Wuxia: Become the 100-Victory Sword King at the Beginning

Chapter 418. Soul Pact: A Bond Shakes the Heavens.
“But we can’t escape this fate.” Nangong Xiaodie tiptoed and buried her face in his blood-stained clothes, greedily inhaling the scent of gunpowder and osmanthus cake mixed on his body. “Shi Lang, you always say you’re a江湖混子 (jianghu hunzi, a kind of wandering swordsman), but do you know? Every time you wield your sword for me, the heat in your eyes is more scorching than the cold light of Mingyu Gong.”

She looked up, tears falling from her eyelashes onto his wound. "That time you shielded me from the torrential rain of pear blossom needles, and you were unconscious for three days and three nights. I stayed by your bedside, listening to your faint heartbeat, and only then did I understand what it meant to be... inseparable in life and death."

The ice shards of the Palace Mistress of the Moon Palace hung in mid-air, yet did not fall for a long time.

Looking at the lovers embracing each other in their life-or-death struggle, she was momentarily reminded of her childhood, of her mother weeping as she held her father, who had gone mad with desire. At that moment, Nangong Xiaodie's soft sword had already plunged into Shi Feiyang's chest, and blood meandered along the blade, blooming like a bewitching flower between their overlapping garments.

"Does it hurt?" Nangong Xiaodie trembled as she touched his pale face. "Just like that time when I was poisoned by Hele Powder, you used your internal energy to expel the poison from me, freezing yourself into an ice sculpture..." Her voice grew softer and softer, and her body began to glow. "Shi Lang, you said our lives are intertwined. Now, let me use this crippled body to break this yin-yang predicament for you."

Shi Feiyang suddenly roared to the sky, the sword energy of the Nine Heavens Sword Manual and the chilling aura of the Bright Jade Skill exploding around him. He embraced Nangong Xiaodie's gradually transparent body, as if trying to merge his own soul into it: "I refuse to believe in fate!"

His voice shook the bamboo forest, “I will defy fate! If you vanish, I will shatter the netherworld; if you become a poison, I will drink it all!” Nangong Xiaodie’s tears mingled with his blood, dripping to the ground and blooming into a flower that was half red and half white. “Shi Lang, look…”

She smiled weakly, "Our blood has finally mingled." Her fingertips traced his brow bone and the bridge of his nose, finally stopping at his lips, "Do you remember our first kiss? Under the peach tree, you were so nervous you bumped my teeth..."

"Shut up!" Shi Feiyang kissed her frantically, the taste of blood spreading between his teeth, yet sweeter than any nectar in the world. "I won't let you say those things! I want to hear you call me a scoundrel, I want to hear you nag me about not taking care of my body, I want to hear you..."

His voice was shattered by sobs, and the person in his arms had turned into thousands of pink light spots, each one reflecting their past of knowing and understanding each other.

As the last ray of light entered the yin-yang symbol in his dantian, Shi Feiyang knelt on the ground, trembling as he picked up the two-colored flower.

“Xiao Die…” He buried his face in the soil, tears mixed with blood seeping into the earth, “This world, without you, is just… a desolate wasteland.”

In the distance, the mournful sound of the Jade Flute of the Palace Master Lianxing could be heard, while the madness and sorrow in Shi Feiyang's eyes were more chilling than the ghost fire of the Netherworld.

The stench of blood in the bamboo forest was so thick it was almost unbearable. Shi Feiyang knelt amidst the pink glowing light, his knuckles digging deep into the soil that Nangong Xiaodie had last touched before vanishing. The Palace Mistress of Yaoyue Palace wore a long, icy gown, her hand holding a frozen icicle pointed at his back, but it gradually lost its sharpness in the moonlight.

"Why..." Shi Feiyang's voice seemed to be squeezed out from the depths of hell, his bloodied fingertips suddenly gripping her skirt, "You clearly wanted to kill me! Why didn't you do it now?"

When he looked up, the red and blue energies were still clashing wildly in his transparent skin under the influence of the Mingyu Gong, making the bloodshot veins in his eyes particularly glaring.

The Palace Mistress of Yaoyue's eyelashes trembled violently, her icy blue pupils reflecting the stubborn face before her.

In a daze, the scene from a few years ago overlapped with this moment—when Jiang Feng fell, he also grabbed her clothes with his bloodied hands and said, "Yaoyue, is there really no room for Hua Yuenu between us?"

"Let go." Her voice was as cold as a crack in an Arctic glacier, yet her jade-like hand never delivered the fatal blow.

Shi Feiyang suddenly laughed, the sound shaking the frost that had formed on the bamboo leaves: "So, the Moon Invitation Palace Master of the Flower Shifting Palace is nothing but a coward! You dare not kill me because you're afraid to remember what you destroyed with your own hands..."

