Seeing Zhang Yong again, his temperament had changed beyond recognition.
To suffer such a sudden calamity—such a transformation was only natural.
But... something still felt off.
Just like when Jiang Wang had first seen him outside the Celestial Residence Secret Realm: although Zhang Yong had appeared reserved and timid, fitting the image of a descendant from a fallen noble house, Jiang Wang had inexplicably felt uncomfortable.
This "discomfort" was not because Jiang Wang harbored any negative opinion or ill impression of the man.
Quite the contrary—he had formed a favorable impression of Zhang Yong at the time.
It was simply a subconscious sense that something was not quite right, that something lacked naturalness. As though the state Zhang Yong had been in then—both the person and the moment—contained some subtle discord.
And now, this gaunt, emaciated version of Zhang Yong, though consumed by grief, deadness inside, guarded and in pain—Jiang Wang strangely felt that *this* was the real him.
There was no logical reason. It was the most direct feeling.
Regardless, having concluded that there was no prospect of recruiting Zhang Yong for the time being, Jiang Wang chose not to linger and waste any more time.
The State of Yang lay to the northwest of the State of Qi. The coachman was skilled, the horses pulling the carriage were fine steeds.
With the Chongxuan clan's name behind them, the carriage traveled onward smoothly, without obstruction.
And Jiang Wang sat quietly within, eyes closed in cultivation.
...
Fenglin City Domain.
Nearly all life had been extinguished. Only a faint life-fire still burned within the body of a man wasted to the bone.
No one knew how much time had passed.
In the Fenglin City Domain, time seemed to have lost all meaning. The only proof that any time had elapsed at all was the trail of graves behind him—stretching back in an almost infinite line.
He alone buried everyone.
He remembered that this place should have been the Wang clan's territory.
Ha—was there any corner of Fenglin City that he did not know?
How many years had he lived here?
Memory was such a torturous thing.
Ling Chuan trudged through the ruins.
The erosion of the netherworld qi should have claimed his life long ago, yet somehow he clung to a single breath.
That breath was not the breath of respiration, but a wisp of qi floating within his Celestial Palace—vividly divided between mystic yellow and white, the colors of heaven and earth.
Ling Chuan did not know that this was the Merit qi he had earned by reciting the Supreme Scripture of Saving from Suffering to deliver the souls of the dead.
Mystic white above, yellow below—the colors of heaven and earth.
All he knew was that he was still alive.
And since he was still alive, he had to keep doing something, and finish what he had started.
He was a man of conviction and perseverance.
It was precisely this tenacity that had kept his cultivation from falling too far behind.
Ling Chuan had lost count of how many corpses he had buried, how many graves he had raised.
He simply walked forward, saw a body, laid it to rest in the earth, and recited scriptures to deliver its soul.
Again and again, the same ritual.
He came to the most remote corner of the Wang clan's domain—likely the residence of the clan's most neglected members.
But Ling Chuan never cared about such things. He had never cared about poverty or wealth, status or beauty or ugliness. He was, as Zhao Rucheng had once called him, "a soft touch."
Strangely, it was here that the most people seemed to have died.
They had not perished in the earth calamity, but at the hands of some terrifying power—killed in an instant, utterly without resistance.
Ling Chuan pressed his dry lips together.
He began to dig a pit.
All along the way, he buried the dead and raised grave mounds behind him.
Before him was a small courtyard. To his surprise, amid an earth calamity of that magnitude, nearly every structure had collapsed.
Yet this small courtyard remained completely intact.
But desolate as it was, no one was left.
Ling Chuan pushed the door open and stepped inside. The first thing he saw was the rotting, putrid corpse of an orange cat.
The stench of death was nothing to him by now—these past days, he had grown accustomed to it.
What disturbed him was the cat's manner of death—it had apparently been dismembered by someone.
This cruelty made him frown.
He thought for a moment, then dug a small pit, buried the cat, and recited scriptures for it as well.
Ling Chuan continued forward. Entering the bedroom, he found the body of Wang Changxiang lying face-up. Because his cultivation had progressed considerably, the corpse had not yet begun to decay.
The expression on Wang Changxiang's face was one Ling Chuan had not seen on anyone else along this entire journey.
It was not pained at all. Rather, it held a hint of... relief?
