Chapter 650
Fu Shaoping's sword-wielding action was faster than his thinking, but the red liquid split into strands the moment it touched the sword's edge, flowing upstream along the sword's energy. Nangong Wan's purple flame intercepted most of it in time, but a few strands still seeped into his right hand holding the sword. The black iron sword suddenly trembled like a dragon's roar, and the sword body showed veins and patterns that were exactly the same as the red leaves.
"This is not something from the Xuanyin Sect." Nangong Wan flipped her hand and showed half of a jade slip dug out from the bottom of the pond. The incomplete pattern on it showed some kind of sacrificial scene. "At least not all of it. Before the elder died, he sealed an even more ancient existence into his own bone marrow—" She suddenly fell silent, because a tattoo exactly the same as the jade slip's pattern appeared on the back of Fu Shaoping's right hand, although it was only fleeting.
The red plant has grown to three feet tall, and the ice-blue dewdrop on the top has expanded into a fist-sized fruit. When the moonlight moves to a certain angle, the surface of the fruit will show a three-dimensional projection of the bottom of the cold pond, and even a real-time picture of the protective array carved by Nangong Wan and Fu Shaoping last year being corroded by the red fog can be seen. What's more terrifying is that the back of each red leaf begins to secrete a sticky red pulp, which generates new roots as soon as it falls to the ground. The speed of its spread has reached a level that can be seen with the naked eye during the day.
Nangong Wan was decomposing the red leaf sample. Zi Yan arranged the crystals left after melting the leaves into a strange array in the jade disc - it was exactly the pattern that Fu Shaoping had seen on the dungeon wall when he was a child. When she tried to touch the crystals with the silver needle stained with Fu Shaoping's breath, the particles suddenly became active and formed a miniature model of the Xuanyin Sect altar, and the little doll kneeling in the center of the altar was wearing the makeup that Fu Shaoping wore when he was seven years old.
"So that's it." Nangong Wan crushed the crystal, and the memory fragments of a certain ancestor of the Xuanyin Sect emerged in the purple flames - in order to break through the realm, the great man actually sealed a trace of the spirit of the outer demon into the blood of his descendants. As the bloodline inheritor of this generation, Fu Shaoping's natural icy characteristics in his sword energy are actually the manifestation of the spirit of the demon after it was sealed. And Hongye, sensing that the spirit of the demon is about to awaken, instinctively began to build a "nest" to welcome the host's return.
Fu Shaoping stared at his reflection in the water. Every time the red leaf fruit pulsated, a flash of red gold would flash through his eyes. The reflection under the water suddenly spoke on its own, and the voice was an ancient accent that Nangong Wan had never heard before: "The time to return to the abyss has come, the time when ice and fire are in the same furnace." Fu Shaoping swung his sword to break the surface of the water, and the sky-peeking mirror hidden in Nangong Wan's sleeve showed that his shadow was still standing there with a strange smile, holding a fruit that was exactly the same as the one on the top of the spiritual field plant.
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The cinnabar mark on the cultivation notes had dried up. Nangong Wan stared at the violently shaking glass cover, and the medicine spoon in his hand was cracked. The spiritual medicine in the cover was undergoing its third transformation. The stems that should have been as white as jade were now covered with ice cracks, and each crack exuded an ice-blue mist that was the same source as Fu Shaoping's sword energy.
"Back off!" Fu Shaoping suddenly waved his sleeves and swept away all the utensils on the table, and the black iron sword was placed in front of Nangong Wan. Almost at the same time, the glass cover exploded into thousands of crystals, and the spiritual medicine sprouted branches and leaves at a terrifying speed. The flower buds at the top opened like a beast's mouth, spewing out a sword energy storm wrapped in ice.
The bamboo beam groaned as it could not bear the heavy load. Before Nangong Wan's purple flames formed a barrier, Fu Shaoping had already leaped into the storm. She would always remember that back figure - his frosty white robe was torn into pieces by the sword energy, and he opened his arms as if he was embracing the out-of-control spiritual plant. When the ice-blue mist poured into his body, the spiritual medicine suddenly withered, and Fu Shaoping fell from mid-air like an ice sculpture.
