The cavern was deep.
A ghostly green light seeped from the cavern walls, illuminating a passage that sloped downward. The stone walls on either side were covered in thick tree roots, like the veins of an entire mountain laid bare. Every single one pulsed faintly.
They walked for about the time it took to drink a cup of tea before the passage suddenly opened up.
It was a vast underground space, as if someone had hollowed out an entire section of the mountain's interior. The domed ceiling was too high to make out, and the surrounding rock walls were crawling with dense masses of tree roots. At the very center of the space stood a tree.
No. Not a tree.
A heart.
A gigantic, dark-brown tree heart lay exposed to the air. It had no bark, no branches, and no leaves—only its innermost wood grain, spreading outward in concentric rings, as if three hundred years of time had been compressed into a single piece of amber. The surface of the tree heart was covered in black patterns. They writhed slowly, as if something were crawling inside.
Resentment.
Chen Yu could feel it. The sensation was neither cold nor hot, but an indescribable heaviness, as if hundreds of people were crying in his ears at once.
An old man sat in front of the tree heart.
Calling him an old man wasn't quite accurate—his lower body had already merged with the ground. Thick roots spread out from below his waist and burrowed into the surrounding rock walls. His upper body still retained a human shape, but his skin was dark brown and covered in bark-like cracks. His eyes were enormous, and his pupils were an inky green. Deep within them lay a profound weariness.
“You shouldn't have come in.” His voice was soft, carrying the rustling sound of an old tree swaying in the wind.
Then his eyes suddenly turned red, and his voice changed with them. “Now that you're in, don't even think about leaving!”
The red lasted only an instant before fading back to inky green. The old man shut his eyes in agony, his entire body trembling.
“...I'm sorry,” he panted. “I can't control it for long.”
Yingning stepped forward. “Senior, I'm Yingning Qin of Linghu Valley. My mother has told me about you—”
“The Qin family's daughter?” The old man opened his eyes, a trace of warmth flashing through his gaze. “How is your mother?”
“She is well.” Yingning's voice tightened slightly. “Senior, is there any way to purge the resentment?”
The old man was silent for a long time.
“There is,” he said. “The tree heart is my bonded spirit object. The roots of the resentment are embedded in the tree heart. If someone could purify the resentment inside it from within...”
His gaze shifted to the brass lamp in Chen Yu's hand.
“Your light,” he said, suddenly intent. “I sensed it at the cave entrance just now. That light... is so clean. It isn't lightning, and it isn't fire. It's pure light.”
He paused.
“Can you pour that light into the tree heart?”
Chen Yu looked at the brass lamp in his hand, then at the enormous tree heart covered in black patterns.
“I can,” he said, “but I've only just reached the Spirit-Sensing stage. If I output everything I have—”
“At least one shichen,” the old man finished for him. “I've calculated it. Your light is pure, but too weak. To burn away three hundred years of resentment, it will take at least one shichen.”
One shichen.
Chen Yu thought about it. The last time he invoked holy light, it had lasted perhaps a dozen breaths before he was completely drained. Now he was supposed to output everything he had for an entire shichen.
“During the process,” the old man continued, his voice growing lower and lower, “I will... be unstable. When the resentment is burned, it will resist. It will release things from inside the tree heart. Ghosts, vengeful spirits, all sorts of things I've taken in over the past three hundred years.”
“They'll attack the person doing the purification?” Wu Wei asked.
“They'll attack everything that's alive.”
The cavern fell silent for several seconds.
Chen Yu raised the brass lamp and stared at the slender wick inside its glass casing. The wick wasn't lit, but he could sense something inside waiting to be awakened.
“All right,” he said. “One shichen it is.”
He pressed his palm against the body of the brass lamp and spoke in a low voice.
“Let there be light.”
The wick flared to life.
Holy light surged from the brass lamp. It wasn't the explosive flash from last time, but a sustained, steady pillar of white light. The pillar wasn't thick—about the width of an arm—but it was blindingly bright, like someone had ignited a miniature sun beneath the earth.
