Na'er's Sacrifice Begins

Na'er turned and ran, the slippers making rapid pattering sounds against the floor.

Lin Qingzhou braced himself against the wall, shuffling toward the sofa step by step before sinking heavily into it.

He piled his spoils onto the coffee table, grabbed a bottle of disinfectant, twisted off the cap, and poured it directly into the deepest wound under his ribs.

The stinging pain felt like a red-hot knife carving into his flesh. He let out a muffled groan, veins bulging on his forehead, his hand shaking so violently he nearly dropped the bottle.

Yet, he gritted his teeth, rinsed the wound clean in a few quick motions, and wrapped it haphazardly with bandages, barely managing to stem the bleeding.

"Look, didn't I tell you I was fine?" He tied off the bandage, leaned back against the sofa, and reached out to wipe the tears from Na'er's face.

Just then, a wave of intense dizziness suddenly struck him.

His heart gave a violent spasm, as if gripped tightly by an invisible hand. It was just as he feared—it was too late. Lin Qingzhou had used medication to delay the toxin, but it was still too late.

Following that, a bone-chilling cold began to spread from the wound under his ribs, racing along his blood vessels to his limbs and bones.

This chill was not ordinary cold; it was a necrotic, sinister frost that seemed capable of freezing the soul. His body began to tremble uncontrollably, and his fingernails turned a visible shade of cyan-purple.

He looked down at the wound—the bandage was soaked through with blood, but the color was wrong. It wasn't a normal dark red, but a viscous, inky green that shimmered with an eerie fluorescence.

Poison.

The strange smile the Evil Soul Master wore before he died finally made sense; it was indeed him.

He knew he wouldn't survive, but he also knew that anyone struck by his blade wouldn't survive either.

Lin Qingzhou wanted to reach for the alloy medicine box, but his body no longer obeyed him. His legs felt as if the bones had been removed; the moment he tried to stand, he collapsed back onto the sofa.

The toxin spread with alarming speed. The sinister cold surged from his limbs back to his chest, then shot upward, straight into his brain. His consciousness began to blur, and the scene before him fractured into pieces.

"Brother! Brother! What's wrong, Brother!" Na'er lunged at him, cupping his face in her hands, her voice turning into a wail.

Lin Qingzhou saw her mouth moving, but the sound seemed to come from very, very far away.

He wanted to say "I'm fine," but his lips only twitched, unable to produce a sound. His tongue was numb, his throat felt as if it had been filled with cement, and every breath was accompanied by a hoarse, abnormal wheeze.

The poison had reached his heart.

His pupils began to dilate, a faint cyan-black hue surfaced on his skin, and his veins bulged beneath the surface like twisted earthworms, crawling from his neck up to his cheeks.

Blood began to seep from his fingertips, dripping onto the sofa and staining it with small, dark red blotches.

Lin Qingzhou's consciousness struggled on the edge of darkness. He could feel the pain—an intense, tearing agony radiating from his heart throughout his entire body, as if every nerve were being soaked in molten lava.

He suddenly found it somewhat amusing. After dying over a thousand times in that hellish place without being truly killed, he was actually going to fall at the hands of an Evil Soul Master whose name he didn't even know.

What a pity. After finally living a second life and coming to the Douluo Continent, was he really going to die like this, without even leaving a name behind?

He wondered if he could be reborn again, and where he might end up next. He hadn't cherished the chance the heavens had given him.

But this bitterness was soon drowned out by another emotion.

Na'er.

She was kneeling before him, trembling as she sobbed. If he died, what would happen to this little girl? Would she be taken back to the Star Dou Forest, fused, and have every memory and emotion of "Na'er" erased?

His lips twitched slightly, and he used all his remaining strength to squeeze out a few hoarse, barely audible words: "In the wardrobe... there is..." Before he could finish, his fingers fell limp.

Na'er froze. She looked at Lin Qingzhou's fallen hand, at his pale, cyan-tinged face, and at the way his chest rose and fell with decreasing frequency.

He was dying.

The thought struck her mind like a bolt of lightning, instantly shattering all her reason and restraint.

She stood up abruptly, rushed into Lin Qingzhou's bedroom, and pulled open the wardrobe door.

A metal box lay quietly inside. Na'er opened it violently, only to find it filled with Federation Currency. This was the secret stash Lin Qingzhou had saved; it was useless now, meant to be left for Na'er.

Na'er wiped her tears, then suddenly remembered something. She bolted back to her own room, opened a drawer, and pulled out an ancient-looking book.

Heaven-Swallowing Demonic Art

She flipped through the manual, her gaze sweeping across the pages. The archaic characters were not difficult for her to understand; the inheritance of the Dragon God bloodline allowed her to naturally perceive ancient scripts.

As she read line by line, her breathing grew more rapid, and her purple eyes grew brighter. She had long known that her brother had taken her in for this very reason.

But as the thought crossed her mind, it stirred no anger or disappointment. She didn't care. Why he had taken her in at the beginning didn't matter at all.

From the moment she learned to say her first "Brother," she knew those cold calculations had long since been melted away by his day-after-day tenderness.

She knew what kind of person he was better than anyone. And now, this manual, which could allow him to defy the heavens and change his fate, was the only thing that could save him.

She clutched the manual tightly to her chest, walked back to the living room, and knelt beside Lin Qingzhou. She reached out and gently stroked his cheek; it was already terrifyingly cold.

"Brother, you fool," she choked out. "You already took me in, so why lock this away? If you had used it sooner, you would have been a Soul Master long ago, and you wouldn't have ended up like this tonight..."

She couldn't continue. She knew the answer: he couldn't bear to.

He would rather go to that terrifying place every night to be killed repeatedly, enduring the agony every single night. He would rather swing a hammer day and night, rather risk his own life, than let her suffer even the slightest bit.

When he locked that manual away, he wasn't just locking away a few pages of paper; he was locking away all his own ambitions and his only hope.

"You couldn't bear to, but I can."

She turned the manual to the page recording the sacrificial ritual and formed an ancient, complex hand seal with her hands in front of her chest.

Her lips parted slightly, uttering obscure and solemn syllables. It was the sacrificial language used by the ancient Dragon race, and every syllable sent visible ripples through the air.

Based on the memories of the Dragon God, Na'er was reshaping and adapting this manual to perfectly suit Lin Qingzhou.

The sacrifice began.

Her body began to glow. It wasn't the dazzling, intense light of a soul skill, but a gentle, dreamlike silver-white radiance.