Chapter 58: Thousand-Year Vermilion Fruit
Rainy night, ancient temple.
Candlelight, sword shadows.
In a mere moment, the dimly-lit Nuwa Temple, modest in scale and sitting at the foot of the wilderness mountains, is soaked with thick, scarlet blood filling the cracks between the worn stones. It mixes with the dust accumulated over years, trampled under leather soles, squelching like mud with every step.
Nezha treads through this bloody mire, advancing step by step towards the ’Night Master.’ He seems weary, slowly squatting down.
On this chilly rainy night, he exhales a breath that shows white and clear, eyeing the other’s face that has turned purple with suffocation, he says, "If you knew it would come to this, why did you even begin?"
His fingers, clutching the Chaos Sky Silk, twitch, slightly loosening its grip.
"Cough! Cough!"
The woman keeps coughing. She looks up at Nezha, his youthful face brimming with a content smile, blood spattered across his fair skin.
Valued by King Wu Cheng, she was revered as the ’Night Master’ by her subordinates, tasked to sneak into Jue Long Ridge and steal the millenary Vermilion Fruit, rumored to prolong life, right under the watch of thousands of bandits and various forces.
Though she had faced enemies several times, even the cultivator in her team succumbing to fatal wounds, lost to the vast mountains during the escape, she had not once found herself in such dire straits, on the brink of death as now.