Ch79 - May This Be the Last Time You and I Part in Life

Editor: Sahloknir

Qin Jun quietly told him everything last night, but Jiang Yinghe could barely remember half of it.

Even though Chang Ye didn’t shift into his beast form this time, Jiang Yinghe was still very tired. His mind wandered a little as he thought back to the words he had heard last night.

Before he could completely recall, he felt a chill by his feet as the quilt there was lifted. A hand took hold of his ankle and raised it slightly.

A cool ointment was then applied, covering all the unsightly hickeys and teeth marks.

Jiang Yinghe subconsciously shrank back half an inch at the unwelcome memories this action brought back. The slight tightening of those fingers on his ankle didn’t help. Images really unsuitable for this site came to mind.

Just as he became tense, Jiang Yinghe was violently wrapped in a hug. Qin Jun’s voice rang out by his ears with deep amusement.

“What are you so afraid of?”

…Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.

“…I’m afraid you’ll say I’m biased again,” Jiang Yinghe settled the score after the autumn and pointed out the other’s trap, “and blackmail me with that.”

Qin Jun laughed. He leaned over and kissed the tip of his shizun’s ear, saying, “Does Shizun feel like you’re being blackmailed?”

Jiang Yinghe didn’t say anything, instead just giving him a look.

The other person’s motions never ceased. He pulled away Jiang Yinghe’s thin shirt to reveal the beautiful body inside. Scooping up ointment with his fingers, Qin Jun dabbed at the reddened areas. He saw his shizun lightly frown.

“Does it hurt?” Qin Jun asked.

“No…it just feels a bit weird.” Jiang Yinghe took the case of medicine from him. “I’ll do it myself.”

Qin Jun complied. His arms instead encircled Shizun’s waist and massaged the strained muscles there.

Li Huanhan was not here because he had a lot of work to do as both the Tian Mo Sect Leader and a Peng Lai Dashixiong. Thus, he had to leave for a time after brewing tea to moisten Jiang Yinghe’s throat.

It was understandable that he didn’t see Li Huanhan, but where was Chang Ye? His littlest disciple was often idle and spent the entire day sticking to his side. What was he up to now?

As Jiang Yinghe was thinking that, he suddenly felt a chill in his palm. Looking down, he saw Qin Jun holding his hand and putting something on it.

It was a small ring made of bone that faintly radiated the aura of a lightning tribulation.

“A messenger token.” Qin Jun said.

Startled, Jiang Yinghe raised his eyes. He heard the other person continue.

“I was born as a natural wraith in the Nether Realm. It was only after I came into existence that ghost cultivators began to appear in this world.”

“I was given authority over my domain right after birth, and I encountered no troubles until my tribulation.” Qin Jun paused and looked at him, his tone as casual as ever. “There was only one area in which fate slighted me.”

His arrogant and disrespectful demeanour stemmed from how he had never needed to take anything seriously since his birth. Unlike Li Huanhan, who was born into an abyss of despair or Chang Ye, who suffered setbacks halfway, Qin Jun had never experienced hardship in his life.

That was, until his tribulations.

Each of his lightning tribulations were hundreds, if not thousands of times more difficult than the ones other races or cultivators experienced. The losses he suffered each time were nigh unimaginable.

The Heavenly Dao wasn’t testing him, it was set on extermination.

The lightning tribulation stripped away the body he possessed at the time and crushed the foundation he constructed to smithereens. Every part of his body was shattered.

Only his phantom-like divine soul remained.

After experiencing further targeted hardship, Qin Jun abandoned his body and constructed one himself by solidifying his divine soul. He also changed out all his ghost cultivation methods in an attempt to leave all obstacles behind him.

Alas, the Heavenly Dao refused to let him become one with the Dao. It set impenetrable hurdles at the most important steps along the way.

For this reason, Qin Jun forged the Zhanyun sword. In order to pass this tribulation, he severed the luck of this world in two and crushed the Heavenly Dao standing in his way beneath his feet. Step by step, he approached the final moments of his ascension.

