141: Chapter 141 Spirits Can Hear Minds, I'll Shout for You

Chen Fan sat cross-legged on the bottom stone surface of the abyss, his scorched knuckles gripping the handle of the hammer of the thunder god tightly.

The ringing caused by deafness roared in his mind, but he could clearly feel the pulsation of the spiritual body in his chest—the frequency was perfectly synchronized with the blue flame at Su Shuang's fingertips on the stone platform, like two flutes pulled by the same string.

"Try it," he told himself in a hoarse voice.

The prompt from the residual soul's fluctuation was still flashing on the system interface. The spiritual body's translucent outline floated up in his palm. He raised his arm, letting that phantom of deep blue slowly approach Su Shuang's brow.

The moment they touched, Chen Fan's temples twitched violently.

Shattered images poured back like a tidal wave: the Moon of Blood shrouding Qingqiu Mountain, the fox clan girl laughing even as lightning chains pierced her spine; in the cellar wall of the Frost Moon Teahouse, symbols carved by the Silent-Faced Child glowed faintly, and Su Shuang was pressing a blue flame crystal into a stone crevice; on the altar atop the Starlight Tower, she knelt amidst nine bronze pillars, the blue flame on her fingertip resonating with the runes on the pillars—finally, all the scenes suddenly froze, locking onto the instant she embedded the blue flame crystal into her own heart. Blood flowed down her collarbone into her clothes, yet she was still smiling: "This way, they can't take it away."

"Cough!" Chen Fan tasted a sweet, metallic taste in his throat, and the spiritual body was jolted three inches backward.

He hurriedly stabilized his mind, but heard an extremely faint vibration coming from within the spiritual body—it wasn't a sound, but a resonance that reached directly into his soul, as if Su Shuang were speaking right next to his ear: "I am not the vessel... I am the key."

"Su Shuang?" he subconsciously called out, but his deaf ears only registered the itchy vibration of his own vocal cords.

The system interface suddenly exploded with a red prompt: [High-Dimensional Resonance Ongoing! External Spiritual Body Signal Detected—]

The communicator at his waist vibrated violently, and Black Crow's voice squeezed through with electrical static, every word sounding as if it had been shattered by lightning and pieced back together: "Chen Fan! Your spiritual body fluctuation... bypassed the system's monitoring frequency! What she just said... can it transmit through the spiritual body?"

Chen Fan's pupils constricted.

He looked at the flickering blue flame on the stone platform and suddenly recalled the resonance between the spiritual body and the spark previously—that ball of fire was the materialization of Su Shuang's residual soul.

He gritted his teeth and slowly injected spiritual body energy into the blue flame. Sure enough, the deep blue flame began to flicker with a rhythm: first three rapid flashes, then five seconds of steady light, followed by two short and one long flash...

"The Third Seat of the Shadow Pavilion..." Black Crow's voice suddenly rose in pitch, "She said the Third Seat of the Shadow Pavilion isn't meant to activate the Final Cleansing! It's meant for self-sacrifice... to exchange for a system reboot!"

"Thud."

Chen Fan's movements paused.

A muffled sound of something heavy hitting the ground came from the edge of the abyss. Flash Skin sat up, leaning against the stone wall, half of his face still covered in scorch marks from the thunder tribulation. His voice was as thin as a thread: "Si... Silent Thunder Monk is here... He said... Thunder shouldn't fall for killing..."

Before the words finished, a gray shadow tore down through the clouds.

It was a withered old monk. His gray cloth cassock billowed wildly in the wind and thunder, and his bare feet stepped onto the thunder clouds at the mouth of the abyss without triggering a single electric arc.

He pressed his palms together, but his turbid eyes shone with astonishing brightness: "Thunder should not kill, and the Hammer should not sound for war."

Chen Fan tightened his grip on the hammer of the thunder god.

He could see the thunder clouds beneath the Silent Thunder Monk's feet shrinking, as if grasped by an invisible hand around the throat. "Then let the thunder strike me dead?" he pulled at the corner of his mouth, revealing small cuts of blood where his scorched skin cracked. "That pile of thunder just now didn't speak of mercy to me."

The old monk shook his head, his gaze passing over Chen Fan to land on Su Shuang on the stone platform. "I stop the thunder only to protect someone who does not lie." He raised his withered finger. "She is about to wake up. But when she wakes up and discovers she is the 'Spark,' can you bear her hatred?"

Chen Fan's breath hitched.

The spiritual body suddenly left his body autonomously.

The translucent phantom shot out like an arrow from a bowstring, slamming directly into the Silent Thunder Monk.

The old monk neither dodged nor evaded, allowing the spiritual body to pass through his chest—the next second, a dazzling burst of fire flashed in his turbid eyes, as if he had suddenly been injected with a memory that didn't belong to him.

"So..." His Adam's apple bobbed. "You were once the Fox Clan's Lamp Keeper..."

Chen Fan felt his temples throbbing again.

An unfamiliar memory surged like a tide: on a stormy night a hundred years ago, a fox clan woman knelt before a thunder core, a blue flame crystal identical to Su Shuang's embedded in her chest. Her blood dripped onto the thunder core, and every drop seemed to say: "Hold on for three more days, and my clansmen can escape to the human world..."

"Su Shuang isn't the vessel..." he murmured, "She is the inheritor."

The blue flame on the stone platform suddenly surged three feet high.

Su Shuang's eyelashes trembled violently, like a butterfly fluttering beneath her eyelids.

Chen Fan looked at her face gradually losing its paleness, looked at the marks her fingertips deeply pressed into the stone surface, looked at the tear mole at the corner of her eye trembling with her breath—then, she opened her eyes.

Her pupils, like molten gold, flowed in her eyes, resembling two setting suns that had melted. Her lips moved slightly, her voice as light as a feather, yet it landed precisely in Chen Fan's deaf ears: "Fan... I can hear you."

Chen Fan looked up sharply.

The system prompt exploded with blinding golden light before his eyes, but he couldn't pay any attention—Su Shuang's gaze was locked onto him, and in her molten gold pupils was a clarity he had never seen before, yet it seemed to hide the blue flame from a hundred years ago, burning the heart and soul.

In the distance, on the observation deck of the highest floor of the Shadow Pavilion headquarters, a figure in red robes removed her hood.

Her face, seven parts similar to Su Shuang's, was pale under the moonlight. She lightly stroked the light-language recording transmitted through her communicator, a faint smile curving her lips: "Sister... you are finally ready to wake up."