The moment his blood touched the wood, the coffin trembled faintly, as if breathing in. A deep tug pulled at Wuji's core, his vision blurring, as a sharp pang of loss hollowed his chest.
His lifespan began to bleed away, and a primal urge screamed at him to pull back, to stop this foolishness, to preserve what little time he had left.
But another voice—quiet, resolute, and merceless—rose to meet it. "What difference does it make? Three years now or three years later? Death will always come; it's just a matter of time."
His fingers trembled, yet he held them steady. If he stopped now, this chance would never return. Fate did not offer mercy twice, or perhaps this was never mercy at all.
Drop by drop, his blood fell. The soft thud of each drop striking the lid echoed inside his skull, pounding in rhythm with his heart. It wasn't just the fear of dying that gnawed at him; it was also the fear of making the wrong choice, fear that this sacrifice would all be for nothing.
Minutes stretched on; seven passed. His face grew deathly pale, his breathing turned ragged. His vision swam, and his heartbeat slowed with each passing second. Cold sweat soaked his back as he watched the numbers burn into his consciousness.
[Lifespan: 82/84]
His destined death had come closer by another year.
Seeing this, his knees nearly buckled. "So this is the price," he mumbled hoarsely.
One more moment, and his body might give out. One more minute, and he would collapse before seeing the result.
The final drop of blood fell. Thuck! The coffin erupted instantly with blinding light, engulfing the workshop, streaming through the windows like a flood of pale radiance. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, it snapped inward.
Absolute, crushing silence followed and Wuji completely exhausted collapsed, striking the coffin with a dull thud.
He lay there for several long breaths, his chest heaving and his lungs burning, clinging to consciousness by instinct alone. When the world finally steadied, he pushed himself upright with trembling arms.
The time for the answer had come. He placed his hands on the lid and this time, the heavy wood slid aside as if it had been waiting for him. There was no velvet or gold inside, only bare wood inscribed with uneven, almost childish sigils.
Yet, the moment his gaze fell upon them, a sharp clarity pierced his mind. These markings were anything but simple. He could instinctively feel the resonant frequency between them and his soul. Without hesitation, he climbed inside and lay down.
The lid closed on its own.
The sigils ignited, bathing the interior in a pale, ghostly light. As he pressed his palm against the carvings, the wood seemed to dissolve into an immeasurable dark vastness, and he felt as if he were floating within an endless dark void.
From afar in the dark void, tiny glowing threads flickered into existence. As he focused on them, information flooded his entire being, not in words or images, but in raw, incomprehensible concepts: end, weight, debt, and the heavy cycles of existence that had no beginning or end.
His breath hitched. A sharp pressure clamped around his skull, as if invisible hands were prying his thoughts apart. Something ancient, unknown, and vast beyond human comprehension pressed against his awareness, threatening to shatter his already fragile sanity.
He realized with chilling clarity that if this continued, his mind would collapse long before his body did.
Suddenly, the pressure lessened, though it didn't vanish. Instead, it compressed as the infinite mysteries of the coffin folded inward, shrinking into something narrower and more orderly—something a mortal mind could survive.
Before his eyes, the chaos of incomprehensible concepts aligned. The dynamic, unknown incomprehensible threads slithering in the dark void before him straightened and arranged themselves into a language and construct his mind could understand, then plunged into his body.
Knowledge about the coffin, imposed itself on his perception, forcing reality to speak a language he could understand. Wuji gasped, sucking in air like a drowning man breaking the surface.
"So that's it," he murmured hoarsely. "It downgraded its complexity in form I can understand."
He knew then that if he had tried to perceive the coffin's essence directly, his soul would have been crushed instantly into nothingness and justthe thought turned his spine cold.
His gaze then settled on the new blue panel floating in front of him.
[Name: Ye Wuji
Path: Bearer of the Heaven Burial Coffin
Lifespan: 82/84
Stored Lifespan: 3/3
Coffin Arts: Lifespan Plunderer, Eye of the End, Husk]
He absorbed the information at a glance. The numbers were brutally simple, especially the "stored lifespan." Those were years held in reserve within the coffin, not yet his own.
