65: Chapter 65 The Price of Resurrection and the Awakening of the "Stone Statue"

Xia Lengbai gripped her right wrist tightly with her left hand, her fingers almost digging into her flesh.

She took a deep breath, and her remaining spiritual power, like a trickling stream, surged from her Dantian, laboriously converging toward the arm infected with the blue-black hue.

The moment her spiritual power collided with that mixed aura, her entire arm trembled violently.

It was not the sharp pain of being cut by knives or pierced by swords, but a dull ache, as if countless ice needles were stabbing into the depths of her bone marrow, while simultaneously being scorched by poisonous fire.

It felt as if someone was using her blood vessels as lute strings, tightening them one by one, and then slowly scraping them with their fingernails.

"Hiss..."

Xia Lengbai gasped, the veins on her forehead bulging, her molars grinding together with a rattling sound.

She dared not relax; her spiritual power acted like a cold sluice gate, firmly locked at the junction of her wrist and forearm, barely confining the blue-black erosion within the range of her palm.

Effective.

But the price was the alarming speed at which her spiritual power was being consumed.

Xia Lengbai panted heavily, sliding down until she was sitting with her back against the Ice Cave wall, her left hand still gripping her right wrist, her fingertips white from the exertion.

She raised her head, her gaze passing through the swirling cold mist, landing on the ice sculpture beside the hot spring.

Shen Xiao's situation... seemed to have stabilized?

The fine, newly burst cracks on the surface of the ice sculpture were still clearly visible, like a broken spider web, but at the most critical spot—the knees—the originally arrogant, churning mass of pitch-black Blood Poison had now faded by more than half, leaving only a few wisps of thin black energy attached to the depths of the ice layer like soot.

What was even more surprising was the healing of the frozen layer.

The ice surface, originally riddled with holes from the Blood Poison's erosion, was now slowly repairing itself at a speed visible to the naked eye.

New ice crystals grew from the edges of the cracks, layer upon layer; although thin and fragile, they were indeed healing.

Xia Lengbai narrowed her eyes.

It wasn't her spiritual power at work—she had completely withdrawn all her externalized spiritual power the moment she severed the connection.

Was it... that Dark Gold Core?

She recalled the scene she had just perceived: that eerie core was like a starving black hole, frantically devouring the dispersed, chaotic energy, then converting and releasing it.

Some sort of predatory instinct of a higher order.

Xia Lengbai shook her head, temporarily pushing this dangerous conjecture to the back of her mind.

Now was not the time to study that strange thing inside Shen Xiao; her own hand was still fucking blue.

She lowered her head to check the condition of her right hand.

The blue-black spread had been successfully blocked below her wrist and was not continuing to erode upward, but her entire palm had swollen like a leavened bun, the surface of the skin gleaming with an eerie metallic luster, with tiny black beads seeping from under her fingernails, emitting a pungent, fishy stench.

She couldn't move it.

At least until she found a way to completely purge it, she had to continuously consume spiritual power to suppress it.

Xia Lengbai gave a wry smile, pulling at the corners of her mouth.

Saving someone and getting herself dragged into it—this was a huge loss.

Just as she prepared to close her eyes and regulate her breathing, she inadvertently kicked something.

"Hmm?"

The dull thud of hard objects colliding was exceptionally clear in the silent Ice Cave.

Xia Lengbai lowered her head, her gaze falling on the few inconspicuous ice shards by her feet, which were the fragments dislodged by her footsteps when she had staggered back earlier.

Beneath the ice shards, a line of text was revealed on the ice surface.

The handwriting was extremely small; had the ice shards not been moved, it would have been impossible to discover.

More importantly, the style of this line of text was completely different from the delicate and gentle handwriting beside the previous Jade Slip.

Sharp.

Unrestrained.

Every stroke was like a blade slashing across the ice surface, carrying a fierce energy as if it wanted to break out of the ice.

Xia Lengbai's pupils constricted sharply as she identified the ice-blue carved characters, one by one.

"Seven Absolutes Spirit Sealing, also known as the Seven Absolutes Death Array."

"The Gate of Life is the Gate of Death; the spring eye is the array eye."

"Later comer, if you take the Jade Slip and use the spiritual power of this place for more than a quarter of an hour..."

The last line of text had a suddenly heavier stroke, almost splitting the ice surface:

"The array activates."

Xia Lengbai's blood seemed to freeze in that instant.

She slowly raised her head, her neck as stiff as a rusted machine, her gaze sweeping across the Ice Cave inch by inch.

Seven humanoid ice sculptures.

Seven distinct postures.

Some sitting cross-legged, some standing, some looking up at the sky, some bowing their heads in contemplation.

