Xu Yuan’s feelings were a little complicated. Whatever had happened before, from this point on he would probably only be able to use the name Xu Changtian.
“Oh.” In the dark cave dwelling, Ran Qingmo’s soft voice rang out with a trace of disappointment. She seemed a little let down that he had not told her his real name.
After a few seconds of silence, she asked quietly, “Then will you keep using the name Xu Yuan from now on?”
Xu Yuan? A strange look flickered through his eyes.
After thinking for a moment, Xu Yuan recalled that in Azure Point, people seemed to have courtesy names as well. It was just that the Third Young Master had always died the moment he entered the story, so his given name had never once come up.
Now that he knew the original owner of this body had also been named Xu Yuan, even he found it surprising.
A coincidence? Or is there something else behind it? His thoughts drifted for an instant, then quickly drew back in. Xu Yuan had never liked wasting time on things he could not figure out.
With that, he said slowly to the woman beside him, “Miss Ran, in a little while—”
“Ran Qingmo.” The iceberg of a woman suddenly cut him off. Her clear, secluded eyes did not blink as she stared at him with utmost seriousness. “My name is Ran Qingmo.”
The air fell still for a moment. In the darkness, the two of them looked at each other without a word.
A little speechless, Xu Yuan nodded with a faint smile and tried again, “Ran Qingmo, when they come later, don’t say anything. I’ll handle it.”
This time, this iceberg of a woman seemed satisfied. She nodded. “Mhm. Okay.”
After that, neither of them spoke again.
Xu Yuan slowly closed his eyes and entered cultivation once more. Since the pool of spirit spring water had already been completely stored inside the Sumeru Ring, the source qi in the cave dwelling had begun to thin out. Even so, with the spirit locking array still in place, the amount of source qi he could sense around him still made him click his tongue in amazement.
Xu Yuan’s cultivation art began to circulate through his meridians, and the surrounding source qi was gradually drawn into his body. The meridians within him, once as narrow as twisting goat trails, had now become broad, open highways. The icy blue source qi that had once coated their inner walls had already been completely scoured away by the tremendous medicinal force from earlier.
The source qi drifting through Heaven and Earth entered his meridians and, almost without the slightest obstruction, began transforming at breakneck speed.
In just fifteen minutes, Xu Yuan discovered that the amount of source qi he had refined in that short span was already equal to what had once taken him a full week of bitter cultivation. He could not help feeling a little emotional, and a little helpless. What ordinary people could never achieve even after exhausting everything they had, geniuses could accomplish casually, almost without trying.
He sank completely into cultivation. Only someone who had once lived as an ordinary person, who had struggled with everything he had just to barely sense the faint traces of source qi, could truly understand how terrifying an advantage this Innate Dao Physique possessed.
But very soon, Xu Yuan noticed that, for some reason, the source qi drifting around them was dissipating at a rate visible to the naked eye. Source qi behaved much like air. It naturally flowed from places of high pressure toward places of low pressure, constantly filling in whatever space had been emptied.
And yet even so, the source qi inside the cave was draining away at terrifying speed. From dense, to thin, to almost nothing at all, until in the end only a few faint little clumps of qi remained within two feet of his body.
Xu Yuan kept his eyes closed and frowned slightly, sending out his soul sense to investigate. When ordinary people first stepped onto the path of cultivation, their soul sense could only detect the faint source qi within less than a foot around them. Beyond that, they couldn’t perceive the movement of source qi at all, much less how it replenished itself.
And now the terror of an Innate Soul Physique showed itself again. Xu Yuan’s range of perception was not only far broader, he could also clearly sense the direction in which the source qi was flowing.
As his soul sense spread outward, Xu Yuan discovered that all the source qi vanishing from the cave was gathering toward a spot about a meter from his side.
Xu Yuan stopped circulating his technique and opened his eyes. Ran Qingmo was sitting cross-legged beside him, eyes closed. She had stolen all the source qi in the cave. And he could not steal it back from this big iceberg no matter what he did.
His eyes flickered slightly. Xu Yuan gave a faint shake of his head, gave up on cultivating, and simply leaned against the stone wall to rest with his eyes closed. He was beginning to understand how Ran Qingmo had managed to become a Grandmaster at such a young age.
