“Little Nine, please—don't leave me!”
Her eyes were tightly shut. Blood stained her lips, and her unbound hair lay scattered around her. Her robes had been soaked through with crimson. Frail as a withered leaf about to fall, she seemed only a breath away from vanishing.
At the man's anguished cry, she forced her eyes open and tried to speak. Blood came first.
She could feel her life slowly slipping away.
“Little Nine... Little Nine, this is all my fault. I should have known sooner—”
Tears slid from the man's exquisitely shaped chin and fell onto her. She wanted to lift a hand and wipe them away, but she no longer had the strength.
“Cough... cough...”
She coughed up two mouthfuls of blood. The eyes she raised to him were filled with longing.
“I don't blame you. I just... I just can't bear to leave you...”
Everyone said that after drinking Granny Meng's soup, a soul forgot every bond and sorrow of its former life.
But she did not want to forget.
Her life had been brief, and the only happiness in it had come from him. If she forgot, even that last trace of sweetness would be gone.
Then again, she probably would never enter the cycle of reincarnation.
Her fate was to have her soul scattered into nothingness. Those people would never allow her the chance to be reborn.
“Little Nine, don't abandon me. Didn't we agree that when I returned, we would go to the mortal realm together and find your friend there?”
As the man spoke, he poured immortal energy into her body. Yet she was already a lamp at the end of its oil. His power could dull the pain, but it could not extend her life.
Blood loss made her face increasingly translucent.
“You still haven't introduced me to that mortal friend. You said she knew so many things and was far more interesting than I am. You even told me to learn from her how to make you happy. I haven't learned yet, Little Nine. You can't leave me like this.”
His voice trembled. Of course he knew that even he was powerless to save her.
The woman's lips curved faintly, as though she were remembering.
“So you remembered all of it.”
The immortal energy he gave her lent her a fleeting strength to speak.
He had carefully kept every word she had ever said in his heart. That was enough.
She reached up and brushed his beautiful face. Tears finally spilled from her eyes.
“But I can't hold on any longer.”
Her people had been slaughtered. Her palace had been destroyed. Even if she survived, there was nowhere left for her in the Three Realms.
Perhaps this had always been her fate.
“There is still a way, Little Nine!” Hope flared in the man's deadened eyes. “Master has a Soul-Gathering Lamp. I only need to place your soul inside and nourish it. In no more than a hundred years, you can be reborn!”
“It won't work. My inner core has already shattered,” she whispered.
Without an inner core, no immortal medicine could save her.
And the Soul-Gathering Lamp was a sacred artifact of the Celestial Realm. She was neither immortal nor human. It would never accept her soul. Trying would only hasten its destruction.
“After I'm gone, you must cultivate diligently. Become a High God, just as they want you to.”
“Don't keep thinking of me, and don't do anything foolish. They were right. Our meeting was a mistake from the beginning.”
She wanted to say more, but her eyes drifted closed. Only one last sentence remained.
“Forget me, Qingchen.”
Her hand fell limply, and all life left her.
The man's trembling fingers touched her cheek. It felt as though he had lost everything.
Every future he had imagined, every life he had dreamed of sharing with her, dissolved into illusion.
Nothing remained for him to grasp. None of it could ever come true.
Without her, what use was ascension?
What did ten thousand years on the immortal path hold besides loneliness?
So this was what it meant to lose the one you loved forever.
The thought tore a mouthful of blood from him, and agony spread from his heart through every bone and vein.
Little Nine, in all the heavens and beneath the earth, where can I ever find another trace of you?