Chapter 647: Eternal Belief

Chapter 647: Chapter 9: Eternal Belief

“That’s not naive. You just don’t like to compromise.”

Zhou Buyi said in a low voice, “That’s the kind of person you are. It’s who you’ve always been. That’s why, back then, we all admired you so much.”

“But none of that is your real reason.”

But just then, Su Zhou’s tone shifted. Having activated his Thoughtless Mind, he could hear Zhou Buyi’s innermost thoughts. Those reasons might be enough to persuade anyone else, but they couldn’t persuade him. “Compared to all that reasonable and logical talk, your very first sentence, ‘I want to be immortal,’ was far more convincing.”

‘Ah, are they about to fight?’ Hearing this, Shao Qiming’s heart tightened. He had already taken out a Shock-Resistant Capsule, ready to duck into its high-strength airbag at a moment’s notice. He could sense that the previously calm atmosphere between the two men had suddenly erupted with turbulent waves of Spiritual Qi.

But the turbulence subsided as quickly as it had appeared. Zhou Buyi frowned slightly. Throughout their confrontation, he had been unable to gauge the depths of Su Zhou’s power. Though his opponent appeared to be in the Celestial Spirit Realm, just like himself, he remained as unfathomable as ever.

‘But that’s to be expected… This is Su Zhou, after all.’ He was the man who, from the mere Peak of the Postnatal Realm, had slain both the National Preceptor and the Demon Emperor. ‘Even with the Divine Wood Power I now cultivate, I’m not certain I could defeat him.’

“There is never just one reason. This world’s peace does need me to maintain it. If I hadn’t taken the Divine Wood Power, someone else would have. Where there is Order, there will always be those who resist it. I’m just setting myself up as a target, letting them gather in one place to make them easier to eliminate. All of this is necessary.”

This wasn’t a self-justification; Zhou Buyi was simply stating the facts. When he finished, he lowered his head in silence for a moment before slowly looking up. “Of course,” he said, “you’re right. My most fundamental reason is still the desire to not die. It is because I want to not die that I did everything that followed.”

“Why?”

Su Zhou asked simply, “You don’t crave power, and you don’t seem like the type to do anything for the sake of Longevity. A Celestial Spirit Martial God has a natural lifespan of at least several hundred, if not a thousand, years. If you want to achieve immortality, you have plenty of time to find a better way. In other words, I don’t see any pressing reason for you to be pursuing it, at least not for the next five hundred years.”

Zhou Buyi didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he posed a question of his own. “Su Zhou, do you remember the last words of our fallen comrades?”

Su Zhou paused, taken aback. He was about to say that none of his companions had died, but that wasn’t entirely true. He hadn’t been there when his friends from the Divine Wood World had passed away.

So he remained silent. Zhou Buyi offered a small, candid smile. “Most people forget. That’s just how it is on the battlefield.”

“But I remember. I remember the last words of every single person—my master, my comrades, my friends, my wife, my eldest son, my eldest daughter, my second daughter… I remember the final words each of them spoke to me as they died.”

“In this world, now, I am the only one who remembers. The only one who remembers why the Hundred Schools fought, why we fought to bring about the Taiping, why we struggled against the Demon Dynasty. Our history of suffering, the cries and battles in the darkness… I am the only one left from that era.”

“If it were just about me, then death would mean nothing. It would just be a reunion with them. But I cannot live for myself alone. Someone has to remember those words, to remember those Beliefs… Future generations will forget. Beliefs will be eroded, rewritten, and revised. It’s just like the allegory you mentioned earlier: yes, the Dragon Slayer becomes the Dragon. Beliefs decay. But the truth is, if I were to let everything go, the world would simply repeat the historical cycle of ‘what unites must one day divide, and what divides must one day unite.’ And the decay of those Beliefs would happen ten times faster than my own.”

When one person passes a message to a second, the meaning might not change. But by the time it reaches the tenth person, or the hundredth, that’s no longer certain. The very essence of the message could be twisted into something completely different from the original.

The man could not accept that. He, the first person in that chain, could not tolerate seeing the fruits of a victory—a victory paid for with the lives of everyone he held dear—be distorted by ungrateful successors. So he would rather not pass the message on at all. He would rather stand guard over it, alone.

As he spoke, Zhou Buyi’s voice grew heavier and more forceful with each word. “I will never allow it! I will not let the Taiping we created with the lives of nearly everyone become corrupted, fractured, and utterly disintegrated by the mere passage of a few hundred years!”

“It must endure, and I will be the one to protect it—forever!”