We Agreed On Experiencing Life, So Why Did You Immortals Become Real?

Chapter 595: Did He Get My Permission?!

Great Zhou imperial palace, Hall of Nourishing the Heart.

As Xiao Mo’s consciousness gradually withdrew from the Book of a Hundred Lives, he slowly opened his eyes.

This time felt different from his previous deaths.

He did not feel that agonizing sensation of impending death.

Instead, he felt as though he had merely woken from a dream.

Everything he had experienced seemed so hazy.

And yet, it had all felt so real.

【Ding...】

Just as Xiao Mo was calming his thoughts, the Book of a Hundred Lives spoke in his mind once more.

【The rewards from the Book of a Hundred Lives are being calculated. Please wait a moment. While the rewards are being calculated, the Host may enter the river of time as an “Observer.” Does the Host wish to enter?】

“Yes.”

Xiao Mo did not hesitate.

Before long, his vision blurred again.

When Xiao Mo opened his eyes, he was already standing atop Moon God Peak in Tushan.

The towering Moon God Tree was still burning fiercely.

Countless flaming leaves drifted through the night sky, gradually burning out like sky lanterns.

Beneath the tree, the woman in white was still asleep.

Tushan’s fortune protected her from all disturbance. Even the burning leaves could not touch the hem of her skirt.

With the Moon God Tree gone, Tushan’s fortune continued to leak away. Yet because Tushan Jingci was Tushan’s holy daughter, much of that fortune flowed into her body.

Three days and three nights passed.

The blaze around the Moon God Tree had already died out. The charred tree had lost all of its former verdure.

Amid Tushan’s ruins, it only made the place seem more desolate.

Tushan Jingci’s brows faintly furrowed, then slowly relaxed.

A breeze stirred her waterfall of hair. Her long, curled lashes trembled softly, like a butterfly beating its wings.

But before long, the sleeping Tushan Jingci frowned tightly again. Her head shook from side to side without stop.

As though she were trapped in a nightmare.

“Xiao Mo!”

Tushan Jingci jolted awake from that nightmare. She sat upright and cried out Xiao Mo’s name.

Her voice rang out across Tushan, then slowly faded.

No one answered.

Tushan Jingci rose to her feet and looked around, her eyes trembling.

It was as though the nightmare had not ended at all.

It had only become more cruel.

But the breeze brushing against her skin, the stench of blood in the air, and the bodies scattered throughout Tushan all told Tushan Jingci the same thing.

This was real.

“Xiao Mo...”

Tushan Jingci held her head, forcing herself to endure the pain as she tried to recall what had happened.

She remembered only that the Human Alliance and the Demon Alliance had entered peace talks, and that Xiao Mo had come.

She herself had attended those talks as well.

At the time, seeing Xiao Mo and Gui Junmeng together so intimately had made her furious. She had nearly lost control of herself.

But in the end, stopped by her grandfather and her master, she had managed to restrain herself.

The negotiations between the Human Alliance and Demon Alliance had gone smoothly.

Although a few details still had not been settled, they had not been far from signing an alliance pact beneath the Moon God Tree.

But last night...

For some reason, Xiao Mo had harvested Gui Junmeng and used Great Dream of Yellow Millet to absorb her cultivation, thereby entering the Ascension Realm.

And somehow, Xiao Mo had gained control of the Moon God Tree, seized most of Tushan’s fortune, and brought many of Tushan’s elders under his control.

Cultivator after cultivator had died beneath the Moon God Tree’s vines.

Xiao Mo had not even spared Tushan’s innocent civilians.

Everyone had been blood-sacrificed, turned into stepping stones on his path toward the Great Dao.

Having witnessed it all, she had fought Xiao Mo.

And in the end...

In the end... I killed Xiao Mo...

Tushan Jingci lowered her head and looked at her bloodstained hands. They trembled uncontrollably.

The sensation of driving her sword through Xiao Mo’s chest—the feeling of flesh splitting and organs tearing—still lingered in her palms.

It had felt too real.

It could not possibly have been false...

And Tushan Jingci was no longer the little girl who understood nothing.

She knew that the most direct way for the Nine-Tailed Heavenly Fox clan to testify to the Way was to kill one’s beloved with one’s own hands.

But to Tushan Jingci, the Ascension Realm meant nothing compared to being with Xiao Mo.

Even if she had to die, she wanted to die with him.

If they could not become husband and wife in life, then they would become a pair of lovers in death.

But now, Tushan Jingci could sense her own realm.

Over a single night, she had entered the Ascension Realm.

