At the center of his soul space, his soul sphere glowed with a pale white light marred by faint, dark patches. These dark patches were the fading remnants of the young disciple's previous identity: corroded, mixed memories of himself, the disciples, and the instincts of the several chickens he had buried.
Weirdly enough, all of these patches seemed to thin with each breath
Clenching his jaw, he closed his eyes and the moment he did, the sigil threads plunged into the soul sphere.
His body convulsed violently, his hands gripping the coffin walls until his knuckles blanched. Veins bulged across his forehead. His breath came in sharp, broken gasps as the absorption began.
First came her hard-earned combat instinct.
His mind flooded with movement; angles, distances, timing, the subtle prickle of killing intent, the body's weak points and vital areas, for both human and beast. As this knowledge seared into him, his untrained muscles reacted without permission, jerking and tensing as they tried to synchronize with a wisdom they had never earned.
And as he'd expected, pain followed. It was a burning, grinding agony that surged through his limbs as muscle fibers strained to obey unfamiliar commands.
His body twisted against the coffin's interior, fingers clawing reflexively, teeth grinding as his muscles tried and failed to mirror a form they could not yet hold.
For long minutes, his muscles spasmed and strained, trying and failing to reshape themselves after Mei Xu's. But they could not. Her movements belonged to a trained cultivator—a woman whose body had been reforged by qi, beast blood, pills, body forging techniques, and decades of violence.
His own frail, mortal frame rejected the transformation outright. Eventually, as he gave up the futile effort, the physical strain eased. Though his body could not replicate her form, the knowledge she had honed over centuries remained in his mind.
It settled into him as a refined combat awareness, like how to choose his engagements, how to read intent, how to position himself, how to retreat, and how to kill when killing was the only answer.
Next came her fragmented memories. They struck his mind like falling blades. He saw—no, he became—a small village girl standing by a river.
Water shimmered gold in the evening light. A middle-aged fisherman smiled at her, his face warm and ordinary. For a fleeting instant, there was peace.
Then the image shattered like glass, replaced by fire. A village engulfed in flames, black smoke coiling, wails piercing the air. Embers drifted like ash-snow. Corpses were strewn across the ground, blood soaking the earth.
The girl—he—was wailing, throat raw, chest crushed by suffocating grief. Powerlessness pressed down as he stared through reddened eyes at the sky, now dyed crimson, where blurry figures hovered above the village on swords.
The scene shattered again.
He found himself in a pit, a vast, deep pit crawling with children his own age. A single pill was thrown down. A crude breathing technique followed. Chaos erupted within moments. Children eyed each other's pills. The rule became simple: kill or be killed.
She hid. He hid. Sometimes she was found. Sometimes she escaped, bleeding, limping, shaking. Survival stretched into a quiet, agonizing span where survival was reduced to fear and hunger.
Then the memory broke apart. Again.
He found himself in another pit, larger than the last, filled with cultivators already in the Qi Cycling realm. Here, she chose her natal spell—an illusion-based spell that complemented her spirit roots. She thrived. She deceived, manipulated, and endured for years.
The scene shattered again.
She stood in a towering stronghold of the true demonic sect, inside a library that stretched upward into darkness. She moved forward with others, guided to choose a cultivation canon, but the vision collapsed before he could see it.
Again, he found himself in a cavern deep within the sect. Its walls were covered in sketches of array studies, littered with broken array plates and endless diagrams. She walked the array path, her spirit roots harmonizing perfectly with the illusion branch.
Other paths were abandoned without regret. Years passed in fragments. Her attainments in illusion arrays deepened. Her cruelty shed emotion and hardened into cold calculation. With this change came absolute focus, and with focus, her reputation grew. So did her confidence. And with it, her greed for knowledge, for power, swelled like a hunger.
Through it all, Wuji fought desperately to hold onto himself. The memories no longer felt observed; they felt lived, like this was his previous life.
At times, he could no longer tell whether he was Wuji reliving Mei Xu's past, or Mei Xu awakening inside Wuji's body. Identity blurred and boundaries between memories thinned. His sense of self trembled under the weight of another life forced into his mind.
And within that chaos, something else began to crystallize: a new desire. Not the shallow greed he had already seen through, not for money or trivial things, but an all-consuming thirst for knowledge, for absolute power. And deeper still, buried so far it had nearly fossilized was hatred and vengeance.
Hatred for those who had betrayed her. For those who had burned her village. For those who had shaped her into what she became, and all she endured.
That hatred had been sealed away with ruthless discipline, hidden even from herself, for fear the sect would discover it. And if they did, she knew she would not survive.
