Chapter 221 - The Sealed Battlefield and the Fallen Commander
Su Bai remained motionless for a long time.
The flood of memories had already ended, but what he had seen refused to leave his mind.
The Blank Stele had extracted the old man’s memories and delivered them with frightening completeness.
It almost felt as though Su Bai had lived through portions of another man’s life.
Only now did he understand the remnant soul a little better.
The old man had not always been the scheming remnant who tried to steal his body.
Long before Fallen-Star Sanctuary became a dead world filled with Ashen-Blood Miasma, he had been one of the battlefield commanders of the Heaven-Splitting Sword Sect.
A Void-Shattering cultivator.
In that era, the Heaven-Splitting Sword Sect had been one of the great powers of the region.
Su Bai had never heard the name. That alone told him how much time had passed.
In the deepest memories, the old man was younger.
His hair had still been black, his back straight, and his sword had not yet been buried beneath thousands of years of rust.
He had family. He had disciples. He had fellow elders who argued with him over wine and commanders who trusted him enough to place thousands of cultivators under his orders.
By the end of the war, almost all of them were dead.
Su Bai closed his eyes.
The fragmented memories he had obtained from the ancient soldiers before had shown him pieces of that battlefield.
Those fragments had not prepared him for the whole thing.
The sky in the old man’s memories was almost permanently red.
The air itself had been stained by blood, miasma, burned Qi, and the remains of formations powerful enough to distort the heavens.
Across the battlefield loomed the flesh masses.
Seeing them through the eyes of someone who had actually fought them was completely different from seeing their weakened remnants beneath the altar.
Some were larger than fortresses. Others spread beneath the ground, forcing veins of black-red flesh upward through ruined formations before bursting open and creating new bodies.
Cutting them apart did little. Burning them only slowed their recovery, while freezing them only delayed it. Even after most of a flesh mass had been destroyed, whatever remained would begin spreading again until the creature gradually rebuilt itself.
The real horror began when the battlefield filled with faces people recognized.
False Bodies appeared wearing the forms of dead cultivators. The Soul-Bloom Returnees were worse.
The old man had personally executed one of his former disciples after the thing returned wearing the young man’s body.
That memory remained unusually clear.
The disciple had called him Master.
The old man had cut off its head without answering.
Only after the battle ended did he vomit blood behind a collapsed formation where none of his soldiers could see him.
Su Bai slowly exhaled.
The war had not collapsed immediately.
The ancient cultivators resisted.
Sect formations were combined.
Enemies who had spent generations fighting one another stood on the same walls.
Entire clans abandoned ancestral territories to reinforce the battlefield.
For a time, they actually pushed the corruption back.
But it was not enough.
Every prolonged battle favored the flesh masses.
The ancient powers eventually did something they had avoided until there was no other choice.
They contacted their ancestors in the Immortal Realm.
The memory changed.
Su Bai saw thousands of cultivators kneeling beneath an enormous formation carved into the earth.
Spirit Stones vanished by the mountain.
Blood from high-ranking cultivators flowed through formation grooves.
Above them, space gradually opened.
The moment the Immortals answered, the battlefield erupted in celebration.
People cried. Some collapsed to their knees. Others laughed while still covered in the blood of their companions.
The old man had laughed too.
He had truly believed the war was over.
Immortals had descended. What could possibly remain beyond them?
Su Bai’s expression slowly hardened.
The memory continued.
The Immortals’ presence alone made the mortal cultivators struggle to breathe.
The old man remembered thinking that any one of them could have slaughtered every commander on the battlefield without drawing a second breath.
One of the enormous flesh masses surfaced shortly afterward.
An Immortal raised his hand.
White fire descended.
The entire creature disappeared.
Flesh, blood, miasma, and even the ground beneath it were burned until nothing remained but a glassy crater.
The battlefield erupted in cheers.
But then, the Immortals did not celebrate.
That was the first thing the old man remembered noticing.
Their expressions remained grim.
Seconds later, the crater moved.
A strand of black-red flesh pushed through the melted ground.
Another followed.
