Eternal Cultivation of Alchemy

"I was... what?" Scarlet asked.

"I can't really describe it, lady Phoenix. Your body was covered in Phoenix fire and it was dripping down from you, like liquid," Yao Ning said.

"My armor... something must have broken through it," Scarlet said. "Was it the monster?"

"We are not sure," Yao Ning said. "But... because you were bleeding fire and you were flying towards your home... everything in your path was also burning in fire."

Scarlet paused when she heard that and her eyes went wide. "You aren't saying..."

"You were burning everything and everyone on your path with Phoenix fire, one that you did not seem to have control over at all," Yao Ning said. "And since you have come from the Wasteland... it was the wasteland where everyone was suffering from your flames."

"Had you continued... you would have burned the people in the mountains and then... the capital," Yao Ning said.

Scarlet's eyes were wide, tears seemingly rolling down her eyes as the emotion resurfaced once more. The feelings she felt before her rebirth. She felt pain and guilt for hurting others, ones she did not want to hurt at all.

"And we had gone there to protect the Southern Continent from--"

"Me," Scarlet said, as she finally understood that they were telling the truth. They really were there to save the continent, and not to kill her.

"Wait, so how did I die?" Scarlet asked.

"We arrived to stop you, lady Phoenix," they said. "But you didn't seem to be in a situation where you could talk. You tried to fight through us, but... you were so very weak at the time. The only thing that was strong about you was the bleeding fire that fell from you, but you didn't seem to have any control over that."

"We fought for a while, and while we did not mean to hurt you at all, we most likely led to the reason why you were," Yao Ning said. "You see... something happened after we started fighting for a while."

"What? What happened?" Scarlet asked.

"I don't know how to explain this... but there was a storm that night. It was a starry night, and yet the storm appeared out of nowhere as if someone was trying to break through to Immortality," the old woman said. "And then... a single bolt of lightning struck you."

Scarlet was a mess already, and even then she could understand what must have happened.

"Heavenly Judgment," Alex said. "You must have used up Immortal Qi during your battle with the monster. You ended up triggering the Heavenly Judgment, just like senior Luhei."

Scarlet couldn't even speak as she quietly processed everything she had heard. She tried to process the feelings she felt, the emotions that were there again.

"Whatever it was," Yao Ning continued, "It was enough to make you run away from the place. We tried to follow you, but the attack had left us disoriented, even though we weren't the target at all."

"You flew away from us, fire raining below you once again," she said. "We followed a little later, watching you fly aimlessly. The fire... burned the people of the desert. We tried to save as many as we could, but we couldn't do much. We were in danger ourselves."

"After that, we heard a blast one last time," she said. "And then... you had died."

Scarlet's emotions were too much for her to handle and she burst out crying. "I... I killed them," she said. "I killed all of them"

"Lady Phoenix, you didn't mean to do it," another one of the elders spoke. "The blame cannot be with you. We shouldn't have tried stopping you in the first place. We should have helped you, instead of being in your way."

"That's right. We were the ones at fault. We were the ones that led you to your death. Please kill us for our insolence and forget about the past," another one said.

Scarlet didn't listen to anyone as she wallowed in her own devastated emotions.

Alex looked at her and didn't know how to help her at all. He stood next to her and softly rubbed her back.

The rest of the elders didn't know what else they could say. They were mostly surprised by how close Alex was to Scarlet in the first place. They really wanted to learn how they knew each other, but this was not the time to be questioning things.

Alex turned towards the elders and asked, "You said a lot of things today that should have been stopped by your oaths. What happened?"

"Our oaths? They are no more," one of them said. "Our oaths lasted until our ruler returned back to us. Now that she has, the oath has no hold on us."

"There were a lot of things in the oath weren't there? Even Zhu Shaofan was involved somehow," Alex said.

"Our oath primarily was made to stop people from learning about lady Phoenix's death, and to rule the Continent in her stead until she returned," Yao Ning explained. "We spoke the oath amongst the 10 of us, and Zhu Shaofan, who was not far away from the location where the battle had taken place."

"He wasn't part of the battle, but he was there," She explained. "We forced him to make the same oaths as us. He was not to reveal her death, and was to never do anything to harm the people of the continent. He had no interest in ruling, so we didn't force him to take that oath."

