The scholar looked at Wei Yuan with suspicion. Wei Yuan forced himself to remain calm, saying, "I just finished undergoing an inner demon tribulation, so some lingering effects are unavoidable. Since you have come here, your woman and child must be among those I captured. Which ones are they, specifically?"
"Do you think I would tell you?"
"Doesn't matter. I'll find out sooner or later. But looking at you like this, Lord Hongye, could it be you were once human too?"
Hongye said, "It is merely a mortal husk. What it looks like is of no importance."
Wei Yuan suddenly grew wary. Sizing Hongye up and down, he asked, "Are you from the Pure Land Sect as well?"
"Of course not. I only said so looking at your current appearance."
*Current appearance?* Wei Yuan suddenly had a bad feeling. He reached up and felt his crown—sure enough, smooth beneath his hand. He was actually bald!
He had just weathered the heavenly tribulation when Hongye arrived, leaving him no time at all to change clothes or prepare. For Wei Yuan to have thrown on a set of robes in that split second of lightning and flint was already nimble enough.
Yet Wei Yuan had exceptionally thick skin. Acting as if nothing were amiss, he said, "It's nothing. My body refinement is simply unpolished; I haven't managed to make hair as tough as my dharma body. But as for you—between the you of today and the you on the battlefield that day, which one is the real you?"
Hongye smiled faintly. "A personality may take thousands of forms, but the primordial spirit is only one. So knowing I am Hongye is enough."
"True enough." Wei Yuan carefully distinguished Hongye's aura, which was identical to what he had perceived on the battlefield. Nodding, he said, "Someone offered a massive price for me to take your dog life. It's a bounty I couldn't refuse, so I had no choice but to use underhanded means to send you on your way."
"Fighting in here would damage the memorial tablets. Let us step outside."
Hongye took the lead and stepped out the hall doors. His gaze fell upon the orchids planted to the left and right of the entrance, and he praised, "A fine breed!"
"A gift from an old friend. Nourished here for a few centuries, it might just become an immortal plant."
Hongye neither agreed nor disagreed. Walking at an unhurried pace, he came to a stop beneath a tree, then turned around. "There is no need for us to tangle endlessly like low-level cultivators. Shall we each exert full strength and decide the victor in three moves?"
Wei Yuan shook his head at once. "No good. Better to just use whatever we've got."
"You truly refuse to suffer the slightest loss. Very well, then let me first have you taste Fate's Withering." Behind Hongye emerged a colossal flowering tree, its leaves crimson as blood. Above the red tree lingered the afterglow of a setting sun. What should have been a magnificent spectacle inexplicably evoked a poignant grief of all things meeting their end.
An autumn wind rose abruptly, stripping the tree of its red leaves.
Wei Yuan suddenly discovered that with every withered red leaf falling, his heart trembled. It was as though something was being taken away, lost. It was his destiny and karmic luck!
Hongye's shamanic art actually whittled away an opponent's destiny and karmic luck directly, sharing a wondrous similarity with Wei Yuan's lifespan-shaving art, only in a far more circuitous manner. Once one's destiny and fortune were depleted to a certain extent, it would trigger all manner of calamitous variables.
At its peak, not even an emperor could escape disaster under this shamanic art—either suddenly struck down by virulent illness, or the realm falling into utter chaos as warlords arose.
Autumn leaves like blades, each one deadly.
In that instant, Wei Yuan made his decision: he directly substituted human-karmic azure qi for his own fortune to let Hongye whittle away. In the blink of an eye, more than half the tree's red leaves drifted down, and Wei Yuan lost tens of thousands of strands of azure qi.
Yet Wei Yuan's renown in Qingming was currently at its zenith. Even after losing tens of thousands of strands of human karmic luck, he still possessed over a hundred thousand more. Meanwhile, barely any leaves remained on the tree behind Hongye.
Seeing Wei Yuan still lively and unharmed, Hongye was exceedingly surprised. "Using a karmic luck art against you truly brings humiliation upon oneself. So be it. Then taste my innate shamanic art: Doomsday's Lingering Sorrow."
Hongye's entire body radiated a hazy red glow, like the setting sun setting evening clouds ablaze. The surrounding thousand zhang transformed completely into a purgatory of red lotus hellfire, faint red flames burning everywhere.
This fire was shamanic fire, peculiar in nature. Fueled by Hongye's shamanic power, it burned only sentient beings endowed with spiritual awareness; things devoid of spirituality, even ordinary insects, birds, and beasts, could pass through the flames unscathed.
Yet several hundred men guarding the Hall of Heroic Spirits and sweeping the cemetery suddenly burst into flame. In mere flickers of an instant, their vital essence and life force were completely incinerated, reducing them to desiccated corpses.
Wei Yuan was both shocked and enraged, but powerless to stop it. Across the entire span of his vision, all the shamanic fire converged upon him. Wei Yuan's Dao power was rapidly depleted, burned away by the shamanic fire; in the span of a breath, an amount of Dao power equivalent to several dharma idols was burnt to ash.
In essence, this shamanic fire was Hongye and Wei Yuan engaging in a direct contest of magic power. It was the fiercest, most direct clash in magical combat—a raw contest of power volume and tier of existence. The side with lesser magic power could easily be burnt straight to cinder.
