Chapter 116: How Many Years to Live

Qu Jing dabbed at her tears and smiled at Lin Lu. “If I hadn’t loved you once, how could it hurt like this?”
She cried not because the cleansing was painful, but because her heart was.
Yet however painful it was, she still had to let it go.
Lin Lu felt a tightness in his chest. “Are you certain? Have you truly decided?”
Qu Jing was still smiling, …

Along the road they passed through a great number of refugees, most of them dragging their families with them. Every few steps they saw more of the fleeing common folk. Their clothes were ragged, their faces sallow and thin, each of them leaning on another as they walked the road.

The farther they went in, the stranger the air in the cave became. At the entrance everyone had only smelt what seemed like many rotting corpses, but now, in that foul, stinging odor, there seemed to be another much more complex scent. Ma Chengfeng had never encountered it before: it was sharply pungent, and yet it had nothing to do with decay at all.

“Clang!” came a great crash as the spears struck each other, and Zhang Fei, not as strong, had his arm numbed by the blow, stumbling so badly he nearly tumbled from the saddle.

Qi Yanran gave a troubled look, pointed to a lit building by the roadside, and said, “That’s a gambling house… my father might be inside…”
Though her father was a brute, blood ties were deep, and she still could not bring herself to ignore him.

“Grandpa, this is far too precious. If I take it and break it, wouldn’t the loss be terrible?” Qin Li still wanted to refuse.
This Golden Dragon dagger was an imperial article, an implement fit for the throne, sharp enough to shave through iron as if it were clay, an heirloom of the Ming Emperor.

The image was likely from the surveillance camera at the front gate. In it, the backs of Li Yuyue and a man appeared. Because the camera was outside, the angle must have been wider.

“Yes,” he said. “Earlier, I had already passed through the baptism of violet lightning.” Qin Li then recounted, one incident after another, what he had endured on the Cube Planet.

Before Qin Li could finish, Ji Ruyu, who was seated on his lap, shifted and slipped into his arms, and her soft lips once again covered his.

Xu Jingqi, perhaps feeling his words were indecent, jabbed him twice beneath the table.

Haotian suddenly remembered, on the blazing fire road from the Road of the Netherworld to the Asura Realm, the time Liuli had pointed to a Forget-the-Sorrows Pool and told him why she truly feared water.

“If it were me,” Gou Ling said at last, finally breaking her silence, mustering courage to face Shanjia Poso, “I would follow my own man.”

“You won’t go back? How can that be? If Mingyue is separated from you, she won’t have peace!” Ming Potian clearly did not want Tang Youyou to stay here any longer. He was already attached to her; when he could not see her, his heart felt strangely hollow.

“Letting you all in is more than I can be held responsible for,” the guard said, still in good temper. “Brother, I’d advise you to go back. This isn’t a place you’re meant to come to. Go back—go back.”

Shao Tong opened the door with trembling hands. As soon as it swung wide, a fist swung toward her head. She gasped, covering herself instinctively.

Huarong, who was brewing herbal broth for the Skeletal Patriarch, looked at Xing Feng with suspicion. Xing Feng had never spoken to her on his own before; this time he had not only spoken, but also brought her food. That could only mean either deceit or theft in her mind—there was no such thing as kindness without motive. He was no friend.

Even his silence would have been acceptable. But after he spoke like that, the Second Lady grew furious. It was obvious he was deliberately shielding Huarong; he must have heard she was to be driven out, and because that wounded him, he had made up his mind not to let this base maid remain for another moment.

Fu Yunxi had gone too. She had deliberately changed her attire, replacing her clothes with a pink gauze skirt, and she wore a string of tiny gold bells on her head; her steps rang out with a playful jingling as she walked.

For several days Qin Mingzhu had complained of stomach pain. She had taken several rounds of medicine to hold her pregnancy, yet it offered no relief. The pain was like the cramps that come on the eve of a monthly tide.