You said you would practice martial arts. Have you mastered the Tiangang Dharma?

The wind chimes on the ancient tree suddenly stopped, and the whole village fell into an eerie silence. Jiang Qiu could hear his own heartbeat and the rapid breathing of the villagers around him.

At this moment, the door of the village chief's residence opened. The great elder came out. He was an old fox demon with long silver-white hair that reached his ankles. His face was covered with wrinkles, but his eyes were still as bright as stars. Jiang Qiu saw that he was holding an ancient staff in his hand, with a faintly glowing gem inlaid on the top of the staff.

“Villagers,” the elder’s voice was deep and powerful, “something unusual has happened in the barrier. This has never happened in a thousand years.”

Jiang Qiu saw the surrounding villagers in turmoil, and the faces of various demons were filled with fear. The vines of a tree demon were waving uncontrollably, knocking over the flower pots nearby; tiny sparks began to emerge from the horns of a deer demon.

"But," the great elder raised his staff, "our Qingqiu Village has gone through thousands of years of wind and rain. What storms and waves have we not seen? Now, all adult demons are required to gather in the square. Young people, please help the elders maintain order."

A'li dragged Jiang Qiu to the square. On the way, Jiang Qiu saw more abnormal phenomena: the flowers and plants on the roadside suddenly withered, and the air was filled with a burnt smell; tiny cracks appeared on the walls of some houses, as if they were torn by an invisible force.

When they arrived at the square, there were already many demons gathered there. Jiang Qiu saw several elders setting up magic arrays, and the magic weapons in their hands emitted dazzling light. The air was filled with a strong demonic aura, and the spiritual charms of various attributes were interweaving and colliding.

Suddenly, the crack in the sky widened. A black lightning bolt struck down and hit an ancient tree at the edge of the square. The tree withered instantly, and the leaves turned into ashes and drifted away. Jiang Qiu saw the tree demon elder holding his chest in pain. It was obvious that the tree had some connection with him.

"The barrier is collapsing!" an elder shouted, "Everyone, inject spiritual energy immediately!"

Jiang Qiu and A Li looked at each other and stretched out their hands at the same time. Jiang Qiu felt the spiritual energy in his body surging, flowing along his fingertips to the magic circle. The surrounding monsters were doing the same thing, and the colorful spiritual energy intertwined in the air, forming a huge net.

But at this moment, Jiang Qiu heard a chuckle.

The laughter was very light, but it made Jiang Qiu's blood freeze instantly. It came from the crack in the sky, carrying an indescribable evil. Jiang Qiu saw something seemed to be wriggling in the crack, it was a dark shadow, trying to break through the shackles of the barrier.

In Qingqiu Village, where the dew has not yet dried, tiny ice crystals are floating in the air.

Jiang Qiu stood under the ancient locust tree and looked up. The sky above the barrier dome, which was originally as clear as crystal, was now covered with spider-web-like cracks. Ink-like mist continued to seep out of those cracks, and the moment it came into contact with the air, it condensed into black ice spikes, which fell on the bluestone slabs with a clanking sound.

"Jiang Qiu!" Ah Li ran out of the morning mist, with three bronze bells wrapped around her snow-white fox tail. When her embroidered shoes stepped over the frozen demon spring, the runes on the soles lit up green, "The elders found that the ground veins at the altar were moving abnormally."

Before he finished speaking, the ground suddenly shook violently. The roots of the thousand-year-old locust tree at the entrance of the village broke through the soil, and dark red veins appeared on the old bark. Jiang Qiu reached out to hold the trunk of the tree, and felt a burning pain in his palm - those tree veins were actually devouring Jiang Qiu's spirit!

"Let go!" Ah Li threw out the silver rope from her waist and wrapped it around Jiang Qiu's wrist. At this moment, the nine hundred and ninety-nine soul lamps hanging between the branches of the ancient locust tree went out at the same time. A cold wind suddenly blew, and Jiang Qiu heard countless dead souls wailing in the treetops, and those sounds penetrated his eardrums and pierced his soul.

The village was filled with the sound of a quick bone flute alarm. As we ran towards the altar, we saw a horrifying sight: moon grass was growing wildly in the sunlight, its vines crushing the wooden bridge; a three-eyed crow crashed to death on the dome of the barrier, its black blood drawing strange totems on the cracks; the most terrifying thing was the little demons with little cultivation, their demon cores were emerging from their bodies, as if they were being gouged out by an invisible hand.

The bronze sundial in the center of the altar had tilted, and dark golden liquid was seeping out of the twelve hour scales. The elder held a tortoise shell for divination, and the tortoise shell exploded into powder in the demonic fire. "It's not an invasion by foreign enemies." His long silver-white beard was covered with cinnabar used for divination, "It's the barrier itself that is collapsing."

As if to confirm this, a loud noise like a landslide suddenly came from the southeast. When they rode the wind to rush over, they saw that the Emerald Peak that originally protected the village had split open, revealing the crystal clear barrier core inside. The demon pill suspended in the air was covered with cracks, and black tentacles stretched out from each crack, greedily devouring the surrounding spiritual energy.