That was the best proof that she had killed Xiao Mo.

And Tushan Jingci found that her Great Dao seemed more complete than ever before, as though a part of her soul that had always been missing had finally been made whole.

“Jingci...”

Suddenly, a familiar voice echoed within Tushan Jingci’s mind.

Tushan Jingci lifted her head, her heart beginning to race.

Then she felt her Great Dao gradually separating away.

When she turned around, she saw Gui Junmeng standing beside her.

“You...” Tushan Jingci looked at Gui Junmeng in astonishment. “What is going on? What happened last night?”

“I don’t know either.” Gui Junmeng shook her head, looking equally dazed.

In her memories, it seemed that Xiao Mo had harvested her and that she had died by Xiao Mo’s hand.

But in the end, she had merged with Jingci.

And after merging with Jingci, she could voluntarily separate from Jingci’s body and walk the world in a human-bloodline body.

More than that, she could feel Jingci’s emotions. Even everything Jingci did felt as though she had experienced it herself.

The only problem was that her cultivation was gone.

But she could still cultivate. She would merely have to start over from the beginning.

Gui Junmeng could even sense that her cultivation and Jingci’s could complement each other and merge.

If she cultivated back to the Ascension Realm while Jingci continued to advance, then once she and Jingci became one again, it was impossible to say how far their realm might reach.

“Could this have been Xiao Mo’s doing as well...? But why would he do this?”

Gui Junmeng lowered her head in thought.

She desperately wanted to know what had happened that night, but she remembered only Xiao Mo harvesting her and killing her.

Tushan Jingci pressed her thin lips together as she looked at Gui Junmeng.

Her feelings toward this “sister” had always been complicated.

If Gui Junmeng had been only her sister, Tushan Jingci would have been happy.

But Gui Junmeng had taken Xiao Mo from her.

So Tushan Jingci did not like her.

Yet now that the two had merged, Tushan Jingci could feel the emotions in Gui Junmeng’s heart.

She knew that Gui Junmeng had always regarded her as a younger sister.

Gui Junmeng had even thought of sharing Xiao Mo with her, so that the three of them could live together.

But Gui Junmeng had never found the chance to say it. She had also feared that Tushan Jingci would reject her, and that guilt had lingered in her heart ever since.

Faced with her sister’s feelings, Tushan Jingci pressed her lips together, unsure what to say.

But none of that seemed important now.

Tushan was gone.

Every last one of her clansmen was dead.

Tushan Jingci looked once at the blackened Moon God Tree, then turned and walked away from Moon God Peak.

“Jingci...”

Gui Junmeng called after her.

“Since neither of us knows what happened, I will get answers.”

Tushan Jingci’s voice was cold.

*****

Over the next month, Tushan Jingci buried everyone in Tushan and returned them to the earth.

Then she tried to gather the remnant souls of her clansmen, but nearly all of them had already entered reincarnation.

Just as Tushan Jingci was about to give up, the soul of a woman appeared before her.

“Xiangniang?”

Tushan Jingci was startled.

She had not expected that Tushan still had a remnant soul.

She wanted to learn what had happened that night from Xiangniang.

But Xiangniang said that she remembered only Xiao Mo killing one clansman after another.

In the end, Xiao Mo had killed her as well.

Thinking of those memories, which felt utterly real, Xiangniang clenched her sleeve. Doubt still lingered in her eyes.

“Holy Daughter, did Young Master truly massacre all of Tushan?”

Tushan Jingci did not know how to answer.

“I will find out what happened.”

At last, Tushan Jingci spoke slowly.

But even as she said those words, doubt stirred in her heart.

She still could not believe that Xiao Mo would do such a thing.

No matter how deeply he hated her because of the wedding, he would never have dragged other people into it...

But now, everything pointed to Xiao Mo as the one responsible for that night’s massacre.

Tushan Jingci wanted to guide Xiangniang onward to reincarnation.

But Xiangniang refused in the end.

“Holy Daughter, my talent was never great. In this life, I had no hope of reaching the Nascent Soul Realm. I would rather become a ghost cultivator, so that I may continue helping the Holy Daughter rebuild Tushan. And besides... I want to know what happened that night as well...”

Xiangniang knelt before Tushan Jingci.

“I ask the Holy Daughter to grant my request.”

“I understand. From now on, you may follow me.”

Tushan Jingci nodded and agreed.

*****

Three months later, news of what had happened in Tushan spread throughout the demon-race world, causing a tremendous uproar.

No one could believe that Tushan had been exterminated.