"Are you crazy?" When Nangong Wan caught him, countless sword energies were rushing through the meridians under the skin of his back that her palm touched. She tore open his clothes and saw the same ice cracks as the elixir on his heart. The purple flame penetrated along the cracks and encountered some kind of ancient restriction under the skin - it was a power older than the Xuanyin Sect's seal, greedily devouring Fu Shaoping's vitality to feed the elixir.
The cold pond was frozen seven feet thick on this winter night. Nangong Wan immersed Fu Shaoping in the ice well dug out in the center of the pond, while she sat on the ice and continued to transmit the purple flame. When the first ray of light at dawn shone on the ice cracks, she suddenly discovered that those lines formed a long-lost ancient pill formula. After tremblingly memorizing the last rune, Fu Shaoping under the ice suddenly opened his eyes, and his pupils flashed the same red gold as the heart of the spiritual medicine flower.
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There were still sparks on the edge of the burn marks on the seventh page of the cultivation notes. Nangong Wan stared at the position calculated by the planetarium, and beads of sweat rolled down his temples onto the hot bronze medicine furnace, instantly evaporating into white mist. The extreme yang sky fire at 15:30 today was the only opportunity for the key stage of refining the elixir.
"The sword energy can only last for thirty breaths." Fu Shaoping inserted the black iron sword into the center of the formation, and the frosty white sword energy flowed along the grooves carved on the ground, forming a circular ice wall around the spiritual field. Nangong Wan's purple flame lamp was suspended in the center of the formation, and a ray of lightning and fire stolen from the nine-layer calamity was dancing in the lamp flame.
The moment the skyfire descended, the whole valley was filled with a clear whistle like a phoenix. Nangong Wan's purple hair fluttered like a flag in the heat wave, and the fire control spell she formed with her hands was trembling slightly - the skyfire was ten times more violent than expected, and the purple flame began to backfire when it came into contact with it. Outside the formation, Fu Shaoping saw the real fire burning on her sleeves, and the spiritual medicine was stretching its leaves in the fire, as if enjoying nourishment.
When the ice wall collapsed, Nangong Wan's exclamation was stuck in her throat. Fu Shaoping's figure was engulfed by the sea of fire, and only the cry of the black iron sword pierced through the heat wave. Just as she was about to disperse her power to save people, a crystal ice coffin suddenly rose in the center of the sea of fire, and Fu Shaoping jumped into the center of the formation holding a whole piece of cold pond black ice. The shock wave caused by the collision of extreme cold and extreme heat threw the two of them away.
When Nangong Wan woke up on the scorched earth, he found that his right hand and Fu Shaoping's left hand were attached by a translucent colored glass substance. This strange crystal formed by the fusion of ice and fire was spreading from their touching skin to the surroundings, eventually forming an egg-shaped protective shield. The spiritual medicine was growing wildly outside the shield, and the leaves showed the same patterns as the colored glass shield - it was actually imitating the state of the fusion of the two people's spiritual power.
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Nangong Wan's silver needle has been hanging above the twin flowers for three hours. This rare pair of gold and silver buds is a miracle bred by the elixir's fifteenth transformation. The golden flower on the left exudes the sharpness of Fu Shaoping's sword energy, while the silver flower on the right carries the burning heat of Nangong Wan's purple flame. At the junction of the two flowers, the thin red line is pulsating with their breathing frequency.
"The third layer of the calyx." Fu Shaoping suddenly spoke, and the tip of the sword lightly touched the hidden part of the receptacle. The scene under the magnifying glass made Nangong Wan hold his breath - in an area as small as a grain of rice, an exquisite micro-array was running, and the combination of the array pattern was exactly the same as the "Soul Locking Array" recorded in the forbidden art books of the Xuanyin Sect.
The night dew wet Nangong Wan's eyelashes. She watched Fu Shaoping condense his sword energy into a hair-thin probe and carefully pierce the center of the silver flower. The center of the flower suddenly exploded, and what spewed out was not pollen, but a fragment of memory: seven-year-old Fu Shaoping was chained in front of a wall engraved with red leaves, and the elder of the Xuanyin Sect stabbed his forehead with a dagger emitting red mist.
