Chapter 127: The Seeker of Eternal Life (Combined Two Parts)

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Reset once again, Zhou Bai remained remarkably calm in the face of the situation.

He lowered his head and glanced at Ah Huang. The foolish dog could clearly sense that something was wrong, whining uneasily without pause. It seemed he was not the only one affected.

Whether this was truly an illusion still remained to be confirmed. Zhou Bai glanced at the village in the distance, then turned and returned to the entrance through which he had come.

He had taken only a few steps into the pitch-black cavern when that familiar sensation appeared again. The reset arrived, and in an instant he was back before the entrance.

Now he could be certain of one thing: this strange phenomenon was definitely connected to Liao Wu’s First Life.

Yet Zhou Bai was extremely familiar with Buddhist cultivation. He had mastered two cultivation methods, and in his view, the cultivation of Liao Wu’s First Life should have been the most ordinary of all. In theory, it should not have produced such a bizarre change.

He tried several more times. Using various supernatural abilities, he destroyed the village, but each time, after a brief interval, it reset to its original state.

Moreover, the resets did not include him. Zhou Bai could feel that a considerable amount of Yin energy had been consumed within his body, and none of it had been replenished.

He also tried transforming directly into his True Bone Form and using his memory-stealing ability on the strange men, but it had no effect whatsoever.

Frowning, he drew a cut across his palm. After the next reset, the wound had not healed. Looking down at the ground, he saw that the blood he had shed remained exactly where it had fallen.

He began to ponder. He did not know when he had first fallen victim to the phenomenon, but he could be certain that, apart from himself and Ah Huang, nothing else in the mountain village was real.

Zhou Bai closed his eyes and carefully recalled everything. From the moment he had entered the village to the present reset, it had happened more than a dozen times. His extraordinary memory churned through every detail in his mind.

Then he suddenly opened his eyes. His body transformed into a fading afterimage and vanished from its original position. A succession of blade flashes swept through the village, destroying it completely.

The scene reset once more, but Zhou Bai appeared to have found the key to breaking through the deadlock.

During each of these resets, the old men’s movements seemed identical. Yet relying on his astonishing memory, he still noticed something slightly amiss.

During this period, he had even memorized the frequency with which they blinked. One of them displayed an almost imperceptible change in movement.

Zhou Bai hurried toward the village, with Ah Huang scrambling after him. He arrived before the fields and swept his gaze across the people within. At last, his attention settled on the strange man at the very edge.

He stood before the man and observed every movement with meticulous care. Then Zhou Bai extended one finger, Yin energy coiling around it, and touched the man between the eyebrows.

Yin energy spread across the strange man’s entire body, stimulating him like boiling water.

Under Zhou Bai’s gaze, the flesh and blood covering the man’s body slowly dissolved. Before long, only a skeleton remained.

If the strange man possessed intelligence or a sense of pain, he should have suffered unbearable agony during the process, making it impossible for him not to reveal some flaw.

Yet under the Yin-Yang Eyes, the man’s heartbeat did not fluctuate in the slightest from life to death. Neither did his pupils. It was as though everything before had merely been Zhou Bai’s own illusion.

The next moment, the scene reset, and Zhou Bai returned to the entrance. With his previous experience, he quickly discovered what was different this time.

The variable among the strange men had shifted to another person. Once again, there was only a slight change in the rhythm of his breathing or blinking.

Zhou Bai exhaled and transformed directly into his True Bone Dharma Form. He appeared before the man in an instant, and Yin Fire covered the man’s body. Unfortunately, even after the man had been burned to ash, Zhou Bai obtained not a trace of his memories.

After another reset, Zhou Bai immediately reached into his storage pouch and pulled out the spinal bone. With a flick of his arm, he wrapped it around several of the men.

He released the Ghost Tree as well. Countless roots coiled around the strange men and bound them before Zhou Bai.

The spinal bone flexibly tied them together. Zhou Bai discovered that as long as he did not take their lives or cause severe damage to the scene, the mechanism of the reset would not be triggered.

He activated the memory-reading ability of his True Bone Form, and this time it acted upon every one of the strange men.

As Yin Fire burned them one by one into ash, Zhou Bai finally gained something.

The reset appeared once more, but this time it was different. Everything before Zhou Bai sank into darkness, yet nothing changed for a long while.

Unfamiliar memories surged into his mind. As he slowly digested them, a sliver of light appeared within the darkness.

Then a sensation of weightlessness struck him. Zhou Bai felt as though he had suddenly fallen from a cliff, and gooseflesh rose across his entire body.

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After a moment of disorientation, the strange little mountain village was no longer before him. Instead, he found himself inside a modest cavern.

Ah Huang also awoke, though his consciousness was clearly still hazy. He lay on the ground with his tongue hanging out.

