A few seconds later, Ran Qingmo dropped from the sky holding a giant white tiger in one hand and slammed it heavily onto the ground.
The white tiger’s enormous body, over six meters long, looked like nothing more than an oversized housecat in Ran Qingmo’s grip. With one hand pressing the back of its neck, she pinned it to the ground so thoroughly it could not move at all.
Ran Qingmo let go, pointed at the white tiger sprawled on the ground, then walked toward Xu Yuan and asked softly, “Will this one do?”
Xu Yuan did not answer.
The moment Ran Qingmo released it, the tiger quietly lifted its head. Its vertical pupils fixed on her back with a cold, sinister stare.
The next moment, the big white tiger decided to demonstrate with its life what it meant to say better dead than enslaved. It lunged at the woman’s slender figure with all its strength, only for Ran Qingmo to casually smack it across the skull with the scabbard of her sword.
In that instant, Xu Yuan could swear he saw the white tiger flying through midair with the sort of dazed, unfocused eyes that looked one hit away from ascending to heaven.
BOOM! The tiger’s huge body turned into a white blur and shot backward, crashing hard into the roots of a towering tree dozens of meters away.
Ran Qingmo stopped in the middle of walking toward Xu Yuan. She turned to glance at the tiger, then murmured in a slightly disappointed voice, “Seems not yet… Wait a moment.”
She carried her sword and walked toward the cloud of dust.
A moment of silence passed. Then a white blur burst out of the dust cloud. This time it did not attack Ran Qingmo again. Rolling and scrambling, it tried to flee straight into the depths of the forest.
Ran Qingmo pressed lightly off the ground and vanished from where she stood.
BANG A dull thud split the quiet forest, startling a flock of birds into flight.
Ran Qingmo landed steadily, glanced at the big tiger with its head half-buried in the dirt and lying motionless, then silently reached down, grabbed the fur on its head, and dragged it back toward Xu Yuan.
Watching the scene, Xu Yuan’s eyelid twitched.
Coming to a stop before him, Ran Qingmo nodded at Xu Yuan. “It should be fine now. Get on and try it.”
“Ah, uh…” Xu Yuan opened his mouth, then glanced at the big white tiger lying motionless on the ground.
The white tiger’s eyes were half-closed. It was obviously playing dead, though the look it gave Xu Yuan still carried a trace of warning. All demonic beasts possessed intelligence, some more, some less.
By now, this big white tiger had already realized that this terrifying human woman intended to turn it into a mount for the human man in front of it.
Xu Yuan fell briefly silent. In the end, trusting in Ran Qingmo’s strength, he still walked step by step toward the tiger lying on the ground.
The moment he stepped closer, the white tiger opened its half-lidded eyes and fixed Xu Yuan with a stare. Its head lifted slightly, and a low warning growl rumbled from its throat.
“Grrr...”
A warrior could be killed, but not humiliated.
BANG! The woman standing beside it answered with a tap of her sword scabbard.
“Awoo...” The white tiger immediately lowered its head again.
Seeing that, Xu Yuan grabbed the tiger’s fur and climbed onto its back. Its white fur was smooth and soft, pleasant to the touch, giving him the same sort of satisfaction as petting a cat in his previous life.
Xu Yuan even tried rubbing its head a couple of times, only to find several swollen lumps there already.
“Grrr...” The white tiger bared its teeth and growled.
BANG! There was now one more lump.
“Whine...” The tiger obediently flattened its head against the ground.
Ran Qingmo slowly withdrew her sheath and said softly, “Let’s go.”
As she spoke, she cast the white tiger a sidelong glance.
With nothing more than that one look from Ran Qingmo, Xu Yuan felt the big white tiger tremble beneath him. It did not get up right away. Instead, it rubbed its head against the hem of Ran Qingmo’s black robe first.
The sight almost made Xu Yuan laugh. His lips had only just started to curl when a tightness in his chest suddenly spread inward, mixed with a faint itching sensation.
The smile vanished. Xu Yuan frowned. He had already experienced this itching sensation several times over the past two days. It was probably the addictive aftereffect left behind by the Third Young Master’s drug use. As long as he endured it for about fifteen minutes, it would fade on its own.