But at the final step, he found that the Dao seed was incompatible with him.

Merging with the Dao…

After thousands of years pursuing this goal, the phrase became nothing more than a joke in the end.

His life was like some absurd joke. The entire world itself rejected his existence from the start, rendering everything he had done as meaningless.

But this matter was known to only him and the Heavenly Dao. In the eyes of other cultivators, races, and even other ghost cultivators, Sovereign Qin was born a wraith and suffered no setbacks to this day.

They said that the Lord of the Underworld was born with a golden spoon in his mouth, that he had never needed to make an effort.

And thus Qin Jun’s arrogance and conceit were born. He treated those remarks like smoke, but he would always act like everything was effortless to him as well.

No one knew what price he had paid for his ‘effortlessness’.

That’s why he was moved when his shizun first mentioned ‘the Spirit Patriarch’ in front of him.

Qin Jun didn’t say everything. He merely mentioned the most important points and glossed over the rest.

He was used to it by now.

Following along, Jiang Yinghe barely filled in the many missing elements and constructed a rough outline of Qin Jun’s life. He tried his best to consider it a happy story, but he knew all too well that Jun-er must’ve not been truly happy either.

Just like Huanhan and Ye-er.

“However,” Qin Jun looked at him and said, “it’s not so bad when I look back on it now.”

Jiang Yinghe was taken aback.

“Compared to that day when the Kanmi Mirror revealed my divine soul, when Shizun wanted to leave me forever… My past experiences were not even a fraction as painful.”

That sentence alone made Jiang Yinghe’s heart soften into a puddle. He could even set aside what this guy had done last night for now. He quietly muttered, “…You’re saying these things on purpose.”

“I am,” Qin Jun responded, “but that doesn’t mean they don’t come from my heart. I mean every word I say.”

He raised a hand and slightly lifted Jiang Yinghe’s chin. Lowering his head, he pressed a kiss between his beloved’s brows.

“Both Heaven and Earth have never tolerated me. Only you were willing to take me in.”

—-

After that day, the Peng Lai Immortal Sect welcomed several consecutive autumn months, followed by the weather getting colder as winter slowly arrived.

Jiang Yinghe’s cultivation gradually returned to its peak. At the same time, Huan Han Sect’s succession was almost complete too.

The previous unification task had been completed, rewarding him with 20 unification points. Taking into account the point he had received for dual cultivating before, the progress bar had finally passed the halfway mark.

However, the relationship between those three hadn’t improved much. Despite their temperaments becoming almost interchangeable, they still fed themselves vinegar all the time.

After passing 50%, Jiang Yinghe finally took out that ‘Journal of Observations’ again. He first estimated its thickness before settling in to finally read all the pages that had accumulated. He flipped to the page after the last one he had read.

“…We sat down and sketched out three types of split souls and arranged the part that each would carry. As the most important fraction, Li Junye‘s innate true nature needs to carry his Dao seed. However, this means it has a high chance of being influenced by the burden and going insane like him.”

“To leave enough time to set everything up, this plan could end up taking quite a while… He said he was willing to accompany me home if he manages to luckily survive. An apt way of putting it. In his current state, only luck could save him now.”

“The second part will carry his acquired mentality, but it is suffused with far too many negative emotions. This is also the portion that affects the development of the mortal realm… The world that he created wouldn’t reject this fraction once it gains sentience, right?”

“The third… We couldn’t discuss the third fraction because this guy’s moods change at the drop of a hat. He pressed me down today to forcefully kiss and even bite me. What is he trying to do, squeeze out a cat or a dog?”

Jiang Yinghe wanted to laugh at that. He thought himself to have quite a talent for journal writing. As he continued on, he fitted the pieces together in his mind.

“Four thousand and eighty-one years since the beginning of time, your Dao Ancestor squeezed a cat out.”

“I don’t know how he dared to send a part of his divine soul into it, but by the time I found out, he had already finished arranging it.”

