The world was a rotting carcass, but Cang Yaochen moved through it like a god surveying a ruined garden. He carried the girl, Jiang Li, by her collar, as if she were a piece of discarded porcelain he'd plucked from the mud.
He kicked open the doors of a half-collapsed temple. Inside, a decapitated Buddha leaned against a crumbling wall, its stone eyes staring blankly at this sacrilegious return.
"Filthy," he murmured, his voice a low, melodic thrum that lacked any real disgust. Instead, it shimmered with a dark, predatory excitement.
With a casual flick of his fingers, a wave of pale pink divinity rippled through the ruins. The suffocating stench of decay was instantly swallowed by the cloying, hypnotic fragrance of peach blossoms. From the stagnant mud, petals sprouted—thick, velvet-soft, and laced with veins of deep, bruised crimson. He dropped her into this bed of blossoms. The girl's frail, skeletal frame was immediately engulfed by the scent, a fragrance so sweet it felt like a physical weight.
"Little thing," Cang Yaochen chuckled, kneeling beside her. His long, silver-spun hair cascaded over Jiang Li's grime-streaked face. "In a world this dead, a corpse shouldn't have eyes as vivid as yours."
He produced a silk handkerchief, soaked in starlight-infused spring water. He didn't use a spell to cleanse her; he wanted the tactile sensation of the task. He began to rub her face, his movements slow and rhythmic, like a restorer working on a forbidden painting.
His touch was elegant, yet the pressure was immense—a silent command for her to stay still.
"Even as a beggar who can't even fill her belly with bark, the hatred in your bones... it's delicious," he whispered against her ear. His warm breath mingled with the cold scent of the blossoms. "Tell me, do you have a name? Or would you prefer I treat you as a doll that cannot speak?"
Jiang Li understood nothing. In her fractured mind, filled only with the echoes of starvation, this glowing man was more terrifying than any beast.
She didn't dare breathe. Her body convulsed in silent, jagged tremors. But when that ice-cold silk slid over the pulse point of her throat, the primal instinct for survival overrode her paralysis.
"Kill... kill you..."
A shattered hiss tore from her throat. Her hand, hidden beneath a tattered sleeve, tightened around a shard of jagged black stone—the same tool she used to pry rotting meat from bone. With every ounce of her remaining life, she lunged at his exposed throat.
Cang Yaochen didn't move. He welcomed it.
Squelch.
The stone sliced through his alabaster skin. A drop of gold-red divine blood surged forth, hot as molten lava, and splattered onto Jiang Li's fingertips.
The impossible happened. The moment the blood touched her skin, it didn't smear; it burrowed. It sank into her veins like a living parasite, seeking the core of her soul.
[Ding! Divine Blood Contact Detected.] [Resonance Initiated: "The Bell of Primordial Reincarnation" fragment — Progress: 0.1%]
"AAAGH!"
A piercing scream tore through the temple. Within Jiang Li's sea of consciousness, a gargantuan, ancient bell seemed to toll with a deafening, soul-crushing roar. Fragments of fallen heavens, rain made of blood, and the silhouette of a towering, familiar god exploded in her mind.
She knew nothing of her past, only that her soul was being ripped apart. Her eyes rolled back, her body going limp in Cang Yaochen's arms. She looked like a crushed flower, shivering and sobbing in a daze. "It hurts... help me..."
Cang Yaochen stared at the lingering heat on his fingertips. The pink, flickering light of the "God of Love" in his eyes fractured for the first time. How could a mere mortal house his blood without exploding?
Just as the obsessive hunger in his gaze reached a breaking point, a bone-chilling cold swept through the temple.
The blossoms withered. The pink light died.
The "Fallen Buddha" within him had been jolted awake by that agonizing scream.
He looked at his blood-stained hands, then at the broken, trembling girl in his arms. He looked at the sacrilegious luxury he had created in this house of worship. For the first time in an eternity, his unshakable heart of stone shuddered.
"What a sin..." he whispered, his voice trembling as he caught her before she hit the ground. "What... what have I done to this innocent soul?"