Chapter 168: Encountering an Old Friend Again, the Bitter Hundred Flowers Brew
Chapter 168 – Encountering an Old Friend Again, the Bitter Hundred Flowers Brew
The Road to Heaven was impossibly long.
Chen Changsheng walked its lonely expanse for fifty full years.
Over these five decades, he performed the final rites for exactly 5,898 corpses.
He did not recognize a single face among them.
Judging by their vestments, they were likely the newer generations of disciples taken in by the Purple Mansion Holy Land over the last few millennia.
However, on a bleak day in his fiftieth year of travel, a profound anomaly obstructed the endless path.
A colossal, shimmering sphere stood directly in their way.
The anomaly eclipsed even the greatest mountains; standing before it, Chen Changsheng was no more than an insignificant ant facing the vault of heaven.
“Heavens above!”
“To cleave through the void and establish an independent pocket realm… what terrifying mastery of the Dao!”
Gazing at the spatial sphere, White Marsh could not hold back his shock.
Yet Chen Changsheng remained entirely indifferent to this monumental display of spatial manipulation, for his Divine Sense had caught the familiar, lingering aura of an old friend.
After standing in silent contemplation outside the pocket realm for a long while, the Eternal Undertaker finally stepped through the veil.
……
A flat, ravaged wasteland stretched out as far as the eye could perceive.
Yet, bursting forth from this desolation was a towering, grotesque mountain of corpses that pierced the very clouds.
Met with the nauseating stench of ancient, dried blood radiating from the summit, Chen Changsheng’s footsteps ground to a halt.
At the base of the macabre monument stood a single, jagged stone stele.
“The Undefeated Daoist severed 103,500 heads. He fought a bitter war for a century and never yielded a single inch of ground!”
The inscription was brief. Chen Changsheng consumed its weight in less than a breath’s time.
Yet, the sheer gravity of those few carved characters rooted him to the spot for a full hour.
When the hour passed, Chen Changsheng lifted his foot and began his ascent up the mountain of the dead.
Staring at the solitary figure’s back, a profound, inexplicable sorrow seized White Marsh’s chest.
Even though the man was clearly doing everything in his power to walk slowly, he would invariably outpace everyone he ever knew.
Because his path possessed no end, and he could never afford to stop.
……
At the bloody summit.
A young man draped in a tattered Daoist robe sat cross-legged amidst the carnage.
“You have finally arrived. I knew you would find me.”
A faint, tranquil smile graced the Daoist-robed man’s lips as his gaze met Chen Changsheng’s.
Frowning at this sight, Chen Changsheng cast him a reprimanding look.
“Slipping away like thieves in the night without so much as a whisper… you lots are increasingly forgetting your manners around me.”
“Hehehe!”
“Leaving you in the dark was a unanimous decision we all agreed upon.”
“You possess a free and unbound nature, and your circumstances defy the heavens.”
“If we had dragged you into this slaughter, it would have been no different than locking you inside a cage for eternity.”
“I am, after all, your Senior Brother. How could I ever allow you to be caged?”
“Bullshit!”
Chen Changsheng rudely cut off Song Yuanshan’s grand speech.
“The seat of Temple Master for the Shangqing Temple rightfully belonged to me. If I hadn’t willingly tossed it aside, do you think your rear end would have ever touched it?”
“Therefore, by all laws of the Dao, I am the Senior Brother.”
Watching Chen Changsheng’s feigned indignation, Song Yuanshan’s eyes crinkled with deep amusement.
“The Great Dao does not entertain ‘ifs’. I am the Master of Shangqing Temple, and my seniority eclipses yours.”
“Thus, you are doomed to be the Junior Brother until the end of time!”
“I will grant you ten breaths to reorganize your words. If you still insist on this treacherous rebellion,”
“then you can forget about tasting my Hundred Flowers Brew.”
At the mere mention of the “Hundred Flowers Brew,” a brilliant light flared in Song Yuanshan’s eyes.
“Is it from the vintage we buried back then?”
“Exactly. The very same batch we fermented during our first expedition into the Boundless Secret Realm.”
“So many epochs have drifted by… I never imagined you kept any. Hurry, bring it out and let me savor it!”
“I have attempted to replicate the Hundred Flowers Brew myself over the centuries, but it never possessed that exact same flavor of the past.”
Yielding to Song Yuanshan’s urgent demands, Chen Changsheng withdrew an earthen wine jar from his spatial ring and presented it forward.