“This fraction of the divine soul was the first to enter the cycle of reincarnation. I expect to see it within a few years. But before that cat appears, we have to split the remaining two parts. His realm fell after removing a fraction of his soul, but he was fine thanks to the Dao seed on him. On the contrary, he seems to be in much better spirits and even played chess with me for a while.”

“This is good. It means he’s calming down…But I’m starting to feel like I’m accompanying a terminally ill person.”

“The day you and I will part is fast approaching.”

The ink of the last paragraph was somewhat muddled, perhaps from tears or a slightly shaking hand.

Jiang Yinghe followed suit and breathed in. He only breathed out again after closing his eyes for a moment.

He turned to the next page.

The handwriting on the back was messy, only a little bit of it was carefully written, just a few words.

“You are the gentlest person in this world.”

“The only one in the world.”

Then there were a few accounts of their first meeting, of the two of them becoming friends, playing chess and drinking tea, heating wine in the snow, having discussions in the Endless Sky Watchtower and visiting the ancient forests and snowy mountains of the mortal realm.

One entry recalled how that person had taken a plum branch and fashioned it into an ornament for Wuchen. Even since, the fragrance of plum had infused itself into Sword Saint Taichu’s divine soul forever. Not even reincarnation could cleanse this mark.

“Crane Immortal,” Li Junye’s tone was teasing, but his gaze was quietly insistent, “my mortal heart has been moved by you.”

Li Junye cultivated the supreme path, and the supreme one should discard all emotions. In his eyes, every living thing should be equal without the slightest imbalance.

Wind blew on this snowy night. Sword Saint Taichu gripped his longsword that had never been tainted by mortal affairs and left with fluttering sleeves.

In the centuries of seclusion that followed, the mortal realm crumbled and degenerated in the Sword Saint’s absence, quickly turning into an earthly purgatory due to the foundation of its creator disintegrating. This was the scene the Sword Saint returned to, and the one he described on the very first page of this journal.

When Jiang Yinghe came to the last page, the story of the two had not reached them reuniting yet. The majority had been blotted out with ink.

Only one line remained untouched at the bottom, in another person’s handwriting. The words seemed to elegantly flow into each other, but there were a few points that seemed out of place.

The sentence was not in simplified Chinese, but the ancient runic script used long ago in the cultivation world.

“May this be the last time you and I part in life.”

Jiang Yinghe looked at these words for a long, long time.

Something vague rose from the depths of Jiang Yinghe’s mind, but it was far too muddled. Tracing along the words, he could only supplement the remainder with imagination to recall the hand that had gifted him the plum blossom.

…

How could the supreme one, someone who had renounced his emotions, possibly have a mortal heart to move?

Snow covered the white plums, radiating a cold and distant chill. There seemed to be the slightly bitter and sharp aura of a sword cultivator as well.

At the time, Sword Saint Taichu believed the admission to be a momentary mistake. He left and secluded himself for hundreds of years so that his good friend could restrain himself and stabilize his Dao heart.

But the sword pendant made from white plum was fastened to Wuchen’s hilt, merging permanently with the sword spirit within.

And this breath that was dyed into his divine soul itself, even after tens of thousands of years had passed, led every part of him straight back to Jiang Yinghe’s side.

Author’s Corner

Normal Dao Ancestor: Gently embracing the wind, the moon, the snow, the plums. Meditating and contemplating the Dao like no other.

Dao Ancestor after being moved: I’m going to cripple my own cultivation. Of myself and this world, one must perish today.

Normal Sword Saint: You’re a madman, aren’t you? You like me? You think that I wanted to come to this earthly purgatory?! Don’t be foolish! Save your breath and cultivate properly!

Sword Saint after being moved: He is the gentlest person in this world. The only one in the world.

Rain: So…everything went horribly wrong because Jiang Yinghe transmigrated in and managed to drive a god insane by acting tsundere? I don’t know why I’m laughing so hard. Probably so I don’t start crying (´•-•̥`)

On another note, I found this really beautiful and melancholic song called ‘Firelight’ while working on this chapter. It reminded me a lot of this novel ヽ(；▽；)ノ

Sahl: I’m not crying, you’re crying…