The group continued climbing deeper along the cliff face.
With the petal the old woman had given them for protection, the thorny vines could not harm them in the slightest.
However, the others on the cliff wall were not so fortunate.
Everywhere they looked, people were climbing.
Some were climbing bare-handed, their hands mangled and bloody from the thorns, blood streaming down their arms, every drop greedily absorbed by the flower roots below.
Some wore protective gloves, but after the gloves were pierced, they stubbornly kept climbing downward.
The wounds on their palms tore wider, the flesh between their fingers peeling back completely, revealing half a length of stark white finger bone poking through the bloody mess.
White Night even saw a Pharmacist Craftsman.
He was huddled in a recess on the cliff wall, frantically smearing golden wound ointment onto his palms.
But the ointment was washed away the moment it touched the wounds by the gushing blood.
In a panic, he switched to a hemostatic powder, but the result was the same.
The blood washed the powder clean away, like pouring water into a leaky bucket.
He tried every hemostatic method he had on him. None worked.
In the end, he could only slump against the cliff wall, his face paler than a corpse’s, his two hands hanging limply at his sides, dripping blood continuously, without even the strength to climb upward.
Further away, two people were fighting on the cliff wall.
Each held onto a thorny vine with one hand, barely clinging to the cliff face, while using their other hand to desperately strike at the other.
With every punch thrown, their bodies swayed violently, and the wounds on their hands tore wider.
By the end, there wasn’t a shred of intact skin left on either of their palms, only tattered flesh and exposed tendons.
All their blood flowed downward.
It converged along the thorny vines into dark red rivulets, winding their way toward the depths of the valley floor, nourishing the strange flowers blooming larger and brighter further below.
White Night couldn’t bear to watch any longer and averted her gaze.
Just then, from not far below on the cliff wall, a series of extremely peculiar sounds reached her ears.
White Night looked down toward the sound.
A middle-aged man was hanging on the middle section of the cliff, surrounded by seven or eight people.
He held no sword or spear, only an ordinary pair of flower arrangement shears.
“That’s a Flower Arranger Craftsman,” Gu Jiao, who knew a bit about these things, explained.
At this moment, the Flower Arranger’s body was covered in flowers.
Not pinned to his clothes, but truly and deeply embedded in his flesh.
The flower stems pierced his skin, their roots burrowing into his muscle fibers to firmly take root, the blossoms blooming on his shoulders, arms, back, and chest.
Flowers of various colors sprouted from within him, each glowing with a sinister light.
Those in the know would recognize this as the Yin Killing Technique of the flower arrangement craft—Flesh Flower Arrangement.
With every flower inserted, his body underwent a drastic transformation.
His muscles swelled wildly, his bones emitted sickening cracking sounds of restructuring, and intricate floral patterns surfaced on his skin.
Different flowers granted him different enhancements—strength, speed, regenerative power—layering and stacking upon each other.
Seven or eight people surrounded and attacked him on the nearly vertical cliff face, but the flower arrangement shears in his hand danced like a living thing, the flower stems on his body transformed into whips to lash out, and the thorny vines coiled around to strangle any enemy who got too close.
Hanging alone on the cliff wall, he single-handedly withstood the assault of all his attackers.
It could be said that this was the Flower Arranger’s home ground, allowing him to display his might for a time.
But White Night also clearly saw the Price of this technique.
Those flowers weren’t just giving him power; they were also frantically devouring his flesh and blood.
The flower roots were like countless tiny straws, ceaselessly sucking his vital energy. The edges of each flower’s petals were tinged a dark red, stained by his blood.
The more flowers on his body, the greater his power, and the faster the flowers devoured him.
His originally robust body visibly withered at a rapid pace, his cheeks sunken, his skin stretched taut over his bones.
He was feeding the flowers with his own life, trading it for this brief, immense power.
But he couldn’t stop now. More and more people swarmed toward him, all drawn by the glowing strange flowers on his body.
He was forced to continue inserting flowers into himself. With each one he pushed in, he gasped heavily, as if a chunk of flesh and blood had been brutally torn from his body.
Soon, he couldn’t hold on any longer.
The flowers had drained most of his vital energy. His hand gripping the vine suddenly went limp, and his whole body slid a long way down, barely catching a thick main vine to avoid plummeting.
The flower arrangement shears slipped from his hand, tumbling end over end into the bottomless abyss.
