Chapter 475 Torture of the brook
Yang Qing felt the scene before his eyes changed. He felt like he had been transported back to the night he met Ma Yuan.
That cool, clear sky night with a chilly scent in the air, a full moon, and a person trying to take his life in the river.
The scene started out with him flying over the skies atop Ellie's back. He was seeing things from a third person's perspective.
He could see himself, clueless, unaware of the rumbling storm that was about to befall him. Though what he knows now, if time was reversed, he would have still chosen to save Ma Yuan, hear him out, and help him in the finding of his wife and child.
The only difference between then and now would be, with a culprit in sight, he wouldn't need to wait that long before acting.
But all that was just wishful thinking on his part. He wasn't sure if there was even a cultivation art, treasure, or realm of cultivation that would enable one to reverse the flow of time and write their wrongs.
If one could reach such a domain, would they be considered mortals?
The scene then played out as it went with extreme clarity. He saved Ma Yuan and they shared a meal.
His short interlude with the starlight crab had been erased, as the scenes focused solely on his interactions with Ma Yuan since it was the trigger of everything.
"Right, I forgot about this in the chaos, the arts tied to the Frozen Serenity Scripture, what did they need them for, and from our fight, it didn't seem like they cultivated them, as the art they used even seemed to deviate from the main art.." Yang Qing muttered to himself as he saw the crystal ice shard Ma Yuan had given him to help in the search of his wife and daughter.
Yang Qing suspected there was something to those arts and to why the Ice Emerald Sect seemed to want to look for them with the same fervor as they did for those with yin-related physiques.
Yang Qing made a mental note to research further into it using the two cultivation arts the Order had on hand, that were a part of the Frozen Serenity Scripture. With the month-long break he had, he could afford to research it further when he wasn't at the Requited Blissful Peak.
After the scene with the shard, the scenes rapidly progressed to the minimal interactions he had with Ma Yuan, Yu Gen, and Xia Ting before it the bombshell news of what the Ice Emerald Sect had been doing came to light.
Yang Qing clenched his fists when it reached this part, and despite his figure being a phantasmal incorporeal concept, he felt like his palms were sweaty as his body heated up. And finally, the scene that he had dreaded the most out of all of them, finally came up.His attack that froze and killed over ten thousand members of the Ice Emerald Sect, innocent and guilty alike.
Before the scene of the attack, the brook highlighted with great clarity, everything Yang Qing had sensed that day either consciously or unconsciously, which made the viewing extremely difficult for him.
One of the scenes, was just before they announced themselves to the Ice Emerald Sect and detailed their crimes, Yang Qing's palace sense had already been deployed, so even with the guarding array covering the sect, he could still see what the sect members were doing at the time, which the brook played out before him.
He could see a wholesome look of the whole sect, and every single cultivator within it, and what they were doing, and their emotions doing it.
The same level of detail was still there even to their deaths. Some were horrified when they saw it coming, while others, those too weak to grasp anything were still clamoring hyped up by the sect master's riling words thinking they were the heroes in the story, and that they would get to live through it, in victory, unaware, those were to be their final moments.
Different emotions, different outlooks, different cultivation bases, different stations; some could have grown to be powerful cultivators, some could have grown to guide others, others could have remained the same, while others could have grown to be mediocre. Each with their own trajectories in life, but with one single act from Yang Qing, all that was erased, and they all shared one ending, Death.
This was the part Yang Qing struggled with. The futures he had erased with a single movement. With the great memory afforded to him, he kept playing out scenarios in his head of each of the members, and the life they could have potentially led had they lived.
He only did it for those deemed innocent, as for the guilty, he truly had no remorse. In fact, some part of him even resented them for doing things that led him to that moment. If it wasn't for them and their deeds, the Order would not have been involved and Yang Qing would have not been forced to end the lives of so many.
With the brook of clarity slowly replaying that event, he felt like he was reliving that moment again. He wanted so much to close his eyes, but eyes open or closed, the scene played out for him, he could not avoid it.
The brook of clarity even went as far as to transmit the emotions every single one of those victims felt in the moment of their death.
The last nail to his guilt-ridden coffin was the confirmation of the death of Ma Yuan's wife, Li Lun.
He kept wondering if they had arrived a day earlier from when she was refined and if she would have been saved. However, he knew deep down that was wishful thinking on his part.
The Wisteria tree had told Yang Qing that Ma Yuan's wife had died a month before they arrived. Yang Qing met Ma Yuan a month and a few days prior. The few days were the one-and-a-half days he spent doing the evaluations. For them to be able to remotely save Ma Yuan's wife, they needed to have deduced the attacker's identity in that one and a half day and then act immediately, and for them to be able to act, the evidence needed to be clear proof.
One and a half days was an impossible time frame to work with considering the only evidence was the crystal ice shard Ma Yuan had and the hazy image of Deng Yaozu. They had little to work with, which was why it took Yu Gen, Xia Ting, and even the enlisted help of other inquisitors, close to a month to uncover everything.
Despite the logic of it, Yang Qing couldn't help but blame himself for not acting fast enough despite it being impossible, especially, when he saw Ma Yuan's decrepit look when he received the news.
The scenes ended where he had delivered the news to Ma Yuan.
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