In his dreams, he wanted to speak, but he never knew what he should say. In the end, he would always see Shen Tang throw his head back and laugh, blood tears trailing from the corners of his eyes.
“Hua Po’an, Hua Po’an… Why did I give you such a beautiful name? How could you possibly deserve it?
“You never regretted it, did you?
“I regret it.
“The thing I regret most in my entire life is taking an evil ghost like you as my disciple.”
At the deepest part of the nightmare, Hua Po’an would always see Shen Tang’s face, so cold that it was almost unrecognizable, viciously spitting out two words—
“Bastard.”
……
“Bastard!!”
He suddenly jolted awake, golden silk curtains drifting around the bed.
Hua Po’an gasped for breath, unable to calm his pounding heart in the middle of the night.
His heavy robe was soaked through with sweat.
Everyone in Liao said that their ruler, Hua Po’an, had gone mad.
After his defeat at Chonghua, he had become increasingly deranged.
Yes, he had gone mad. But it wasn’t because of the defeat, as everyone thought. It was because of the endless nightmares, the resentment and hatred filling his heart, and the pain he was unwilling to admit.
He searched for every method of summoning souls that he could find throughout the Jiuzhou Continent, desperately trying to call back fragments of Shen Tang’s soul.
He frantically wanted to demand an answer from Shen Tang.
Why did he have to take things this far? Whoever became ruler of the world, what difference did it make?! Why couldn’t it be him? Even if he slaughtered everyone after entering the city, he would certainly have spared Shen Tang’s life—
So why was Shen Tang the one who died in the end?
The only person he had been willing to spare had actually sacrificed himself to the demon beast to save those useless fools whom Hua Po’an had wanted to cut down like weeds!
Why?!
Again and again, he cast spells to piece together Shen Tang’s shattered soul fragments. Every failure made the resentment in his heart grow more vicious.
He would think that Shen Tang really had been a loyal hound of Chonghua’s ruler after all. He had ruined his great ambition and now wanted to destroy his heart as well.
This torment was Shen Tang’s revenge against him, wasn’t it?
He would never give up.
Whatever Hua Po’an wanted to do, no one could stop him.
Finally, one day, he managed to capture one of Shen Tang’s distant relatives.
The bond of blood caused the soul-returning ritual, which had always failed, to finally succeed.
Hua Po’an poured all of Shen Tang’s soul into that living body, almost like forcibly seizing it, and brought the Master of the Academy back.
Inside the Great Liao Palace, beneath the golden canopy, Hua Po’an faced the person he had lost and regained, the person who had died and returned to life.
Countless thoughts surged through his mind.
Yet in the end, what he did was something even he had never anticipated.
He put everything else aside.
All his curses and venomous words remained caught in his throat.
Then his lips trembled slightly, and he bent down and kissed him.
Shen Tang—
The Grand Master of the noble Academy, a man of great wisdom, a loyal subject who had sworn to serve Chonghua to the death…
Heh…
Hadn’t he still become a living corpse brought back to life by him?!
What had Chonghua done for its hero?
They couldn’t even protect the peace of Shen Tang’s soul after his death!
How useless!
He, Hua Po’an, was the one ruler in all of Jiuzhou whom no one could defy!
With that kiss, it was as though he had suddenly achieved enlightenment. He felt as though he had discovered the most exquisite way to indulge himself.
It almost seemed like a joke.
He had created a puppet, summoned a soul into a body, and gone to such extraordinary lengths to bring a dead man back to life—
Only to enjoy one night with him?
Yet that night, Hua Po’an was like a traveler dying of thirst, greedily drinking from a sweet spring.
He tore apart the man he had dragged back from the gates of the underworld, devouring him completely, swallowing flesh and gnawing bones.
Shen Tang returned to his side in the form of a living corpse.
At that moment, Hua Po’an suddenly no longer wanted to ask why Shen Tang had insisted on sacrificing himself to the demon, or why he had insisted on dying to save the country.
None of that mattered anymore.
It was all in the past.
At that moment, his heart felt incomparably peaceful. It seemed that Shen Tang being alive was what he had always wanted deep down, and he had simply only realized it today.
He was satisfied.
But in the end, he was the only one who was satisfied.
Shen Tang, whom he had forcibly dragged back from the underworld, lived in tremendous suffering.
Every day, he had to face the karma Hua Po’an himself had created.
He was trapped inside a cage, trapped within a body that did not belong to him.
A soul that should have descended into the Yellow Springs had been forcibly kept in the mortal world, enduring the torment of being alive.