The golden flower suddenly shook violently, and ice-blue light threads shot out from the pistil, interweaving with the purple flames from the silver flower to form a net, enveloping and digesting that memory. When the light faded, a pearl-sized fruit grew in the center of the twin flowers, with ice cracks and flame patterns on the surface. The moment Nangong Wan took the fruit with the jade knife, Fu Shaoping suddenly pressed his temple: "I heard the whisper of the devil."
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The mist formed by the aroma of medicine flowed in the bamboo pavilion. Nangong Wan stared at the main trunk of the spiritual medicine that was beginning to turn into jade. In his hand, he turned to the remaining page of "The Art of Breathing in Purple Flame" that recorded "Ice and Fire in the Same Furnace". Outside the window was the twenty-third snowfall since they went into seclusion. The fruit on the top of the spiritual medicine had become translucent, and a curled-up baby could be vaguely seen inside.
When Fu Shaoping's sword energy patrolled the surface of the fruit for the seventh time, something unexpected happened. The inside of the fruit suddenly opened its red-gold eyes, and the entire bamboo pavilion was instantly pulled into an illusion. Nangong Wan's purple flame lamp illuminated the red leaves crawling all over the ground, and Fu Shaoping was kneeling in the Xuanyin Sect dungeon that had been transformed, with the black iron sword inserted beside him but he turned a blind eye.
"Shao Ping!" Nangong Wan's call was bounced back by the blood-colored barrier. She saw Fu Shao Ping in the illusion repeating the scene of being forbidden that year, and the spiritual medicine fruit was suspended above his head, constantly extracting some silver-blue light threads - that was the essence of the sealed memory.
The purple flame turned into a long needle and pierced her temple. Nangong Wan forced the channel between the two people's sea of consciousness in the severe pain. When she broke into the depths of Fu Shaoping's sea of consciousness, she finally saw that the ice coffin suppressed at the bottom of the heart lake was cracking. Bound by seven chains were the same red-gold eyes as those in the spiritual medicine fruit.
"Look at me!" Nangong Wan's purple flames entangled Fu Shaoping's consciousness, injecting treasured fragments of memories - the frost flowers he cut off when they first met in the cold pond, the fingertips he accidentally touched when refining the elixir, and the small ice sculpture he quietly placed on his pillow on his birthday last year. In the violent tremor of his sea of consciousness, Fu Shaoping suddenly grabbed her wrist: "Wan'er?" The spiritual medicine fruit in reality cracked, and the escaped red mist was refined into elixir by the blended spiritual power of the two. But the real crisis has just begun - the baby form in the fruit has grown to three inches tall at this moment.
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The forty-nine years of cultivation notes piled up on the desk like a small mountain, and Nangong Wan's silver hair and Fu Shaoping's white hair were tangled together in the night wind. The human-shaped fruit on the top of the spiritual medicine had grown to more than a foot long, and its face was 50% similar to theirs. At this moment, it was breathing out the spiritual energy of ice and fire under the moonlight.
The sound of midnight became louder, and the fruit suddenly broke away from the branch and floated in the air. The thunderclouds gathered over the valley began to rain down purple and gold dual-color thunder, each of which struck the fruit accurately. Fu Shaoping's sword energy and Nangong Wan's purple flame intertwined into a net, but were pushed back the moment they touched the thunder - this thunder tribulation must be borne by the spiritual medicine itself.
When the seventy-second thunderbolt struck, the skin of the humanoid fruit began to turn into glass. Nangong Wan suddenly dragged Fu Shaoping onto the roof, and the purple flame and sword energy simultaneously shot into his heart, forcing two drops of heart blood to shoot at the fruit. This forbidden technique recorded on the last page of "Purple Flame Breathing Technique" requires the practitioner to sacrifice his lifelong cultivation.
The moment the blood bead merged, the fruit burst into a dazzling light. When the vision was restored, the night sky with the thunderclouds dissipated was filled with red and blue spiritual snow, and what was suspended in the air was no longer the fruit, but the crystallization of the Tao rhyme that kept changing its shape - sometimes like a lotus with two stems, sometimes like a yin and yang fish, and finally fixed into the outline of two little people hugging each other.
When Fu Shaoping caught the falling Nangong Wan, he found that she was holding half a crystal in her palm, which contained a miniature of every important node in the past forty-nine years. And his own sword energy had taken on the temperature of the purple flame without knowing when, just as her purple flame had incorporated his coldness.
