But at this moment, they were all alive. They were laughing, drinking, and throwing themselves into the sheer, unrestrained joy of being alive.
Su Han suddenly recalled the battlefield in the Buddhist Realm illusion. Corpses had carpeted the ground, blood had flowed like rivers, and the sky had been dark crimson. He had killed ten thousand people there. What expressions had those ten thousand worn when they died? Had any of them, like the people in the training grounds now, once laughed heartily, gotten drunk, and danced the yangko? When had their light gone out?
He lowered his head to look at the clear wine in his cup and drifted into a daze.
"What are you thinking about?" Shen Qingdai had come to stand beside him at some point, holding a cup of wine herself. Her cheeks were slightly flushed; she had clearly already been drinking.
Su Han glanced at her. "The cultivators who died at the hands of those evil creatures."
Shen Qingdai's smile faded slightly. After a moment of silence, she took a sip of wine. "One of my friends died too. The one who stood to my left that day, the one who used twin blades. Do you remember her?"
Su Han remembered. That twin-blade cultivator had charged at the very front, only to be snared by an evil creature's tentacles and hurled against the mountainside. She had died on the spot. By the time he arrived, all he saw was a mangled pool of flesh and blood and a blade snapped in two.
"I remember."
"Her name was A-Jiu. A wandering cultivator. She entered the trade three years before I did. She was the one who first took me out into the world." Shen Qingdai's voice was calm, but the fingers holding her cup had turned