All things come and all things go;

The lightness of existence, eternal reincarnation......

When the dim spiritual lamp in the air was lit, and the song of the requiem sounded in the snowy night, the young man seemed to see the desperate and numb emotions of this besieged city in the last days.

From early morning to dusk, countless corpses were dragged in one by one, stacked on top of the old corpses that had been placed here for a long time, until they formed a tower-like hill. In this temporary requiem of the temple, there are messy stumps, dried and stagnant blood stains, and the dead and rancid stench that even the wind and snow can't suppress.

As far as the eye can see, the whole world is like the legendary Netherworld Abyss, filled with the carnival of death.

However, no one cared about this, and the soldiers who had been improvised from all over the city were all crowded in this ancient temple called Norenji, dragging an unrecognizable corpse under the command of the alchemists, and moving it mechanically, like a wandering soul that had lost its mind, making it impossible to distinguish which were the real dead and which were still alive.

Everyone's faces were carved with numbness, which was the kind of numbness that can only be honed in such a purgatory, and the faces of old people who should have endured a lifetime of misery.

The eight tall requiem pagodas around it had moved outward again and again, and had been attached to the courtyard wall of the temple. If the frequency of corpses like this increases, I am afraid that even the walls of this temple will have to be torn down.

These eight spirit pagodas are the hub of this requiem array, and they are connected to each other by the spirit lamp hanging in the sky directly above the corpse mountain, faintly exuding gentle fluctuations. But in this snowstorm and more desolate night, the wandering and indifferent expressions of the requiems on the tower not only made today's ceremony seem a little hasty, but also made the faint flickering aura in the air seem a little sad.

As the final destination of all dead souls, this requiem ritual is one of the two most important rituals in the spiritual world today, and has always been known for its solemnity. But now, after months of continuous requiem ritual torture, all the practitioners have felt deeply tired.

In the crowd, a young man moved slowly between the mountains of corpses, not daring to go far, not daring to go fast. The corpse he was holding in his hand was the eighth he had dragged in today, so there was no need to waste extra energy on it.

The young man looked no more than fifteen or sixteen years old, his body was mottled with blood, his thin face was full of vegetables, his facial features were as hard as if he was beaten with iron, and his face had long since lost the childishness that he should have at this age. The military uniform made of coarse cloth was loosely put on his body, which showed his weakness even more.

The corpse in his hand looked a few years younger than him, and her relatively complete face showed that she had been a delicate girl in her lifetime. But at this moment, she was holding her hands down, her skin was pale, and her body had shrunk to the point that she couldn't look like it.

The boy remembers that he found her in front of a spiritual artifact shop in the east of the city called Falling Moon. When she found it, the shop was already dilapidated and abandoned, and she was the only one curled up on the ground, a pair of small hands clasped tightly to her chest so hard that she couldn't break it, and her body had already been frozen as hard as a stone by the wind and snow for days. Presumably, like the corpses that died on the streets, she walked alone in the wind and snow, and once she fell, she never had a chance to get up again.

Following the alchemist's instructions, the young man numbly placed her in the designated position, then mechanically turned around and prepared to leave. I just didn't take a few steps, but I couldn't help but look back.

He shook his head, a little surprised by his sudden compassion. As a new recruit, although he has not yet been on the battlefield, he has not experienced death. What's more, now in this Xunyang City, people can only hear about these deaths.

The young man showed a wry smile on his face, took a somewhat sour step, and walked towards the outside of the formation.

yes, death, who hasn't seen death?

For 280 days since the rebels besieged the city, no one inside the city could get out, and no one outside the city could enter. Dozens of city walls were attacked and defended at any cost, and the dead on both sides were like snowflakes entering the river, and they disappeared without a trace before they entered the water. The so-called life is so light that it makes people feel empty for a while.

Shi Jingtang, the Linghou of Xunyang, who was stationed here by the empire, had abandoned the city and fled as early as the beginning of the siege of the rebels, and took the countless spiritual treasures and beautiful wives and concubines he looted, along with the Moon Shadow River in the north of the city all the way to the east, and there was no trace of him.

If it weren't for General Xunchuan Shi, who had retired from the army and returned to his hometown to live in seclusion, he stepped forward in times of crisis, united with the spiritual refining monks on Lufeng Mountain outside the city to recruit the displaced people, build a large array, reorganize the defenders, and lead the soldiers and civilians in the city to fight to the death, I am afraid that even he would be like this girl, and he would have already become a member of this corpse mountain.

