Chapter 1729: The Red Dust Flows; Fourth Calamity (2)

Chapter 1729: The Red Dust Flows; Fourth Calamity (2)

With practiced etiquette, the youth with two distinctively unique pupils—a peerlessly sharp saber and an all-encompassing sunlit star—carefully cleaned up the table, doing so with diligence and movements that could inspire indescribable emotions, entirely unbefitting a five-year-old youth, as if this specific event, this specific activity was mentally executed an uncountable amount of times.

Each piece of tableware was emblazoned with marks representing the Red Dove City’s Wei Clan, and as they were collected, flashes of nostalgic emotions flickered within the youth’s uncommonly steady gaze.

The young man, beautiful woman, and middle-aged woman had long since left. An extraordinary impulse crashed into the youth’s mind repeatedly, insisting and luring him outside to follow.

Needing him to follow.

The sounds of loud voices outside rang, indicating a great commotion was occurring, yet none of that moved the youth’s heart. Not even the faint, indistinct calls of his older brother were enough to do so. His mental fortitude prevented such indirect influence from affecting his heart or soul in the slightest.

This task wasn’t something he could ignore.

Not again.

After cleaning and clearing the table, the youth deeply inhaled before exhaling a breath of turbid air laced with expelled regret that no longer existed.

To him, this moment happened over a century ago. To many cultivators, this degree of time was utterly insignificant, like a single day for a mortal, easily forgotten. But there were things where, even after an eternity had passed, the feeling would feel as recent as a mortal’s current exhaled breath.

The youth caressed the chair that sat the beautiful woman. Her face was hazy here, but in his soul, that visage of unsurpassed grace that no other woman could hope to match in his eyes was something that couldn’t be forgotten even if Hell succeeded in eradicating his existence.

She had asked him to clear the table all those years ago, yet despite being so young, the youth’s rebellious streak often reared its head, and he stubbornly refused. He had so stupidly refused!

But just as his father was about to deliver some old-fashioned teachings to the youth, she—his mother—started to convulse mid-sentence. And then... and then... when she opened her eyes, well and healthy, her eyes no longer contained the warmth that his mother had. She no longer had the faintest idea who she was or where she was.

He could still recall the feeling of his heart sinking as he tried to reach out with his tiny hands to the bottom of the coldest depths from a single sentence:

“DON’T TOUCH ME!”

That moment... changed... everything.

It spurred his father into desperation to find a solution to her condition, leading them out of that door, and then out of their lives—forever.

“Chains of my past life;

shackles of unknown future;

Present is unchanged.”

But he must.

The Calamity of Mortal Despair was not about seeing through the illusions, but experiencing it and resisting the despair. To live it.

That reality.

With solid, firm steps, the youth exited the room to the outside as his Celestial Eyes receded in full force. Since he began cultivating this Spiritual Spell, his Celestial Eyes, something a part of ancestral lineage, he had never once deactivated its passive functions, especially the Gaze of the Celestial.

“Past ties bind present;

Will resets, mind resets, free;

Future in my eye.”

The red dust formed objects, weather, and people that were as true as one could imagine. The youth felt the red dust enter his lungs, caressing his soul, attempting to adhere to it when despair was generated from its deepest depths, desiring to entrench itself within.

As long as he felt true despair, plunged into the darkest depths of that negative, irrevocable emotion, the red sand would gather onto his soul and body until the very end. Then, Soul Deterge Mist would descend in full, cleansing him of his memories and sense of self as if justifying such eradication of himself.

But for those like him, Inheritors of Sin, if their souls and bodies could not withstand such forceful cleansing, they would vanish entirely—body, soul, and existence.

There was no afterlife.

There was no samsara.

This was it. Their final fight.

And he refused to lose.

“Little Wei! Come here!”

The voice of that steady, strong, masculine voice that was unmistakable to the youth, belonging to none other than his father, resounded out with authority.

Wei Wuyin reaffirmed his heart as the throbbing of his grey, draconic heart warmed his body, his two pupils and the mark on his glabella released gentle glows of light.

Today—he will not despair.

No, today—they will not despair.