pjbooks Chapter 85 The Difference Between Immortals and Mortals
Chapter 85 The Difference Between Immortals and Mortals
Morgana slowly rose from her throne.
Her movements were incredibly light, as light as a withered petal falling from a branch. Her long black hair floated silently in the air, each strand leaving a fleeting purplish-black crack as it brushed against the air. Her pair of black, empty eyes stared at Jiang Chen, something stirring deep within them.
"Jiang Chen." She uttered his name in a soft, delicate voice, yet it caused every distorted face in the void to simultaneously emit a silent shriek.
"I've been waiting for you for a long time."
Jiang Chen stood in the void, his hands in his school uniform pockets, his posture as casual as if he were admiring the scenery from his own balcony. His gaze swept over Morgana's face, landed on the purple-black throne, and then returned to her.
"Wait for me to come and kill you?"
Morgana's lips curled up slightly. The smile was devoid of warmth or emotion, containing only a pure, almost morbid, pleasure.
"Wait for me to read you."
She raised her right hand. Her five fingers were pale and slender, with a faint purplish-black halo around the tips. She waved her hand lightly in the air, as if brushing away an invisible layer of dust.
"You fought your way up, killing every one of my gatekeepers. What do you think was the purpose of those gatekeepers? To stop you? Or to wear you down?"
Her smile deepened.
"No. They are here to let me see you clearly. Every time you kill a gatekeeper, a fragment of its soul attaches to your consciousness and tells me everything about you. Your memories, your emotions, your fears, your obsessions. Your thousand years of killing, your thousand years of loneliness, your thousand years of indifference—I have seen it all."
She took a step forward. Beneath her feet, a purplish-black ripple appeared in the void, within which countless distorted faces loomed.
"But do you know? In the deepest part of your consciousness, there is a door sealed by true essence. I used the soul fragments of seventy layers of gatekeepers to barely pry it open a crack. And then I saw—those things hidden in the deepest part of the Immortal Emperor's Dao Heart, the things you least want to face."
Her black, hollow gaze was fixed on Jiang Chen.
"It's not fear. You no longer have fear. What's deeper than fear is guilt."
Jiang Chen's expression remained unchanged. However, the fingertips of his right hand, which was in his pocket, twitched slightly.
Morgana caught that subtle movement. Her smile widened.
"You've lived in the cultivation world for a thousand years. You've cultivated from the lowest Qi Refining stage to the Tribulation Transcending stage, from an ant chased by demonic beasts to a Celestial Emperor who shatters the void. You've killed more people than anyone you've ever seen in this world. You thought you'd forgotten all those unimportant people and things, but I've dug them all out of your sea of consciousness."
She raised her left hand, her fingers spread wide. A rotating purplish-black sphere of light appeared in her palm, and something was condensing inside it—no, something was being drawn from the void, given form, and given life.
"The first one."
Her voice echoed in the void.
"It's also the one you keep the deepest in your memory."
The ball of light exploded.
The purplish-black light surged in all directions like a tide, then suddenly receded at its peak. At the center of the receding light, a figure was coalescing.
It was a woman.
She wore coarse cloth clothes, her long hair casually tied back with a wooden hairpin, a few stray strands falling beside her ears. Her face wasn't stunning, but it possessed a gentle, jade-like softness. Her eyes were like autumn water, her eyebrows like distant mountains, and a faint smile played at the corners of her lips, as if she had been waiting for someone for a long time and finally heard familiar footsteps.
Her figure stood in the void, the hem of her simple robe fluttering gently. She raised her eyes and looked at Jiang Chen.
In those eyes, there was the misty rain of a Jiangnan town a thousand years ago, the dusk when walking with an oil-paper umbrella on the bluestone road, the ripples stirred by the wind when washing clothes by the stream, and the flickering candlelight when mending old clothes by the window under the moon.
"Ah Chen."