Observing the panel further, only the word "Path" gave him pause. "Bearer of the Heaven Burial Coffin..." He tasted the words. From the title alone, the bizarre and dreadful experience thus far suggested that it was not just a treasure, but a mantle and role that could be inherited, abandoned, or worse, stripped away.
"Bearer huh? Who owned the coffin before me? Where are they now? Are they dead, or are they watching from some high palace, using me as a pawn?"
He forced the paranoia into a dark corner of his mind. Speculation was a luxury reserved for those with more than two years to live.
He shifted his focus to the first Coffin Art, the core of his survival.
[Lifespan Plunderer (Rank 1): When the bearer causes the death of a being—directly or indirectly—whose life ends before its destined time, and completes its burial, the Heaven Burial Coffin claims a portion of the unlived years]
Wuji stared at the text until the words seemed to blur. "So, it feeds on years that no longer belong anywhere," he murmured, understanding dawning on him. "Years that should have been lived but weren't. Maybe like scraps torn from fate, or leftovers the heavens couldn't reclaim quickly enough."
The idea unsettled him, but then he remembered the young disciple he had buried alive. In the absorbed memories, he could still hear the muffled thuds, the screech of fingernails against wood, and the frantic, wet gasps for air.
"So that counted as indirect," he said, clenching his hands into bloodless fists.
In both of his lives, he had never taken a soul. Yet his first kill had been neither clean nor quick. It had been claustrophobic and slow. Worst of all, the memory wasn't a distant observation; it was a visceral haunting.
The terror, panic, and suffocating dread of knowing death was inches away flooded his chest as if he were in the coffin and forced to relive the murder from the victim's perspective.
He finally understood. The coffin didn't just steal time; it harvested the most potent fragments of experience. It made sure he felt the weight of what he was stealing. Maybe it was a warning, or perhaps a tax on his soul for using something so perverse.
Silence filled the coffin as he lay there, breathing shallowly. He knew that kindness had no place in this world. He had learned that lesson twice over, yet knowing death this intimately made inflicting it harder, not easier.
The description of the Lifespan Plunderer was clear: Slaughter would no longer be accidental or by choice. It was an expectation and a necessity.
"No," he muttered, shaking his head to clear the fog. "I'm spiraling."
Hesitation was a death sentence, that much was certain.
"Surely it can't be limited to humans," he said after a long moment of pondering, his voice regaining faint confidence. "Beasts die before their time every day."
The nearby forest was a theater of their premature death. "I'll experiment later," he decided, closing his eyes against the blue glow. Whether he liked it or not, he had already begun down the path, and the coffin did not care about his protests of conscience.
His gaze then shifted to the second art.
[Eye of the End (Rank 1): Allows the bearer to see the destined death of living beings]
He didn't need to test it; he already knew its power. Recalling the glowing numbers above Wang Da's head, he had a disturbing realization. The ability wasn't a prophecy or a mere prediction; it was an inevitable conclusion.
This coffin art didn't concern itself with the how or the when the death would occur, it simply revealed the point beyond which life could no longer endure. No amount of struggle, prayer, or fortune could overcome this quiet certainty.
A man might laugh tomorrow or labor for decades, but his limit had already been etched in glowing numbers.
This frightened him more than the Lifespan Plunderer did. There was no negotiation or moral ambiguity with this art; only the visibility of the inevitable.
"This isn't some eye techniques," he mumbled to himself. "But a judgment." Or perhaps it was worse and more powerful. He forced his mind away from the thought before it could take root and rot his resolve.
His attention fell to the final art, the one that remained dark.
[Husk(Rank one) Locked — Insufficient Stored Lifespan. By expending stored lifespan, the bearer can imbue a corpse with false vitality and shape it into a husk—an obedient avatar born of death]
Wuji's breath caught. False vitality, not life and not resurrection. The husk would be a mockery assembled from what was. He immediately understood why the art was locked away. Three years of stored life was a pittance—a handful of scraps—far from unlocking it.
Furthermore, reanimating a body from the grave as a hollow shell required many years of life, something he did not yet possess. Moreover, he wouldn't foolishly use it on one husk when he was only two years away from becoming one himself.