After My White Moonlight Killed Me - Chapter 2

Song Huaiyan stared at the person before him, his fingertips tightening involuntarily as that trace of frost melted into the thin sweat of his palm.

A dull rumble of thunder rolled across the sky, and dark clouds gathered in an instant, as if the heavens were about to drip ink.

The person opposite him looked back at him at the same time, their posture pausing for a fraction of a second as the dark robes and long hair were whipped into disarray by the abruptly rising wind.

They stood face to face, mere inches apart.

It felt as though only a single split second had passed, yet it also felt as though a hundred years had gone by.

The surrounding area suddenly grew terrifyingly quiet; both the sound of the wind and the rhythm of their breathing came to a complete halt.

Then, Song Huaiyan heard that person speak in a hoarse voice.

“It’s you…” he said, “It’s you again…”

Hearing his voice, Song Huaiyan felt his heart begin to ache uncontrollably once more, his gaze dazed as he was momentarily at a loss for how to react.

Before he could snap back to his senses, a chilling glint reflected in his eyes, stabbing straight toward his vital point. He raised his hands to form hand seals, bearing the brunt of the attack head-on, and took advantage of the momentum to leap back several steps, his chest still roiling with turbulent blood flow.

“The illusion array cannot trap me,” that person said, his sword tip pointing downward as his voice remained indifferent. “Neither can you.”

“—Shen Yu?” Song Huaiyan pressed against his chest, his eyes still filled with disbelief. “Why are you here?”

Most of those who came to the Hall of All Affairs were wandering souls; could it be that he had already…

“You…” Upon hearing these words, the person’s expression seemed to shift, his voice already growing hoarse as he spoke: “You still want to deceive me… You can’t fool me anymore!”

While they spoke, the long sword closed in relentlessly. Song Huaiyan sidestepped to evade it, but the person did not allow him a single moment to catch his breath; the moment one move ended, a new attack followed instantly. Song Huaiyan raised a hand to conjure a yellow paper talisman, slapping it directly onto the person’s chest. However, the person merely paused in his movements for a fraction of a second, lowering his head to glance at the talisman attached to his body.

It had no effect?

Song Huaiyan’s brows furrowed slightly: “You didn’t”

Before he could finish the word “die,” he was interrupted by the person’s roar-like voice: “Why aren’t you dead? Why aren’t you dead yet!”

The person’s movements never stopped for a moment; his swordsmanship was fierce and overbearing, every single strike carrying lethal intent while his expression bore a manic demeanor, his clear and handsome face twisted out of shape.

Though his moves were chaotic, his spiritual energy was as boundless as the sea.

Empty-handed, Song Huaiyan could not rely solely on footwork to completely evade him. As he barely managed to parry and cope with the assault, several gasps had already been torn into his clothing. He narrowly dodged a fierce sword stroke from the person, his inner doubts growing even more profound.

In this world, could someone still unleash spiritual energy so recklessly?

However, the spiritual energy surrounding this person was now dissipating unconstrained in tandem. Not only would his spiritual power deplete rapidly, but the erratic circulation of his qi would also lead to internal injuries, and might even trigger a deviation in his cultivation.

That certainly matched the frantic state this person was currently exhibiting.

Song Huaiyan had been no match for Shen Yu in his past life, and encountering such a life-or-death, reckless fighting style in this life left him with even less chance of winning. He made a prompt and decisive decision, quickly drawing a talisman with his blood and chanting the incantation to open the array: “The Nine Palaces as the guide, Heaven and Earth fixed in place, the Dipper turning to align the Heavenly Stem, the cosmic laws of the Nine Chapters, Yin and Yang intersecting, the Four Symbols returning to the Primordial. Obey the law with utmost urgency, open! Seal! Suppress! Lock!”

This was the Four Symbols Universe Array he had created himself, which focused primarily on trapping and sealing.

The Hall of All Affairs was naturally guarded by a grand array of its own, making it much easier for him to set up an array within an array, but it still required time. Just as he was trying to find a way to stall for time, he saw the person abruptly halt his attack, his reddened eyes staring blankly at him.

Seeing him lose focus, Song Huaiyan was about to seize the opportunity to drop the talisman inscription when he saw the person suddenly spin around and leap swiftly over the courtyard wall. The array had not yet fully formed, making it impossible to trap him.

Song Huaiyan stood within the courtyard, though he did not immediately give chase.

