Beyond the Timescape

Chapter 3: May… You Rest in Peace

*This thing…*

A sharp gleam flashed in Xu Qing’s eyes. The image of the perfectly preserved corpse—the one holding the Purple Crystal before he took it—surfaced in his mind.

*It preserves the dead and rapidly heals the living?*

His fingers tightened around the Purple Crystal. Heart pounding, his gaze darted across the ruins. He knew the city was dead, but holding a treasure of this magnitude triggered his feral survival instincts.

He didn’t linger. He broke into a dead sprint toward his hidden burrow.

As he ran, he noticed his wounds knitting together at a visible rate. Even the deep-seated exhaustion in his bones was fading. Normally, a sprint like this would force him to rest after thirty minutes. Now, well past that mark, a comfortable warmth suffused his limbs. His stamina felt boundless.

He even snatched a low-flying bird out of the air on his way back. He didn’t snap its neck; he merely knocked it unconscious. Live meat kept longer.

Despite the detour, he made record time. The sun was still hanging above the horizon when his burrow came into view. A rare surge of elation gripped him, but he ruthlessly suppressed it. Carelessness meant death.

The Fragmented Face of God had opened its eyes, turning the city into a nascent restricted zone. At night, it wasn’t just mutated beasts that prowled the ruins; supernatural horrors awakened. Slum-dwellers whispered that places saturated with death birthed these anomalies. The eerie laughter he heard outside his burrow at night belonged to them.

The golden rule for surviving anomalies was absolute: *Do not look. Do not touch. Do not engage.*

He had only ever heard them at night, but he wasn’t about to bet his life on their schedule. Without slowing down, he slipped through the narrow crack of his burrow and immediately sealed the entrance with debris.

Sitting cross-legged in the pitch-black hole, he finally opened his hand.

A soft purple luminescence spilled from his palm, bathing the cramped dirt walls and reflecting in his cold, dark eyes. He studied the Purple Crystal. It was roughly the size of his index finger. Wispy, fibrous strands drifted within its core, pulsing with that strange, violet light.

*Healing…* He pulled open his ragged fur coat and inspected the gash on his chest. It was ninety percent closed. At this rate, it would be fully healed within the hour. Even the old, jagged scars surrounding it were fading into smooth skin.

Factoring in his boundless stamina during the run, Xu Qing came to a pragmatic conclusion. The crystal’s primary function was restoration. It restored flesh, restored stamina, and restored vitality.

*Does it do anything else?* he wondered.

Whether it was a byproduct of the god opening its eyes or something else entirely, it didn’t matter. It was a priceless artifact. In all his thirteen years of brutal survival, he had never heard of anything possessing such miraculous restorative properties. To a scavenger, this was a second life.

But his cold logic quickly doused his excitement. He only had this crystal because everyone else in the city was dead. Once the blood rain stopped and he ventured back into the wasteland, he lacked the strength to protect it. If anyone saw it, they would gut him without a second thought.

He had to hide it.

His gaze shifted to the unconscious bird. Grabbing it, he clamped a hand over its beak to muffle any noise. With his other hand, he drew the black iron skewer from his calf and sliced a shallow gash into the bird’s flesh. Ignoring its frantic struggles, he shoved the Purple Crystal directly into the wound.

He watched, unblinking.

The bird thrashed violently, but then the air inside the burrow shifted. Invisible currents of spiritual energy surged, drawn toward the creature in volumes far exceeding what Xu Qing could pull during his own cultivation. The energy flooded the bird. Instantly, its struggles grew terrifyingly forceful. It thrashed with such savage power that Xu Qing nearly lost his grip.

Xu Qing’s eyes gleamed. Normally, he could crush a bird’s neck with two fingers. Now, he had to squeeze several times before he felt the vertebrae snap. He quickly retrieved the Purple Crystal, wiped it clean, and closed his eyes in thought.

*The bird didn’t die. Instead, spiritual energy poured in, and its strength skyrocketed… It should be safe.*

A moment later, his eyes snapped open, filled with resolve. He shoved the Purple Crystal directly into the nearly healed wound on his chest.

The pain was sharp, but he gritted his teeth. There was no safer place than inside his own body. And his crude experiment suggested the effects might be even stronger when embedded.

As the crystal settled into his flesh and his wound sealed over, a thunderous roar erupted within him. A torrent of spiritual energy, far more immense than what the bird had attracted, tore through the earth and flooded his body.

The influx was staggering. Xu Qing’s skin instantly took on a pale, bluish tint. An indescribable chill spread through his limbs—a sign of the overwhelming concentration of mutagen within the raw energy.

But Xu Qing was prepared. Without hesitation, he activated the Sea Mountain Technique.

As the technique cycled, vast quantities of mutagen were forcibly separated from the incoming spiritual energy. The purified energy surged through his meridians, filling every corner of his being. His body thrummed with a series of explosive pops, as if long-blocked pathways were being violently cleared. His flesh was nourished and refined.

The Kui image he visualized in his mind seemed to come alive, shifting through a series of stances on its own.

The Sea Mountain Technique was a body-tempering art, not a Qi cultivation method. It consisted of ten layers, corresponding to the ten layers of the Qi Condensation realm. According to the bamboo scroll, each layer granted the cultivator the strength of one tiger. Five tigers equaled one Kui, and two Kui equaled one Kui. It was said a Kui could move mountains, and a Kui could shift seas—hence the name Sea Mountain Technique.