Even more terrifying was that he had no idea when such a life would end.
After Hua Po’an brought him back to life, he seemed to temporarily lose interest in conquest and instead became obsessed with researching the art of immortality.
It seemed he wanted to extend this existence for a hundred years, two hundred years, and beyond.
Hua Po’an never again gave him the chance to “die.”
And there was something even more absurd.
Because of Shen Tang’s previous death, the madness and darkness in Hua Po’an’s heart had only grown worse.
This demon seemed to believe that Shen Tang had cared too much about the lives and deaths of people unrelated to him, which was why he had sacrificed himself to the demon back then.
To prevent Shen Tang from ever placing anyone else in his heart again, he studied all kinds of sinister techniques to sever, one by one, Shen Tang’s connections with the outside world.
Potions that erased memories of relatives.
Gu curses that severed feelings of longing.
Anything and everything—he used it without restraint.
Hua Po’an had even uncovered a sinister method capable of severing all the bonds a mortal would have across every lifetime—
Whether marital bonds, familial bonds, or bonds of friendship.
Only by severing every connection Shen Tang had, making him someone destined to live a solitary and cursed life, could Hua Po’an finally feel at ease.
Only then could he be certain that Shen Tang would never again sacrifice his life for someone else.
But perhaps because her conscience had not yet completely died, or perhaps because she had been moved by Shen Tang’s stubborn refusal to submit, the Holy Maiden Grand Priestess responsible for caring for Shen Tang in the Liao Palace developed compassion for him.
That Holy Maiden was Su Yurou.
Because of her abilities and status, Su Yurou was one of the few people who could approach Shen Tang.
Over all these years, she watched Shen Tang struggle against those evil arts, enduring suffering that defied the laws of heaven, living every day in a state worse than death.
The more she admired his unwavering will, the more unbearable she found it to watch.
Finally, one day, she made up her mind.
Taking advantage of Hua Po’an’s expedition to the northwest because of the war, she rescued Shen Tang from the palace.
The two of them endured countless hardships before finally escaping beyond the borders of Liao.
In truth, her assistance had not been entirely selfless.
By then, Su Yurou had already fallen in love with Shen Tang and intended to marry him.
But Shen Tang’s marriage fate had already been severed by Hua Po’an.
No matter how sincerely Su Yurou treated him, all her efforts ultimately came to nothing.
Even worse, because Hua Po’an had tortured Shen Tang in countless ways before, leaving him afflicted with evil arts, his memories became increasingly confused, and his suffering grew increasingly severe.
Seeing him struggling to remain alive in such a state, Su Yurou was heartbroken.
In the end, she made a decision—
When she left the palace, she stole one of the most precious treasures in the Liao Palace.
It was the legendary artifact passed down through Shen Tang’s family, the “Reversal Stone,” which Hua Po’an had discovered while searching Shen Tang’s clan.
It was said that the Reversal Stone possessed the ability to alter the past.
However, the people of Shen Tang’s family had always merely guarded it and had never used it.
Hua Po’an had tried several times to coax the method for awakening the Reversal Stone out of Shen Tang, but had never succeeded.
Nevertheless, regardless of how things stood, the stone contained immense power capable of defying fate and changing destiny.
So Su Yurou used it as the core of a formation.
She constructed the formation and cast the spell, sealing away all of Shen Tang’s memories and the curses upon him, granting him a new life.
From that moment onward, there was no longer any Master Shen in this world.
The person who awakened on the sickbed was Jiang Fuli.
The price of using the Reversal Stone was simply too great.
Su Yurou suffered severe backlash.
Half of her breathtakingly beautiful face was devoured by the backlash. One half remained extraordinarily beautiful, while the other had become almost demonic.
From then on, she could only conceal her face behind a white veil.
As for the Reversal Stone, she secretly embedded it within Jiang Fuli’s left eye.
Because of its nature, it absorbed the spiritual energy of heaven and earth at night and entered a temporary dormant state.
That was also why Jiang Fuli’s left eye could not see clearly at night.
After that, Su Yurou traveled together with Jiang Fuli.
She had thought that they could live peacefully like this from then on.
But gradually, Su Yurou discovered just how terrifying the mark Hua Po’an had left on Shen Tang truly was.
For example, although Jiang Fuli, whose memories were suppressed by the Reversal Stone, remembered almost nothing, he would sometimes suddenly ask her:
“Did I once have a very well-behaved little disciple?”
One afternoon, with the spring sunlight warm and the peach blossoms just beginning to bloom, he even sat beside the window and silently copied an entire sword manual.
