bookbashuk Chapter 429 3 Days
Chapter 429 3 Days
Nie Lingfeng's pupils contracted sharply. His palm was still pressed against the ice, but the sensation under his palm had changed from a warm pulsation to a violent tremor, like a wall being pounded by a giant hammer from the other side, about to shatter at any moment.
"No." His voice finally came from his throat, not loud, but extremely firm, "You can't come out."
The voice from inside the ice wall paused for a moment: "What?"
"You're filled with hatred now." Nie Lingfeng withdrew his palm from the ice wall, took a half step back, and the lingering warmth in his hand evaporated into a thin layer of white mist in the sub-zero air. "Hundreds of years of sealing have trapped you into a ball of resentment. The first thing you'll do upon emerging isn't to see the light of day again, but to seek revenge. And you don't know how much power you have left—you might lose control."
"So what?!" The voice finally exploded violently, a rumbling sound emanating from within the entire ice wall. Cracks expanded visibly outwards, and large chunks of ice crashed down from the top, splattering across the valley floor and kicking up clouds of snow dust. "I've been imprisoned for four hundred years! Four hundred years! I've protected this Kunlun Mountain for a thousand years, and this is what I get in return—four hundred years without seeing the light of day! Why can't I hate?!"
"You can hate." Nie Lingfeng's voice wasn't raised, but every word was clear enough to reach everyone's ears despite the roar of the ice walls. "But you can't pay with someone else's life."
"Then use your life?"
An extremely dense stream of blue-gold Qi cleaved out from the largest crack in the ice wall, shaped like a curved claw, aimed straight at Nie Lingfeng's chest and abdomen! The speed was so fast that most of the people present didn't even have time to blink.
A flash of light.
Feng Baobao had somehow already crossed the three-zhang distance between them. The silver arc of her drawn katana, illuminated by the blue-gold qi, drew a long, thin, cold light, striking the root of the qi! The moment they clashed, a visible shockwave exploded, scattering shards of ice from the ground in all directions. Feng Baobao's blade drew a piercing, metallic sound across the qi, and she was forced back half a step. She turned the hilt of her katana in her palm to dissipate the remaining force.
At the same time, Nie Lingfeng moved. Instead of retreating, he sidestepped, drawing a short blade from his waist with his left hand and holding it horizontally in front of him. With his right hand, he forcefully gathered the surrounding Qi in his palm, forming a semi-transparent barrier that stopped the second stream of Qi that followed just two feet in front of him. The two streams of Qi exploded on the surface of his barrier, scattering blue-gold fragments like shards of glass across the ground.
"You can't stop me!" the voice roared. Seven or eight beams of light simultaneously erupted from the cracks in the ice wall, like a giant fan of light pushing open from beneath the ice. The entire ice wall began to bulge outwards at a visible speed, reaching its limit. "The array's core has been corroded! Even without you, I can break through on my own—"
"Senior!" Wang Ye suddenly stepped forward, standing half a body's width behind Nie Lingfeng. He clasped his hands in a respectful bow, his voice urgent and earnest. "The Nine Palaces Dragon Sealing Formation you mentioned is one of the ancient, long-lost formations of Wudang Mountain! If someone tampered with the formation's core, the residual power of the seal will backfire when you forcefully break through! At that time, the earth's energy within a hundred miles will instantly collapse, burying all the villages and towns below the snow line!"
The vibrations inside the ice wall paused for a very short moment—like the voice pausing after hearing the words "within a hundred miles." But it only paused for a moment.
"What do those humans have to do with me?" The resolute tone in his voice was even colder than before. "I've protected them for a thousand years, have they ever even thought of me for a moment?"
"The person who made the move at the core of the formation," Nie Lingfeng's voice suddenly broke in, calm yet cold, "did he know you were inside?"
The voice didn't answer.
"He knew. And he deliberately tore open the array's core with external force, letting you break free from the inside." Nie Lingfeng sheathed his short blade, straightened his body, and let his hands hang down, but an invisible ball of Qi still condensed in his palms. "Did you calculate his purpose in doing this?"
The bulging of the ice wall stopped. The light gushing out from the cracks paused for a moment, like a rushing river suddenly being blocked upstream.
"The moment you break free of the seal, you will absorb most of the dragon vein's power that was collapsing—in your current state of rage, you simply cannot control that flow, and the remaining aftershocks will radiate outwards from your body." Nie Lingfeng took a step forward, his gaze fixed on the glowing cracks. "The earth's energy within a hundred miles is crumbling, villages at the foot of the snow-capped mountains are swallowed by avalanches within minutes, and the main vein energy of the Kunlun Mountains is leaking out from the fractures..."