The attackers instantly pounced.
A blade hacked into his back, a sword stabbed into his side.
He tried to command the flowers to counterattack, but they no longer obeyed him, focused only on sucking the last remnants of his vital energy.
He reached to pull the flowers from his body, but they wouldn’t budge.
The roots had long since burrowed deep into his bones and muscles, becoming one with his flesh.
A slight tug lifted a large flap of skin and flesh, blood instantly gushing forth, but the flowers remained firmly in place.
Inserting them was easy; pulling them out was fatal.
He took several more blows, covered in blood, hanging onto the cliff wall with one hand, his whole body swaying precariously.
His apprentice was not far above him.
A young man in his early twenties, his hands gripping the thorns desperately, his palms long since slick with blood.
From start to finish, he hadn’t dared to go down.
Not because he didn’t want to, but because the disparity in strength was too great. Going down would only be a pointless death.
He could only hang on the cliff wall, tears mixing with blood streaming down his face.
“Master!” The apprentice’s voice tore through the wind. “Master, come up! Grab my hand!”
The Flower Arranger looked up, over the shoulders of his attackers, and saw his apprentice’s face above.
His expression suddenly changed.
At this moment of life and death, realizing there was no chance of survival, he instead grew calm.
He stopped struggling.
Covered in blood, hanging on the cliff wall, letting the blades and swords fall upon him, his gaze looked toward a far, faraway place, as if piercing through the blood and slaughter before him to see scenes from many years past.
In his final moments, his Life Flashback began.
He saw himself from many years ago.
An old flower room, filled with the clean scent of flower pots and soil.
A gray-haired Old Flower Arranger sat before a flower stand, holding a white orchid branch, demonstrating the most basic positioning for flower arrangement.
His younger self stood behind the Old Flower Arranger, but his gaze wasn’t on the white orchid. It was fixed on a painting on the wall.
The painting depicted a human figure covered in flowers, its posture eerie and sinister.
It was precisely the forbidden Yin Killing Technique of the flower arrangement craft—Flesh Flower Arrangement.
“What are you looking at?” The Old Flower Arranger didn’t even turn his head.
“Nothing,” he hastily averted his eyes.
But the Old Flower Arranger knew everything.
That night, the Old Flower Arranger found him, his tone ten times stricter than usual.
“I know you’re eyeing that technique. That thing, you must not learn it.”
“Why?” He was defiant. “Other schools have people practicing Yin Killing Techniques. Why can’t we?”
The Old Flower Arranger was silent for a long time.
“That technique isn’t something you can’t practice. It’s that once you practice it, you can’t turn back.”
He didn’t listen.
He only thought his master was being selfish, afraid he would surpass him.
He learned it in secret, piecing it together from fragments, the black market, notes left behind by other deceased Flower Arrangers, stubbornly figuring it out on his own.
When his master found out, he said nothing, only completely erased his name from the school’s registry wall.
The day he was expelled from the school, the Old Flower Arranger stood at the doorway, his back to him.
He stood at the door for a long time, waiting for his master to scold him, hit him, even say a single word to make him stay.
But the Old Flower Arranger said nothing, only waved a hand at him and sighed.
He left and never went back.
The Life Flashback stopped here.
The Flower Arranger hung on the cliff wall, covered in blood.
Something slid from the corner of his eye, mingling with the grime, indistinguishable as blood or tears.
He opened his mouth, his voice so light it was almost scattered by the wind, but White Night still heard it.
Her Soul Body Perception was far sharper than an ordinary person’s.
Across such a distance, those few words reached her ears without missing a single one.
“Master… I’m sorry.”
He closed his eyes.
Old tears squeezed from the tight seams of his eyelids, flowing down his blood-stained cheeks.
“You weren’t wrong back then. I was wrong. I was bewitched, learned this Yin Killing Technique… and in the end, it’s all come to nothing.”
His voice trembled.
The deep, bone-revealing wound on his chest still bled profusely, but he seemed to feel no pain at all anymore.
“You said once you practice it, you can’t turn back. I didn’t believe it then. I thought you were being selfish, thought you were afraid I’d surpass you.”
He smiled, his mouth full of bloody foam, yet that smile was as pure as if he’d returned to his apprentice years in the flower room.
“Only when I’ve reached this point today do I understand. You weren’t being selfish. You could see places I couldn’t. The end of this path… is exactly what I am now.”