Chapter 243 - 234: Presenting Buddha with a Borrowed Flower
Ye Junhan stood to the side with his hands down, gazing at the messy, crisscrossing slashes on the tree trunk before looking back at the blade in Gu Xi’s hand.
He was inwardly stunned.
Every slash Gu Xi made seemed light and casual, but the marks they left behind were all uniform: five meters wide, one meter deep. Even the arcs at either end were identical.
Of course, he was also capable of such precise control, but that was because this was *his* blade, one he had nurtured with his ability for ten years.
But Gu Xi was using *his* blade right now...
Just then, Gu Xi suddenly stopped and handed the blade back to him.
"?" Ye Junhan looked at her, confused.
Gu Xi said nothing, but her brow furrowed slightly.
It was Qi Xiang who spoke up, trusting her intuition. "Just now... did something run away?"
’Ran away?’
Hearing Qi Xiang, Shen Yue and Wei Heng were baffled.
’What ran away?’
They both looked at Gu Xi.
Gu Xi, however, tilted her head back to look at the crooked-necked tree, her gaze fixed on a spot halfway up the trunk.
Before, she hadn’t been able to sense her blade at all, but now, it had appeared.
’It’s right there.’
Qi Xiang followed her gaze, and it suddenly clicked. "Gu Xi, are you looking for something? Do you want me to come with..."
"No need." Gu Xi lowered her eyes. With a light tap of her foot, she used the notches she’d just carved to leap up the tree in a few quick steps.
Soon, she reached a gnarled branch that coiled like a dragon more than thirty meters off the ground and reached her hand into a hollow.
Meanwhile, down below, Qi Xiang nudged her companion. "Did you guys hear that?" Just a moment ago, she thought she’d heard a sharp, joyful ringing sound.
Wei Heng gave her a surprised look and whispered, "What sound?"
"You didn’t hear it?" Qi Xiang glanced at him, surprised, then turned to Shen Yue and Ye Junhan. "What about you two?
Shen Yue slowly shook his head. Ye Junhan, however, was focused intently on Gu Xi up in the tree.
Qi Xiang frowned slightly. ’Was I just hearing things?’
Up in the tree, Gu Xi’s hand, deep inside the hollow, slowly caressed the cold steel of a blade.
The sharp edge slowly cut into her palm. A thin line of blood welled up, only to be absorbed completely by the blade in an instant.
A flash of white light later, Gu Xi’s palm was completely healed, without so much as a scar.
The blade began to tremble faintly in her hand, like a puppy begging for a treat.
The next moment, a green vine shot out from her fingertips and lashed the blade viciously.
The whining blade instantly fell silent.
The little green sprout, however, coiled around the blade again and again, gradually fusing with it...
A nostalgic look appeared in Gu Xi’s eyes.
Back then, everyone in the base knew that Gu Xi’s blade was a unique, un-replicable super-powered weapon.
What they didn’t know was that its uniqueness didn’t come from the high-grade rare ores or the Dragon Horn of a Divine Rank Mutated Flood Dragon used to forge it. It was because, during the forging process, Gu Xi had secretly tossed in a small piece of her Sprout to fuse with the metal.
On that day thirty years ago, after she killed the last Zombie Emperor in the world, she came to this cliff alone. She sat at its peak and thought about so many things...
She remembered when she was a child, how nearly everyone around her reminisced about the beautiful world before the apocalypse. They would always end by telling her, tirelessly, over and over again, "Xiaoxi, whether or not we can reclaim our home in the future is all up to you."
Later, she lived up to their expectations. She and her companions put an end to that wretched world overrun by zombies.
On that day, she buried her blade here with her own hands.
But sadly, she never got to see the era of peace and prosperity they all talked about. Thirty years later, she had to take up this blade once more.
"Gu Xi?" Shen Yue flew up beside her, a lollipop dangling from his mouth. He nudged the dazed Gu Xi with his hand. "What are you thinking about?"
