AWB Chapter 421 Star River Ashes: A Letter to You (The Finale)
Chapter 421 Star River Ashes: A Letter to You (The Finale)
Humans are unaware of the moon.
Ten thousand years have passed in the blink of an eye.
As time passed, the battle between immortals and demons long since turned to dust in the vast galaxy.
Beyond the Nine Heavens, the sea of clouds surged, and Xu Nian's eyes reflected the clarity she had when she first entered the Sword Sect.
His white hair was whipped by the strong wind, revealing a faint red tooth mark on his neck—a mark left by Wu Qinghuan a hundred years ago. He rubbed the blood-stained contract in his palm, when suddenly he smelled the intense fragrance of lotus blossoms behind him.
"Senior brother always seems to stare blankly at old things. What's he thinking about this time?"
The girl in red shattered the void with her bare feet, the golden bells on her ankles ringing softly like the sound of swords. A half-peach branch was pinned in her hair, the very same one that had stood outside the window of the servants' quarters years ago.
Ten thousand years later, a withered branch sprouted a crimson bud at her temple, making the blood mole between her eyebrows appear even more alluring.
As Xu Nian turned around, a wood shaving fell from her sleeve.
"Of course I miss you."
Wu Qinghuan bent down to pick it up, and a wisp of karmic fire ignited at his fingertips. In an instant, the wood chips transformed into fireflies floating among the stars—those were fragments of the old wooden buckets they used to carry water.
"Back then, you took three lashes from Senior Sister Shangguan for me." She suddenly chuckled, a red lotus formed from karmic fire blooming in her palm. "Are the scars on your back still there?"
Xu Nian did not answer, but his robe suddenly slipped down to his waist.
The gruesome whip marks on his back had long since healed, but they meandered into a golden sword pattern, resonating and vibrating with the jade pendant at Wu Qinghuan's waist.
“When you used the karmic fire to erode me, you should have thought that these marks would never be erased.” He grasped her hand, which she tried to pull away. The karmic fire climbed up her wrist and shoulder, but turned into warm, soft silk. “Just like the warmth of you curling up in my arms every night when you pretended to be a man.”
Wu Qinghuan's ear tips flushed slightly.
The straw mat in the servants' quarters from ten thousand years ago suddenly appeared in the clouds. In the phantom, two boys slept side by side, and Xu Nian's inner garment sash was still wrapped around her fingertips.
In a daze, the karmic fire around her subsided completely.
Her red dress transformed into a pure white silk veil, and peach branches suddenly bloomed in her hair.
Billions of petals, carrying memories of the past, flooded into my mind—
On a rainy night in the servants' quarters, she pretended to be asleep and hid in his arms, feigning fear of thunder.
During his foundation-building tribulation, he deliberately attracted heavenly lightning to shatter the sachet that Shangguan Ling had given him;
Even that "accidental" kiss in her past life was actually her timing to dispel her protective aura...
Suddenly, a rain of flowers fell from the heavens, and the ancient peach tree from the Sword Sect ruins took root here, transcending time and space.
A wine jar buried by Xu Nian 100,000 years ago has broken out of the ground, and the seal still bears Wu Qinghuan's childish handwriting: [For Senior Brother's wedding].
"It's not too late to drink now." She slapped open the wine jar, her crimson eyes turning completely into spring water.
Xu Nian tilted his head back and drank the remaining wine, then suddenly threw the empty jar into the world.
As the altar plunged into the East Sea, all the cultivators' swords rang out in unison—
A thousand years later, a fisherman's child found a fragment of a wine jar on the beach and saw two lines of small characters engraved on the inside:
The highest form of enlightenment is not forgetting emotions; ultimate bliss resides in your eyes.
[Xu Nianwu and Qinghuan, forever united in heart]
Above the sea of clouds, two figures gradually faded away.
Xu Nian's white hair entwined around the red string on her wrist, fragments of a wooden bucket solidified into a wedding hairpin, and the Milky Way wove a wedding canopy behind them.
In the Human Sword Sect, newly initiated disciples sat around an ancient tree, listening to the elders recount a legend lost to time.
"Later, Grandmaster Xu and Grandmaster Wu swept away the Demon Abyss with a single sword strike, reshaping the rules of Heaven. Some say they returned to chaos, some say they hid in the mortal world... But the oldest scroll in the Scripture Pavilion says—" The elder paused, pointing to the intertwined stars in the sky, "Look, that is their sword intent."
Amidst the dazzling starlight, two sword lights, one red and one white, flow eternally, just like the hands that the young man held tightly back then.
(End of full text)