But in the end, everything had failed.
Until a slightly hoarse, forceful voice suddenly rang out: "Why wouldn't you let him finish painting?"
Li Piaoqing whipped her head around. The boy in green stood beside Xifang Tian, gazing steadily at the woman's figure, about to dissolve within this Heart Poison.
The wind stopped and the snow stilled. Everything that was collapsing suddenly halted.
"Have you really seen what this painting looks like when it's finished?" Pei Ye asked softly. Beside him, the man who had not spoken a word from beginning to end was still tracing the painting with his brush, his chilblain-covered hands trembling.
Thirty days traveling there and back through ice and bitter cold had ruined his vocal cords, tongue, and mouth. He had lost all ability to speak, and his mind remained locked in a state of hallucination and madness. The Immortal Lord's lofty will prevented him from doing anything else.
This final ink painting, left after three days and nights without sleep or rest, was everything he had wanted to say in the twelfth month of the renzi year.
Of course Yi Danjun had never seen it. She only knew that he would madly copy the Edict Diagram.
At last, the painting was finished.
Xifang Tian slowly raised his head and held the painting out to the woman whose figure was fading.
They had accompanied each other here for thirty years. In her Mindscape, he had always been nothing more than a stiff, withered shadow whose will the Immortal Lord had stolen. Now, for the first time, he looked at her.
In the painting, between two towering mountains, a Jiaolong's shadow hung down from the heavens. Above it was a blackness that could not be looked upon directly; beneath it, mist steeped in divine mystery and