"Nothing." The nudge snapped Gu Xi back to reality. She stored the blade in her dimensional space, then turned and hesitated when she saw the lollipop in his mouth. "That lollipop...?"
Shen Yue shrugged. "Wei Heng made them. A few days ago, Mr. Chen and his team successfully de-mutated a sugarcane stalk, remember...?"
The research team used pre-apocalypse methods to make some cane sugar. Qi Xiang had wanted to try making blown sugar art, but Wei Heng couldn’t bear to see her waste it, so he ended up making a batch of lollipops instead.
’I heard sugar is supposed to lift your spirits, and Gu Xi’s been in a bad mood lately.’
Wei Heng had been worried sick about it.
Seeing her staring at his lollipop, Shen Yue thought for a moment, then reluctantly pulled another one from his pocket and offered it to her. "Want one?"
Gu Xi took it and leaped down from the tree.
When Qi Xiang saw the candy in her hand, she gave Shen Yue a teasing look. "You’re pretty good at passing off someone else’s gift as your own."
Shen Yue shrugged. Gu Xi ignored her teammates’ silent banter and said slowly, "This tree had a very high mutation level in the early days of the apocalypse, but for some reason, it didn’t survive the great mutation thirty years ago. Leaving it here now could be a liability. It’s better to destroy it."
Ye Junhan glanced at Gu Xi. "I’ll do it."
He pulled off his black tactical gloves, revealing a pair of clean, slender hands with well-defined knuckles. Purple arcs of electricity coiled around his fingertips, sparking intermittently.
At the same time, Wei Heng dropped to one knee and pressed a hand to the ground. His ability surged forth, and the earth churned violently. With a deafening CRASH, the massive crooked-necked tree toppled over.
Ye Junhan’s Thunder Net instantly enveloped the entire tree. In moments, the colossal crooked-necked tree was blasted to smithereens.
A breeze swept by, gathering the ashes into a pile.
Gu Xi glanced at Shen Yue.
Shen Yue shrugged nonchalantly and crunched down on the lollipop in his mouth.
Gu Xi looked away, stepped forward, and from the pile of ashes, she picked up a small piece of the tree’s heart, which had been burned to charcoal. She tossed it into her dimensional space.
Seeing this, Shen Yue pulled a foldable entrenching tool from his belt, walked over to Gu Xi, and asked, "Are you going to bury it?"
Gu Xi gave him a surprised look and slowly shook her head. "There’s no need."
Her bond with the crooked-necked tree wasn’t actually that deep. They had met during the cruelest days of the apocalypse, a time when any friend or family member could die at a moment’s notice.
In an apocalypse like that, sentiment was truly an extravagance.
That’s why Li Ming had taught her from a young age to control her emotions, to always keep a clear head.
In the past, Gu Xi thought she had succeeded.
She was indifferent to life and death. There wasn’t even a hint of slaughter or numbness in her eyes—only a perpetual, almost unnerving, calm.
Even though Gu Xi always told herself she was human, in the eyes of many, she was nothing more than a sharpened, humanoid weapon.
Gu Xi knew perfectly well that she had feelings.
But not many.
Shen Yue sighed. "Let’s bury it anyway." It would only take a few shovelfuls of dirt. It was no trouble.
As he spoke, he glanced at Wei Heng.
Wei Heng looked to Gu Xi for confirmation, then raised his hand. A small pit opened up in the ground.
Shen Yue handed the shovel to Gu Xi.
Gu Xi thought for a moment before taking the shovel and adding the first scoop of dirt. "All right." ’Consider this a burial for an old friend.’
’It’s the least I can do for our past acquaintance.’
Ye Junhan stepped up beside Gu Xi. "We should head back."
"...Right." Gu Xi tossed the shovel back to Shen Yue, not daring to look again, afraid she would get lost in her memories and waste what little emotion she had left.
The group retrieved the nearby cameras, climbed back to the top of the cliff, and after regrouping with the Qin sisters, drove toward their base camp.