Wait, How Did My Digital Girlfriend Become a Sword Immortal? Chapter 863: Inside the Eight Trigrams Furnace, the Six Ding Divine Fire Refines the Golden Body
Previously on Wait, How Did My Digital Girlfriend Become a Sword Immortal?...
Chapter 863: Inside the Eight Trigrams Furnace, the Six Ding Divine Fire Refines the Golden Body
Within the furnace burned an ocean of flames, a hellish realm of refinement.
In this space, no up or down existed, no sense of direction, just endless fire.
The Six Ding Divine Fire.
This flame ranked among the most domineering blazes between heaven and earth, famous for incinerating all things without fail.
The pill furnace's interior spanned a boundless expanse, forming an utterly separate world detached from all else. Yet this realm remained purely scarlet and void, holding only the alchemical flames.
"Big Boss, what do we do?" Muscle Tyrant pressed close to Chen Huaian, his face solemn, a trace of dread flashing in his eyes. "This is Taishang Laojun's pill furnace, known to refine everything. Even a Great Luo Golden Immortal or Quasi-Saint tossed in would get melted down. We..."
"What's there to panic about?" Chen Huaian tsked.
Muscle Tyrant's face brightened with delight at those words. "Do you have a way to escape the furnace?"
"No," Chen Huaian shook his head."Then..."
"Does panicking solve the problem?" Chen Huaian shot back.
Muscle Tyrant hung his head, let out a sigh, and slumped down against Chen Huaian. "No."
A long silence followed, his features hardening with resolve. "Then refine us, let them try... We slew a Shi Huo Zhu, and I badly wounded a Kang Jin Long. This battle's already a triumph. Soon, I'll perish alongside you. We'll fuse into a single immortal pill, you in me, me in you. Though we fall short, at least your servant departs with his master."
Chen Huaian: "..."
"Shut your mouth for This Venerable One!"
"Who wants to merge into a lump with you? This Venerable One has a Dao Companion!"
"Hehe..." Muscle Tyrant wagged his huge head, showing a shy, foolish smile. Still, his claw subtly clenched the edge of Chen Huaian's robe.
He was truly ready to face death.
"Get in."
With a casual flick, Chen Huaian hurled out the Purple Gold Gourd.
"If This Venerable One escapes, you'll come with me for sure."
His gaze fixed on the encroaching flames from every side, his tone quiet but resolute.
"Yet This Venerable One bears a vital fate. Even a tiny hope means This Venerable One won't back down, cannot back down!"
"Should we let those countless Celestial Immortals and Gods regroup today, they'll shatter our backbone tomorrow. The Celestial God Clan won't even need to act; their mongrel minions will grind us to dust!"
"Fine, I'll follow your lead."
Muscle Tyrant nodded firmly, no more words, shifting into a ray of light and diving meekly into the gourd.
Remnants of other Fierce Beast souls lingered inside the gourd, making it feel cozy and reassuring to inhabit.
Chen Huaian stowed the gourd away.
In truth, for breaking free from this crisis, one option existed for him.
Rip space apart by force and flee back to the Cangyun Realm for shelter. No matter the might of these myriad Gods and Buddhas, would they pursue into Cangyun Realm? That was uncharted ground, ruled by a different Heavenly Dao.
However, doing so would squander the Gate of Heaven he had just carved open.
That surge of rebellion would fade away.
Thus, retreat was impossible.
The fiery tide surged closer.
Chen Huaian shut his eyes and settled into a cross-legged meditative pose.
Agony struck.
Unbearable torment beyond words.
These flames seared not merely his flesh and skin but his marrow, his very Divine Soul.
The Immortal King physique he had only just forged began dissolving and crumbling visibly beneath the divine fire.
His skin blackened and flaked off.
Exposing the blood-red muscles below, then the stark white bones.
Even the Chaos energy coursing through him got slowly purified by the blaze.
His sight grew hazy.
In his stupor, Chen Huaian sensed something familiar about this fire.
Beyond the scorching heat, it bore a trace of... grudge.
Deep in the roiling blaze, space-time distorted and rippled.
A slender, tiny silhouette appeared to Chen Huaian.
Not human, but a monkey.
A monkey impaled through the collarbones by iron chains, molten copper forced down its throat, thrashing in torment amid the flames.
It wailed.
Its cries echoed like a blood-weeping cuckoo, each one slashing at Chen Huaian's heart like a blade.
"Master... it hurts..."
"Master... why is this fire so hot..."
Memory shards locked deep in his soul burst forth like a breached dam, surging into Chen Huaian's consciousness amid the Six Ding Divine Fire's blaze.
The Slanted Moon Three Stars Cave.