The flesh spread rapidly, dividing and reconnecting until the mass began rebuilding itself from somewhere deeper below.
The cheers died.
The Immortal who had destroyed it merely watched.
There was no surprise in his face.
That frightened the old man more than the regeneration itself.
The Immortals had expected it.
They tried other methods afterward.
They tried severing, incineration, suppression, and even attacks from the descended Immortals that tore open space itself, reducing entire sections of the battlefield to ruins.
The flesh masses suffered.
Some were weakened severely enough that mortal forces could push forward for days.
None of the old man’s memories showed one being permanently killed.
Su Bai frowned.
That did not prove they were immortal. It only proved that nothing the old man had witnessed could finish them.
More importantly, the Immortals had not descended without preparation.
They had brought enormous formation cores, ancient weapons, sealing chains, and specialized arrays that had no purpose in ordinary warfare.
The moment Su Bai saw them through the old man’s memories, he understood what the remnant had meant.
The Immortals had come intending to seal the creatures from the beginning.
Whatever experiments they performed afterward had not changed the real plan.
That realization had changed something in the old man too.
At first, he felt relief.
The Immortals knew the enemy. That meant they must know how to stop it.
Later, relief became something uglier.
The Immortals refused to explain what the creatures were.
They issued orders.
Questions received almost nothing in return.
The mortals fighting beside them knew only what they needed to know to continue fighting.
The old man came to resent them for that.
Su Bai saw an Immortal lose half his body holding down a flesh mass while another drove an ancient weapon through its core.
The survivors showed no arrogance afterward.
If anything, the Immortals looked increasingly exhausted.
But the old man could never forget the way they had arrived already knowing that victory would not mean killing the enemy.
It would mean imprisonment.
He had wondered many times what kind of enemy could make Immortals descend into a mortal realm carrying sealing tools before the battle had even begun.
He never received an answer.
The final sealing started soon afterward.
Su Bai’s breathing slowed as the memory expanded around him.
The entire battlefield shook.
"Boundary Pillars" descended one after another. They were sealing nails.
The Immortals spread across the region.
Ancient weapons were driven into the largest flesh masses.
Chains of light crossed mountains.
Formation lines connected the sealing nails.
Space itself began to distort.
The battlefield screamed.
Su Bai had no better word for it.
Mountains cracked while remaining strangely fixed in place. Rivers stopped flowing. Entire stretches of land shuddered as the formation separated them from whatever existed beyond.
The ancient battlefield was being torn away from the cultivation world.
That was the birth of Fallen-Star Sanctuary.
Except, nobody inside called it that. To them, it was still the battlefield.
The prison had simply closed around them.
The old man had initially believed there would be an evacuation.
There was none.
The sealing could not wait.
The creatures were still multiplying.
False Bodies were already moving toward distant populated regions.
Every delay allowed more corruption to escape.
The Immortals activated the final formation while countless mortal cultivators remained inside.
The old man never forgot that moment.
It’s not because someone announced they had been sacrificed.
Nobody did.
He simply looked toward the horizon and watched the outside world disappear behind a wall of distorted space.
That was when he understood.
They were not leaving this place anymore.
His hatred toward the Immortals began there.
Su Bai watched the memory without sharing the conclusion completely.
From the old man’s perspective, it was easy to understand.
His family was inside.
His sect was inside.
His soldiers were inside.
The people ordering the sealing had known what would happen and still activated it.
But Su Bai also saw things the old man had been too furious to care about.
The Immortals remained inside too.
They continued maintaining the seals. They fought beside the trapped mortals.
Whether stronger Immortals could have descended or whether the people who came had been nothing more than expendable forces was something the old man never learned.
He had simply believed that somewhere above them, stronger people must have existed.
That belief became another source of resentment.
If stronger Immortals existed, why had they not come?
If they could not come, why had nobody explained why?
If the battlefield had to be sealed, why had so many people been left to die inside it?
The memories gave no answers. Only the questions remained.
The sealing was not finished once the battlefield disappeared.
That was when the slow death began.
The Boundary Pillars drew continuously upon the spiritual energy of the separated realm. So did the formations. So did the weapons pinning the flesh masses.