At the center of the cavern was what appeared to be a natural hot spring. However, the ground around it was elevated, preventing Zhou Bai from seeing what lay within.

He turned and glanced behind him. There was a waterway, and through its surface he could see more than a dozen corpses of old men bobbing ceaselessly with the ripples.

Zhou Bai frowned. From the moment he had entered the well, he should already have fallen into an illusion. Yet he had not sensed it at all. As he drew closer, he had gradually sunk into increasingly deeper layers of illusion.

Zhou Bai did not immediately investigate the cavern. Instead, he began digesting the memories that had appeared in his mind.

As he learned more and more about the circumstances, he could not help releasing a long sigh.

He leaped to the edge of the hot spring and looked into the water. As expected, dozens of old men lay densely packed within it. Their clothes were sumptuous, and their jewelry was equally valuable, corresponding exactly to the number of people in the illusion.

At the spring’s outlet, a withered old monk had been bound in place. This was the target of Zhou Bai’s journey—the incarnation of Liao Wu’s First Life.

Zhou Bai walked over and carefully examined the old monk’s body. Aside from the wounds left behind by his struggles, the injury around his left eye was the most conspicuous. Transparent, pale fluid occasionally trickled from the corner of the eye.

Through the old monk’s skull, the Yin-Yang Eyes revealed his brain. At the forehead, the brain had clearly atrophied.

This reminded Zhou Bai of a notorious operation from the twentieth century of his former life: a lobotomy.

It was a form of neurosurgery originally used to treat certain mental illnesses. After the operation, however, patients would often display a state of dementia and might even lose the ability to move.

In that era, when medicine was not particularly advanced, lobotomies were used to treat nearly every kind of mental disorder.

Zhou Bai did not know much about the procedure, but the old monk’s condition was somewhat similar. Someone had probably rammed an iron pestle into his eye, violently stirring half his brain into pulp.

And the true culprits behind all this were the richly dressed old men lying in the pool.

Zhou Bai’s gaze settled on the old man closest to the spring’s outlet. His head was covered in white hair, his face was furrowed with wrinkles, and every one of his teeth had rotted away.

It was difficult to imagine that a person like this had attempted to attain immortality in a mortal body.

Zhou Bai placed his palm against the old man’s forehead. Yin Fire spread outward, quickly bringing an end to the feeble life clinging to him.

He chose the most direct method of taking the old man’s memories, so they remained relatively complete. It took him quite some time to digest them before he returned to his senses.

Zhou Bai’s expression became complicated. The unremarkable old man was named Huang Su. He was nearly a hundred years old. Most of the Nine Provinces might have forgotten his name by now, but forty years earlier, he had been a figure of great renown.

At that time, Huang Su was known as the Immortal Physician Huang. He had been highly famous in the capital of Tang-Song, not only because he had served as the imperial physician of the previous Tang-Song Emperor, but also because his profound medical knowledge had enabled him to compile and restore the Imperial Medical Canon of Universal Treasures.

The moment it appeared, this medical text was revered as a classic. It could be said to have established the pinnacle of Tang-Song medicine.

The Imperial Medical Canon of Universal Treasures consisted of an Inner Volume and an Outer Volume. Huang Su had spent ten years first compiling the Outer Volume, which mainly recorded methods for treating external injuries and chronic illnesses, with some discussion of the effects of medicinal herbs as well.

Zhou Bai skimmed through the book via Huang Su’s memories. From a modern perspective, it could be regarded as foundational to modern medicine. Its contents covered internal medicine and surgery, and even touched upon the nervous system.

With this medical text, Huang Su not only became the Tang-Song Emperor’s chief imperial physician, but also received an astonishing annual salary and allocation of funds.

The Tang-Song Emperor had been frail and sickly since childhood. He was only in his early thirties, yet signs of weakness and exhaustion had already appeared in his body. He had ordered Huang Su to compile the medical text and provided him with enormous funding because he wanted Huang Su to help prolong his life.

Huang Su naturally did not dare refuse. He devoted himself entirely to developing an elixir capable of extending longevity.

But time waits for no one. Before he was even forty, the Tang-Song Emperor had become so gravely ill that he could no longer attend court. Huang Su was helpless. He searched through every medical text at his disposal, yet could not turn back the tide.

With no other option, Tang-Song violated the former emperor’s decree that the imperial court must never become involved with the Netherworld Registry and secretly contacted the Third Hall King, Song.

With the Third Hall King’s abilities, granting a single pill was effortless. After the Tang-Song Emperor consumed it, his condition turned from critical to stable that very day.

But once the precedent had been set, it could not be stopped. Large numbers of members of the imperial family began repeatedly contacting the Netherworld Registry in pursuit of immortality pills, going so far as to abandon all dignity.

Whether royal descendants or the families of high officials, a wave arose throughout the empire. Everyone sought to enter the Netherworld Registry and obtain methods of cultivation.