They stood quietly at the edge of the Ice Cave, like seven silent guardians that had not moved a single inch for thousands of years.

But now.

Xia Lengbai saw it.

Between the brows of the ice sculptures, the cinnabar marks, which were originally so dim they were almost invisible, were lighting up.

They were not suddenly lit up, but rather like eyes that had been sleeping for ten thousand years, slowly opening.

First, a faint red glow, like a candle in the wind.

Then gradually becoming brighter, brighter, and brighter still.

The seven cinnabar points lit up simultaneously, dyeing the entire Ice Cave in a layer of eerie, blood-colored halo.

"Crack."

The first sound of cracking came from the ice sculpture closest to the hot spring.

Xia Lengbai turned her head sharply and saw that on the surface of the ice sculpture with hands forming a seal, a crack was spreading downward from the cinnabar mark between its brows, like a scarlet vein, winding its way over the bridge of the nose, lips, and chin, all the way down to the chest.

Immediately after, the second ice sculpture also cracked.

The third one.

The fourth one.

"Crack, crack, crack..."

The sound of cracking merged into one, like firecrackers on New Year's Eve, exploding frantically inside the Ice Cave.

Xia Lengbai's scalp tingled, and the hairs all over her body stood on end.

The moonstones embedded in the walls of the Ice Cave, which originally emitted a soft, cold white light, now seemed to have been injected with some kind of violent energy; their light suddenly surged, illuminating the entire Ice Cave with a harsh, ghastly white, ten times brighter than the shadowless lamps in an operating room.

Xia Lengbai was forced to narrow her eyes, her pupils constricting to the size of pinpricks, her gaze searching laboriously through the blinding white light.

The water flow of the hot spring had changed.

The spring eye, which had originally been bubbling upward with heat, now began to flow backward.

The scorching water vapor completely disappeared within a few breaths, replaced by a cold current surging from the depths of the spring eye, so bone-chilling it felt as if it could freeze the Soul.

The cold current spread along the stone walls of the hot spring, and wherever it passed, even the air emitted a faint "crackling" sound, as if even light itself were about to be frozen into ice.

Xia Lengbai's breath condensed into white mist in mid-air, and her eyelashes were covered in tiny ice crystals.

The seven ice sculptures moved.

It was not the mechanical displacement caused by external force, but they had truly "come alive."

The ice layer cracked, revealing underneath...

Xia Lengbai's pupils contracted violently.

No flesh and blood.

No bones.

Beneath the ice layer, it was still ice.

But that ice, as if endowed with life, was writhing and reorganizing in an extremely eerie way that defied the Laws of physics.

They formed joints, formed limbs, and formed structures capable of bending and stretching.

The seven ice sculptures slowly turned their bodies, their movements as stiff as marionettes, but their targets were chillingly clear.

They all turned toward the center of the Ice Cave.

Toward Shen Xiao at the side of the hot spring and... her.

Seven pairs of eyes formed from ice crystals locked onto Xia Lengbai simultaneously.

No pupils, no whites of the eyes, just seven ice holes emitting a blood-red glow.

But Xia Lengbai clearly felt the weight of their gaze.

Like seven cold blades held against her neck.

"..."

She opened her mouth, wanting to say something, but her throat felt as if it had been frozen, unable to make a sound.

Just at this moment.

"Crack!"

A loud, crisp sound, like glass shattering, came from the side of the hot spring.

Xia Lengbai turned her head sharply.

Shen Xiao's ice sculpture cracked.

It was not the fine, spider-web-like cracks from before, but a huge fissure that split down from the very center of the top of his head, running through his entire face, and extending all the way to his chest.

Ice shavings fell down with a rustling sound, like shattered crystal, refracting chaotic spots of light in the ghastly white glow of the moonstones.

Inside the fissure, something was moving.

An eye.

A pitch-black pupil, bottomless, as if it could swallow all light.

And in the deepest part of that pupil, a speck of Dark Gold light was flowing, like a sleeping ancient Vicious Beast, slowly awakening.

That eye turned slightly.

It swept coldly over the seven approaching ice sculptures.

Then, it landed on Xia Lengbai.

From within the ice fissure came a teeth-grinding sound of friction.

Shen Xiao's lips moved laboriously beneath the ice layer, and a voice as coarse as sandpaper squeezed out bit by bit from that narrow fissure, each word sounding as if it had been dug out of frozen earth:

"...Array?"

Ice shavings crumbled from the corners of his mouth.

Those pitch-black eyes stared fixedly at Xia Lengbai, and the Dark Gold light in the depths of his pupils suddenly flared intensely for an instant.

"Did you... trigger it?"