Chapter 695: This Is What It Truly Means to Share Life and Death

With the bone-armored Manifestation cultivator’s escape route cut off by the desperate measures of these old veterans, the followers trailing behind the bigwigs to watch the spectacle saw the grim sight of their own master vanishing into death. What did they care about old grudges or hidden currents now? They couldn’t even be bothered to pick up a single one of the weapons scattered across the ground. Without so much as a shout, they all turned and fled in a frantic rush toward the distant edge of the fluorescent swamp.

The gale gradually died down. After all that turmoil, the chunks of debris finally settled somewhat quietly against the ground, while a little dust drifted back and forth beneath the pale emerald light filtering down through the fissures.

Panshi was still leaning against the underground river opening that Su Ming had just repaired with a formation.

This elder, who usually charged headfirst into the rock layers and never spoke a word of complaint, had more than cracks in the basalt armor covering his body. Between the fierce surge of death energy earlier and the violent tugging caused by his own attempt to hold back the shattered earth, most of his left stone hand had crumbled away, taking with it a great deal of withered yellow earth and sand.

He used the back of the other hand, the one he could still raise, to wipe the purple-black traces of old blood hanging from the corner of his mouth.

Facing the devastation all around and the various root veins torn up from the old pit, he let out a long, deep breath.

No one in Greenwood Court tried to whip up the clamor and celebration that usually followed a great victory. This should have been a moment when, after the chaos, everyone could finally breathe a great sigh of relief. Yet between the glaring, severed scar of withered wood on the Banyan’s trunk and the pale emerald light spilling down from above, the scene was weighed down by a profound, empty silence.

Whether they were the little sprites still trembling as they gripped their weapons in the tree-hollow city on the outskirts, the woven vine bridges suspended midway up and linked together by green hanging tendrils, or the ordinary grass-and-wood spirits nestled deep among the great roots, after that first stunned pause as they gazed at the sky and saw its long-lost natural colors again, almost none of the surviving spirits cried out with the sort of cheers common in human battles, such as “The elders are invincible!”

No elder gave orders to organize them, and no one suggested setting out spirit fruit and fine water to celebrate.

The thousands upon thousands of small figures living throughout this enormous ancient tree all bowed in unison, with an astonishing, unspoken unity, toward the thick inner walls of the tree’s roots beneath their feet, which had been hacked and battered in the great battle and were now covered in cracks.

A countless series of tiny, gentle rustling sounds traveled along the withered wooden vines, echoing throughout the entire tree nest.

The young and old among the spirits, some of whom had yet to reach the Condensation Form stage in their cultivation, and some of whom were still only just beginning to learn their letters, pressed their palms firmly against the immense walls of the divine tree’s root veins, where drops of golden blood were still trickling down from the long gashes.

Not one of their fingers clawed needlessly at the surface. Instead, following the exposed patterns where the bark had been torn away, they willingly and without reservation sent every last trace of the grass-and-wood vitality within them, though meager, yet utterly genuine, back toward the deepest core of the Woodheart, which was still enduring the immense shockwaves from the main root’s forced severing.

Even the little wild-vine girl beside Su Ming, who was not quite dead yet, trembled as she crawled across the ground. She pressed her head against the tree and stayed there, not letting go.

Su Ming sat leaning behind the old bend where he had earlier marked the underground river as an escape route, watching everything in absolute silence.

After witnessing for a moment this straightforward sight of tens of thousands of spirits, without uttering a single slogan, truly willing to give up their lives to shoulder the wounds of one ancient tree, the old ideas he had always held, judging good and evil through the lens of human self-interest and scheming, began to waver.

He had always thought that what the spirits called their “gentle nature,” spending their days basking in warm sunlight on the branches, never talking back when attacked, then pointing at others to curse them for being unreasonable when they were struck, was nothing more than the helpless weakness of a bunch of foolish simpletons. Under the pressure of the Heavenly Dao, they had made no progress and had no means to fight back.

Only now, after enduring the Manifestation cultivator’s successive explosions and the massive ancient tree severing its own trunk, while still keeping their hearts steady on the brink of death, did he understand from the bottom of his heart. They needed no vows to bind them, nor any grand cause hanging over their heads, yet they were truly willing to share life and death, prosperity and decline, for the sake of the same ancient root. That way of life was no weakness born of fearfully following the current. It was something that would make even the great human cultivators, who shouted “brothers” and “fellow cultivators” every day while privately keeping their own little calculations and stabbing one another in the back, feel so ashamed they would want the ground to swallow them.

Amid the connected emerald glimmers of vitality flowing back into the tree, the flying dust before the Grand Hall, which had just been bouncing with the falling rocks, gradually settled to the ground.

After Qingheng’s short, withered wooden cane tapped against the great stone slab, he no longer carried the sharp, imposing air he had shown when pointing and forming seals. Instead, he looked as though someone had forcibly drained most of the tension from his exhausted body. Though his feet moved, his steps were so unsteady that he seemed barely able to keep them on the ground.

The high-ranking sacrificial elder, who had just shattered the great blood banner of a Manifestation cultivator with half a seal and severed the hopeless path of the Faceless one’s pull, now wore a sacrificial robe so tattered it looked like a heap of black charcoal strips. The lingering soul flames of the old veterans were still burning away at it, consuming the hem and most of the sleeves in repeated flares.

He made his way around to the side of the twenty-four leaf-shaped cocoons, which had been stabilized by the Void-guiding formation but had still suffered severe damage in the great waves of this battle, and sat down cross-legged.