547 Commissioned (1/2)
A flash of sword light blinked in the snow. The message that Venerable Lord Ice left vanished.
”Head back!”
Venerable Lord Sword's voice sounded parched.
”We'll talk after we return to our room.”
Venerable Lord Snow and Venerable Lord Frost were startled out of their daze, bitterness filling their hearts.
There was, of course, a need for discussion when they returned to their room but as they had stood frozen out in the open for nearly a quarter of an hour now, it would be a lie to say that they did not attract any attention.
”How much of what Ice said about the God Bone is true?” asked Venerable Lord Sword with a frown.
Venerable Lord Snow sighed and answered, ”Possibly…one hundred percent.”
”A hundred percent?!” Venerable Lord Sword turned around abruptly to look at his brother.
”Yes.” Venerable Lord Frost nodded as well.
”Why?” Venerable Lord Sword's cultivation base was remarkable but his astuteness was far from reaching Venerable Lord Snow and Frost's level. Generally speaking, Snow would rank first followed by Ice then Frost among five of the Venerable Lords in terms of intelligence; Saber and Sword usually had no opinion of their own, knowing only to charge and fight with brute force.
”I've been doubtful for many years too,” Venerable Lord Snow said with a frown, ”Where have the Four Seasons Tower's previous Venerable Lords gone to? Before us Five Venerable Lords, there should be plenty more Venerable Lords! Perhaps they're just like us, Saber, Sword, Snow, Frost, and Ice, but it's possible there are others.”
Venerable Lord Sword retorted, ”So many years have passed, they must have died! If they aren't dead, how do we go up in rank? Is this even a real question?”
”Of course I know that they've all died. Even if they're not killed by others, they'd have died from old age.” Venerable Lord Snow spat his words out slowly, ”What I'm asking is even when they've died, where have the God Bones gone to?”
Venerable Lord Sword's jaw dropped.
”We all know that all the God Bones ultimately belong to the Four Seasons Tower and our ultimate goal is to complete the God Bone collection! To become an immortal deity.”
Venerable Lord Snow spoke slowly, ”Theoretically, since we've become the new Venerable Lords, the God Bones that the previous seniors had should be handed to us for our utilization, right? After all, a piece of bone made us who we are now – what about three? Ten? Twenty?”
As his questions piled, Venerable Lord Sword and Frost looked worse than before.
”But, the fact is that they weren't passed to us. But why not? In other words, since the bones were not given to us, who were they given to?”
Venerable Lord Snow lowered his voice as his expression darkened too. ”According to the boss' bold vision, how could he allow such a gem to be sealed in dust?”
”There's one more thing – even if we're lucky and have received the rest of the God Bones, what we get wouldn't be complete. Why is that?”
Venerable Lord Frost exhaled and chimed in with a low eerie voice, ”I've also been thinking about this.”
Venerable Lord Sword was already chilled to his core.
He stood there with a vacant look, his gaze lifeless, he had lost his shine. After a long time, he suddenly coughed in a low grunt as a thick trail of blood trickled from his mouth. Yet he still stood dumbly, like he did not realize that he had just spat blood.
His physical, mental, and emotional state had collapsed. He had served the Four Seasons Tower his entire life, fighting in the martial world and gambling his life away thousands of times; he had never suspected anything.
However, it was today, within this short amount of time, that his lifelong pursuit and belief had altogether crumbled!
This was as if the sky had fallen on Venerable Lord Sword.
”Sword!” Venerable Lord Snow cried out in worry.
Venerable Lord Sword turned around stoically like a puppet and answered numbly, ”What?”
Right after the one-word reply, he spluttered another mouthful of blood. He looked very pale. The thought of dying crossed his mind at that very moment. Knowing that such violent emotions could scramble his cultivation method and mess up his meridians thus causing his mystical Qi to retaliate against him, he allowed it to happen, not doing anything to restrict the chaos occurring within him.
His pair of eyes had already turned into two black holes, not unlike the eye sockets of a skull that had been buried for decades underground.
Boom!
Venerable Lord Frost blew Venerable Lord Sword away with a slap. Freezing cold frost landed on Venerable Lord Sword alongside the sound as Frost pounced and choked Sword's neck; he roared out loud, ”What are you going to do? Are you going to die? Who among us doesn't want to die?! But should you die just because you want to? Committing suicide right in front of your own brothers, what are you thinking?!”
Venerable Lord Sword gurgled from the choke but finally broke out of his trance. He blinked, regaining clarity, and grabbed onto Venerable Lord Frost's hand, mumbling, ”That's right, I can't die yet.”
He then sat himself down crossing his legs to cultivate and sort through his meridians. Despite the bud of suicide being nipped, his expression still spoke of incredible sullenness.