He opened his left hand, and a red thread manifested around his ring finger, with an ancient copper coin dangling from its tip. As it swayed gently, it emitted no sound whatsoever.

Everything that had just happened was far too sudden and bizarre; he almost thought he had fallen into an apparition illusion.

The so-called apparition was a dream fragment born from the lingering, unvanquished obsessions of the deceased. It generally could not linger long in the world before dissipating; if too many gathered, they would transform into the black mist from earlier, which required spellcraft to purge. Ordinarily, apparitions would not inflict severe damage upon living people, acting much like a dream that left one feeling somewhat fatigued upon waking.

However, he carried the Mountain-Ghost Copper Coin upon his person, which generally prevented him from easily falling into illusions. Furthermore, since the copper coin had emitted no sound, it proved that everything that had just transpired was entirely real.

Yet Shen Yu was not a soul; how could he possibly appear here? Clearly, they belonged to entirely different worlds.

Song Huaiyan steadied his state of mind and quickly gave chase. Whether it was Shen Yu or not, whether he was dead or alive, he could not allow such an entity with an extremely high danger coefficient to disrupt the balance of this world.

The small town was already quiet, and the Hall of All Affairs was situated in a remote location, leaving the surroundings devoid of any human figures. Tracking the traces of spiritual energy, Song Huaiyan soon spotted a curled-up dark shadow in front of an abandoned courtyard.

“Shen Yu?”

Song Huaiyan approached while clutching a talisman, only to find the person leaning against a wooden door completely motionless, appearing to have passed out. Reaching out to gently test the person’s breath, he discovered that his breathing was perilously weak.

The person’s long hair was scattered loosely, obscuring the greater part of his face. His complexion grew all the more pale against the backdrop of dark hair; his lips were tightly pressed together, his long eyelashes drooped downward, and both his cheeks and eye sockets were somewhat sunken, making his originally clear-cut, handsome face appear somewhat fragile and shattered bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the violent, frenzied hostility he had displayed while chasing him earlier.

Song Huaiyan stood there in a daze, looking somewhat absentmindedly at this familiar yet somewhat unfamiliar face, until the biting cold wind stirred up the pain from the various-sized cuts across his body. Pressing his palm against his chest, he felt the old wound there begin to ache faintly once more.

As it turned out, no matter how many years passed, he could never forget the chilling frost and agonizing torment of that sword piercing through his heart.

He had dreamed of encountering Shen Yu on numerous occasions, yet he had never imagined it would look like this—seeing that person from atop the clouds tumble down into the dust.

“Recycling old color televisions, old refrigerators, washing machines, old air conditioners…” A familiar loudspeaker sound drifted from not far away, and the sound of tires crushing against the flagstone road grew steadily closer.

Song Huaiyan hesitated for a moment, but ultimately bent down to pull the person onto his back, his hand instantly brushing against a sticky patch of wetness.

Shen Yu’s back was already completely soaked through with blood! It had simply not been very noticeable against his dark garments. He had faintly caught the scent of blood ever since a moment ago, yet he had never expected such a severe wound.

Song Huaiyan sighed inwardly, carefully avoiding the injury on the person’s back as he hoisted him up.

This fellow looked as though he had grown much taller, so why was he so light? His bones pressed against him with an aching sharpness.

The Hall of All Affairs conformed to people’s stereotypical impressions of a funeral goods store: dim, eerie, and cold, draped all over with black-and-white mourning banners. Along the corners of the inner courtyard wall sat an array of various paper funerary offerings; those paper figures painted in bright reds and greens all possessed rigid limbs and vacant gazes, as if they might move at any second.

Yet directly beneath the Hall of All Affairs lay a massive, stone-built underground chamber.

There were no electric lights or other illumination devices; the only light leaked down from an octagonal opening at the very top. To be precise, the structure above was a sky-well shaft, though what it connected to beneath was not ordinary groundwater, but rather a spring rising upward from the depths of the earth, forming a water column roughly the width of two people embracing within this stone chamber.

The water column sat within a pool measuring about eight square meters across. Within the transparent water column, rushing currents could be seen surging endlessly, yet they remained enveloped by an invisible barrier, failing to spill outward by even a fraction of a millimeter.

Meanwhile, daylight filtered downward from the shaft opening through the water’s surface, serving as the sole light source in this place.

The back rooms had been uninhabited for many years, and there was not even a bed here. Carrying the person on his back, Song Huaiyan came to a halt beside a black coffin near the edge of the pool.

