Xu Qing was smiling, and it was beautiful. Although her hair was white and her face covered with wrinkles, her smile was as beautiful as ever.
She gazed softly at Meng Hao, and a glow filled her face that could almost be described as holy. She appeared to be seeing everything that had happened on Mount Daqing and in the Reliance Sect. Each scene ended with Meng Hao, and when that happened, her eyes seemed to fill with all of the love that existed in her life.
She had a simple personality, and was not the type of person to allow the seeds of love to be planted easily. However, once those seeds were planted… they existed for a lifetime.
She held Meng Hao in her arms as she walked forward step by step, directly into the ghastly cave mouth in the side of the mountain, the Rebirth Cave.
Stepping into the cave was like passing through the barrier that existed between life and death. In that instant, everything turned black, and no more warmth existed. There was not even a scrap of the life that existed in Heaven and Earth. The only thing that remained was stifling death and infinite coldness.
The outside of the Rebirth Cave, and the inside of the cave, were two different worlds.
One was a world of life, the other was a world of death.
When Xu Qing carried Meng Hao inside, all of the wills inside the cave retreated back into the recesses of the cave to watch from afar.
To them, when Meng Hao and Xu Qing were on the outside, they were people from a different world. Not only were they envious and jealous of them, they also scorned and disdained them.
But now that Xu Qing had carried Meng Hao into the Rebirth Cave, they were all the same, and all existed in the same world.
Here, there was no power of Heaven and Earth. When living things entered the cave, their life force would fade away even more rapidly than before. When it disappeared, when they were inundated with death, then all they could do was wait for the supposed… awakening.
Xu Qing walked onward with Meng Hao, her face pale, her body trembling. Her life force was rapidly fading away, and as for the single strand that existed within Meng Hao, it would soon be completely gone.
In the moment when Meng Hao’s strand of life disappeared, Xu Qing kissed his lips again, delivering more of her own life force… into him.
By the time she had walked a few dozen meters into the cave, Xu Qing’s face was completely ancient, and her body was extremely withered. She was thin and emaciated, with no trace of youth left in her at all. She had lost everything.
She sat down cross-legged.
“Meng Hao,” she murmured, “I can’t go any further….” He now lay resting across her legs, his face devoid of blood, his features ancient. She looked down at him. “When I joined the Reliance Sect, I had already promised myself that I would never marry anyone, not for my entire life. I would not become someone’s beloved. Instead, I would focus solely on cultivation….” She stroked his face with a hand that had once been as lustrous as jade, but was now dried up and old.
“But then you came along….” she said. Her face flushed a bit as she looked at him for a long moment. Then she leaned down and kissed him again, delivering more of her life force.
As the life force entered him, a bit of color returned to his face. On the other hand, Xu Qing’s only became more withered. The amount of life force she had was only growing less and less.
“You had only been in the sect for a short time when you happened to get that medicinal pill,” she murmured. “When you ended up giving the pill to me as a gift… my face was calm, but my heart was actually filled with joy.
“Not because of you, but because of the pill.” She smiled. “I gave you the Immortal’s cave because I figured it would make us even. But then, you crafty little fox, you managed to entangle me even further. You got your hands on a Cosmetic Cultivation Pill….” When she thought back to everything that had happened back then, her smile grew sweeter, and she gently stroked Meng Hao’s cheek.
“Did you know that when you killed Zhao Wugang, I secretly helped to make sure no one found out? Down to this day, I don’t think you ever realized that.