My eyes blurred. I instinctively reached for Moxi’s hand to shield him but in my panic, I was unable to grab onto him. Then everything darkened as I felt a heaviness weighing down on me.
I heard popping cracks, and then warm liquid ran down my cheek, smelling of pungent blood. Realizing what it was, chills coursed through my trembling body.
“Moxi!”
No one answered me. In this life, he had never answered me.
After those sounds abated, the body pressing on top of me still didn’t move. My hands shook as I climbed out from underneath. When I saw what was happening, my mind instantly blanked.
“Moxi!”\nChang’an sighed: “Sansheng, please consider carefully. Slaughtering is against the laws of Heaven and Earth. You shall have to suffer the punishment of losing your soul. This is nothing but a trial. You are helping Moxi cross his trial but you’re destroying the cultivation you’ve accumulated for a whole millennium.”
“So what?” I chuckled. “I am a stone, and that is what I will remain even without my soul. It’ll save me from worrying about worldly things. What is so bad about it? These people have killed Moxi. I don’t care if it’s Moxi’s tribulation. The reality is that they’ve killed him. There’s nothing wrong with my wanting them to pay an eye for an eye.”
“Sansheng,” Changan’s expression was full of grief, “it pains you to lose Moxi, but these hundreds of thousands of people are also living beings. Like you, they have loved ones. If you killed them, what would their loved ones do?”
I stiffened, looking back at those people. Some were still struggling in agony, while others had stopped breathing altogether like Moxi, lying on the ground, quietly, motionlessly…
They shouldn’t have killed Moxi, but neither did I have the right to kill them.
The dark forces in my body dissipated. The horror in the vicinity also diminished to small sobbing sounds.
It suddenly occurred to me that these three lifetimes were but a happy dream Moxi had given me. Sooner or later I would have to wake up from it. Now that Moxi was gone, I was just waking up a little sooner.
“Chang’an, since you can look into Heaven’s will, strive for divine cultivation. You’ll find success in time to come.”
I went back to Moxi’s side, reaching for his hand and touching his already icy cheek.
If these three lives were now finished, then lets end here.
I slowly closed my eyes and severed my own veins.
My soul drifted away. This time, the Black and White Guards of Impermanence didn’t come to take me. In their place was the frigid judge working by Yanwang’s side. He made a stroke with the brush in his hand whereupon my wrists weighed down with an iron chain. “Sansheng, you’ve committed murder,” he said. “I’m here to take you back to await your judgment.”