Chapter 76.1 White Hair

It seemed like just a second, but also felt like a century.

Tantai Jin was finally able to move, and he slowly hugged the cold corpse under the city wall. He hugged her tightly, the bloody tears from his left eye falling into her hair.

“I don’t believe it,” he whispered, crying and laughing like a child. “Why didn’t your Hidden Dragon Guards save you? Aren’t you…… amazing? You can even kill me, why, why would you do this? This is a joke, it must be a joke.”

“The Fuci bracelet, that’s right, as long as your soul is still here, you won’t die.”

He seemed to have grasped onto one last straw, and frantically searched for the bracelet.

The golden Fuci bracelet was shattered beside the young girl, buried in the winter snow.

Thousands of soldiers saw their emperor frantically looking for the broken pieces in the heavy snow.

The Fuci bracelet fragments cut his hands bloody. He gripped them tightly, not daring to lose a single piece.

“Look, I got it back.” Tantai Jin’s face was covered with the blood pouring out of his left eye, but his eyes were full of hope as he hurriedly pieced the fragments back together.

However, the broken Fuci bracelet would never be whole again, and the young girl’s body rested on his lap silently. Her hand slipped out from his grasp.

He expressionlessly took her hand again and blew on her icy cold palm.

“It’s too cold outside, let’s go home.”

He picked up her badly mangled body and passed by Ye Chufeng. Ye Chufeng sadly said, “Your Majesty!”

The emperor in black ignored him and kept walking with the young girl in his arms.

Heavy snow fell on his shoulders.

Nian Muning also couldn’t help but say, “Your Majesty!”

He kept walking and walking, not daring to stop. Behind him was his huge and mighty army, and in front of him was the colorless snow. Just like the year when Tantai Jin had met Su Su, the young girl who’d crashed into his arms in a panic.

But now, she no longer had any temperature.

More than seven hundred days and nights, those memories finally slowly becoming clear——

She once went against the crowd, killing the Scarlet Flame Wasps to find him, she helped him up from the heavy snow, and fought against King Zhao for him;

She once picked him up by the lake in the village and gently cleaned the wound in his left eye;

In the peach blossom cocoon, she hugged him, surrounded by swirling petals, and in the endless nightmare, the warm and soft sensation on his lips was her kiss.

Together, they had seen the palace of the Xia Empire, the moon from the town, the vast river, and the demons and monsters of the world.

The infatuated fox demon, the ten thousand-year-old zombie, the pitiful Clam Princess, and walked through a lifetime in the Fleeting Life Wisdom……

Tantai Jin remembered, those dust-laden things from the past that had left no ripples in his heart turned into stormy waves in an instant.

He remembered how he’d been full of delusion and joy, stitch by stitch, stitching his hopes into the veil with his own two hands.

Seeing her, his heart couldn’t help but rejoice, couldn’t help but watch her, follow her.

But now——

The Soul Eating Flag was torn, the old Daoist inside was dead, and even the Fuci bracelet that had trapped her was broken.

The belated string of affection had taken root and sprouted, like a climbing vine, growing wildly and entrapping him. His heart ached, his whole body ached, and it even stung to breathe.

What should I do, who will help me save her……

Nian Muning caught up and saw the youth, who didn’t dare to turn back, finally collapse and kneel in the snow.

His ink-black hair turned white inch by inch, and he was tightly holding the young girl in his arms, crying out helplessly.

That was the first time in Nian Muning’s life that she’d seen him shed tears and cry aloud.

He wanted to beg, but he didn’t know who to beg from. He wanted to hate, but didn’t know who to hate. Tears washed away the blood on his face, and he finally couldn’t hold on and spat out a mouthful of blood.

*****

The winter of the first year of Jinghe was a disaster for Linwei City.

The second day after the death of the Eighth Prince, Tantai Jin personally chopped his body into pieces and fed it to vicious dogs.

He led his troops to slaughter Linwei City.

The silver-haired emperor laughed out loud, his face covered with blood splatter.

He couldn’t stop killing, and finally lay down in the thick snow, covering his face with a mask and looking up blankly at the gray sky.

Tantai Jin couldn’t remember how many people he had killed.

She loved the common people, so why didn’t she remember to take off his mask and stop him this time? Didn’t she want him to die? But he was still alive, how could she…… leave without worries just like that?

The blood of mortals was warm, but Tantai Jin felt cold all over.

Ye Chufeng was silent and he brought Tantai Jin back. He hadn’t expected his Third Sister’s temperament to be this fiery. None of them had time to save her, and none of them could’ve saved her.

