chsdbacks Chapter 370 White Bones
Chapter 370 White Bones
"The inner core is not the Law of Returning to Nothingness. It is the Heavenly Dao Mother Liquid that remained in its body when it first operated completely in the ancient primordial world."
"The chaotic dregs of the Lord of the Well are on this core shell, but the inner core has never been reduced to nothingness. When it was excreted as sediment, it took away a portion of the Heavenly Dao Mother Liquid."
"The mother liquor was not contaminated; for 30,000 years, it has been wrapped in the innermost layer of the old core. It has repeatedly died and been reborn, not out of resentment, but because it is trying to protect this last drop of mother liquor."
After the old core was squeezed out, the ribcage of the skeleton began to close naturally.
The bone at the crack healed automatically, and the new skin covered the trace of the old crack, leaving only a very thin, pale gold line.
The core hovered in mid-air in front of the skeleton, the dark red light fading inch by inch, revealing the complete crimson gold core.
Su Fan reached out and grasped the core.
The core throbbed violently in his palm, throbbing so fast it burned the skin on his hand.
He looked down at the glowing crimson-gold droplets within the core, then at the lips that had sprouted from the white bones.
The lips are moving.
The lips parted.
When the skeleton opened its mouth for the first time, there were no vocal cords in its throat; only the lingering echo of pale golden laws reverberated deep within its trachea.
The voice was very soft, so soft that it could be drowned out by the sound of mud rubbing against mud in the ruins, but every word was spoken with great force.
"It shattered. I guarded it for 30,000 years."
Su Fan held the core in his hand and looked down at the old core that had been beating for 30,000 years.
"Your teeth marks have been biting yourself for over a dozen generations, just to suppress this core and prevent it from shattering?"
"If it shatters, the world above will collapse. I will protect it. It can live on."
Bai Gu's voice was still very soft, with pauses between each word.
Sun Wukong jumped up from the edge of the altar and landed in front of the white bones.
The monkey's eyes stared straight at the newly formed eye sockets of the white bone. The eyeballs inside the sockets had already taken shape; they were a pair of pale golden eyes, and the pupils were still adjusting their focus.
The monkey spoke in a very low voice, so low that those outside the altar could not hear it.
"Whom are you referring to? The Heavenly Dao left behind by Pangu? Or the primordial chaos left behind by you?"
The skeleton paused for a moment, then aimed its newly learned-to-move eyes at Sun Wukong's ashes-covered monkey fur, and then at its own still-developing hand.
The blood vessels beneath the newly formed skin are pulsating, beating in sync with the will of all living beings.
"Thirty thousand years ago, I never imagined that I would be guarding this core for the primordial world that expelled me. When the will of all beings entered, I heard you all say one thing."
"That statement didn't call me scum. The voice only said that I've guarded this place for 30,000 years. You have records; every generation of my broken bones has sown seeds among you—seeds of mortal bones. I'm not scum; I've always been the bottom of this world."
The skeleton raised its hand and pointed at the human warriors, then at the remnants of the defeated army and the nicks in their weapons.
The human warrior struck the ground with his broken sword.
He didn't speak.
Qingfeng pulled his broken sword from the mud, and a piece of bone fragment came out with it from the tip of the sword. It was a fragment of a tooth mark left in the mud of the Guixu by the previous generation of white bones.
He placed the broken bones on the altar and pushed them toward the skeleton.
The skeleton looked down at the fragment that its predecessor had chewed up and that was recorded in the register of the prehistoric people in this generation. After a long while, it finally clenched its fist.
Su Fan placed the core, which was floating in mid-air, back into the white bone's hand.
The dark red light on the surface of the core had completely faded, leaving only the crimson-gold mother fluid core, which emitted a continuous golden hum the moment it was gripped tightly in the white bone palm.
"You asked if it was worth guarding it for 30,000 years. I healed your old wounds with three cuts. The Path of All Beings caught you; now you can answer that for yourself."
Su Fan looked into the eyes of the skeleton.
The skeleton, supporting the edge of the altar, used its elbows to push against the newly formed midline bones in its chest cavity after the chaotic sand had melted into it, pushing upwards inch by inch.
It stood up, its legs still trembling. Its feet, which hadn't touched the ground for 30,000 years, stepped onto the altar stone, leaving two shallow imprints on the stone that were exactly the same temperature as the footprints of a living person.
All eyes were fixed on it as it walked out from the edge of the altar, barefoot onto the muddy ground of the ruins, bent down to pick up the first piece of bone from the mud, and swallowed it.
"This is the right calf from the previous generation."
The skeleton raised its head, and countless broken bones in the silt of the Ruins resonated simultaneously.
The fragments of laws left behind by the bones of more than a dozen generations who died in the silt were reactivated by the will of all living beings, and one by one they rose from the depths of the silt.
The left forearm, the right calf, and three ribs—each bone swallowed by the white bones corresponds to a death mark recorded by the Chaos Sand, perfectly pieced back together on its newly formed skeleton.
The moment it swallowed the last piece of bone fragment, the foundation of Guixu trembled with a series of muffled thunderclaps, but each tremor was completely contained by the pale golden ripples rising from the ground.
The foundation is not broken.