The instant the pillar shot into the tree heart, the entire underground space shuddered.
The black patterns on the surface of the tree heart writhed violently, as though scalded. A shrill scream emerged from deep within it—not the old man's voice, but another voice: shrill, furious, and filled with pure malice.
“How dare you!”
Black mist spewed from the cracks in the tree heart and congealed in the air into one twisted humanoid shape after another. The figures had no features, only indistinct outlines and pairs of hollow eye sockets, within which dark-red light burned.
Vengeful spirits.
Dozens, then hundreds, poured from the tree heart like bees from a hive that had been stabbed.
Wu Wei charged forward, talismans unfurling between his fingers as lightning exploded outward. A thunder talisman shattered three vengeful spirits, but even more surged up from behind to fill the gap.
Yingning manifested her fox tails. Nine silver-white tails unfurled behind her, each wrapped in spiritual power as they lashed toward the vengeful spirits like whips. But her spiritual power was far less effective against them than Wu Wei's thunder talismans. She could only scatter them; after a few breaths, they would coalesce again.
The old man's eyes flickered repeatedly between inky green and dark red. He looked as if he were being torn apart by two opposing forces. When he was lucid, he used his roots to block some of the vengeful spirits. When he lost himself, the roots lashed toward Wu Wei and Yingning instead.
Chen Yu knelt before the tree heart, both hands gripping the brass lamp as he poured every ounce of his strength into the pillar of light. Sweat covered his forehead, and his arms trembled, but the pillar did not break.
A quarter of an hour passed.
His vision began to blur.
Half an hour.
He heard Wu Wei shouting something, but couldn't make out the words.
Three quarters of an hour.
His fingers had already gone numb.
Then he heard a voice.
Very small, very soft, coming from behind him.
“I'll hold them back.”
It was Xiaonian.
Xiaonian floated out of the oil-paper umbrella.
She was tiny, her entire ghost taking the form of a girl of seven or eight. The bluish-white glow around her was much dimmer than usual, but her eyes were bright—far too bright for a ghost.
She floated to the entrance of the tree heart, stopping in front of the crack from which the vengeful spirits continuously poured, and opened the oil-paper umbrella.
The canopy faced outward, blocking the crack like a shield.
The vengeful spirits slammed into the canopy with a sizzling sound, like ice thrown into a pan of hot oil. The oil paper began to glow—not with Xiaonian's ghostly energy, but because the umbrella's own spiritual nature had been awakened. That oil-paper umbrella, which had accompanied Chen Yu in his scholar identity for who knew how many years, released all the spiritual nature it had accumulated over that time in this moment.
But the holy light was scorching her, too.
She stood beside the pillar of light as the white radiance sliced through her ghost like knives. The edges of her body began to blur, like a piece of ice slowly melting beneath the sun.
“Xiaonian!” Wu Wei shouted. “You won't be able to hold out!”
“I know.” Her voice was perfectly calm, far too calm for a seven- or eight-year-old girl.
She didn't turn around.
“When I died in this mountain, no one came to save me,” she said, her voice growing softer and softer. “Now someone is saving this mountain. I want to help.”
The light on the canopy grew brighter and brighter. The vengeful spirits were held outside, shrieking but unable to break through. Xiaonian's body became increasingly transparent, but her hands remained clamped tightly around the umbrella's handle, perfectly still.
Time passed second by second.
Chen Yu's holy light was weakening. He had already reached his limit. His arms had lost all feeling, and he was relying solely on his will to maintain that last thread of light.
The old man's eyes turned completely dark red.
The resentment personality had fully taken him over. Roots lashed in from all directions, beating Wu Wei and Yingning until they staggered. More vengeful spirits poured from other cracks in the tree heart, bypassing Xiaonian's umbrella and circling around from the sides.
Just as everyone was about to collapse—
The old man's eyes suddenly turned back to inky green.
It wasn't the wavering alternation from before, but a decisive, complete clarity. It was as if he had used every last bit of his strength to wrench himself free from the resentment.
