Chapter 106: It Is Alive

Cheng Xi and Jiang Zhongqiao's expressions turned stern; they were instantly pushed backward by a force, until their backs were pressed tightly against the cold stone wall.

One could see vertebrae, glistening and translucent as jade, being slowly extracted bit by bit from the back of the Fox Clan High Priestess. With every inch extracted, the Fox Clan High Priestess's complexion grew paler, as if all the blood had been drained away, turning her as white as a sheet of paper.

Her teeth were clenched tight, her lower lip already bitten through; bright red blood slowly slid down the corner of her mouth, dripping onto the ground beneath her feet, seeping into shocking, blood-red flowers. Yet, she seemed oblivious to the pain, stubbornly continuing this gruesome ritual.

The Fox Clan High Priestess pulled at the corners of her mouth with difficulty, looking at Cheng Xi. That smile was filled with exhaustion and relief: "This is... the method of inheritance. Only my Spirit Bone can bear the full secrets of the Record of Rebirth, and only in this way can you truly find the key to breaking Ye Wujin's cultivation technique."

As the final segment of the spine was completely extracted, the Fox Clan High Priestess's body, like a snapped, withered branch, swayed precariously.

Cheng Xi was quick-witted and fast-handed; he lunged forward in a single stride, steadily supporting her nearly limp body. That Spirit Bone, now detached from her body, actually hovered slowly in mid-air, radiating a soft and holy light.

Under the illumination of this light, dense golden characters, like nimble spirits, began to emerge one by one on the Spirit Bone; it was the content of the mysterious and unfathomable Record of Rebirth.

"Quickly... memorize the content above." The Fox Clan High Priestess's breath was weak, her voice barely audible, yet it carried an irresistible power.

Cheng Xi dared not show the slightest slack; he focused all his attention, his gaze locked tightly onto the shifting characters on the Spirit Bone, deeply branding every single character into his mind.

Cheng Xi's pupils reflected the flowing golden characters, and the veins on his temples bulged. Those Sanskrit-like characters seemed to come alive as they burrowed into his sea of consciousness; every character he memorized felt like a steel needle stirring inside his skull. Jiang Zhongqiao suddenly grabbed his shoulder: "Your seven orifices are bleeding!"

Before the words had faded, the entire stone chamber suddenly trembled. The Night Pearls on the dome shattered one after another, and gravel fell with a rustling sound. The High Priestess's broken body began to glow with fluorescence, and fine cracks appeared beneath her skin.

"Go quickly..." She raised her hand with difficulty, her fingertips touching the center of Cheng Xi's brow, "The Nine-Tailed Clan... the Nine Luminaries Star Disk..."

The icy touch made Cheng Xi shiver all over. A certain profound resonance suddenly connected heaven and earth; he saw the towering Ancient Tomb rising from the depths of his consciousness, seven Fox God statues guarding the Bronze Star Disk, and on the disk's surface, the Twenty-Eight Mansions were slowly shifting out of alignment.

"Watch out!" Jiang Zhongqiao suddenly swung his Sword to strike the ground.

The blade brushed past Cheng Xi's hem, pinning a vine that looked like blood jade into a crack in the stone. The thing actually let out a scream like a wailing infant, and foul-smelling mucus sprayed from the severed end.

More blood vines emerged from the ground, their surfaces covered in human-faced nodules. The High Priestess used her final strength to form a seal, and the Spirit Bone suddenly erupted with blinding white light.

In the intense light, Cheng Xi saw those golden characters peeling off the bone, turning into streams of light that submerged into his dantian.

With a crisp "Crack!", the hovering Spirit Bone cracked with spiderweb patterns. At the same time, the ancient murals on the surrounding stone walls began to squirm; the cinnabar pigment depicting the sacrificial scenes turned into blood beads and rolled off, and the priests in the murals slowly turned their heads, their hollow eye sockets facing the three of them.

Jiang Zhongqiao pulled Cheng Xi back rapidly, his sword blade carving a semi-circular sword screen in front of them. The severed blood vines twisted into eerie Runes outside the sword screen, and the air filled with a cloying, rotten fragrance.

Cheng Xi suddenly grabbed Jiang Zhongqiao's wrist: "Three steps to the Kan position, seven steps to the Zhen position!"

The Nine Palaces and Eight Trigrams array diagram unfolded automatically in his mind; the two of them dodged and shifted, stepping on the tortoise-shell patterned floor tiles, while the stone tiles behind them collapsed one after another, revealing a bottomless blood pool.