Now, the Purple Crystal embedded in his chest acted like a vortex, relentlessly drawing in spiritual energy. It poured into him like a waterfall, drastically accelerating his cultivation.

Time lost meaning. The popping sounds within his body intensified into a continuous roar. Impurities were forced out through every pore, filling the burrow with a foul, acrid stench. As the filth was expelled, his skin grew noticeably clearer, and his grime-covered features revealed a surprisingly delicate handsomeness.

Eventually, the internal noise subsided, and the flood of energy tapered off. Xu Qing’s eyes snapped open. For a fleeting moment, a flash of purple light shone in their depths before fading.

He blinked, stunned. The pitch-black burrow was now slightly visible to him. He hurriedly examined his body, his expression shifting to one of disbelief.

*This feeling…*

A flicker of excitement stirred within him. He stood and threw a punch. The air whistled sharply. The burrow was too cramped to test his speed, but the explosive power in his limbs told him he had undergone a shocking transformation.

He immediately rolled up his left sleeve. On his forearm, a black dot the size of a fingernail had appeared. Xu Qing took a deep breath, forcing down his elation.

*So this is the first layer of Qi Condensation!*

According to the bamboo scroll, this was a Mutation Point. The Sea Mountain Technique manifested its Mutation Points on the left arm, adding one with each layer.

He touched the dot, his heart swelling with the thrill of newfound strength. He glanced at the burrow’s entrance, already planning to test his speed at dawn.

But then his expression shifted to one of suspicion. He crept to the entrance and listened intently.

Outside, it was still dark, but all the usual sounds were gone. No mutated beasts, no eerie laughter. Not even the ever-present patter of rain.

*Could it be…?*

A possibility dawned on him. He waited in silence until a brilliant beam of light pierced through a crack in the entrance, illuminating his dark eyes as if igniting his world.

At the sight of the light, Xu Qing’s body trembled. He slowly reached out, placing his hand into the sunbeam. The warmth in his palm felt alien yet achingly familiar, slowly thawing something frozen deep within him.

*Sunlight…*

After a long moment, a bright light kindled in his eyes. He pushed aside the debris blocking the entrance. As more beams of light embraced him, he slowly crawled out.

Emerging from the hole, he lifted his head. The oppressive, rain-heavy clouds were gone. In their place was a brilliant, radiant sun. It was like an old man at dawn, recovering from a long illness, slowly drawing back the curtain to let freshness return to the world.

*The rain has stopped.*

Xu Qing took a deep breath of the sun-warmed air and silently surveyed the city bathed in morning light. Under the dazzling red sun, everything seemed to glow with a different vitality.

Crimson morning clouds in the distance shot rays of light through gaps in the sky, like countless whales spouting golden waterfalls. They washed away the lingering haze and gloom, revealing the city’s scars. Collapsed buildings, blue-black corpses, and shocking crimson puddles—all served as grim reminders of the cataclysm.

A complex emotion flickered in Xu Qing’s eyes. He had lived in the slums outside this city for six years. He had watched it for six years. He hadn’t entered often, but it had been the place he most yearned to live.

*I obtained a cultivation technique here.*

*I obtained the Purple Crystal here.*

*I survived here.*

He fell silent. After a long while, he sighed softly. He walked to a nearby blue-black corpse, studied it for a moment, then hoisted it onto his back and began to walk.

He carried it to a nearby square and laid it down. Then he turned back for a second corpse, a third, a fourth… Some were scattered in the streets; others were buried under rubble.

He worked until he had carried every corpse from the surrounding area to the square. The bodies piled up like a small mountain—some intact, some mutilated.

Xu Qing stood before the pile and lit a fire. Perhaps due to the mutagen, the flames roared to life with unnatural ferocity, belching thick, black smoke…

He watched the smoke for a long time before silently walking away to a second area. Soon, another column of smoke rose into the sky. Then another, and another…

Thus, on the first day sunlight returned to the ruined city, the light was accompanied by the dark smoke of cremation. These black pillars rose, blotting out the sun. The dawn, once full of promise, grew dim and blood-red, as if holding a deep sigh.

It seemed each plume of smoke was a tear shed by the sky. The long shadows they cast on the ground became the earth’s tearstains.

The final tearstain was the place where Xu Qing had found the purple light.

There, he laid down the old apothecary’s body. As the pyre burned, waves of heat washed over him. He stood silently beside the flames, the raging fire reflected in his dark pupils, constantly shifting. His wild, tangled hair curled in the heat. After a long moment, Xu Qing himself bowed deeply.

*May… you rest in peace.*

The flames suddenly blazed with renewed intensity, scattering countless embers like dandelion seeds into the wind. Yet the thick smoke rising from the pyre still carried the unresolved resentment and regret of the dead—a weight even the wind could not disperse.

It rose higher and higher, like faint scars upon the sky.

Insignificant. Full of helplessness.

…

Much later, accompanied by the sound of chaotic footsteps, a voice dripping with mockery suddenly rang out from behind the youth.

“So this is why I haven’t seen any corpses along the way. There’s a fool of a boy here, wasting his energy moving and burning them.”

“Fine. Since you’re so attached, I’ll do you a favor and toss you in to join them.”

Xu Qing whirled around.