As the absorption of Mei Xu's fragmented memories ended, it left behind more than echoes, more than chaos.
It left boons.
Knowledge flooded him, not the type a mortal could acquire through study or time, or ever know existed. It was array knowledge so deep, so structured, that it bypassed all preliminary stages of array path.
He now possessed enough comprehension of the array path to stand as a peak Grade One Array Expert, having skipped the apprentice stage entirely.
It was absurd. Like a three-year-old child suddenly grasping the foundations of all sciences on Earth, not through learning, but through forced implantation.
The sheer weight of it would have crushed an ordinary mortal's mind or perhaps driven them insane with excitement. Yet Wuji felt no such things. Danger still loomed; survival was not secured.
Clenching his fists, he willed the sigils to perform the most important instillations.
Her lifespan.
Instantly, the sigil threads flared with blinding brilliance as they started the installation. His mind immediately grew heavy, thoughts slowed, then stagnated, as if trapped in thick mud. For a brief, terrifying moment, he could not form a single coherent thought. Sixty years were being forced into a mortal soul never meant to bear them.
His mortal, fragile soul trembled under the burden. His body convulsed, straining to restructure itself around the weight of this added existence.
After long, agonizing moments, the sigil threads finally withdrew. They retreated from his soul sphere and slithered back into the coffin's walls, disappearing into the still-glowing sigils.
Wuji lay in complete silence, unmoving. Then he realized something. The fragmented memories had not overtaken him as he feared. He did not feel displaced, nor as if this body belonged to someone else. Mei Xu's emotions did not bleed into his own. Her hatred, grief, and obsessions remained hers.
Understanding dawned slowly, but with certainty. "Will." The stronger his will, the less power foreign memories held over him. If his will were refined to an inhuman degree, these memories would become nothing more than inert records, tools, not threats.
That realization eased, if only slightly, his fear of losing himself.
He took a deep breath and willed the coffin's panel into existence.
[Name]: Ye Wuji
[Path]: Bearer of the Heaven Burial Coffin
[Lifespan]: 82 / 127
[Stored Lifespan]: 60 / 60
[Coffin Arts]: Lifespan Plunderer. Eye of the End. Husk
His gaze locked onto the stored lifespan. A quiet excitement stirred, not for the amount of lifespan itself, but for what it unlocked: Husk.
Even then, the cost of fifty years to unlock it tightened his chest, but he knew deep down it was reasonable. This was no simple necromancy, demonic arts like Mei Xu's memory suggested, it was something far more profound.
He did not hesitate. The moment he willed it, the threads surged out once more, pierced his soul, and extracted fifty years in a single breath. They withdrew just as quickly, leaving him hollowed, as if something essential had been scooped out of his core.
He did not dwell on the loss. Those years had never truly been his. His focus shifted to the newly unlocked art.
[Husk (Rank One)] — Unlocked
By expending stored lifespan, the bearer can imbue a corpse with false vitality, shaping it into a husk—an obedient avatar born of death]
Without delay, he exited the coffin and activated the art. The wooden surface inside liquefied into a black, viscous stretch. Mei Xu's corpse slowly surfaced and rose unnaturally, limbs stiff, joints locked, like a marionette pulled upright by invisible strings.
In his mind, he selected the smallest usable unit; Six days.
Immediately, six days was cut of from the stored lifespan. Six days of lifespan granted him one minute of control over the husk.
He issued a command. The husk shifted and it's hand reached for the spatial pouch beside the coffin, floated it in the, and—fueled by the false vitality, transformed into its qi—forced it open.
Then, it retrieved the blue pill and placed it into Wuji's outstretched hand and without hesitation, he swallowed it.
Through her memories, he knew it was genuine. Mei Xu had never intended to deceive him, not out of mercy, but arrogance.
She had never imagined this outcome. Now her body served him, and through her failure, Wuji carved a profound lesson into his bones: In this world, never underestimate anyone. A child might be an immortal's reincarnation, a heavenly chosen one. A beggar might be bait. A stray dog might belong to an old monster.
One must walk the world as though death waited behind every shadow, even among mortals.
Minutes later, the pressure in his chest vanished. A wave of nausea followed. He bent forward and vomited a clotted, black mass that reeked of rot, the congealed remains of the Heart Gu poison.
His body sagged, drained and trembling. He slowly sat atop the coffin, breathing heavily, and spent long minutes steadying himself. Only then did his thoughts begin to settle. Only then did he truly begin to sort through what he had taken from Mei Xu.