“Enough,” he said. His voice was soft, but every word was as steady as stone. “Three hundred years is enough.”
He closed his eyes.
Then his body began to glow.
It wasn't the white of holy light, but a warm, profound inky-green radiance. It was all the energy he had accumulated through three hundred years of cultivation—from an ordinary sapling, to awakening intelligence, to Spirit Sensing, Spirit Drawing, and Spirit Condensation. Three hundred years of time, condensed into everything he was.
He poured it all into the tree heart.
The inky-green light collided with the black resentment inside the tree heart, releasing a muffled boom. The old man's body began to crumble, starting at his feet and turning inch by inch into tiny points of light, like an old tree shedding its final leaf in autumn.
The resentment personality released one final shriek, sharp as fingernails dragged across glass.
Then everything fell silent.
The vengeful spirits dispersed. The black patterns faded from the surface of the tree heart, like ink washed away by clear water. The roots stopped pulsing and hung quietly against the rock walls.
The old man was gone.
Only two things remained where he had sat.
A section of three-hundred-year-old tree heart, its brown grain as clean as if it had just been washed by rain.
And a thumb-sized sapling poking its head from a crack in the old tree heart, its two tender green leaves trembling faintly in the windless underground space.
Xiaonian collapsed onto the ground.
The oil-paper umbrella was shattered, its ribs broken and its canopy burned through in several places. Her ghost was even more transparent than before, almost invisible, leaving only a vague outline beside the ruined umbrella.
Chen Yu crawled over with the last of his strength.
“Xiaonian.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. There was no pain in them, only something very quiet.
“Big brother,” she said, her voice seeming to come from a very distant place. “I want to go home.”
Chen Yu froze for a moment.
The newborn sapling suddenly moved. Its two tender leaves turned toward Xiaonian and released an incredibly faint inky-green glow. The glow fell over Xiaonian, making her outline just a little clearer.
Then a voice rang out.
Very soft, very distant, like the rustling of wind through leaves. But every word was perfectly clear.
“Go east... once you're out of the valley... thirty li away... there's a city...”
It was the old man's voice.
No. It wasn't the old man anymore. It was the newborn sapling, using the faint spiritual nature that had just begun to sprout within it to speak the old man's final words in his place.
“...In that city... there's a merchant surnamed Nie... He's been looking for you... for a very, very long time...”
Xiaonian's eyes suddenly lit up.
It wasn't ghost fire or spiritual light, but the kind of brightness that appeared in a child's eyes upon hearing the word “Daddy.”
“I know that city,” she whispered. “I remember the way home.”
She looked at Chen Yu and smiled.
It was the first time Chen Yu had ever seen her smile. Not the coquettish expression she had put on as a ghost, nor the helpless, tearful smile she'd worn when frightened, but the truly pure, spotless smile of a seven- or eight-year-old girl.
“Big brother, thank you.”
Her body began to glow. It wasn't the bluish-white light of a ghost, but a warm, gentle gold. Her outline slowly blurred in the golden light, like a lamp being softly covered by sunlight at dawn.
“Tell Daddy,” her voice drifted farther and farther away, growing softer, as if she were speaking from across an entire river, “that I miss him very much.”
The golden light grew brighter.
“Tell him I don't blame him.”
Then the light scattered.
Xiaonian was gone.
Only the shattered oil-paper umbrella remained on the ground. A faint, warm trace of spiritual nature still lingered on its canopy, like someone had just held it and the warmth of their palm had not yet faded.
Chen Yu sat on the ground, staring at the ruined umbrella, silent for a long time.
Wu Wei stood beside him, his eyes red, but he said nothing. Yingning turned away, her shoulders trembling faintly.
After a long while, Chen Yu reached out, picked up the ruined umbrella, and carefully placed it inside the book chest.
“Let's go.” He stood, his voice as calm as ever. “She said there's a city thirty li east.”
He paused.
“We need to tell her father.”