This was the bed where he had slept for many years back when he lived in the Hall of All Affairs.

The coffin was crafted from fine dark-crystal material, carved with intricate patterns, and boasted a rather large dimension. Just looking at it gave the impression of high value and considerable prestige.

Inside the coffin, it was warm in winter and cool in summer, offering pleasant conditions throughout the seasons. Lying down inside and pulling the lid shut gave one the peaceful feeling of a warm, reassuring corpse.

Song Huaiyan reached out to press a lotus-shaped carving on the side of the coffin, and the bottom of the dark-crystal coffin slowly rose until it leveled flush with the rim.

The mysterious coffin was equipped with a lifting mechanism; if lying inside felt too stuffy, one could raise it upward to breathe fresh air yielding an exceptionally superb user experience.

He laid the person down, pulled out a talisman, and tossed it into a brazier nearby. The talisman ignited on its own; though tiny, it illuminated half of the stone chamber with no sign of extinguishing anytime soon.

By the illumination, Song Huaiyan sized up the person lying before him.

Upon closer inspection, the dark attire on the person’s body bore numerous tears and dirty smudges, as though he had been injured by various sharp objects such as blades, fierce gales, or sharp claws. Meanwhile, the wounds on his back were bleeding continuously under the strain of their intense clash earlier.

Crimson blood spread across the dark-crystal coffin, and the person let out a low groan, as though enduring immense agony.

Song Huaiyan’s brows furrowed slightly as he reached out to undress the person. A black flower resembling a lotus fell out from the person’s embrace; its petals were jet-black, yet its pistil was crimson red.

The Illusory Phantasm Flower?

The level of astonishment Song Huaiyan felt upon seeing this flower was no less than when Shen Yu, a living person in the flesh, had appeared before him.

Because of his own cold affliction in the past, he possessed considerable knowledge of many rare plants native to that world of Yunzhou. Legend had it that this Illusory Phantasm Flower could only be found by passing through the boundary between life and death; moreover, it bloomed once every hundred years, with a blooming period lasting no more than seven days.

Throughout Yunzhou’s eight-thousand-year history, rumor had it that only three mighty masters had ever entered the boundary of life and death, and two of them had failed to emerge.

Song Huaiyan stripped away the upper garments of the person, revealing wounds deep enough to reveal bone that spanned horizontally across his back hideous and terrifying, as though gouged out by sharp claws.

Rumor had it that the Illusory Phantasm Flower was guarded by crimson-flamed golden-feathered birds. These golden-feathered birds possessed an intensely blazing, pure-Yang nature, yet uniquely, their beaks and talons were bitterly cold and pure-Yin. Being clawed by them would cause the cold poison to rapidly invade the heart meridians, leaving the body chilled to the marrow while the wounds burned with a fiery, searing pain.

The person lying down trembled slightly at that moment, curling up his body instinctively. His pale lips quivered, his long eyelashes faintly moistened before quickly freezing over with a layer of frost, and even his feeble breath grew extremely icy.

Song Huaiyan drew a slow breath, doing his best to restrain the tremor in his breathing.

He had no idea whether his amateur medical skills of a half-baked doctor could save him.

After all, he only “treated” dead bodies, and had virtually no experience treating living people.

By the time he finished cleaning up the blood and gauze bandages, it was already the dead of night.

Song Huaiyan sat down slowly against the side of the coffin, feeling utterly exhausted. The collar of his shirt was half-unbuttoned, and his clothes were drenched in cold sweat.

Only then did he remember that he was also an injured party. Glancing downward at himself, he saw that his wounds were all superficial and were already seventy to eighty percent healed—though the bloodstains on his shirt would probably never wash out.

As for that beige trench coat—the one he had bought on a steep discount, worn only three times, and cherished dearly—it had been slashed into several shreds by the Snow-Negative Sword and was now draped over the person inside the coffin.

The cold poison within that person had already been purged, and the wounds on his back had been properly dressed. However, after all that tossing about, he remained extremely weak and could not possibly wake up anytime soon.

That poison had already penetrated his heart meridians, and he had been relying entirely on his profound personal cultivation to forcibly suppress it; ordinary medicine was powerless to reverse his condition. The only thing that could be used was this Illusory Phantasm Flower. Although he did not know what purpose Shen Yu originally had in seeking this flower, right now, only this flower could save his life.

Song Huaiyan looked at the sleeping person and let out a soft sigh.

Saving a life truly proved far more exhausting than building a seven-tiered pagoda.