Since the outbreak of war months ago, Wei Yuan had witnessed several of Hongye's innate shamanic arts, each terrifyingly potent. Much like this Doomsday's Lingering Sorrow, it could be used for area-of-effect attacks as well as single-target execution, forcibly dragging opponents into a pure contest of magic power.
And in terms of magical tier, Hongye was terrifyingly high, surpassing even the fundamental essence of Wei Yuan's Dao power. Roughly two measures of shamanic power were enough to burn away three of Wei Yuan's Dao power.
In an instant, both Hongye and Wei Yuan calculated the ratio of their magic power consumption. Consequently, both relaxed, wearing confident smiles.
Hongye said leisurely, "Falling by my hand is no disgrace. Aside from Long Zhe, you are the only formidable foe I have encountered in my life. It is enough for you to be... pro... ud..."
Hongye's voice suddenly dragged out, its cadence shifting markedly. His head of black hair quickly frosted gray, then turned stark white. Deep creases furrowed his once-smooth skin. His brows drooped, eye sockets hollowed, spine hunched, and his legs bowed.
In the blink of an eye, he went from barely into middle age to tottering and decrepit, an aura of decay and rot oozing from him inside and out.
Hongye was utterly astonished. He looked at Wei Yuan's hand. Wei Yuan's left hand had remained clenched tight the entire time, faintly exuding the aura of lifespan-shaving. Hongye had assumed all along that the Yang Bullet killer move was in Wei Yuan's left hand, never expecting that the Yang Bullet had been fired from behind, bored into him almost flush against his back.
Hongye turned around to see the large tree standing behind him holding the rifle Brutality wrapped in its branches, the barrel still venting hot vapor.
In a single step, Hongye reached the tree and landed a seemingly light punch against the trunk. The blow appeared soft and powerless, but in reality was blindingly fast and devastatingly heavy. The outer tree shattered in an instant, revealing an ice-blue immortal tree within.
The force of the fist struck the ice-blue immortal tree so hard its entire canopy bent to one side, the trunk groaning and creaking, though it barely managed to avoid snapping.
Hongye exhaled and unleashed his breath, shouting fiercely, "Break!" Boundless force surged from his fist once more!
Under this second burst of power, the Bingli Divine Wood could no longer withstand it. The trunk snapped down the middle, and the entire canopy went flying a hundred zhang!
Immediately after, the Bingli Divine Wood vanished. Only then did Hongye pull back his fist and say to Wei Yuan, "Splendid trick! Truly beyond my expectations. Taking this shot wasn't unwarranted. Someone with your level of strength who can also be this shameless is truly one of a kind in this world."
Wei Yuan was struggling bitterly against the shamanic fire, unable to speak a single word.
Hongye traced a finger in the air, conjuring a water mirror before him. He examined his appearance, dismissed the water mirror, and then withdrew the shamanic fire.
Wei Yuan finally breathed a long sigh of relief, his eyes fixed on Hongye. From the moment they engaged until now, he had been thoroughly suppressed, having no room to fight back. Fortunately, relying on his advance preparations, he had successfully ambushed Hongye and planted the Yang Bullet into his body.
Hongye looked at his hands, now mottled with age spots. "So this is what aging feels like. It truly is unpleasant. Fortunately, I still have a dozen-odd years of lifespan left, enough to do a few small things at the end so as not to leave too many regrets."
Wei Yuan asked suddenly, "Did you take that shot on purpose?"
Hongye chuckled and said, "I did have that thought initially, but I never expected you to be even more treacherous than I anticipated. There was no way I could have dodged that shot anyway. But this is fine too; it saves me the trouble of putting on an act."
"For a woman and a child, is it worth it? You already have tens of thousands of blood descendants." This had been Wei Yuan's lingering question all along.
Hongye flicked a finger, seemingly popping a water bubble. Certain changes occurred in certain places, though Wei Yuan did not know what they were at the moment; he only knew that this flick was profound beyond measure, seeming no less wondrous than an immortal's technique.
Having done this, Hongye finally said, "Without taking this shot, there was no way I could return to the Land of Rain alive. Those fellows who commissioned you to do this would never have let me leave Qingming unscathed. From the moment you returned a second time and took her and Xiaobao away, I knew.
"The ending now is not bad. I still have some time to attend to my own affairs, and those fellows will no longer disturb me. Heh, a shaman like me whose lifespan is almost spent—no one would want to provoke me. Well, I don't have much time left. It's time for me to go."
Wei Yuan asked, "Why?"
"Why..." Hongye seemed to recall events from long ago. Lost in thought for a moment, he finally said, "The original reason, which was also the catalyst for my decisive battle with Long Zhe, was that I... did not want to become a Heavenly Shaman."
Wei Yuan never expected this answer in the least. He wanted to probe further, but Hongye shook his head. "That is all I can say. If you want to know more, seek out the answers yourself in the future."
"What about your woman and child? You're not taking them with you?"
Hongye waved his hand. "Let them live here among the humans!"
Hongye said no more. With hands behind his back, he walked slowly toward the borders of the realm. Heading west into the setting sun, the blood-red twilight dyed his somewhat disheveled white hair in gold and crimson.
Watching the old man's figure gradually fade into the dying embers of the sunset glow, Wei Yuan could not describe what he felt in his heart. A peerless paragon of a generation, taking his final bow just like this?
At that moment, Hongye's voice drifted from afar, yet sounded as if spoken right beside his ear: "You asked earlier whether coming here to seek death for a woman and a child was worth it. Now, you have your answer."
Chapter 592