Nor could anyone believe that every upper-three-realm cultivator from the Human Alliance and Demon Alliance who had gone to Tushan had died.

Both sides of the peace talks had Ascension Realm cultivators holding the field.

But when neither Gui Ning nor Daoist Yunxi appeared, and countless people came to Tushan and witnessed its devastation with their own eyes, they finally understood that the rumors were real.

With no leader left to unite them, the war between the Human Alliance and Demon Alliance resumed.

Nor would the factions within either alliance submit to one another. Internal conflict erupted as well, until both the Human Alliance and Demon Alliance split apart once more.

Ten years later, the demon-race world had fallen into a state where countless factions ruled their own territories.

But because the demon-race world had been at war for too long, most cultivators had lost the will to fight. They wanted only to protect their own small piece of land.

For a time, the demon-race world instead entered a period of relative stability.

The Human Alliance also gained a small amount of territory in the demon-race world.

It was not much, but compared to before, the humans finally had somewhere to stand.

Still, the human race remained weak. No one knew how long they could hold those footholds.

When Tushan Xinhua returned from her travels, she found her daughter.

She had spent all that time searching ancient ruins for a way to save her daughter.

But when she returned, Tushan was gone.

And her two daughters had merged into one, though they could still separate from each other...

When Tushan Xinhua heard that Xiao Mo had destroyed all of Tushan, she could not believe that he would do such a thing.

But Tushan, reduced to ruins, told her without pause that it was all true.

Over the next hundred years, Tushan Jingci continued searching for Xiao Mo’s reincarnation, but she found nothing.

“One person is too slow...”

In the end, Tushan Jingci established a kingdom upon Tushan’s ruins.

It was called the Nine-Tails Kingdom.

When fox-clan cultivators throughout the demon-race world heard that the Nine-Tails Kingdom had been founded, they flocked there in droves.

The Nine-Tails Kingdom took Tushan’s place, becoming a sacred land in the hearts of foxes everywhere.

Within the Nine-Tails Kingdom, humans held equal status with the demon race.

The demon race was forbidden from eating humans.

Even in the buying and selling of slaves, human slaves had to be valued the same as demon slaves.

Those who violated the law would be severely punished.

Humans could even enter the court and serve as officials.

For a time, many humans from across the demon-race world made their way to the Nine-Tails Kingdom.

Tushan Jingci also restored Cold Mountain Academy.

The rebuilt Cold Mountain Academy differed little from how it had been before.

It once again admitted Confucian scholars from across the world, whether human or demon.

But there was one mountain peak that had become forbidden ground. Not even the head of Cold Mountain Academy was permitted to enter.

Every spring, that peak bloomed with peach blossoms.

Thus, the academy’s students called it Spring Peach Mountain.

The students of Cold Mountain Academy looked forward to every spring.

Because each spring, the ruler of the Nine-Tails Kingdom—hailed as the greatest beauty in the demon-race world—would come to Cold Mountain Academy and wait for the peach blossoms to bloom.

That spring, as she had every year before, Tushan Jingci came to the academy and returned to the courtyard where she and Xiao Mo had once lived.

This courtyard was where Tushan Jingci and Xiao Mo had spent the longest time together. It was also one of the places bound to them by the deepest karma.

So Tushan Jingci drew a formation in the courtyard, intending to use the karma of that place to search for Xiao Mo’s reincarnation.

Watching her daughter draw the same formation for what felt like countless times, Tushan Xinhua’s eyes were full of worry.

Over the years, afraid for her daughter, Tushan Xinhua had stayed by Jingci’s side and watched her search for Xiao Mo.

Gui Junmeng cultivated within the palace of the Nine-Tails Kingdom and handled affairs of state. She seemed to have let Xiao Mo go, but in truth, she was doing the same thing.

The two simply used different methods.

Tushan Xinhua could no longer bear to watch her two daughters continue searching like this.

Ever since the day she had seen Jingci and Junmeng again, neither of them had smiled.

“Jingci, enough... Even if you find him, what then? How could he remember everything from before? What has happened has already happened. No matter what Xiao Mo did, he is gone. The karma of this life has come to an end...”

“The karma of this life has come to an end? Heh...”

Tushan Jingci gave a cold laugh and lifted her head to look toward the distant sky.

“I will find him! No matter how long it takes!”

“I will ask him what he did!”

“If he cannot remember, then I will make him remember!”

“What do you mean, the karma of this life has come to an end?”

Tushan Jingci turned around. Her eyes had already reddened.

“Did he get my permission?!”