The thought had only just crossed his mind. Xu Yuan was about to speak and suggest delaying their departure a little, but before the words could leave his mouth, the itching inside his chest suddenly flared like a worsening illness. In mere seconds, it turned into a maddening craving.
A fierce wave of suffocation hit him instantly, and his vision went black.
Xu Yuan instinctively clenched the soft fur beneath him to steady himself, but dizziness surged through him in waves. His straight back gradually bent forward. The hand gripping the fur lost its strength little by little, and his body pitched sideways, toppling uncontrollably off the tiger.
Ran Qingmo noticed something was wrong at once. In a flash, she caught Xu Yuan before he hit the ground, her brows knitting slightly.
“What’s wrong with you?”
Xu Yuan’s vision was darkening fast. He opened his mouth, trying to speak, but a burst of metallic sweetness surged violently up his throat.
“Wah...!” A large mouthful of blood splattered onto the earth.
The agony and choking craving made Xu Yuan instinctively shove away Ran Qingmo’s supporting hand and drop to one knee on the ground. His mind blurred. Pain and that suffocating craving drove him to dig his fingers deep into the soil.
There was something seriously wrong with this body. That kind of pain, the sort that seemed to come straight from the depths of his soul, could not possibly be something caused by drug abuse alone.
Xu Yuan frantically searched through everything he knew about the Third Young Master, but no matter how many times he turned it over in his mind, he came up empty.
There was nothing about symptoms like this in the guidebook, the game plot, or any of the related novels, much less any clue about the cause.
Could it be… the world filling in the blanks?
The thought flashed through Xu Yuan’s mind.
Even though Azure Point had millions of words of source material, that was still far too little for an entire world. All the empty spaces the text had never described would naturally be completed on their own. But why would the world’s auto-completion give him a condition like this?
Xu Yuan tried to seize on a clue and think it through, but his consciousness was already growing hazy. His eyelids felt unbearably heavy, and he shut his eyes in pain.
ᯓ➤
By the time Xu Yuan woke again, the stars had shifted, the sun long gone.
Through the gaps of his fingers, Xu Yuan could vaguely see a bright moon hanging beyond the canopy, accompanied by a sky full of stars. He stared blankly at the night sky for a long while before the memories from before he blacked out came rushing back like a flood.
His brows drew together, and Xu Yuan immediately sat up, still shaken. He touched his chest with lingering fear, but the source of that pain that had once coiled inside it had already vanished without a trace.
“You’re awake?”
The woman’s cool voice drew his attention. Turning to look, Xu Yuan immediately saw the familiar sight of Ran Qingmo sitting by a tree with her eyes closed, quietly resting.
Xu Yuan swept his gaze around. The surroundings had changed so drastically from before he fainted that it was almost another world. The towering trees, vast and alien like the forests of Pandora, were gone. In their place stretched a barren range of snowy mountains.
Apparently, while he had been unconscious, Ran Qingmo had already taken him a very long way.
Xu Yuan rubbed his brow and asked softly, “How long was I out?”
“Four days,” Ran Qingmo replied.
Xu Yuan looked startled. “I was unconscious that long?”
After a pause, he still forced the surprise down. Thinking back to the symptoms from before he passed out, a shadow entered his eyes. Now that he was fully awake, recalling that horrifying pain and suffocating sensation that seemed to come from inside his very bones only made him more certain that ordinary drug use could not have caused it.
With a father like the Chancellor, if anyone had dared give him some lethal substance like that, their whole clan would have been wiped out.
Could it be some kind of constitution?
As a Chinese fantasy cultivation game, Azure Point had its fair share of heaven-blessed physiques, things like Sword Embryo Spirit Bodies or Dao Souls with Divine Bones, but no matter how he thought about it, none of them matched what he was going through now.
Xu Yuan sat there frowning, brooding over the cause. While he was lost in thought, the clear, tranquil eyes of the woman beside him opened at some point. Her calm voice drifted quietly into his ear.
“Has your rejection syndrome ended?”