Chapter 193: The Temptation of Immortality

Lu Yun didn’t even have time to catch his breath after entering the netherworld. Stuffing a handful of healing pills into his mouth, he circulated his mystic force with closed eyes.

Pfft.

Blood seeped out as a crimson mist from all his pores, dying his clothes red. All of his bones, flesh, and meridians spontaneously crumbled away. Not even the pills he’d taken could stop his body’s destruction. The aura of the nine-headed phoenix was just too much for him to handle, even without any physical contact between the two. Its terrifying aura alone was sufficient to almost destroy him!

“This is bad!” Yuying gravely manifested a pill cauldron on instinct—the very treasure that had been buried with her.

Swoosh! Swoosh! Swoosh!

No sooner had the cauldron appeared than the Emerald Mistfire, Lucent Voidfire, and Daevic Skyfire emerged as well. They settled over Lu Yun like a blanket and whisked him into the cauldron. Yuying threw numerous ingredients of great vitality into it. Pill refinement!

She was going to refine Lu Yun like a supreme pill!

“Xuanxi, Feinie, come help me!” she called out.

In the seaside stronghold and on the banks of Dusk River, Feinie and Xuanxi opened their eyes at the same time and entered the Gates of the Abyss with a simple turn. Sensing Lu Yun’s condition twisted their expressions considerably.

“Master’s body and soul have almost shattered. I will use master’s body as the main ingredient and refine the Void Meridian Pill to cure his wounds!”

Xuanxi and Feinie blinked, struck dumb with amazement. This was to refine a person into a pill and the void into their meridians!

It wasn’t precisely a pill, per se, but a method that was capable of saving someone with even a shattered body and broken soul. Of course, the success rate was very low. It was said that an ancient celestial emperor had revived his dying son that way, but other than him, no one else had ever been known to succeed.

“Don’t do anything to him,” came a soft voice from Violetgrave, which lay beside Lu Yun. “His constitution is unique, so this injury is nothing to him. A Void Meridian Pill? Whether the refining process succeeds or not makes no difference to him.”

The sword gently rose into the air and transformed into a young girl in violet dress.

“Who are you?!” Yuying, Feini, and Xuanxi looked warily at her. Hell and the Tome of Life and Death were Lu Yun’s greatest secrets that not even Qing Han knew the truth of. This stranger nonchalantly showing up was certainly a stunning development!

“It doesn’t matter who I am. What matters is that you don’t touch him.” The girl dimpled and released Lu Yun from the cauldron with a wave of violet light.

His clothes burned away by the three immortal fires, a completely naked Lu Yun sat cross-legged in midair. A tiny black flame ignited in his dantian and slowly spread through his entire body.

Whoosh!

Hellfire forced out the three immortal fires that Yuying had incorporated into Lu Yun’s body; they’d already been at work healing him.

“Is this… rebirth?!” The three envoys gawked in shock. Their master was coming back to life the way only a phoenix could! A thought struck them at the same time; the three ladies whirled around and saw a girl with crimson hair standing silently behind them.

Huangqing.

Lu Yun had made her an Envoy of Samsara with the Tome of Life and Death as soon as he’d entered the netherworld. She quietly stood at attention, like a scarlet shadow. No one would’ve even noticed her if she didn’t move. Moreover, she’d become one with the blood phoenix. Both her body and soul had transformed, unlike Aoxue.

The blood fiend inhabiting Aoxue had been removed by the Enneawyrm Coffinbearers. Only the bones of the blood dragon had been left behind to be resurrected by Lu Yun.

Essentially, Aoxue was only half a blood dragon.

Huang Qing, however, had come back to life in the body of the blood phoenix. She’d even devoured the blood fiend attached to her and melded it into a part of her. She was in truth a pure blood phoenix.

Despite her transformation, she still retained her combat arts and innate abilities as a phoenix, which had naturally become available to Lu Yun as well.

Phoenixes were also hailed as the ‘immortal divine birds’. They had a myriad of skills to keep themselves alive and could deploy the pinnacle of their restoration skills after death to enter the cycle of rebirth. However, the world was fair; the phoenixes’ near immortality ended up restricting the development of their bloodlines.

Seeing that Lu Yun had gained the ability of rebirth with Huangqing as his fifth envoy, Yuying and the others relaxed.

“So it turns out that a phoenix’s rebirth has restrictions. If nothing is left of a soul, the phoenix cannot return from the dead.” Lu Yun opened his eyes and looked at Huangqing. “Phoenixes divide part of their soul to form a soul seed. As long as the seed remains, the phoenix lives on.”

That was the secret of the phoenix race.

Every phoenix split off a tiny part of their soul at birth and stored it somewhere safe. This created the illusion that they could come back to life even after they were killed and their souls destroyed.

“Soul seed… soul seed, heh.” Lu Yun sniffed. “What a terrible conspiracy. Phoenixes would‘ve remained flourishing at the top of the world of immortals. Instead, the race declined by the day and eventually died out.”

Huangqing tensed.

“All living creatures have three ethereal and seven corporal parts to their souls, every single one of which is essential. To split one’s soul apart and create a soul seed…. Tsk tsk, phoenixes would never reach the peak of cultivation, no matter how gifted they were.” [1]

Lu Yun sighed. “Dragons and phoenixes are often mentioned in the same breath, and both are held as tremendously gifted. Other than the divine race, they, too, are the favored races of heaven. While the dragons have spawned many top experts to protect the clan’s supremacy, phoenixes rarely cultivated any famed geniuses. That’s the drawback of soul seeds. Perhaps phoenix heavyweights discovered the truth of this a long time ago, but couldn’t resist the temptation of immortality in the end.”

He heaved a long breath as Huangqing lowered her head. After this rebirth, her soul was whole again. She hadn’t yet split it and created a new soul seed.

“You’re right,” sighed the girl in violet dress. “Who can resist the temptation of immortality?”

1. I’m changing the spacing of her name to reflect her new identity as an envoy and servant to LY.

2. The Chinese soul dualism tradition indicates that there’s an ethereal (yang) and corporate (yin) part to a person’s soul. The ethereal part leaves the body after death, and the corporal stays with the corpse. Daoism takes the concept further and proposes there’s three parts to the ethereal soul (hun) and seven to the corporate one (po).

1. The Chinese soul duality tradition indicates that there’s an ethereal (yang) and corporeal (yin) part to a person’s soul. The ethereal part leaves the body after death, and the corporeal stays with the corpse. Daoism takes the concept further and proposes there’s three parts to the ethereal soul (hun) and seven to the corporeal (po).