"That's the inner elixir of the first village chief!" Ah Li exclaimed. The marriage rope on her wrist suddenly broke, and the moment the thin rope fell into the crack, Jiang Qiu caught a glimpse of half a human face emerging from the tentacles - it was exactly the same as the portrait of the first village chief enshrined in the ancestral hall!
A dragon-like wail came from underground, and nine water columns broke through the rock. The spring water mixed with mud and sand condensed into ice cones in the air, and hit the village like a rainstorm. Jiang Qiu formed a seal to hold up the shield, but saw the ice cones penetrate the barrier and turned into black mist the moment they touched the ground. White bone puppets crawled out of the mist, with demon pill fragments jumping in their eye sockets, and they pounced on living things.

"Take the young tribesmen to the underground cave!" The voice of the great elder exploded in his ears. Jiang Qiu dragged A Li to the forbidden area, and screams came one after another behind him. When passing by the medicinal field, a thousand-year-old ginseng spirit suddenly turned into a demon, and its roots entangled Jiang Qiu's ankles. A Li swung her sword to cut off the vines, and the splashing juice actually corroded her silver sword.

The stone tablet at the entrance of the underground cave was broken in half, and the warning "You must die before entering" was covered in blood. We lit the mermaid oil lamp and stepped into the cave. The fluorescent light illuminated the ancient murals on the cave wall - in the painting, the nine-tailed fox was devouring the sun and the moon, and its tail pierced through the sky and the earth, which was the original form of the barrier.

The deeper we went, the thicker the demonic energy became. Blood oozed from Ah Li's fox ears, and Jiang Qiu's demon pill began to spin uncontrollably. At the end of the cave, we saw a shocking scene: a huge bronze tripod was suspended at the core of the earth vein, and in the boiling golden liquid in the tripod, nine hundred demon skeletons were soaked!
"So all the elders of all generations..." Ah Li fell to the ground. The inscription on the cauldron recorded the cruel truth - the barrier needed to sacrifice an elder every hundred years, and their bones turned into nutrients for the earth veins. Now the liquid in the cauldron was turning black, and the skeletons were struggling to climb out, their finger bones clasping the edge of the cauldron and making a harsh scraping sound.

The cave suddenly shook violently, and black mist rose from the cauldron and condensed into a human shape. The black shadow reached out and touched Jiang Qiu's forehead, and countless memories suddenly flooded into his mind: Jiang Qiu saw the blood sacrifice ceremony of the ancient demon tribe to establish a barrier, saw the first generation of village chiefs push their beloved into the furnace, and saw the elders of all generations turn into dry bones in the cauldron.
"Xiao Qi!" Ah Li's cry seemed to come from a very far distance. Jiang Qiu's demon pill burst into a fiery light, and a nine-tailed phantom appeared behind him. The black shadow laughed happily, turned into a stream of light and sank into Jiang Qiu's dantian. The ground veins were completely out of control at this moment, and the entire cave began to collapse. When we escaped from the ground, the sunset dyed the sky bloody. The cracks in the dome of the barrier had expanded into a huge abyss. Through the cracks, we could see the scene of another world: there were countless demon corpses suspended there, and broken battle flags were fluttering in the void. The most horrifying thing was that the faces of all the corpses were exactly the same as those of the Qingqiu villagers!
The blood-red moonlight penetrated the cracks in the barrier and intertwined into a twisted light web above Qingqiu Village.

Jiang Qiu knelt in the ruins of the altar, looking at the time and space imprint emerging on his palm - that was the mark left by the shadow. A'li was using a silver needle to seal Jiang Qiu's rampaging demon veins, and sparks flew when the needle tip touched his skin. "Time and space are being torn apart," she said in a trembling voice, "look at those raindrops."

The raindrops suspended in the air reflected the battlefield of three thousand years ago. Some raindrops were filled with flying arrows, some reflected the galloping of monsters, and the most terrifying were the raindrops that reflected the faces of the villagers, their eyes were staring at us through the water curtain.

Suddenly, a bell rang from the east of the village. It was the self-ringing of the Soul-Calming Bell. When we arrived, we saw a breathtaking sight: twelve bronze chimes suspended in the air, covered with blood-red vines. Every time the bell rang, a crack in time and space was torn open on the ground. A villager accidentally fell into it, and his body instantly split into fragments of different ages - the old man's arm was connected to the baby's torso.

"Use the marriage rope!" Ah Li threw out a red line to wrap around Jiang Qiu's wrist. When they stepped into the largest rift, a star map suddenly appeared on the jade pendant on their waists, guiding them to the depths of the turbulent flow of time and space.

The ground of the mirror world is paved with memory fragments, and every step creates ripples. Jiang Qiu sees his younger self playing by the stream in this world, and then he turns into a white-haired old woman crying in front of a grave. Ah Li's nine fox tails appear uncontrollably, and blood-red pupils open at the end of each tail.