The stone monkey prostrated outside the entrance, braving snow across three days and three nights.
The sly little demon he only lightly knocked on the head three times, who crept in at midnight to pursue the Dao.
The apprentice who, cast off the mountain, turned back with each step, weeping as though his heart and guts were ripped asunder.
— Wukong.
Indeed, it was so.
In that life, I was truly your master...
Chen Huaian gazed upon the monkey amid the blazing inferno, its flesh charred black, eyes seared blind by acrid smoke, spine slowly consumed by the divine flames. Agony twisted his heart a myriad times fiercer than any torment to his own flesh.
"Master... I want to go back to the mountain..."
"I don't want to be any Great Sage Equal to Heaven anymore... I just want to sweep the floor for Master..."
Within this vision, the monkey extended a skeletal hand, scorched to the bone, feebly clutching at nothingness, desperate to grasp the one anchor from its recollections.
Two streams of tears streamed from Chen Huaian's sightless sockets.
Instantly, the tears vaporized upon emerging, devoured by the divine fire.
"So that's how it was..."
Chen Huaian shuddered as he stretched forth his hand, yearning to caress that phantasm.
"Was the pain that intense back then?"
In that era, I banished you from the mountain to shield you from disaster.
Yet I never foresaw shoving you into this unescapable blaze.
Abruptly, the illusory monkey appeared to perceive something.
It stiffened.
Gaping vacantly at Chen Huaian.
As though peering through endless epochs and voids straight into Chen Huaian's hollow gaze.
The ferocious Six Ding Divine Fire ravaging Chen Huaian's form abruptly stilled in that instant.
Converging, it formed a fiery palm. That hand tenderly, delicately, brushed the tears from Chen Huaian's eye corners.
"Master, don't cry."
A fragile wisp of awareness, spanning myriad years, pierced into Chen Huaian's Divine Soul.
"This old Sun... doesn't hurt anymore."
The monkey's shape faded away.
Becoming a canopy of golden-red sparks, softly cradling Chen Huaian's ravaged frame.
Torment vanished.
A soothing warmth took its place.
It stemmed from the monkey's final obsession, the lingering essence it bequeathed in this furnace.
This essence embodied the indomitable spirit and core identity stripped by the Eight Trigrams Furnace.
It shielded Chen Huaian.
"You damn monkey..."
Chen Huaian bowed his head, lips curving into a grin blending sorrow and fury.
"Refined to dust, and still you shield me?"
He jerked his head up.
In those vacant sockets, sans eyeballs, twin golden karmic fires roared, fiercer and wilder than the Six Ding Divine Fire.
"They scorched your bones, forged you into an empty husk."
"Then today..."
"Your Master shall consume this blaze for you, and incinerate these heavens!!"
Chen Huaian dropped every barrier.
He flung wide every pore, parted his blackened lips, and unleashed a soul-deep bellow toward the divine fire overhead.
— Heavenly Demon Art · Devour the Heavens and Earth.
"Come on!!"
"Pain or grudge alike! All of it, surge into This Venerable One!!"
Boom!
The Six Ding Divine Fire raged as if enraged, morphing into myriad fire dragons that howled and plunged wildly into Chen Huaian's form.
Yet Chen Huaian dreaded nothing, welcoming it entirely.
Devour, swallow it all.
He refused to squander the chance that idiot monkey had seized for him.
The insight it implanted in this Eight Trigrams Furnace prior to refinement.
Detailing resistance to the Six Ding Divine Fire.
How to ingest and refine it.
The monkey failed.
Now, he would triumph in its stead.
Harnessing the mightiest blaze under heaven to forge his Chaos body.
Sizzle sizzle sizzle—
Flames surged inward.
His organs charred to cinders in a flash.
Yet the instant after, they regenerated via the Heavenly Demon Art's overwhelming vitality.
Annihilation, renewal.
Obliterate once more, renew anew.
Each iteration toughened his physique further.
His ashen Chaos bones, infused with this divine fire bearing Sun Wukong's grudge, gleamed with an eerie golden-red tint.
The hue of conflagration.
The shade of calamity.
Even more, the tone of heaven-defiance.
His Ancestral Dragon bloodline fully awakened, merging seamlessly with this divine fire.
No more half-demon, half-immortal.
No longer merely a Chaos body.
Yet, an unbreakable golden body surpassing all laws, immersed in devastation and forged from its very essence.
"Not enough..."
Chen Huaian's aura surged wildly upward, his voice thundering like an explosion inside the furnace.
"More!!"
He greedily consumed every bit inside the furnace.
The flames, Spiritual Energy, and even the Great Dao runes carved on the Eight Trigrams Furnace's inner walls.
Everything—devour it all!
...
