Chapter 85: The Last Mercy

The broken beam groaned under the weight. Concrete debris fell like withered butterflies, and dust blurred Feng Yi’s vision.

The mechanical greatsword had opened on both sides like a giant clamp, pinning him firmly into the ruined wall.

Violent baleful qi turned into dark red lightning and pierced through his body. It gnawed at the corpse qi and corpse poison on him. Those foul things were torn to pieces.

But because the corpse qi and corpse poison had been temporarily cleared, he regained his clarity. This body soaked in corpse poison and the agony of near death for twenty-seven years had, at the brink of destruction, tasted a long-lost ease.

What absurd mercy.

That violent aura, nearly enough to shatter everything in the world, had actually let a zombie like him meet eternal sleep with a human mind.

In the final second of his duel with Xu Zhi, he had deliberately tilted that sword aside. A youth like that should not die under the blade of a man who had already died long ago.

The bronze ancient sword in his palm still carried a faint sword intent around its hilt, as if roaring, mourning, thanking.

‘Let me do something at the very end. Something right. That way I won’t disgrace you, Master?’

The violent red lightning tore open his flesh and peeled away old scars in his memory. In a daze, he seemed to see the woman always dressed in dark Daoist robes.

A bronze bell hung from the eaves of the Daoist temple on a snowy night. Soul-calming incense drifted from the alchemy furnace. That dark-robed figure always turned her back to him while studying scriptures. This time, she finally turned around.

‘You see… does this count…’

From the tangled qi, he caught a trace belonging to that youth. His broken finger bones crossed into a sword seal, defying anatomy. The broken ancient sword lit with moon-white glow and left his hand, turning into a streak of light that shot out of the ruins.

Orthodox sword?

The moon-white glow carried the last sword intent away. Just as his clarity was about to dim, the rubble was suddenly peeled open. A pair of hands reached into the ruins. Broken stone cut bloody lines across the fingers, yet those hands gently lifted his drooping head.

“…”

The owner of those hands whispered something. The voice was like a mother murmuring beside her dying son’s bed, but Feng Yi could no longer hear clearly.

He could not help thinking of his own death. He thought he would have been glad to hear words like that when he died.

Amber sunset spilled through the cracks in the ruins. A faint scent of mugwort reached his nose. The silhouette left by those hands in the amber light gradually overlapped with his master.

A bloody sweetness suddenly rose in his throat. That hint of sweetness mixed with warm liquid slid down his tongue. In his ears, he suddenly heard the gurgle of boiling liquid and the clatter of a lid being lifted.

It was a hallucination. He had often heard that sound as a child.

When he was young, his body was weak. His master brewed herbs to nurse him and strengthen his bones.

Feng Yi did not know what those medicines were exactly. He only remembered they were bitter, so bitter that every time he drank them, his small face scrunched up.

Later, his master always brewed a pot of sugar water as well. That woman was excellent at everything except cooking. The sugar water was sickeningly sweet every time.

But that sweetness was the only taste he could still remember now, just like the milk tea he had drunk in that girl’s clinic.

Sickeningly sweet. Cloying sweet.

Yet that sweetness always made him remember when he had still been human, when he had lived with his master in that small Daoist temple.

He never expected that at the very end he could smell fragrance and taste sweetness like a human. His long-stilled heart pumped blood again for the first time in ages.

Blood foam wound along the patterns of the mechanical blade. The baleful qi sustaining the mechanical greatsword was almost spent. If this continued, his mind would be swallowed by chaos again.

‘Can you do me a favor…’

He struggled to raise his left hand and grasped the wrist of the person before him. He caught her bloodstained fingers and pressed a broken steel bar into her palm.

Holding her wrist, he thrust it hard toward the tattoo at his waist.

“Crack!”

The steel bar pierced flesh with a sharp sound. One. Two. Three.

When the corpse qi core cracked, there would be three sounds. The first was the collapse of corpse qi. The second was his heartbeat, stopped twenty-seven years ago. The third was the extinguishing of his chaotic soul.

‘Thank you…’

In the flying concrete dust, the tattoo at his waist crumbled inch by inch. Along with his obsession, it vanished into the sunset passing through the hall.

The ill-fated youth finally lowered his head. The pain of twenty-seven years finally found release in that moment.

****

When Ye Zi arrived with her people, Lu Qingyu was trying her best to pull Feng Yi’s remains out of the giant clamp that the mechanical greatsword had become. Rubble had cut the young physician’s cheek. The moisture gathered in her eyes might have been tears or sweat.

But the restraint clamp formed by the Xuan Shu Sequence was clearly not something a young physician with no strength could open.

Her foot slipped, and she fell into the pile of broken stone. She got up, wiped her face, and began the useless work again.

Ye Zi did not know how many times Lu Qingyu had repeated this cycle before she arrived. She only found it hard to understand.

The one pinned to the wall was obviously the culprit behind all this. Obviously they could leave him there and wait for the logistics team to clean up.

Why was she doing something so pointless?

Ye Zi grabbed her wrist, wanting to lead her out of the crumbling ruins, but the physician, always gentle as water, knocked her hand away for the first time.

“He was human…” Lu Qingyu murmured, her words buried under broken stone. “At least at the end, he was human…”

Ye Zi fell silent. She could only order the logistics team to authorize the release of the restraint clamp.

The youth’s corpse, covered in wounds, crashed to the ground and raised a cloud of dust.

“His body needs to be contained in the Nine Abyss Forbidden Prison…” Ye Zi’s voice scattered into the sunset colors.

For zombies and the Soul Migration Secret Art, the Demon Suppression Bureau currently knew very little. Even Ye Zi only knew that after the previous zombie was executed, the War Preparedness Bureau had used three tons of cinnabar to seal it into a bronze coffin, which was still buried beneath the Three Gorges.

No one knew whether these living dead who walked between life and death could truly be killed, or whether they might suddenly revive one day in the future.

All they could do was use every method to contain and monitor them, until the day the Demon Suppression Bureau was utterly gone.

“I know…” Lu Qingyu said softly. “I know.”

She wiped the dust and blood from Feng Yi’s face with her sleeve. Lu Qingyu did not think his end was undeserved. She pitied this poor youth, but his hands had long been stained with blood.

So she only pitied him. If it happened again, she would still drive that steel bar into the youth’s waist.

But at least before this youth lay in the bronze coffin, Lu Qingyu could still give him the last bit of dignity.

“The containment procedure begins in five minutes.” Ye Zi suddenly reached out and wiped dirt off a piece of broken stone. She sat down on it, paying no mind to her image as Commander.

“You seem to have discovered him eight hours ago. Can you tell me what you did during those eight hours?”

She looked at the almost completely destroyed campus. Fortunately, Zhou Xuan had evacuated all civilians before everything began. As for the aftermath, let the people from the External Affairs Bureau worry about it.

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