Chapter 63 – The 999 Lives of Bai Xueqing
Light consumed Bai Xueqing as the soul archive pulsed with ancient power.
Her body remained still—standing, but her consciousness plunged into a kaleidoscope of memories. Time bent. Faces, lives, and destinies flickered past her eyes like pages in a book flipping faster than thought.
She gasped, but no sound came. Instead, she lived.
In one life, she was Bai Shenhua, a general who led armies against tyrants, her blade a symbol of justice and rage.
In another, she was a healer—soft-spoken, revered, surrounded by flowers, feared only by the corrupt she quietly dismantled through poisons masked as remedies.
Then came a life where she was betrayed by the one she loved most—stabbed through the back while protecting the innocent. And another where she burned kingdoms to avenge her people, crowned in fire and loss.
Life after life…
Warrior. Priestess. Queen. Assassin. Dancer. Strategist. Empress.
They all led to her. Each with pieces of strength, sorrow, knowledge… and love.
A constant thread wove through them all—him.
Mo Chen.
He had been many names. Sometimes a rival, sometimes a protector, sometimes a shadow watching from afar. But always there.
In one lifetime, he had died shielding her.
In another, she killed him by mistake.
In her most painful life, they ruled side by side—only to fall together, betrayed by a child they had raised as their own.
The emotions hit her like waves—joy, grief, rage, love—until she could no longer tell where one life ended and another began.
> "You are the sum of all who came before."
The voice was hers, but not. A chorus of herself—999 echoes—now whispered as one.
> "But this, the 1000th, is your final thread."
A choice hung in the silence: Integrate them and become more than mortal—or step back and remain Bai Xueqing, reborn but free.
---
Outside the vault, Mo Chen watched her body tremble, light dancing over her skin like living fire.
"She's been in there too long," Meng Zhihao whispered. "What if it's… too much?"
Mo Chen's fists clenched. "She's stronger than you think."
Then the light dimmed.
Bai Xueqing collapsed to her knees, gasping, eyes wide with the weight of a thousand memories.
Mo Chen was at her side in a second, steadying her. "Xueqing—?"
She looked at him—and in her eyes, he saw the storm of a hundred lives.
But also something new: clarity.
"I remember," she said softly.
He held his breath. "All of it?"
She nodded. "And I know now… why they wanted me erased."
---
In the shadows far away, the gloved man watched the feed cut to static.
"She's activated the archive," he muttered.
His companion, face hidden beneath a hood, asked, "Then what now?"
He turned, voice colder than steel. "Now? We kill the Phoenix before she burns the world clean."