Except for the ration of military rations, there was no food to eat in the city, and hunger was everywhere. He had even heard that in some unknown corners of the city, there had been a meat market. A person like a little girl walking on the road is likely to be knocked out from behind, and then cut off the flesh and bones, and into the belly of some hungry ghost.

In the third month of the siege, the old and sick began to die in the city.

In another month, the young men began to die.

In another month, even the deep mansion compound in the south of the city began to hear terrible cries.

Then, with the onset of the snowstorm, the entire huge city with a population of millions began to fall into large-scale chaos and collapse. Countless people began to die from lack of food, disease, pestilence, and the disillusionment of the hearts and minds of the people after a long siege, and the despair that followed the loss of their faith in life.

The boy even felt a little surprised by the vitality of this girl, and really didn't know how her petite body could survive until now.

In addition to the lack of food and clothing, what is even more desperate is the rampant furious qi in the city, and the spirit alchemists in the city have also given it a sensational name - Soul Leaving Gu.

This Soul Separation Gu is colorless, tasteless, formless and formless, although ordinary people can't see it, but as a recruit, the young man knows that this is a deadly poison laid by the besieging rebels against the spiritual cultivators in the city. It has no interest in ordinary people, but it has an insatiable thirst for the soul. Spiritual practitioners who think highly of themselves often die quietly under its attack before they have even begun to fight.

It's ridiculous to say that before the siege of the city, those spiritual cultivators who regarded ordinary people as ants in the past could often rely on the spiritual energy for months without drinking or eating to be satisfied, but in this Xunyang siege, it was the first group of people to die.

For this reason, there was also a frenzy of investigation in the city. Countless spirit refiners, led by General Chuan Shi's henchman and the only soul refining venerable in the city, Shuofeng Lingzun, wanted to figure out the reasons behind these mysterious deaths.

But as one innocent back-the-pot after another was killed by the crazy crowd and captured by the army to behead and sacrifice flags, the spiritual cultivators in this city still died mysteriously one after another.

Just when everyone began to panic, in the end, it was an old blind man who lived in the riverside dock in the north of the city to solve the mystery.

The old blind man usually makes a living by singing, especially the record book of "Spirit Hunting Oath" has always been his repertoire. In the past breezy days, when the boy was just a small coolie who lived on the wharf in the north of the city, he often mingled with the old blind man, and even took him homeless to his home to listen to him sing those ancient heroic legends.

The two spent much time together in his humble room in the slums north of the city, and the boy never felt anything strange about the old blind man. But when the old blind man entered the general's tent and used an ingenious experiment to reveal the secret of this soul-forgetting Gu, it still frightened the young man and the defenders of the city.

The old blind man borrowed an ordinary spirit refining vessel from the spirit refiner who accompanied the army, injected a trace of purple spiritual energy into it, and then plucked a clump of hair from a newly dead spiritual cultivator. In the blink of an eye, the hair turned into a cloud of black gas in the vessel, biting towards the purple aura.

They were torn together, and before they were separated, they were annihilated together between heaven and earth.

As for the corpse of the dead comrade, the old blind man's demonstration told them that when these soul-leaving Gu poisons invaded the corpse's whole body, once the dead soul was controlled by it. Either become another source of the plague that is still raging in the city, or become a mindless zombie that attacks all living life.

So, thanks to that old blind man, and thanks to these Soul Leaving Gu.

If it weren't for them, these mountains of corpses would not have gathered in this requiem array, and these hastily dead people would not have enjoyed the requiem rituals that only spiritual practitioners could obtain in the past, so that their dead souls could truly rest in peace.

And an ordinary person as lonely and weak as this girl must only be able to decay in the more and more broken walls of this city, just like the corpses that have long been reduced to white bones. Then until they completely turned into a lonely soul and wild ghost controlled by this Soul Leaving Gu, wandering in this war-torn and chaotic world, looking for one host after another for these wars.

In the midst of such cranky thoughts, the young man suddenly found that he did not withdraw from the requiem array like a sea of corpses and blood according to the instructions of the spirit refiners, but walked back in the direction where he placed the girl!

Because he found out that she was not a corpse at all!!

Even though her body was already cold and her whole body was stiff. The shrinking petite body made him have no focus, which really took a lot of his strength, but along the way, a wisp of fluctuation still jumped up from her spiritual sea from time to time, and there was a trace of vague breath from the tip of his nose from time to time.

It's faint, but it's still there!

The boy kept laughing at his legs and secretly scolding himself for being nosy. But something strange in his heart kept driving him—something that lurked deeper in his body outside of reason and emotion—and it told the boy: When you meet, you can't leave it alone!

As for the rest, we'll talk about it later—