Ling Chuan did not dwell on it. He stepped forward, lifted Wang Changxiang's body from the room, dug a pit in the courtyard, and buried him beside the orange cat.
When all this was done, he looked around. Under a reclining chair in the courtyard, he noticed a scripture book that had fallen to the ground.
It appeared to have been left open midway, dropped in haste.
Its owner likely never had the chance to pick it up.
Ling Chuan glanced toward Wang Changxiang's grave, then thought that while the courtyard's owner was probably not Wang Changxiang himself, they must have been closely connected to him.
He walked over, picked up the scripture book, and examined its cover.
The cover appeared to be hand-made by the book's owner—meticulous and carefully crafted. On the cover, in neat, composed characters, was written: *Scripture of Delivering the Beings*.
Ling Chuan could not help but sit down on the reclining chair and begin leafing through the scripture.
He was far too tired. But the exhaustion of the body was not the hardest part to bear.
What was truly unbearable was the anguish in his heart.
Every corpse he had buried with his own hands seemed to tell him that those experiences were not some nightmare.
They were real things that had happened, things that could never be undone.
Perhaps within the Dao scriptures lay some answer—a remedy for the soul's rootlessness.
Although the *Scripture of Delivering the Beings* contained no supernatural techniques or cultivation methods in itself, as a Dao scripture it was one of the core classics of the Penglai Island lineage.
Its full title was the *Supreme Cavern Mystery Precious Treasure Boundless Deliverance of the Beings Superior Wondrous Scripture*.
This scripture was hailed as the foremost among all scriptures, the ancestor of all methods, the source of the entire one-dharma realm.
Chanting this scripture was said to dispel heavenly calamities above and protect emperors, ward off poisons and pestilence below and deliver the common people—all men and women alike would be shielded and granted longevity.
It was a scripture for transmitting the Dao, not a foundational cultivation text, and therefore not strictly classified as secret.
Its original form was, of course, immeasurably miraculous, but copies carried no such supernatural power.
The true value lay in the mysteries of heaven and earth that the scripture expounded. One with wisdom might glean something of them.
Since ancient times, there had been no shortage of Daoists, Confucian scholars, and Zen masters who devoted their entire lives to studying scriptures without ever cultivating supernatural techniques.
And among such deeply learned scholars, it was not unheard of for one who penetrated the deepest secrets of the classics to achieve sudden enlightenment through great wisdom, attain great supernatural power in a single step, and ascend to the pinnacle of the extraordinary—a tale passed down as legend.
It was said that one who could fully comprehend the *Scripture of Delivering the Beings* would embody: "The Immortal Way values life; boundless is the deliverance of the beings. The eight gates are opened above; the soul soars through the heavens. Sins and merits, prohibitions and precepts, past lives and karmic ties—all receive salvation. The dead soul is reborn in a living body. The body is granted life, and its voice reaches all the heavens."
Of course, this was merely legend. No one had ever witnessed it.
As for the foundational cultivation scripture of the Penglai Island lineage—the *Supreme High Sage Yuchen Scripture*—that was truly immeasurable in its power.
Together with the State of Yu's *Purple Void Profound Marvel Supreme Scripture* and the Daluo Mountain's *Primordial Birth Scripture* and *Final Tribulation of the Opening Emperor Scripture*, it stood among the most potent cultivation methods under heaven.
What made this copy of the *Scripture of Delivering the Beings* special was the annotations left by its original owner.
In Ling Chuan's estimation, the author was likely an elderly Daoist devoted to a lifetime of scriptural study, who had somehow settled in the Wang clan's territory. The man possessed a profound understanding of the Dao classics, and his writing was plain yet elegant, steeped in the flavor of the Daoist tradition.
There were certain ideas Ling Chuan did not agree with, yet he had to admit they held a measure of truth.
But the further he read, the more he sensed an undercurrent of suppressed anguish.
"Perhaps, when one had read the scriptures to a certain depth, one had already foreseen today's tragedy?"
The thought drifted faintly through Ling Chuan's mind.
He picked up a withered leaf as a bookmark, tucked the scripture under his arm, and left the courtyard.
There was more work to be done—more souls to deliver.
He resolved to read two pages of the scripture each day, articulate his own understanding, and compare it against the annotations.
That would be one of the few small joys in these harsh days.
If he could still go on living.
Le Wen