After slaying all the demonic cultivators who invaded the Heavenly Sword Sect,
The endless despair in Xu Moli's heart
Finally found a moment's relief.
She calmly surveyed her surroundings, looking at those righteous reinforcements who had arrived too late. None dared to meet her gaze. Even those familiar with her from the Heavenly Sword Sect stepped back in fear.
What kind of gaze was it?
Anger?
Sorrow?
No, it was something more extreme - an empty void of nothingness after losing everything.
While inspiring fear, it also raised doubts in people's minds: could this young woman still be considered "human"?
"Living corpse" might be a more accurate description.
Xu Moli's face remained expressionless. She completely ignored these righteous cultivators, mounted her sword, and flew back toward the Heavenly Sword Sect.
"Brother, what really happened three years ago?" the young woman pondered silently.
She wasn't foolish. After avenging her brother, she keenly realized something: if Xu Xi truly considered her a burden, he wouldn't have arrived so coincidentally to save her.
This meant that all along, Xu Xi had been quietly watching over her.
But then...
If he cared so much,
Why did he act so cold-hearted back then, even leaving the Heavenly Sword Sect and cutting off all contact between them?
Carrying these doubts and confusion, Xu Moli flew directly to Forest Sword Peak of the Heavenly Sword Sect. If anyone could answer her questions, it would undoubtedly be Li Wanshou, the mentor of both siblings.
Soon after,
Xu Moli met the elderly man who was recovering from the great battle.
She told him everything that had happened.
Li Wanshou remained silent for a long while before finally sighing, "Very well, very well. What's the point of hiding anything now?"
"Since he appeared before you, he must have been prepared for you to learn everything."
Looking at the blood-stained wooden sword in Xu Moli's hand,
Li Wanshou stroked his beard and shook his head, revealing the full truth: how Xu Xi had sacrificed everything to create an external spirit root to save Moli, and how he had chosen to leave without explanation to prevent her from discovering the truth.
Such truth, such reality, clearly exceeded Xu Moli's expectations.
She could never have imagined.
That the illness that had troubled her for seven years,
The price of its cure was everything her brother had.
Burning away his life, his cultivation, his spirit root - she couldn't imagine what kind of mindset her brother had lived with in such pain.
Even on the last day of his life, he had dragged his broken body to save his sister's life.
"I..."
Xu Moli's pupils trembled violently.
The tragic final moments of her brother kept replaying before her eyes, deepening her despair and making her heart ache more intensely.
It hurt so much.
Her entire body was wracked with intense pain.
Especially her stomach, which cramped with agony.
Her eyes stung, seemingly wanting to shed tears, but they had long since run dry, making the pain even worse, so severe she could barely see her own hands.
Looking down at her hands and feet, she felt they were covered in sinful blood.
"It's all my fault, it's all my fault!"
If it weren't for her, her brother would surely be alive and well, enjoying others' admiring gazes as the foremost genius of his generation.
Instead of ending up like this.
His body and bones completely destroyed.
Yes, it was all her fault. She was a burden, a sinner stained with her brother's blood.
"Brother..."
After learning the whole truth, the young woman left Forest Sword Peak in a daze, returning to the cave dwelling where the siblings had lived together for 12 years. Like a madwoman, she searched every corner.
After searching for a long time, she finally found a small storage ring.
It contained abundant cultivation resources.
It was what Xu Xi had left behind.
The young woman didn't care about how many resources there were. What mattered to her was that this was one of the few items her brother had left in the world, a gift with special meaning.
In the time that followed,
The young woman shut herself in the cave dwelling, neither cultivating nor responding to the sect's summons.
She just silently crouched in the deepest room of the cave.
She opened the storage ring, poured out all its contents, letting these items bearing Xu Xi's essence completely engulf her.
As if doing this
Could create the illusion that Xu Xi was still by her side.
But as she was pouring things out, Xu Moli suddenly discovered something different among the many items. It wasn't a cultivation resource, nor was it some extremely rare treasure.
It was a jar of candy.
A jar packed full of sweets.
"This is..."
Xu Moli's previously lifeless eyes regained a slight gleam. Her arm stiffly picked up the candy jar, and she took out a piece of hard candy and put it in her mouth.
The taste was familiar.
But something wasn't quite right.
Perhaps because it had been stored for too long.
It was no longer edible.
No, that wasn't it. It wasn't that it had been stored too long, but that she had discovered it too late.
The young woman's tears fell silently again. If she had found this jar of candy in the first year after Xu Xi left, she certainly could have enjoyed them at their best.
But she hadn't.
She was so useless, useless to the point of self-loathing.
"I must atone... I must, must... bring brother back to life..."
"No matter... what the price..."
Her mentally broken voice carried both tears and determination.
The next day,
Xu Moli's figure vanished from the Heavenly Sword Sect.
Without any announcement or message left behind, she simply disappeared without a trace.
It was said that someone had accidentally seen Xu Moli's figure in a mortal city called Black Stone City. At that time, she had used great magical powers to move a wooden house, crying tears of blood.
Later, others saw Xu Moli in an inheritance cave.
Her cultivation had reached the Yuan Ying realm.
She acted forcefully, defeating a Hua Shen realm cultivator against the odds.
Her name as the "Immortal Slayer" shocked the entire cultivation world.
Killing, endless killing, killing until the entire demonic path was destroyed.
She seemed to have an irreconcilable hatred for demonic cultivators, single-handedly killing until the demonic path was nearly extinct. This provoked a Tribulation realm demonic overlord to take action, but she still managed to escape.
Not only that,
When Xu Moli appeared again, she had actually broken through to the Tribulation realm.
With one sword strike, she erased that Tribulation realm demon cultivator and his top-tier demonic sect from existence with her great divine ability.
What happened after that, the cultivators didn't know.
Xu Moli's talent was too monstrous and heaven-defying.
The lower realm could no longer contain her.
She also disdained to remain in the cultivation world, as if there was nothing she wanted here. So she carved open the gates of heaven with her sword, and before her cultivation met the requirements for ascension, she forced open the path of ascension with supreme offensive divine abilities and entered the immortal realm alone.
"How dare you, a mortal being, enter the immortal realm without permission!"
"Meeting an immortal without paying respects, your name shall be written on the Reincarnation Stele!"
"Mere mortal, you look at me like a frog in a well gazing at the moon. Even if you've entered the immortal path, you're still like a mayfly trying to comprehend the blue sky before this emperor."
She killed her way forward, breaking through realm after realm.
She encountered countless powerful enemies.
But with just a wooden sword, Xu Moli killed until no one in the immortal realm dared to boast.
Her notorious name as the Immortal Slayer that once spread through the lower realm similarly swept through the immortal realm. In the end, even the high and mighty Immortal Emperors couldn't escape her heaven-slaying sword.