In the third thousandth year after the broken glass lamp, I opened my eyes in the ashes of memory.
The sticky darkness wrapped around my limbs like solidified pine resin, and the remaining burning pain from the purple gold chain piercing my scapula was still wandering in my bone marrow. I tried to move my fingers, and a sticky touch came from my fingertips - it was blood, but it exuded the sweet smell of lotus. This smell reminded me of the years when I was suppressed under the Five Fingers Mountain, when the dew that seeped out of the cracks in the rocks also carried such a disgusting fragrance.
"Don't struggle, monkey."
A hoarse voice came from the right, with a nervous tremor in the tone of rust. I turned the only part of my neck that could move, and saw an old man with only half of his face nailed to the stone pillar next door. There was a coral-like crystal cluster growing in his left eye socket, but the right half of his face looked like it had been gnawed by a wild beast, and his exposed gums opened and closed as he spoke: "The soul-locking nails forged with Jiuyou Cold Iron by those bastards in Ziwei Palace will freeze even the three souls and seven spirits when they are nailed in..."
I squinted my eyes, and the sealed memories suddenly rippled. Three hundred years ago, when a general who drank the nectar secretly at the Queen Mother's birthday banquet was cast down to the mortal world, his face was also condensed with such frost. When gods and Buddhas want to punish rebels, even blood can become a carrier of curses.
"Who are you?" I heard my voice coming from the bottom of a deep well.
The old man grinned with broken corners of his mouth, and the coral crystal cluster suddenly burst into a faint blue flame. In the flickering halo, I saw that what was beating in his chest was not a heart, but a bronze compass wrapped with talismans. "Is it important?" He chuckled in his throat, "In Wuxiangxu, we are just stains that gods and Buddhas don't want to show to others."
The chain suddenly trembled violently, and a thunderous roar came from the bottom of the abyss. The old man's only remaining eye suddenly shrank, and the coral crystal cluster grew wildly, and in a blink of an eye, it covered the entire stone pillar. "Here it comes... again..." His voice began to distort, "Every seven days, the ground veins riot, who will become nutrients this time?"
The whole dungeon began to tilt, and my body was dragged by the chains and swayed in the air. Countless fragments of memory suddenly flooded into my mind: the burning Peach Garden, the broken immortal rope, and the golden eyes of Yunduan who were always merciful and downcast. When the soul-locking nail suddenly burst into a piercing cold, I finally saw clearly that it was not chains wrapped around my limbs, but countless tiny Sanskrit words running under my skin.
"Remember!" The old man's scream was shattered in the roar, "Remember who you are! Remember why you were imprisoned! Otherwise, wait for the people from Ziwei Palace to come and harvest..."
The severe pain made blood-colored stars explode in front of my eyes. At the moment when my consciousness was about to dissipate, I bit my tongue and sprayed a blood mist into the darkness. The scarlet liquid condensed into a strange spell in the air. This was a spell that I didn't even remember when I learned it. The soul-locking nail suddenly wailed, and the wandering Sanskrit curled up like a scalded centipede.
When the first chain broke, the whole abyss was filled with screams. I saw countless prisoners struggling on the stone pillars, and firefly-like memory spots flew out of their wounds. Instinct drove me to open my mouth, and those spots of light rushed into my throat one after another-the broken battlefield scene, the erased heavenly rules, and the tears of a woman in green when she turned around.
"Stop!" The old man's scream was suddenly close at hand. I turned around and saw his body was disintegrating, and the coral crystal clusters turned into ashes and fell. "You can't devour our memories... This is a trap set by Ziwei Xingjun..."
But it was too late. When the last chain broke, I fell to the bottom of the abyss. There were not rocks under my feet, but countless superimposed human faces, their mouths wide open, and crystal lotuses growing in their eye sockets. When I swallowed the seventh memory light ball, I finally understood the truth of this prison - Wuxiangxu is not a prison at all, but a cemetery where gods and Buddhas bury the truth.
"Find the glass heart."
A soft female voice suddenly sounded in my ears, and I turned around abruptly but saw only scattered gold powder. But a certain memory that I just swallowed suddenly began to burn, and the pain rushed from Dantian to Tianling. In the severe pain, I saw this picture: on the Zhuxiantai outside the Nine Heavens, 100,000 heavenly soldiers surrounded the black-clothed bloodstained figure, and the person whose heart was being cut