A single breath later, Song Yuanshan’s voice echoed with pure elation, “Excellent wine!”
“This is precisely the taste of our youth!”
Yet, despite the sheer joy vibrating in his words, Song Yuanshan’s physical body remained deathly still. His lips never parted by even a fraction of an inch.
Song Yuanshan was dead!
He had exhausted his life force and perished centuries ago!
The entity conversing with Chen Changsheng was nothing more than an ephemeral wisp of residual Divine Sense clinging to the mortal coil.
Projecting his lingering emotions into those lifeless eyes was the absolute limit of his remaining power.
“To taste a mouthful of the Hundred Flowers Brew at the very end… I truly face the void without a single regret.”
The fading Divine Sense continued to imprint its thoughts into Chen Changsheng’s mind, even as the final glimmer of light began to recede from Song Yuanshan’s pupils.
Watching the light die, Chen Changsheng tilted his head back and took a long swig directly from the jar. He spoke with a quiet, hollow calm.
“The wine has spoiled. The moment it hits the tongue, it turns bitter and impossible to swallow. I will brew a fresh batch for you another day.”
“Do not spout nonsense about things you cannot comprehend. This is the finest wine I have tasted in my entire existence.”
“Ah, that reminds me. When you buried Third Senior Brother, did you let him have a taste?”
“No. The grief was a bit overwhelming at the time, and it slipped my mind.”
“I only remembered the wine after I had already laid him in the earth, so I could only pour it out over his grave.”
“And he had to share that single jar with the Master and the other Senior Brothers. If I let them drink their fill, there wouldn’t have been a drop left for me.”
“Hahaha!”
“Third Senior Brother valued his liquor more than his own life! If he knew of this injustice, he would be furious enough to claw his way out of the underworld to throttle you! Not even First Senior Brother would be able to hold him back!”
“My fortune surpasses theirs completely. I was able to personally savor this vintage.”
“Once I join them in the Yellow Springs, I will absolutely rub it in their faces.”
With those final, boastful words, Song Yuanshan’s last thread of Divine Sense shattered into nothingness. Simultaneously, his physical shell collapsed, crumbling into a mound of fine, gray ash.
Staring at the dust before him, Chen Changsheng slowly tipped the earthen jar, pouring the fragrant Hundred Flowers Brew out onto the gruesome mountain of corpses.
“Gentlemen of the fallen, I am an undertaker by trade. Under normal circumstances, it would be my solemn duty to encoffin every last one of you.”
“But you serve as the final testament to my Senior Brother’s martial prowess. Your piled bones are the undeniable proof of the Undefeated Daoist’s glory.”
“Therefore, I shall leave your corpses untouched. Accept this meager cup of wine as a token of my sincere respect.”
“May you rest upon this peak for all eternity. As for me… I am taking my Senior Brother home.”
Having delivered his eulogy, Chen Changsheng crouched down. With trembling hands, he reverently gathered Song Yuanshan’s ashes, placing them pinch by pinch into the empty wine jar.
The ritual was agonizingly meticulous; he was terrified of leaving even a single speck of his brother’s essence behind in the bloody dirt.
Since the man had cherished the Hundred Flowers Brew so deeply, it was only fitting that the vessel which bore the wine should now bear him.
After all, this very clay jar had been shaped and fired by Song Yuanshan’s own hands, so many lifetimes ago.
……
Half an hour later.
Chen Changsheng had gathered every last particle of ash. Refusing to be careless, he swept the summit three separate times with his Divine Sense to ensure absolute completion.
Once certain that nothing remained, he folded Song Yuanshan’s tattered Daoist robe and tucked it into the jar alongside the ashes. Finally, he withdrew a meticulously prepared coffin from his spatial ring.
The wood of this casket was not wrought from any divine or luxurious timber; even the mortise and tenon joinery was endearingly crude.
“Senior Brother, in those days, I carved coffins for every single one of us. Today, the very last one has found its master.”
“The Shangqing Temple is finally reunited.”
Placing the urn safely inside, Chen Changsheng sealed the lid, stored the coffin away, and turned his gaze toward the horizon.
Song Yuanshan’s journey had halted here; this peak of carnage was his absolute end.
But Chen Changsheng had not yet reached the precipice of the Road to Heaven, nor had he reached the twilight of his eternal life.
Therefore, he had no choice but to keep walking. No matter how many old friends he found broken and stationary along this bloodstained cosmic highway, the Eternal Undertaker could only shoulder their memories and press ever onward.
……