He paused when he said the last word.
"After all this has happened, you'll be the tip of that crowbar. And the person who helped you break the seal only needs to stand in a safe place and collect the overflowing dragon vein power. You don't need to be his blade; in his hands, you've been just a tool from beginning to end."
The sounds from within the ice wall fell completely silent. The light gushing from the crack receded somewhat within a very short time, like kindling being pulled from the bottom of a violently pulsating flame.
Then the vibrations inside the ice wall suddenly changed frequency—from a violent impact to a slower, more struggling pulsation, as if the voice was suppressing its anger, trying to rein in its momentum with the last bit of remaining reason.
"...You're right." When the voice rang out again, it was hoarse, yet held an indescribable weariness or forced awakening. "Someone is using me as a tool. I can feel that corroding power at the array's core isn't naturally waning—it's being forced in. Someone is consuming my anger to help me break the seal."
"It's not too late to stop the attack," Nie Lingfeng said. "Withdraw your power and stabilize the seal temporarily. Then tell me what you know—about the source of that corrosive force."
The light within the ice wall flickered for a dozen breaths, as if wrestling with some deeper conflict. Eventually, the expansion of the cracks slowed down, and the blue-gold light receded slowly from the edges of the cracks, leaving the stretched cracks on the ice surface white, frozen, and solidified into permanent scars.
"...I tried." The burning anger in the voice faded, revealing a more ancient weariness beneath. "I can't take it all back. More than 70% of the sealing array's core has been corroded, and the remaining 30% can barely hold on—it won't last much longer. At most... three days."
"Three days." Nie Lingfeng nodded. "That's enough."
He turned to face the crowd. The afterglow of the blue-gold light still lingered on his profile, and the faint vertical line between his brows had not completely faded, but the anxiety in his eyes had solidified into something colder and more composed.
"First, notify Chairman Zhao to send two more support teams to Nachitai to stand by. They won't enter the mountains; they'll only guard the valley entrance and passageways. Second—" His gaze fell on the pale cracks in the ice wall, "I need to find the person who tampered with the formation's core within these three days. He's somewhere in the mountains; he knows the direction of the dragon vein, and he used the power of Kunlun Mountain to break the formation. Find this person and cut off his movements first."
"And then?" Zhang Chulan asked, his thunder talisman already clenched in his hand, his fingertips pressing on the talisman paper until they turned slightly white.
"Then I'll come back and talk to it again," Nie Lingfeng said.
As soon as he finished speaking, a very long, low hum, almost touching the limit of hearing, suddenly came from the depths of the ice wall. The sound was neither angry nor violent, but it carried a profound meaning that chilled everyone to the bone.
"Your name is Nie Lingfeng," the voice said.
Nie Lingfeng did not answer, but tilted his head slightly as a response.
"I'll remember you." The voice, having lost its initial ferocity, now carried a heavy, oppressive weight, like the weight of an ancient glacier pressing down on every word. "Don't disappoint me within three days. Otherwise—even if I don't want to be his blade, you might not be able to stop me. I will awaken along with this mountain."
The last syllable of that sentence faded away in the wind.
Then the light inside the ice wall dimmed layer by layer, like someone turning off dozens of lights in a room one by one. Finally, only two dark blue spots remained lit in the deepest part, like a pair of huge eyes slowly closing.
Nie Lingfeng turned and started walking back. As he passed the crowd, he only said two words: "Let's go."
No one asked a question. Everyone quietly turned around and followed in his footsteps as they retreated out of the valley. Behind them, the broken ice wall slowly lost its blue light in the gradually closing wind and snow, like a city sinking into twilight.
Zhang Chulan was walking in the middle of the group when he turned around once.
The two points of blue light still shone in the deepest part, watching their backs through the newly gathered snow powder. In that instant, he felt that the expression in those eyes had changed—no longer like two flames that had burned for hundreds of years, but something more complex: weariness, anger, an expectation that could almost be called sorrow, and an emptiness like a dry well.
He turned back and quickened his pace, leaving the ice wall behind.
Three days. He silently counted the number in his mind. If that wall broke again after three days, no one could guarantee that what was inside would still stop and reason.
The wind howled hoarsely through the cracks in the Kunlun Mountains, its sound a mixture of lingering tremors from the depths of the earth, the suppressed gasps of a remnant soul after four hundred years, and the hurried, shattering footsteps of everyone treading on the ice—spreading down the mountainside.