In the center of the spiritual field, the main trunk of the spiritual medicine that had exhausted its essence was slowly falling down. But the moment it touched the ground, it suddenly turned into countless light spots and dissipated. The next morning, Nangong Wan found two young sprouts at the original location - one was wrapped in ice-blue sword energy, and the other was dancing with purple flames.
In the Hantan Bamboo Pavilion, the purple flame lamp illuminated the whole room with spiritual light. Nangong Wan tapped her fingertips lightly, and seventy-nine spiritual materials floated in the air, flowing like stars. She unfolded the fragment of "Purple Flame Breathing Art", and her fingertips ran over the ancient runes at the end of the pill formula, whispering: "Ice and fire in the same furnace, the two people's spiritual consciousness needs to blend, if there is a slight mistake, the pill will be destroyed and the person will die."
Fu Shaoping stroked the tip of the black iron sword, and the sword energy condensed into frost, carving a black ice protective array around the alchemy furnace. The cold pool of water at the bottom of the furnace reflected his solemn face - this alchemy was actually a fight for life with the sky.
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At the beginning of the morning hour, purple flames rose from Nangong Wan's palm. Nine fire snakes coiled around the furnace, and the temperature inside the furnace rose sharply, and the spiritual materials began to liquefy. The golden and silver twin flowers melted first, the golden flowers turned into hot liquid, while the silver flowers condensed into frost and mist, forming strange layers in the furnace.
"Change!"
At noon, Fu Shaoping pointed his sword. The cold water vapor flowed into the furnace along the sword tip, and the boiling medicine liquid froze instantly. The impurities trapped in the ice crystals were clearly visible, and Nangong Wan took the opportunity to remove them with a silver needle. When the last trace of turbid air was discharged, the ice crystals suddenly burst, and the medicine liquid unexpectedly rotated into a Tai Chi pattern.
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There was a thunderous roar from the furnace. The demon crystal rushed left and right in the liquid medicine, and each collision caused blood-colored lines to appear on the furnace wall. Fu Shaoping suddenly pressed his chest - those lines were exactly the same as the red leaves on the walls of the dungeon when he was a child.
Nangong Wan bit his fingertips, and a drop of blood fell into the purple flame: "Blood as a covenant!" The flames exploded into the shape of a phoenix, surrounding the restless crystals. Just as the phoenix's beak was about to peck the crystals, Fu Shaoping's sword energy penetrated, and the ice-blue chain entangled the phoenix's feet.
During the stalemate between ice and fire, a crack appeared on the surface of the crystal, and a hoarse whisper came out: "The Gate of Guixu"
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The furnace was completely transparent, with a chaotic light ball suspended inside. Nangong Wan's silver hair moved without wind, interweaving with Fu Shaoping's white hair into a net. The two men touched their foreheads, and their spiritual consciousness flowed into the furnace along the hair.
In the illusion, they stood at the junction of ice and fire. Nangong Wan saw the ice coffin deep in Fu Shaoping's sea of consciousness - the coffin lid was shaking, and inside was sealed a red-gold light that originated from the elixir.
"Now!"
The purple flame and the sword energy pierced into the light ball at the same time. The remnant of the demon screamed and turned into red mist in an attempt to erode the consciousness of the two. At the critical moment, Nangong Wan suddenly ignited his life essence and blood, and Fu Shaoping slashed out the sword energy that had been nurtured for forty-nine years.
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At midnight, a ray of light burst out from the top of the furnace. In the beam of light, the elixir moved like a living thing, sometimes turning into a lotus, sometimes condensing into a sword. When the ninth ray of moonlight was injected, the elixir finally took shape - the whole body was colored with glass, with ice and fire patterns inside, and a miniature star map floating on the surface.
Nangong Wan stumbled back and was supported by Fu Shaoping. She spread out her palm, and the pill split into two, each carrying the aura of the other's spiritual power.
Outside the bamboo pavilion, the first rays of morning light shone on the withered roots of the spiritual medicine. In the scorched earth, two young shoots broke through the soil - one was wrapped in ice-blue sword energy, and the other was dancing with purple flames. (End of this chapter)