VESSEL - Extinction Countdown 938: Lovers' Radiance

The night raid on the Clay Buddha temple yielded nothing.

Not entirely fruitless—Ye Shisan gleaned some truths about the Pseudo-Spirit within him. But the troubles it stirred were clear.

Once, two and a half women vied for Ye Shisan. Now, with Hong Lin, it’s three full, counting her half.

By count, four beauties spanned three ages.

In the Mortal Realm’s reckoning, Yi Qing was eldest. Though she never spoke her age, Yi Qing’s mature, statuesque form—tall and curvaceous—suggested she was barely twenty-three or so to those unaware, yet in truth, she was a single woman well past thirty.

Next came You Long’er, an eighteen-year-old in her vibrant prime, never shy about flaunting her youth. Her fiery red hair and peach-blossom face captivated all who saw her, and though her figure fell short of Yi Qing’s, she boldly claimed to outshine everyone else.

Vanilla, once third in line, now yielded to Hong Lin, who appeared by day as a black cat. Her true age dwarfed all—perhaps more than their lives combined. Yet she cheekily claimed a mere two years by a cat’s age—a claim that fooled no one. Behind her back, You Long’er and Vanilla dubbed her “old hag.”

Nonetheless, the moniker hardly fit, for when freed from the cat, Hong Lin appeared as a budding twelve- or thirteen-year-old with features sweeter than any woman’s.

Only her slight figure drew You Long’er’s sharp barbs: “Flat as a airstrip, no chest, no hips.”

Moreover, in her manifestation, so long as Hong Lin willed it, none could discern she was a spirit. Others would merely see Hong Lin as a young girl capable of enchanting any man, inciting dangerous tendencies in lolicons, and sparking social chaos—nothing more.

Having learned modern ways, Hong Lin gleefully embraced You Long’er’s taunt of “Eternal Loli,” adopting it as her own.

She boasted that over countless millennia with “Ye Shisan,” they had explored every imaginable pose—some so wild that mortal minds couldn scarcely comprehend.

Her pale, icy face recounting these fiery tales with a provocative smirk, ignited fierce envy, particularly in Vanilla.

Vanilla was Ye Shisan’s first true female companion, but their twenty-year age gap rendered romance impossible, despite her intellect far surpassing her peers. Most regarded her as a precocious child.

Yet Vanilla herself vehemently disagreed.

To her, she felt as though she was the only one among her kind who could experience love—and was, at this moment, truly feeling it. Thus, anything tied to Ye Shisan was hers by right.

Despite their twenty-year gap, their bond, far stronger than most, she described as “a forbidden love, born of shared suffering”—a sentiment Ye Shisan must never know.

Ye Shisan wasn’t blind; he keenly sensed the women circling him with fervent attention.

Haunted by childhood shadows and twenty years in an asylum, he lived in constant fear that the Pseudo-Spirit within might snap, drowning the world in blood and flesh once more.

Vanilla, You Long’er, Yi Qing, even Hong Lin, who passed through him—he could not bear to see them perish by his hand.

To him, they were family and this makeshift home, though scorned by others, meant more than life itself.

While rejecting all romantic advances, Ye Shisan quietly mended his wounded heart, harboring a soul yearning for release deep within.

In the small temple, amid blooms of jealous love, matters grew deceptively simple yet profoundly complex.

At Hong Lin’s urging, they searched the Clay Buddha temple, a dilapidated Land Temple from the 1930s or ’40s, crumbling from decades of neglect, with only a worn altar and a headless Clay Buddha remaining.

Hong Lin revealed that two clay figures had once been buried beneath—one for Yan Yun, now mysteriously vanished over millennia, while Zhu Qiu’s figure, oddly intact, was unearthed during Touxiang Village’s copper mining.

The black shadow that Dong Laosan and Fourth Uncle glimpsed was likely a sprite, a parasitic entity feeding on Zhu Qiu’s Blood Essence within the clay figure.

Startled by the mining operations, it fled in panic, mistaken by them for the Earth Goddess.

Yet a true Earth Goddess would have dragged them to Zhuxi City God, leaving no one alive.

Yan Yun’s theft was understandable, as her Void Deity body mirrored Ye Shisan’s, and three thousand years was not too long for a skilled thief to unearth her for some unknown purpose.

Surely, one possessing such ability would have uncovered Zhu Qiu’s figure during the excavation, a Celestial of far greater value—so why leave it behind?

Did they sense Zhu Qiu’s madness, deeming it too dangerous?

Of course, guessing is futile. Finding Ye Dongsheng’s cure was key, but for Hong Lin, retrieving the Clay Buddha’s lost head was vital.

For within that head, Xiqing once slayed one head of a Nine-Headed Serpent and extracted a Golden Elixir from its Celestial Core, used to suppress the frenzied Zhuqiu within the Blood Essence Clay.

With that Golden Elixir, it might be possible to force out the Pseudo-Spirit within Ye Shisan!

Ye Shisan examined the figure closely, finding that, save for its head, wholly carved off in anti-superstition campaigns, its body remained relatively intact, with no damage, suggesting Zhuqiu had not yet escaped.

The story became clearer: Touxiang’s miners unearthed Zhu Qiu’s clay figure and built a Land Temple to enshrine it, but decades later, zealots in an anti-superstition frenzy smashed the temple, toppling the figure and kicking its head away.

Without the Golden Elixir’s suppression, Zhu Qiu’s spirit, though trapped in flesh, wandered freely, latching onto Ye Shisan’s Void Deity.

And yet, one mystery lingered: as a mere spirit, how did Zhu Qiu affect reality? And why, whenever the Pseudo-Spirit stirred, did Ye Shisan feel writhing tentacles?

When Zhu Qiu massacred Quanrong’s Yiqu army, he required no physical touch; gliding over Ghost White Wolf and his troops, the heads of everyone on the ground exploded from their necks like cannonballs, shooting into the sky one by one and shattering into fragments like fireworks bursting apart.

As a Celestial, Zhu Qiu could slay “lowly” humans with a mere thought.

In a certain sense, for humanity, still in a primitive state, could never match a Celestial.