Sun Wukong squatted at the highest point of the altar, held his golden cudgel horizontally, and watched the white bones swallow the broken bones. Suddenly, he grinned.
"That's what it means to not be trash. Only those who dare to swallow their old wounds can truly be considered alive."
The white skeleton looked up at Sun Wukong, its pale golden pupils reflecting the aftershocks of the great calamity on the monkey's body.
Thank you.
Nezha leaned against the altar, carrying his gun, and looked down at the ground.
The silt of Guixu is solidifying into a grayish-white rock layer, with a material very similar to the bricks of Nantianmen City.
He looked around at the ruins and found that the ground of the entire ruined city was undergoing the same solidification process.
"What did Laozi see at the South Heavenly Gate?"
Nezha looked up at the direction from which the golden light was coming from deep within the earth.
The Primordial Celestial Venerable sat cross-legged on the spine, his whisk turned gray.
He didn't look down at the Ruins of Guixu, but instead looked up at the dome.
The golden light of Mars shone through every crack in the ruins of the Southern Heavenly Gate, illuminating the pale golden patterns that had previously grown in front of him. All the patterns closed up at the same instant.
His lips twitched slightly as he gently placed the whisk on his lap and said softly.
"The Ruins of Return have been definitively established. The ruined city is no longer just sediment; it has become a living foundation in the deepest part of the primordial wilderness."
As the skeleton walked out of the altar, with each step it took, the solidified white rock beneath its feet spread a layer deeper into the Ruins of Return. By the time it reached Su Fan, the entire ground of the Ruins of Return was covered with white rock.
The mud beneath each soldier's feet has vanished, replaced by smooth, pale gold patterned foundation stones, each surface textured with the Dao essence of ten thousand people.
"This foundation is the first escape route you've paved for us. You've guarded the core for 30,000 years, and now the foundation has supported the Void. The Heavenly Dao will no longer leak, and we are not afraid of external enemies attacking from this entrance."
Su Fan looked down at the white rock patterns beneath his feet, then looked up at the white bones.
"Mortals. You have given me ten thousand and fifty words."
"It's the first sentence," Su Fan said.
"What is the second sentence?" White Bone asked.
Su Fan opened his palm, and the scab from the third cut completely fell off on the pale golden base, exposing the crooked V-shaped scar on his palm to the golden light reflected from the white rocks for the first time without any cover.
He raised his hand and pointed to everyone behind him.
"Secondly, we didn't consider you an external enemy. After we finished fighting the extraterrestrial gods, no matter where the next enemy comes from, the primordial world will have you as an additional layer of defense."
The skeleton pressed the faded red gold core into its chest cavity.
The crimson gold mother fluid and the new heart simultaneously burst forth with their first synchronized beat. A ring of pale golden resonance waves spread out from its chest cavity, along the newly solidified foundation of the Ruins, through the ten-thousand-foot-deep soil layer, through the newly healed cracks of the Southern Heavenly Gate, and from every broken brick bearing golden marks to the entire primordial world.
The golden light of Mars suddenly intensified.
All the ancient stars that had gone dark on the primordial star map lit up at the same instant.
The Primordial Celestial Venerable suddenly opened his eyes from his spine. On the star map that his Dao Heart sensed, those annihilated star positions that originally belonged to the period of the ancient mythological breakpoint were now flashing again in dense clusters.
Yang Jian closed his eyes, scanned the changing star map with his remaining senses, and spoke.
"The star positions of the ancient gods of the primordial era have all lit up. The ruins of the ancient celestial court, which were annihilated by the laws of time, are also being repositioned from the outer reaches of the river of time."
Nezha, carrying a gun, walked up to Su Fan.
"You said the next battle would be inside the primordial wilderness. This battle is over."
"Where will the next battle come from?" Nezha then asked.
The white bones answered for Su Fan.
It looked up through the golden light of the dome-shaped planet and gazed at the more distant horizon above the Ruins of Return, uttering its first complete and clear sentence, devoid of any tremor of laws.
"The ancient stars have returned to their places, and the ancient ruins of those ancient gods in the time gap are all being repositioned. The outer realms are just the beginning."
"There is something beyond the outer realms. After the well was evacuated, something even more ancient than the old cause and effect is awakening in the deepest part of the chaos."
"They have been chasing this core aura for 30,000 years. Now that the Heavenly Dao has not missed it and the Ruins have a foundation, they have found the right coordinates."
Su Fan slung the Pangu Axe over his shoulder.
"Then let's keep fighting."
Sun Wukong slammed his golden cudgel down from the altar, flipped himself up to the highest point of the altar, and squatted on the peak, looking down at everyone below.
The aftershocks of the great calamity on the golden armor were still pulsating, and his tone was very calm.
"I, Old Sun, have squatted on the Five Elements Mountain and the Guixu Pass. Now it's just right for me to squat on a few more enemy graves."
Nezha slammed the gun to the ground.
"Let's go back to the South Heavenly Gate first. Laozi is still waiting up there for a celebratory tea."
The Ruins of Guixu slowly opened, and the golden light of Mars illuminated every inch of the passage from hell to the heavens.
Ten thousand soldiers, supporting their own scars and their comrades' shoulders, walked step by step up the rubble steps remaining at the base of the Five Elements Mountain, on the pale gold foundation stones left by the white bones.