A Guide to Self-Rescue in the Cultivation World - Chapter 12

She saw it.

She saw a massive bronze cauldron, the size of a valley, boiling violently.

Beneath the cauldron, a raging, azure spiritual flame burned fiercely.

And inside the cauldron, constantly churning, was a viscous, dark red… broth.

No, it wasn’t broth.

It was countless limbs, twisted and deformed heads with eyes wide in eternal agony, and floating, overcooked internal organs… In that thick liquid, she saw a multitude of faces, contorted in ultimate suffering, sinking and shattering.

It was… the remains of the Demon Race, boiled into a porridge while still alive.

Among them were children with innocent faces, their eyes gouged out, leaving only hollow, bloody sockets.

There were beautiful female demons, their long hair already stuck to their rotting flesh.

And white-haired, bearded old demons, their cloudy eyes reflecting the despair of their race’s annihilation.

Their souls were imprisoned within the cauldron, unable to escape, emitting silent, mournful sobs. The wails struck directly at her spirit, giving Zhou Suyao a splitting headache, as if her own soul would be torn apart by this boundless malevolence at any moment.

Beside the cauldron, countless figures in blue and white Daoist robes stood. There was no pity on their faces, only the numb indifference of people carrying out orders. They held long-handled implements, their faces expressionless, as they pushed one bound, struggling demon after another into the furnace of death, as if dumping garbage.

“No… don’t let go of my mother!!”

Zhou Suyao looked up sharply, following the source of the sound. It was a young girl demon, her cries shrill and tragic. But the next second, as a cold implement pierced her chest, her voice instantly cut off.

Beside her, a female demon confined by several blue and white robed figures erupted in a sharp wail. A golden light burst from her body, sending her captors scattering. She lunged toward the little girl demon’s corpse, her voice hoarse as she screamed her most vicious curse:

“Dao Moxing… may you never find peace in death!”

This was a living hell.

A searing purgatory.

Yet, in the center of this infernal scene, Zhou Suyao clearly saw one figure.

Xuan Yangming.

But the Xuan Yangming before her was not the withered, ancient man outside the illusion. This Xuan Yangming was clearly still a young boy, yet his demeanor carried a deeply incongruous, world-weary old age, making him seem profoundly unsettling, though one couldn’t immediately pinpoint the source of the strangeness.

But Zhou Suyao knew: this was just one of countless “youthful forms” he had taken to nurture the Three-Path Meridian Flower.

At this moment, he stood by the cauldron, holding a ritual implement carved from white bone. He chanted an incantation, and the “broth” in the giant cauldron instantly began to boil, quickly reducing the bones and flesh within into a bloody paste.

Once everything was ready, she saw Dao Moxing approach the cauldron. He raised his hands and swiftly conjured a complex, eerie spell seal.

As the spell was completed, the surrounding cultivators burst into cheers. They held up jade bowls, forming an orderly queue, waiting to receive a portion of the meaty porridge cooked from demon flesh from Xuan Yangming’s large jade ladle.

“The Demon Race, the vile race that pollutes heaven and earth, forcefully drawing spiritual power to forge their spirit bodies, all so they can wage war against us, Spiritual Dao cultivators, one day. Today, thanks to the righteousness of our disciple Ning Qinggui and Xuan Yangming’s decisive action to exterminate this wicked race, the Spiritual Dao is protected for ten thousand years of peace.”

With that, Dao Moxing raised the bowl of meaty porridge and drank it down in one gulp.

Below the cauldron, the cultivators loudly echoed:

“Slay the wicked race, protect our Spiritual Dao.”

“Slay the wicked race! Protect our Spiritual Dao!”

Yet, in this moment of collective reverence, Zhou Suyao noticed that Xuan Yangming was unlike the others. There was no emotional fluctuation on his face, only a kind of near-cold focus. He carefully guided a red, meaty pellet that had absorbed an immense amount of demon spiritual qi toward the center of the altar.

The Vision Ends

The scene instantly shifted.

Zhou Suyao’s consciousness was forcibly pulled back to an overhead view of the altar. Only this time, she wasn’t the bound, inverted victim, but a transcendent observer.

She saw it.

She saw the altar in its earliest form.

This altar was far less sinister than the one outside the illusion. The stone platform wasn’t carved with gold foil bl00d seals, but with ancient, obscure runes.