Curious, she asked,
“What are you writing?”
Jiang Fuli’s expression was indifferent, devoid of emotion.
That had always been his state after being suppressed by the Reversal Stone.
Sometimes, this state made her feel as though he were a walking corpse.
But only by remaining this way could he live more easily, without being tormented by restless nights and unbearable pain.
Jiang Fuli said,
“I don’t know either. These things suddenly appeared in my mind, so I wrote them down. They seem to be pretty good sword techniques.”
She leaned closer to take a look.
And was rendered speechless.
The Broken Water Sword Manual.
Within the Liao Palace, it was the sword technique Hua Po’an, the ruler of Liao, most loved to practice whenever he had nothing else to do.
As the saying went:
“Five years, one sword, and spring and autumn change.
Ten years, one sword, and the vicissitudes of life reverse.
This sword, supreme above all, can sever flowing water—
Yet in a lifetime, it cannot sever the heart turned toward its lord.”
The Broken Water Sword had been the first sword technique Shen Tang taught Hua Po’an after accepting him as a disciple.
It was said that Shen Tang had specifically created it according to Hua Po’an’s strengths and weaknesses in movement.
Whenever Hua Po’an spoke of this story in the past, there had always been a trace of arrogant pride between his brows, mixed with a little sadness.
To Hua Po’an, he had later mastered countless fierce and formidable sword techniques.
The Broken Water Sword was by no means the strongest.
To Shen Tang, he had created countless extraordinary techniques throughout his life.
The Broken Water Sword was hardly his most remarkable creation, either.
And yet now, Jiang Fuli had forgotten everything, but he could still sit peacefully before the small window and write down this entire sword manual.
Su Yurou watched it all, and even she did not know what she was supposed to feel.
Jiang Fuli looked up.
“What’s wrong? Do you know where this sword manual came from?”
She hurriedly lowered her lashes.
“…Nothing. I—I don’t know either…”
And so the two of them lived in seclusion under assumed names, hiding deep within the forests for many years.
Back in the Liao Palace, Hua Po’an had studied forbidden arts of immortality and had made both Jiang Fuli and Su Yurou take those forbidden medicines.
Su Yurou wanted Jiang Fuli to recover and regain his strength, and she was also afraid that Hua Po’an would track them down.
So she hid with him inside a barrier deep in the mountains.
Gradually, they lost all sense of how much time had passed in the outside world.
When she finally felt that enough time had passed and emerged from the mountains to make inquiries, she discovered that several centuries had already gone by.
She was astonished.
Only then did she realize that Hua Po’an’s secret technique of immortality had actually succeeded.
After asking about the state of the various nations, she learned of the rise and fall of countless small kingdoms over those centuries.
She learned that Chonghua had already gone through several generations of rulers.
But when she asked about Liao, she learned that Hua Po’an, because he had been too desperate to obtain the art of immortality, had extensively practiced witchcraft and gu magic, making enemies everywhere.
In the end, his efforts had backfired.
He was assassinated and then killed by the backlash.
Liao had already gone through several rulers since then.
However, its ruler was merely a puppet.
The true master of the country was actually the Liao State Preceptor, who remained hidden behind the scenes.
After hearing this, Su Yurou could not help but breathe a huge sigh of relief.
She knew that she and Jiang Fuli could finally return to the mortal world without worrying about being tracked down by Hua Po’an.
But there was still a faint unease in her heart.
She always felt that the mysterious State Preceptor seemed to carry some vaguely familiar and ominous quality.
Her unease was confirmed several years later.
Su Yurou and Jiang Fuli had lived in seclusion for several centuries, retreating into the mountains and making medicine their primary cultivation.
After emerging from seclusion, the two traveled across the land, becoming familiar with the world as it now was while rescuing many innocent civilians caught in the flames of war.
Once, they passed through a small village in Lichun.
They happened to encounter Liao cultivators slaughtering the villagers on a massive scale.
Jiang Fuli rescued a pair of orphaned brothers from beneath the blades.
The older boy hugged his younger brother and repeatedly kowtowed to the masked Jiang Fuli, begging him to take them with him.
Jiang Fuli was a man whose emotions had been sealed.
Under ordinary circumstances, nothing should have been able to move him.
Yet that day, as he stared at the young boy kneeling before him and pleading desperately, he did something that Su Yurou could never have expected—
He gave the boy the copy of The Broken Water Sword Manual that he had written himself.
“I have no use for this sword manual. It’s too weak. But if you study it carefully, perhaps you’ll be able to comprehend a sword path of your own from it. It should be enough to protect yourself.”