In this life, he was a small-scale proprietor of a medicine shop who only treated minor ailments like colds and flus; this was his very first time performing such “major surgery” with real blades and genuine stakes.

As for his past life… he had been nothing more than a medicine guinea pig who only knew how to swallow drugs.

His past life… to him, it ought to have felt exceedingly distant, yet right now it felt so close at hand.

His past life had to begin from his life before last.

People probably wouldn’t believe it if he said it aloud, but during the summer vacation of the year he turned eighteen and had just passed the college entrance exam, he was run over and killed by a truck while trying to save a completely stranger girl. Following his death, his soul transmigrated into a xianxia world called Yunzhou, becoming Song Yan, the senior brother of the Cangxuan Sect.

Previously, he had dedicated himself exclusively to textbooks and had never dabbled in martial arts or xianxia novels of any sort; even the major hits by Jin Yong and Gu Long were things he had only glimpsed on tiny black-and-white televisions. Consequently, he was entirely unfamiliar with the xianxia world, and it took him a very long time to adapt to his new identity, resolving to live well for both the original Song Yan and himself.

Thus, he exercised strict discipline toward himself while treating others leniently; he swallowed medicines by the bucketful and drilled in his martial arts relentlessly, determined to shoulder the responsibilities and mission of an immortal sect’s senior brother.

Yet he never expected that the master he respected most would carve out his heart and extract his blood, and that the junior brother he cared for most would pierce right through his heart with a sword.

Later on, he finally understood that being run down by a truck to transmigrate was the most cliché trope imaginable in web novels.

Later on, he finally understood that he was nothing more than a cannon fodder character caught in the love-hate entanglements between his master and his junior brother.

Yes, cannon fodder was a term he had only learned in this current lifetime. Applied to his previous life, it fit to absolute perfection.

He turned his head to look at the person beside him. Someone like Shen Yu tragic in background, peerlessly handsome, aloof, and transcendent was destined to play the protagonist in a web novel no matter where he went.

And this protagonist had actually crossed dimensions and chased after him all the way here.

Do you really hate me that much?

Song Huaiyan smiled self-deprecatingly, leaning his head back against the rim of the coffin.

Back then, he had transmigrated as a soul into a body that shared his exact face, but Shen Yu… should not have undergone a soul transmigration.

When treating his wounds earlier, he had checked the person’s left ear and found an earlobe pierced with a slightly large hole, along with a burn scar behind the ear; these were distinctive traits exclusive to Shen Yu.

Even for two identical people across different worlds, their scars could never match up identically due to differing life experiences—just as he himself had a scar on his knee in this life, whereas the Song Yan of Yunzhou did not.

This person right now… was the genuine, authentic Shen Yu without a doubt.

Yet how could a living person cross through space and time?

Judging by Shen Yu’s appearance, he ought to be twenty-six or twenty-seven years old by now. He had no idea how he and his master… Mu Changfeng had fared after his own death back then. And why on earth would he go looking for the Illusory Phantasm Flower?

“Your junior brother has already promised me; from now on, we won’t even need your blood anymore.”

Could it be because of Mu Changfeng?

Song Huaiyan immediately went to check the person’s hands. There were new and old overlapping scars across both wrists, but the cuts were somewhat crude and did not resemble the marks left behind by blood extraction.

The questions in his mind were tangled and chaotic, but he had exhausted a great deal of energy today and truly lacked the mental capacity to ponder them further.

Out of nowhere, a little junior brother dropped straight from the sky—one who specialized in stabbing him right in the heart.

He could only blame himself for failing to consult the almanac before heading out; today was truly an unlucky day, unfavorable for all undertakings.

Song Huaiyan leaned against the dark-crystal coffin and drifted into a drowsy sleep. In a hazy blur, he heard the sound of chains clanking together. He opened his heavy eyes to find that daylight had already arrived, and Shen Yu had somehow woken up, sitting with his knees hugged against his chest in the corner of the dark-crystal coffin, wearing dark iron chains around both ankles.

Just to be safe, the moment he finished treating him yesterday, he had locked the person up using the iron chains originally stored within the dark-crystal coffin. After all, this was an extraordinary talent of the mystic path and an utter freak of the sect; even in a state of exhaustion, he could still beat him black and blue.

Song Huaiyan stood up, wondering just how he should open the conversation, when the person lifted his buried head slightly to reveal a pair of pale gray eyes, speaking in a hoarse voice:

“Who… are you?”