"Shut up!" An ice shard grazed his ear and embedded itself in the ground, the flying pebbles cutting his cheek. Palace Mistress Yaoyue staggered back half a step, her fingers digging deeply into her palms beneath her wide sleeves. "What do you know about love? It's nothing but the infatuation of young lovers!"

"I don't understand?" Shi Feiyang suddenly ripped open his blood-stained clothes, revealing the wound on his chest where Nangong Xiaodie's soft sword had pierced him. "She knew she was going to die, yet she willingly became my shield; I knew that using my internal energy would cause my body to explode, yet I only wanted to hold her for one more moment. If this isn't love, then what is?"

He suddenly grabbed the Xuan Shuang Blade from the ground, pressing the blade against his throat. "Kill me! Kill me, and you'll erase the regret of hiring someone to kill Jiang Feng back then?" The Palace Mistress of Yaoyue's ice-silk dress fluttered without wind, and the temperature in the entire bamboo forest plummeted by ten feet. But looking at the madness burning in Shi Feiyang's eyes, she suddenly remembered the warmth that lingered on her fingertips when Jiang Feng died.

"Love?" Her voice cracked for the first time, and her jade hand slowly lowered. "Jiang Feng said he loved Hua Yuenü's gentleness, so I destroyed the entire Yuenü Palace; he said he wanted to take her to wander the world, so I used the 'Transplanting Flowers and Jade' technique to shatter his heart meridian."

Her gaze passed through Shi Feiyang and landed on nothingness. "The last look he gave me was exactly the same as the look you gave me now."

The sound of the Jade Flute played by the Palace Mistress Lianxing had stopped at some point. She hid in the bamboo shadows, watching her sister's trembling back.

In the past twenty years, she had never seen Yaoyue like this—the eternally aloof mistress of Yihua Palace was now like a lost child, with frost or tears clinging to her long, flowing silk dress.

Shi Feiyang suddenly sheathed his Xuan Shuang Blade, staggered forward, and grabbed Yaoyue's wrist. The vortex suction of the Mingyu Gong instinctively activated, but vanished the moment it touched her: "You say you don't understand love? Then why haven't you touched other men? Why are Jiang Feng's belongings scattered throughout the forbidden area of ​​Yihua Palace?"

His voice suddenly softened, "Palace Master, you can kill everyone in the world, but you can never kill the one in your own heart..."

"Enough!" Palace Mistress Yaoyue abruptly pulled her hand back, but as she turned away, she let out a suppressed sob. She looked at the lingering warmth in her palm and thought back to her first meeting with Jiang Feng. At that time, she didn't understand why he was so obsessed with warming those murderous hands.

"So... I was the most ridiculous person." Her voice was so soft that only she could hear it, and the icicles shattered inch by inch at her fingertips. "I spent my whole life proving that I didn't love anyone, but I was completely defeated when I saw others pledging their lives to each other."

When the first tear fell on the ice silk, it burned a small hole in the layer of frost that had never melted for millennia.

Shi Feiyang watched her slender figure disappear into the bamboo forest, suddenly recalling Nangong Xiaodie's words: "The people of Yihua Palace may seem cold and hard as ice, but in reality, they crave warmth more than anyone else." He bent down and picked up the pearl hairpin Nangong Xiaodie had left behind. The peach blossom on the hairpin still bore traces of undried blood. Suddenly, he shouted in the direction where Yaoyue had disappeared: "Palace Master! If only you had let go of your pride back then..."

Only the howling mountain wind answered him. Palace Mistress Lianxing walked to his side, holding the jade flute. In the moonlight, she saw a thin layer of ice, stained with tears, in the footprints her sister had left on the ground.

“My sister…” Lianxing choked up and couldn’t continue, “Actually, every day at the hour of Yin (3-5 AM), she would practice swordsmanship in front of Jiang Feng’s portrait, saying that she wanted to put all the tenderness she hadn’t used back then into her sword moves.”

Shi Feiyang gripped the hairpin tightly, letting his fingernails dig bloody marks into his palm.

In the distance, the lights of Yihua Palace flickered in the clouds and mist, much like the light in the eyes of the Palace Mistress Yaoyue, which had been extinguished and then reignited.

Shi Feiyang suddenly realized that the sharpest thing in this world is not the Xuan Shuang Blade, nor the Ming Yu Skill, but the obsession with what cannot be obtained—just as he could not let go of Nangong Xiaodie, and Yaoyue could not let go of the young Jiang Feng who died in her heart demon.

With Lianxing's help, Shi Feiyang made his way back to Medicine King Valley with great difficulty.

Don't cry! Shi Feiyang, don't cry!

He pondered blankly: Su Tun's hatred for Yaoyue stemmed from the Mingyu Gong experiment, but why would Yaoyue conduct such cruel human experiments? Deep within the Yihua Palace, there must be more frozen "experimental subjects" whose faces are extremely similar to the missing masters in the martial arts world.

Shi Feiyang decided to return to Yihua Palace to find out the truth!
(End of this chapter)