And in the center of the altar was a… pitifully small, almost transparent, Three-Path Meridian Flower with only three bl00d-red shoots.

But when Xuan Yangming guided that bloody pellet to a spot above the altar’s center and crushed it, raining down a torrent of bl00d, the flower began to grow at an alarming speed!

It made a sharp, wailing sound, like a child with genuine awareness. Its branches and meridians twisted and struggled… until finally, its stamen began to pulse slowly, like a forced-grown tumor, taking the form of a heart.

Just as the rapidly growing meridian was about to finalize its shape, he seemed to capture a faint gaze. An uncontrollable excitement flashed across his contradictory face, and he slowly turned his head.

And met eyes with Zhou Suyao in the void.

Instantly!

The scene shattered like a smashed mirror.

Zhou Suyao’s consciousness was violently flung back to reality. The intense headache made her vision swim, and the nauseating images from the illusion lingered in her mind, turning her stomach inside out.

The scenes of thousands of demons boiled into a paste, and the sight of that repulsive, sticky, newborn-like flower was branded into the depths of her soul, filling her with overwhelming revulsion and hatred.

In reality, the Three-Path Meridian Flower, which had momentarily stopped its consumption due to the backlash, seemed to be injected with a more savage force when it sensed the century’s worth of resentment and imagery feeding back from Zhou Suyao’s consciousness.

Ohm—!!

The iron chains binding Zhou Suyao instantly shattered. She slammed onto the center of the altar. Beside her, the repulsive-looking and smelling Three Path Meridian Flower suddenly sprouted countless red threads from its core, tightly coiling around her.

Not far away, Xuan Yangming, who had been stunned by the massive backlash, slowly stood up. The fear of being attacked from both sides made Zhou Suyao instinctively struggle.

But the more she struggled, the tighter the red threads bound her.

Xuan Yangming was mere steps away!

“Bang—!”

The Three-Path Meridian Flower suddenly burst with a blinding red light, and a crimson barrier instantly appeared before her.

A phantom figure slowly materialized from within the flower.

Zhou Suyao recognized her: it was the mother of the little demon girl from the illusion.

Immediately following, the little demon girl with the impaled chest appeared beside her. The giant bloody hole was still in her chest, but her face was faintly smiling.

Shadows appeared ceaselessly from within the flower.

Ailing old demons, young demons with innocent faces, and countless others, all looking vastly different, yet sharing the common bl00d that led to their cruel murder—the Demon Race.

Until the last shadow materialized before her.

It was a beautiful woman she had seen before. Her long black hair moved without wind, and her eyes, which held an undeniable presence, were red.

It was the female spirit she had seen in the Underworld.

Ning Qinggui.

The corner of her mouth was faintly turned up. Unlike her vicious appearance in the Underworld, her smile now carried a sense of sorrowful peace after endless suffering.

“Do you see now?” Her voice was ethereal and distant, yet every word carried immense weight. “This is the Road to the Yellow Springs… that Dao Moxing and Xuan Yangming paved for our Demon Race!”

Her gaze swept over the thousands of silent demon phantoms and finally fixed on Zhou Suyao.

“We were refined, we were consumed. We used the price of our race’s annihilation to fill their desires… For a hundred years, our resentment has not faded, our hatred is towering.”

Ning Qinggui’s voice was calm, but filled with deep hatred. “This hatred… cannot save the Demon Race, nor can it destroy this meridian… All we can do is forever sink, becoming the nutrients that allow it to grow stronger and eventually plague the Three Paths…”

As she spoke, her spectral finger gently tapped Zhou Suyao’s glabella. In an instant, a cold, vast surge of spiritual power, mixed with the grief, pain, despair, and deepest longing for freedom of ten thousand years’ worth of demons, flooded into Zhou Suyao’s body like a broken dam.

“Ugh…!” The spiritual power was accompanied by intense pain, causing her to cry out in agony. Her body convulsed under the constraint of the red threads. Countless memory fragments that weren’t hers exploded in her mind, bringing with them endless suffering: the burning agony of being thrown into the cauldron, the despair of having loved ones brutally murdered, and… the helplessness of having her soul forcibly drawn out as all her bl00d converged at her ear tips and slowly drained away.

The pain of a hundred thousand demons over ten thousand years stabbed her soul like a million silver needles.