"After that, we returned to the Sunborn Sanctuary, where we distributed the rumor that our ruler had gone into deep cultivation and that we would be ruling. We made some more oaths when there such as never leaving the Continent or even the Capital without the other's approval, never doing anything that would be harmful to the continent, always staying there, waiting for our ruler to return."

"Now that she has, the purpose of our oaths has been completed," she finished.

Alex thought on it for a bit and nodded. 'So that was it,' he thought. Their oaths had caused quite a bit of problem for him many times, annoying him most other times. However, now that he saw the situation from their perspective, it made a lot of sense.

One could argue what they did wasn't the best way to go about after losing a ruler of your continent, but that was still better than nothing.

The Wasteland was burning and the others were without a leader. They became what the continent needed them to be.

"The wasteland," Alex asked. "Did it turn to a wasteland after..."

"Yes," Yao Ning said. "It used to be a desert with not many resources, but people still lived there, they cultivated there. After the flames got there, however, it all changed."

"The disaster caused chaos for a long time. But in that chaos, people realized that the flames healed them as well. They realized they could heal easily and thus a few started training their bodies."

"The flames were then taken around the desert to give other people the flames as well. Soon enough, the entire Wasteland was burning with Phoenix fire, including places that didn't have anyone around."

"Some people tried to bring the flame over to this side as well, which was why we needed to quickly set a barrier to stop them from coming over here. The people weren't stopped from coming, but rather it was the flames we tried to stop," she explained.

"But you still sent them back when they got there," Alex said.

"We had to," Yao Ning said. "There are a few places in the Southern Continent where the Phoenix fire still burns. It's controlled with formations and is used to heal people. Most of the people that came from the Wasteland tried to steal the flames, some nearly succeeding."

"In the end, we had to stop all of them from coming here entirely to stop any disaster from happening. It continued happening even after that, but since they were escorted away," she said. "It sounds bad, I know, but we couldn't think of any other way at all. Without a phoenix, we couldn't let phoenix fire spread around the mainland the same way it had in the Wasteland."

Alex couldn't deny that. Had the phoenix fire arrived on the mainland, he could only imagine the horror as it burned everything down.

He turned to look at Scarlet who was still a sobbing mess.

"Hey," he spoke up. "It's alright. You didn't mean to do what you did. It was all a horrible situation no one had any control over, you included."

"But... but what if I did?" Scarlet asked. "I probably had a choice between dying and killing them all while trying to save myself. And yet I still chose to go down that path. I, of all, chose not to die."

Alex thought for a bit.

"Don't you guys have to make an oath or something before coming here, how you can't kill anyone?" Alex asked. "Does that oath trigger a lightning strike?"

"That's..." Scarlet paused. "No, it doesn't. Oaths just silently kill you."

"Then you didn't kill anyone intentionally," Alex said. "You probably weren't even in your right mind at the time."

"But, I still feel the guilt. I've felt it all this time, and now I know why I do," Scarlet said. "That either means whatever they are saying is not true... or, that I really did know what was happening and I still chose to let it happen."

Alex didn't know what to say to that. He couldn't understand her feelings at all. There was no way anyone could.

He thought for a moment and asked, "Why did your rebirth take 5 thousand years?"

"Wh-what?" Scarlet turned towards him.

Alex gave her a look, asking for answers.

"I... I don't know," she said. "Maybe it was because I was killed by a Heavenly Judgment, or maybe because the desert had lost all of its Qi."

"Wait... you didn't die to a Heavenly Judgment," Yao Ning said. "There was no thunder at all when you died."

Both Scarlet and Alex looked toward her at the same time. "But you said there was a blast," Scarlet said.

"Not a thunderous one," Yao Ning said. "It was a fiery blast that radiated light all around. The aura was also... strangely warm."

"Warm aura?" Scarlet looked confused for a second before her eyes went wide. "Requiem of the Phoenix Song."

Her words made everyone curious, but Scarlet didn't explain herself. Thankfully, someone within Alex could tell him exactly what it was.

"Requiem of the Phoenix Song," Godslayer repeated. "If I recall correctly, it is one of the forbidden skills used by a phoenix to burn its body, Qi, mind, and its very essence in order to heal as many people as they can."

"Only a few phoenixes ever dare use this technique as using it is a suicide with very little guarantee of rebirth."