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The chaos was soon brought under control, once again by the hand of the Third Hall King, Song. He directly reclaimed the decades of life that had been added to the Tang-Song Emperor’s lifespan, causing the emperor to die horribly that very night.

After that, no one dared openly violate the established rules. Naturally, the powerful and influential continued in secret to seek miraculous pills and medicines from the Netherworld Registry, and took pride in having members of their families join it.

Moreover, once the precedent had been set, the rule forbidding the government and the Netherworld Registry from having contact had effectively become meaningless after the founding of Tang-Song. The official seals capable of suppressing demons and monsters were naturally products of the same arrangement.

Zhou Bai had a feeling that this might have been a scheme devised by the Netherworld Registry. For the sake of the official seal, it had used the emperor’s life as bait, with the aim of freeing a vast amount of manpower in the process.

Huang Su consequently lost the imperial family’s support. Although he remained the chief imperial physician, almost all of his funding had vanished.

Yet instead of becoming enraged, he developed an interest in the Netherworld Registry’s immortal arts. After resigning from his position as imperial physician, he intended to complete the Inner Volume of the Imperial Medical Canon of Universal Treasures.

But after witnessing the methods of immortals, Huang Su’s heart had long since strayed from its original path. He no longer sought to understand medicinal principles, but instead began researching all manner of strange and supernatural phenomena.

The following decades passed in this state of obsession. The Inner Volume progressed slowly, while Huang Su reached an advanced age and his body gradually declined.

Still, he had not gained nothing. During those decades, Huang Su managed to make contact with the alchemical arts of the Netherworld Registry.

How could the alchemical methods created by those demons possibly follow a righteous path? Not only were their ingredients bizarre, they even included methods of refining ghosts directly into pills.

Huang Su plunged completely into madness. At that time, he unexpectedly encountered the incarnation of Liao Wu’s First Life, whose name was Zhang Ming. The monk had no fixed residence and traveled throughout the Nine Provinces relying entirely on alms.

Huang Su had seen him only twice, with nearly sixty years between those meetings. He himself had changed from a strong young man into an old man, while the monk’s appearance remained exactly the same.

After carefully investigating every clue, he discovered that the monk had lived for at least a hundred and fifty years, without showing the slightest sign that his death was approaching.

To uncover the source of this anomaly, Huang Su deliberately sent several criminals to attack the old monk. When his life was threatened, a golden light radiated from his body and instantly reduced the attackers to ash.

Huang Su did not know what sort of sacred being the old monk truly was, but as someone whose life was already nearing its end, he was certainly not the kind of person willing to resign himself to death.

A thought took root in his mind. He wanted to use this man as a medicinal catalyst and obtain eternal life.

With this goal in mind, Huang Su consulted a large number of forbidden and heretical techniques discarded by the Netherworld Registry, and wrote a pill formula filled from beginning to end with horrifying instructions for refining medicine from human beings.

He then relied on his connections to gather powerful and influential men who were approaching death, having them serve as test subjects. In return, they provided him with money and political influence.

All that remained was to wait for an opportunity. The old monk was clearly not an ordinary man, and the golden light he emitted seemed impossible for mortals to resist.

If nothing unexpected occurred, such an opportunity would never appear in their lifetimes. Huang Su and the other dying men would simply perish amid regret.

But then disaster struck Xuzhou. They, together with the old monk, became trapped in Songdu and survived under the protection of the Netherworld Registry.

Afterward, because of Zhou Bai, Liao Wu’s Fourth Life was killed by Long Bo, consciousness and all.

The old monk lost the protection of the Buddha’s radiance. Although ordinary people could not see any difference, Huang Su was different. He had observed the man for more than a decade.

When he noticed dust clinging to the old monk’s clothes, he knew that his opportunity had arrived.

Songdu was ultimately under the watchful eye of the Netherworld Registry. Huang Su patiently waited for the disaster to near its end, then induced the old monk to travel to the mountain village and live in seclusion.

Immediately afterward, the powerful men sent their subordinates to seize him. Huang Su forced him to swallow a pill that would keep him alive, then used an iron pestle to stir half of his brain into pulp through his eye.

Having obtained the immortal he had dreamed of, Huang Su used him directly as the medicinal catalyst. He placed various herbs and a small amount of spiritual materials into the hot spring.

The old monk was positioned at the spring’s outlet. These violently potent medicines would drain his body dry, then gradually nourish all the old men, including Huang Su.

But even the most meticulous plan is bound to contain a flaw. As an incarnation of Liao Wu’s First Life, how could the old monk die so easily? Although he appeared human on the surface, his true nature was a vessel for the Buddha’s radiance.

The vessel turned against its captors and trapped the souls of every old man within it. Since their brains had already been mangled, all that remained was their instinctive consciousness, which drifted hazily into a simple dream.

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