The Fuci bracelet on Su Su’s wrist had shattered, along with the one on Tantai Jin’s wrist. Tantai Jin thought that he was going to die sooner or later.

But instead, he didn’t die. This body was once completely weak, but now when he clenched his fists, it felt like he had been infused with the world’s purest and most tenacious power.

It was a clean and forceful power. It was everything that he’d ever craved, and she’d given it all to him.

His heart was empty, but he didn’t feel happy.

The six nails in his heart made him in so much pain that he wished that he was dead.

Everyone in the Zhou Palace was trembling with fear, not daring to approach the emperor’s sleeping quarters at all. The people in the palace seemed to be in a nightmare that they couldn’t wake up from.

Wei Xi shivered and glanced inside. In the vast cold and cheerless palace, the weak water weapons were melted down by Tantai Jin and used to make her a bed.

The young girl was lying on it, and inserted into the glazed rabbit on the bed curtain was a pitch-black Mingluo Pearl ¹ If you’ve forgotten about this, Pian Ran, the fox demon, used it to preserve the corpse of her lover, Jiang Rao, the zombie, in an earlier chapter. .

When Tantai Jin carried back her corpse, it was mangled.

When the little tyrant came back from killing people, he cried for a long time, tears soaked his lapel, and after crying, he smiled and stitched up her wounds.

He stayed with the corpse everyday. Sometimes, he would pin her hair with new flowers that bloomed in the morning. Sometimes, he would paint her eyebrows and apply rouge for her, and tell her stories about his childhood in the Zhou and Xia Palace.

These stories were from long ago, dull, and dark.

Like claws that dragged you into darkness, but Tantai Jin didn’t know, as he assumed that everyone’s childhood was the same.

Perhaps, people like Xiao Lin were luckier.

However, there were limits on preserving corpses with the Mingluo Pearl, and the cold corpse couldn’t be placed in the main hall.

Back then, when Pain Ran had chosen which mountains to cultivate the ancient zombie in, she’d spent a thousand years of cultivation to set up a formation to absorb the spiritual Qi of heaven and earth, in order to truly wield the full effect of the Mingluo Pearl.

Now, where to find a second nine-tailed fox?

Before the winter was over, the young girl’s body began to emit a faintly rotten smell. Mortal breath is turbid, and the closer Tantai Jin got, the thicker his turbid Qi ² 气 (qì) – breathe; turbid Qi means impure breath. From my understanding and how things usually work in xianxia/fantasy context, to preserve the corpse, you will need an extremely clean environment filled with spiritual Qi to preserve  a corpse. Or maybe like Jing Lan An sealing Yue Fuya inside a weak water coffin (but there isn’t enough weak water for Tantai Jin to do so) was.

The person on the bed was ignorantly unaware, and the only living thing that she had left him was in his left eye.

Tantai Jin didn’t dare to touch her anymore. He fell back in fear, covered his left eye in a daze and was at a loss, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know…… don’t know…… I won’t touch you anymore, won’t touch anymore……”

Everything about her in the Zhou Kingdom slowly disappeared, as she hadn’t wanted to leave him anything. Before Su Su left the Zhou Kingdom palace for Linwei City, she had already set fire to her old jade bracelets and clothes.

The old Daoist was gone, and he couldn’t even keep her body.

Wei Xi saw the little tyrant stumble out and sit in front of the palace hall for a long time. The door behind him was closed, and he cried pitifully while asking like a helpless child, “Wei Xi, what should I do?”

Wei Xi couldn’t hold his horsetail whisk properly and knelt down in fear, “Your Majesty, please spare my life, Your Majesty, please spare my life!”

Wei Xi still remembered the last time when His Majesty had asked an imperial physician like this, and in the next moment, he’d killed the imperial physician with a smile.

The little tyrant had long been a madman.

Tantai Jin glanced at him uninterestedly. The snow in front of his hall was the thickest, because he didn’t allow others to disturb his life together with Su Su.

He cried for a while, then stood up from the ground and happily said, “Today it’s time to make Xi Wu happy.”

Wei Xi trembled all over as he watched Tantai Jin walk away. He felt like he’d been drained of strength and his legs were soft.

‘Time to make Xi Wu happy’, at first, Wei Xi didn’t know what that meant. Until he gradually discovered that something was wrong. The palace’s only Madame seemed to have disappeared for a long time.

No one in the palace dared to be curious about the little tyrant’s affairs.

After the death of the one in the cold palace, Linwei City was slaughtered. Lord Yang Ji, who’d been most popular in the past, didn’t even dare to enter the palace recently.

Things had remained the same, but the people had changed. The Zhou Palace was like a cold purgatory.

Edited by: Gaze