old man’s tone was flat, as if failing his tribulation no longer affected him at all. “By all rights, my soul should have been destroyed then, turning to ashes until nothing remained.”
He paused and glanced at the girl in the coffin.
“But the heavens seemed to think I still had a use and spared my life. When I woke up again, I was already here—on the Ogu Continent. That was about seven hundred years ago. At that time, I was heavily injured, my primordial spirit was shattered, and not even one percent of my strength remained.”
Li Yuan frowned slightly as he heard this. Surviving a failed ascension tribulation was hard enough to imagine, but to be transported to another world afterward... that didn't seem like luck. It seemed more like...
Rate on N.U.