A suspended bronze sundial appeared in front of him, and the projection of the sundial needle on the ground formed a blood-red vortex. In the center of the vortex, a general in tattered armor was confronting another Jiang Qiu - the Jiang Qiu had a nine-tailed beast behind him that covered the sky and the sun, and held a still-beating heart in his hand.

"That's your space-time mirror." Ah Li's red line suddenly tightened, "Don't let him see you!"

But it was too late. The general's halberd split the space-time barrier, and the bloody vortex dragged us into the ancient battlefield. The rancid blood mist rushed over, and Jiang Qiu's demon pill suddenly trembled violently. The corpses piled on the ground began to wriggle, grabbing Jiang Qiu's ankles and roaring: "Why did you abandon us?"

A burning meteor streaked across the sky and shattered on the cracked ground. Jiang Qiu saw clearly that it was not a meteor at all, but a bronze chariot wrapped in flames. The driver wore the same mask as the village chief, and strange red spider lilies appeared wherever the wheels passed.

"Be careful!" Ah Li pushed Jiang Qiu away, and three bone arrows flew past her ears. Where we were standing, the ground surged out of the forest of white bone hands. The glowing red lines were entangled between the finger bones, which were the broken marriage ropes of Ah Li before.

On the altar in the center of the battlefield, the figure of the first generation village chief was reenacting the sacrifice ceremony of the year. When he stabbed the dagger into his beloved's chest, the pendant on Jiang Qiu's neck suddenly became hot - it was the jade pendant worn by his lover. Countless fragments of memory flooded into his mind, and Jiang Qiu finally understood that the original seal of the barrier was a Mobius strip created by the paradox of time and space.

The time-space storm suddenly intensified, and our bodies began to become transparent. Ah Li's fox tail was decomposing into light particles. She grabbed Jiang Qiu's hand and pressed it on the bronze sundial: "Use your blood to restart the time anchor point!"

The moment the sundial needle pierced his palm, three thousand years of time flowed backwards in his blood vessels. Jiang Qiu saw his blood flowing in the bronze lines, awakening the dormant star map. The general's ghost roared unwillingly, and collapsed into a point of light along with the battlefield scene.

When they fell back into the present world, the ancient locust tree at the entrance of the village was full of blood-red flowers. Each petal reflected the scene of different time and space, and the roots were deeply embedded in the cracks of time and space. The elder slumped beside the tree roots, his left eye turned into a chaotic vortex: "The closed loop of time and space formed us, and we were ultimately unable to escape"

As night fell, bloody marks appeared on the wrists of all the villagers. The family tree in the ancestral hall automatically turned pages, and the ink characters gradually turned into our names. Ah Li looked at the three overlapping moons in the sky and whispered: "The next blood moon, we will become the new sacrifices."

On the night when the blood-red dandelions fell, the memory of Qingqiu Village began to turn cancerous.

Jiang Qiu squatted under the eaves of the medicine house, watching Ah Li changing the bandages for the wounded. When the gauze was removed, tiny bronze branches emerged from the wound of the deer demon boy, and bell-like memory crystals hung on the branches. "This is the seventh case of memory parasitism." Ah Li's silver needle shone coldly under the candlelight, "His demon pill is playing the scene of the first elder before his death."

Suddenly, the boy grabbed Jiang Qiu's wrist. His pupils split into countless honeycomb-shaped eyes, and each hole replayed the moment of death in different time and space. "Jiang Qiu saw you," his voice overlapped with the echoes of men, women, young and old, "piercing Ah Li's heart with the fox tail on the blood sacrifice table."

The medicine cabinet suddenly trembled violently, and hundreds of medicine bottles opened automatically. The angelica turned into blood threads wrapped around the beams and pillars, and cinnabar condensed into eyeballs rolling on the surface of the pottery jar. When they rushed out of the medicine house, the whole village was experiencing the embodiment of terrifying memories - the clothes hanging out to dry reproduced the scene of the owner's death, the well water reflected the future that had not yet happened, and the most terrifying thing was the chanting coming from the direction of the ancestral hall.

"Go to the Forbidden Book Pavilion!" Ah Li tore off the jade pendant around her neck. As we leaped across the rooftops, we saw the streets below crawling with memory worms. These translucent creatures were devouring the shadows of the villagers, and the ones being devoured suddenly began to call out their children's names in the dialect of the dead.

On the bronze door of the Forbidden Book Pavilion, their reflections were moving on their own. The mirror image of A-li was slamming the door desperately, but the real A-li's right hand raised the dagger uncontrollably. "Don't look at the reflection!" Jiang Qiu urged the demon pill to burn his retina, but the moment he closed his eyes, he heard his own voice coming from the book pavilion: "You were the one who volunteered to be sacrificed back then."

The bamboo slips floating in the pavilion were flipping frantically, and the ink characters recording the secret history were transforming into blood. When Jiang Qiu's hand touched the jade slip recording the deeds of the first generation of the village chief, the entire history poured directly into his mind. (End of this chapter)