The prison needed power. The battlefield provided it.
At first, the difference was barely noticeable.
Months passed. Years followed. The ambient Qi became thinner.
Ashen-Blood Miasma continued spreading. False Bodies continued appearing. Returnees continued hunting the surviving defenders.
The cultivators trapped inside began retreating.
The strongest remained near the inner battlefield as long as they could.
Those who could no longer contribute were sent outward.
What later generations would call the Outer Area gradually became a refuge for those incapable of continuing the deeper war.
The old man remained.
He was one of the commanders.
His Heaven-Splitting Sword Sect had already lost most of its experts, but he continued leading whoever remained.
The memories became darker after that.
There were fewer armies.
Positions that once held tens of thousands of cultivators were defended by hundreds. Later, dozens.
The old man fought until his meridians cracked.
He fought while the spiritual energy around him became so thin that every major technique consumed reserves he could no longer replace.
Eventually, even a Void-Shattering cultivator reached his limit.
His final battle was not glorious.
There was no great duel beneath the heavens.
The old man simply continued fighting until his Qi no longer answered.
A False Body wearing the face of someone he once knew drove a weapon through his chest.
He still killed it.
Afterward, he collapsed beside his sword.
The Void-Tempering Soul Scripture was the only reason anything of him survived.
As his body died, he forced the remains of his soul into the sword and entered dormancy.
He believed someone would eventually find him.
Nobody came.
Years disappeared.
He awakened occasionally. The battlefield changed every time.
Miasma replaced clear skies.
Formation lights dimmed.
The spiritual energy of the realm continued declining as the Boundary Pillars and sealing formations consumed whatever the isolated battlefield could still provide.
The old man watched entire generations of survivors disappear without ever knowing how much time had passed.
What finally broke something inside him happened much later.
He awakened and encountered people from the Outer Area.
At first, joy almost overwhelmed his weakened soul.
He recognized their clothing. Some wore remnants of uniforms belonging to forces he had once helped protect.
He believed descendants had survived.
One of the figures turned toward the sword, and the old man immediately recognized him as a soldier he had personally ordered to retreat toward the Outer Area during the final years of the war.
Countless years had passed since then. Even if that man had somehow survived, he should not have remained unchanged.
Yet there he stood with the same face, while several more familiar soldiers gathered behind him.
The old man understood.
They were False Bodies.
The people he had sent away in the hope that they might survive had eventually been turned into the enemy’s tools.
The old man’s remnant nearly collapsed.
His hatred became the thing that kept him awake after that.
Hatred for the creatures.
Hatred for his own weakness.
Hatred for the Immortals who had sealed them inside and never returned.
Hatred for a world outside that continued moving while everyone he knew disappeared inside a forgotten prison.
...
Su Bai slowly opened his eyes.
The ruined recess returned.
Ashen-Blood Miasma drifted through the surrounding cracks as though nothing had happened.
The ancient sword remained in his hand.
For a long time, Su Bai said nothing.
Finally, he sighed.
"That’s a lot to leave behind."
He could understand the old man much better now.
That did not mean he agreed with him.
The remnant had not been evil in the simple sense.
Countless years of isolation had taken whatever remained of him and hardened it into obsession.
When Su Bai appeared, the old man had finally seen a possible way to continue.
Unfortunately, his solution had been to steal someone else’s body.
Su Bai looked down at the sword.
He had never particularly liked the idea that a good objective could wash clean every method used to reach it.
People who committed cruel acts while insisting righteousness made those acts acceptable were still committing cruel acts.
Calling something necessary did not automatically make it right.
At least the old man had understood that in the end.
He had never begged Su Bai to forgive him.
He had admitted what he had done and accepted the consequence.
Su Bai could respect that much.
Whether the old man should be called righteous or evil was something Su Bai no longer cared to decide.
A person could probably be both better and worse than a single word allowed.
His attention shifted inward.
Su Bai’s expression became strange.
"Senior..."
He gave the sword a light shake.
"You really should have just handed it over normally."
Within his mind, the old man’s true inheritance remained.