“Accept it.” Ning Qinggui’s voice was both distant and close, making her momentarily confused about where she was or why.

“This is all the power of our Demon Race from centuries past… Please… help us… on behalf of my people.”

“Take vengeance.”

“Collect the bl00d debt…”

As the last word fell, Ning Qinggui’s figure, along with the thousands of demon phantoms around her, turned into countless scarlet dust motes, scattering into the barrier like sand in the wind.

But the barrier, condensed from the spiritual power of countless demons, did not vanish. It seemed to have exhausted its last strength solely to protect the person transforming within.

Not far away, Xuan Yangming slowly stood, leaning on his bone staff. His withered eyes were fixed on Zhou Suyao, who was wrapped in red threads inside the barrier, filled with endless hatred.

The bone staff scraped against the stone floor at his feet, making a harsh sound.

Inside the barrier, no one knew.

Zhou Suyao, who had accepted the spiritual power of the entire Demon Race, was transforming.

An unsettling aura, a bizarre interweaving of chilling cold and fierce vitality, was slowly awakening within her.

“Clang—!”

Time seemed to freeze at that moment.

Just as Xuan Yangming’s staff was a mere inch away from her, she suddenly raised her hand. A colossal spiritual force, erupting from her palm, actually held off Xuan Yangming’s fatal strike!

The impact, visible like a ripple, shattered the surrounding hard stone into fragments.

Xuan Yangming groaned, stumbling back several steps. A streak of black bl00d leaked from the corner of his mouth, and the shock in his eyes intensified.

“Your spiritual power… why is it so similar to hers?”

He wailed, filled with bitter unwillingness.

“Why…! Why…! I only wanted to unify the Three Realms…! Ning Qinggui! The one you should hate isn’t me!”

With that, he glared at Zhou Suyao, grinding his teeth. “The one she should hate is Dao Moxing! Dao Moxing forced her into dual cultivation! Dao Moxing boiled her kin! And I! I just wanted to unify the Three Paths! If not for me, someone else would try to unify the Three Paths! Why did she give you her spiritual power to fight me?”

Zhou Suyao shrugged. The spiritual power in her hand didn’t weaken. The abundant energy in her body had already repaired the repeatedly torn wound in her lower abdomen, giving her a newfound confidence in her voice.

“I don’t know, but…”

“You and Dao Moxing… both deserve to pay the price! One to pay for Ning Qinggui! The other to pay for my Eldest Senior Brother!”

Behind her, the thousands of red threads that had been drooping instantly transformed into thousands of bl00d-red arrows, shooting toward Xuan Yangming with a piercing roar.

Seeing the imminent attack, Xuan Yangming’s pupils constricted. He instantly detonated his inner core. The massive spiritual shockwave, like a modern-day bomb, blasted Zhou Suyao backward.

Everything seemed to happen in slow motion before Zhou Suyao’s eyes.

She was propelled backward by the shock. A deep, bone-visible gash instantly appeared on her body, and scalding hot bl00d spurted from the wound.

But the bl00d did not splatter.

In the fraction of a second before Xuan Yangming vanished in a flash of golden light, she saw an extremely familiar figure.

It was a figure who should have been lying on the mountain peak of the Path to Immortality Sect, looking frail alongside the peach branches.

Yet, this person was now before her.

He did not descend like a god to protect her from harm, as he had done in the past.

Instead, he stood above the Three-Path Meridian Flower, not far away. His face expressionless, he sliced open the palm of his right hand and let his bl00d drip onto the flower’s stamen.

As the stamen shook wildly, he slowly spoke:

“With my bl00d…”

“I sacrifice to Heaven and Earth’s Mysteries…”

“Seal the Heavens… Accept the Meridian…!”

The last word resonated as if from the highest heavens!

Immediately after, a deathly silence fell over the underground chamber.

Not far away, Zhou Suyao slowly closed her eyes.

She felt truly embarrassed to be passing out in front of her Eldest Senior Brother again.

But this time, fainting felt worthwhile.

After all, she had witnessed it: Eldest Senior Brother was indeed that utterly composed, immortal figure from Ning Qinggui’s illusion.

Where did the trust between people go? Why wasn’t Eldest Senior Brother willing to be completely honest with her?

Her little heart felt a bit wounded.

She would definitely interrogate him thoroughly about everything when she woke up.