She spoke. Her voice wasn't loud, but it pierced through the entire void, through the live broadcast signal, and through the eardrums of every viewer in front of billions of screens.
Jiang Chen's pupils contracted slightly.
That was the first time in a thousand years that he had heard someone call him by that name.
Ah Chen.
A thousand years ago, he wasn't yet an Immortal Emperor. A thousand years ago, he was just an ordinary boy in a small town in Jiangnan. His father had died early, and his mother supported them by washing clothes for others. Their life was poor but peaceful. Next door lived a family surnamed Su, who had a daughter named Wan Niang. Wan Niang was three years older than him and had taken care of him like an older sister since childhood. When he was sick, she would prepare medicine; when he was hungry, she would bring him food; when he was bullied by the town's children, she would chase him for three blocks with a broom. Later, he grew up a bit and was no longer bullied, but every evening he would still go to her yard and sit on the threshold to watch her weave. While she wove, she would hum an unknown tune, a soft melody like a spring breeze.
He went to cultivate immortality when he was sixteen. A master from the Qingyun Sect passed through the town, discovered that he had spiritual roots, and offered to take him up the mountain. He stood at the courtyard gate and glanced back at the half-closed wooden door next door.
Behind the door, there was a pair of red, swollen eyes from crying.
He didn't say goodbye. Because he didn't know how to say goodbye. He just thought in his heart, "When I return after I've completed my cultivation, I will definitely come back to marry you."
But time in the cultivation world is different from that in the mortal realm. He cultivated at the Qingyun Sect for decades, and when he returned, the town had changed. The Su family's courtyard was empty; he heard that the Su family's daughter never married and eventually died.
Morghana's voice echoed softly in the void.
Jiang Chen remained silent.
He looked at the woman in plain clothes standing in the void, watching her walk towards him, each step treading on memories he hadn't touched in a thousand years.
"Ah Chen," she called again. Her voice was still soft, as soft as that dusk a thousand years ago when she stood up from behind the loom, smiled at him, and said, "Ah Chen, dinner's ready."
She reached out from her rough sleeve. That hand wasn't the pale, slender one she remembered; instead, it was covered in a purplish-black, soul-shrieking law—sharp bone spurs were forming at her fingertips, their surfaces swirling with a dark light powerful enough to tear apart a soul. Her face still bore that gentle smile, but her body was being transformed into a deadly weapon by Morgana's laws.
"Ah Chen, why didn't you tell me?"
Her voice remained gentle, but every word carried the power of the law of soul-piercing screams, like countless invisible needles piercing Jiang Chen's consciousness.
"Why didn't you tell me you were leaving?"
She walked up to him, raised her hand covered in bone spurs, and gently stroked his cheek. The gesture was exactly the same as it had been a thousand years ago—back then, she had reached out in the same way to wipe the grains of rice from the corner of his mouth.
"Why didn't you tell me you were coming back?"
Her fingertips were only an inch from his cheek.
Why didn't you take me with you?
As she finished speaking, her five fingers suddenly stabbed towards his face. The bone spurs tore through the air, emitting a sharp screech.
The difference between immortals and mortals is, in a sense, the real reason why Jiang Chen didn't take her with him.
Jiang Chen did not dodge.
He raised his right hand and gently pinched her wrist between two fingers. The bone spur stopped between his fingers, and the purplish-black soul shriek power melted silently before the true essence at his fingertips, like ice meeting lava.
Su Wanniang's face was being distorted and deformed under the erosion of the purplish-black light, but her eyes were still looking at him, without resentment or murderous intent, only the tenderness of that twilight a thousand years ago.
The smile remained on her lips, but her figure was beginning to dissipate into specks of light from the edge. The soul-piercing power that Morgana had bestowed upon her was shattered by Jiang Chen's true essence; she was merely a phantom pieced together from fragments of memory. When the power was drained, the phantom also lost its foundation of existence.
Then, she transformed into countless pale golden specks of light and vanished into the void.