Floating and sinking in the pool were countless white bones, each skeleton having half a Peach Wood Nail driven into its heart.

The High Priestess's body finally shattered completely into light dust. The moment the Spirit Bone disintegrated entirely, Cheng Xi heard a clear fox cry resound from the depths of his soul, and nine golden light wheels lit up in his energy center in sequence. She subconsciously joined her fingers into a sword shape, and a wisp of green-glowing Fox Fire condensed at her fingertips.

"Rebirth and reincarnation, so it turns out to be..." Cheng Xi suddenly paused. Those characters branded into his sea of consciousness were rearranging themselves, finally revealing a blood-red warning: To break the Eternal Night, one must first sacrifice the Nine-Orifice Exquisite Heart.

When the blood-colored spider tide surged out from the ground cracks, Cheng Xi smelled a familiar scent of locust flowers.

This smell was exactly the same as the scent that lingered in the mortuary of the Yi Zhuang during his childhood; those corpses with Peach Wood Nails driven into them had also emitted this same rotten, sweet fragrance.

"Hold your breath!" Jiang Zhongqiao threw out three Talismans, but the yellow paper ignited with a ghostly green flame the moment it touched the spider silk.

The abdomens of the fist-sized Blood Jade Spiders pulsed, and the same witchcraft Runes as the cracks on the Spirit Bone appeared in their compound eyes.

Cheng Xi suddenly grabbed Jiang Zhongqiao's sword blade and pressed it downward; the blade grazed his ear, slicing through three strands of crystalline spider silk.

"The Kan position's gate of life is beneath the blood pool!" As Cheng Xi spoke, a fishy sweetness rose in his throat; forcing himself to comprehend the Nine Luminaries Star Disk had already injured his lung meridian.

The spider swarm suddenly let out a sharp hiss, and hundreds of blood-colored spider silks wove into a web in the air, each thread reflecting a distorted past.

Cheng Xi saw that winter night when he was seven; the Peach Wood Nails in the mortuary oozed black blood under the moonlight, and the Qingfu Pattern on the nails perfectly overlapped with the spider web before him.

"Beware of the illusion!"

Jiang Zhongqiao's sword hummed like a dragon's roar, yet it could not cut through the increasingly dense spider web. Cheng Xi suddenly noticed his companion's pupils turning red; those memory fragments reflected on the spider silk were silently eroding his sanity.

When the first spider silk pierced his shoulder blade, Cheng Xi deliberately let go and plummeted toward the blood pool.

The moment the foul wind hit his face, he saw the true appearance of the white bones at the bottom of the pool—they were not human skeletons at all, but humanoid skeletons with fox tails, each Peach Wood Nail driven precisely into the position of a Demon Core.

The intense pain from the fall suddenly awakened a certain instinct; the green glow at Cheng Xi's fingertips surged, and nine wisps of Fox Fire flowed backward along the spider silk, turning every blood spider they touched into ash.

In the rain of fire, she saw the truth of the illusion: there was no blood pool; this was clearly an Altar covered in star charts, and those "Peach Wood Nails" were actually the Star Dial Bronze Pillars of the Twenty-Eight Mansions.

"The Record of Rebirth is alive..." Cheng Xi suddenly realized.

Those golden characters that had burrowed into her sea of consciousness were reshaping her meridians. When she grabbed the nearest bronze pillar to try and leap up, a burning pain suddenly came from her palm; the Qingfu Pattern emerging on the bronze pillar climbed onto her skin.

The entire Altar suddenly began to rotate, and seven beams of moonlight descended from the dome, perfectly shrouding the faces of the Fox God statues. Cheng Xi heard an ancient call spilling from the statues' mouths; the sound pierced through a thousand years of time, shaking her dantian violently.

"Inheritor of the Royal Blood, you must know that when the Candle Dragon opens its eyes and the Star Disk reverses, the dawn of the Nine-Tailed Clan requires the Exquisite Heart to illuminate the Nine Netherworlds..."

Jiang Zhongqiao's exclamation suddenly came; Cheng Xi turned her head to see the Bronze Star Disk cracking, and in the abyss sealed beneath the disk, a dark red pupil slowly opened.

The moment her gaze met that Candle Dragon Eye, the nine light wheels in her energy center suddenly reversed, and the characters of the Record of Rebirth ran wild through her meridians.