She cultivated every waking moment. At their first meeting in the Buddhist hall. After waking up half-frozen in the cave. Even during brief breaks while trekking through the Myriad Ascents Mountain Range. As long as she was sitting there with her eyes closed, she was cultivating. A hardworking genius was the real kind of genius.
At that thought, Xu Yuan’s mind suddenly paused as he recalled his elder brother. That guy… he didn’t cultivate much at all, did he? In his childhood memories, he used to pester that eldest brother, who was ten years older than him, to play with him all day long.
Xu Changge had always looked thoroughly unwilling, but he still played with him anyway, and more often than not, once they started, it lasted the whole day.
And in all those memories, Xu Yuan had never once seen Xu Changge stop halfway through to sit down and cultivate.
While Xu Yuan’s thoughts wandered, Ran Qingmo, seated beside him, quietly opened her eyes and said in her cool voice, “They’re here.”
Xu Yuan instantly snapped back to attention, his gaze sharpening.
BOOM! Rubble flew everywhere as the cave dwelling’s hard stone wall was blasted open by brute force, leaving behind a massive hole more than ten meters deep. Sunlight poured in through the opening and in an instant drove away every trace of darkness inside.
In the sunlight streaming through the opening, several figures could be seen faintly outside. Perhaps because they were wary of Ran Qingmo’s strength, none of them dared enter the cramped cave rashly.
After a brief silence, a cold, hoarse female voice came from outside.
“Miss Ran, please come out.” The voice echoed through the entire cave.
Ran Qingmo silently picked up her sword, rose to her feet, and started walking toward the entrance.
Xu Yuan immediately reached out and caught her by the wrist.
She turned back to look at him. Xu Yuan gave her a slight shake of the head.
At this point in time, with the strength his elder brother currently possessed, he really could kill this iceberg of a woman in a single strike.
Ran Qingmo was silent for two seconds, but in the end she obediently stopped where she was.
Xu Yuan slowly stood up, dusted off his blood-red robe, and called out, “Miss Ran didn’t injure me. Don’t attack her. Let her leave.”
Hearing Xu Yuan’s voice, the figures outside said nothing.
Seeing that, Xu Yuan simply started walking toward the entrance himself.
The blasted-open tunnel through the cave was more than ten meters long, with broken stone scattered everywhere. His boots crunched over the rubble as he walked.
When he reached the entrance and stopped, Xu Yuan narrowed his eyes and poured source qi into them, letting them adjust to the sunlight outside. He lifted a hand and lightly touched his neck as he looked at the four figures suspended in midair beyond the cave.
A scruffy bearded man. A woman in fitted martial clothes with a high ponytail. A bald monk. And that masked woman in tight black clothes with two pale bare arms exposed.
Xu Yuan’s gaze locked onto the last of them. He remembered her. This woman was the same Ying’er who had stood off to the side handing over weapons when Xu Changge was beating him half to death.
Ying’er’s cold gaze swept over Xu Yuan as she said in a low voice, “Zhou Chen, take the Third Young Master away.”
Zhou Chen glanced at the Third Young Master standing in the mouth of the cave and shook his head helplessly. That blood-red robe did look pretty damn cool, but as for the nonsense this wastrel Third Young Master was spouting... who was going to listen to that? Killing Ran Qingmo was the Eldest Young Master’s order.
With that thought, Zhou Chen flashed toward Xu Yuan in an instant, moving so fast Xu Yuan could not even see him clearly.
But halfway there, Zhou Chen’s figure suddenly halted in midair. He frowned and hovered there. What he saw made his eyes tighten. Strands of bizarre blood-red source qi had appeared around the hand this useless Third Young Master had casually laid against his neck, coiling around that pale throat of his.
And in the instant Zhou Chen had moved, thin streams of blood had already begun to seep from Xu Yuan’s neck.
Xu Yuan kept one hand at his neck and swept his gaze across the four of them again, repeating himself word by word, “I said… let Miss Ran leave.”
Feeling the warmth of blood trickling from his throat, Xu Yuan knew that if he were capable of absolute cold-blooded logic, then this was the perfect chance to get rid of that iceberg of a woman. If he did that, his identity would be cemented completely. There would be no loopholes left at all.
However, Xu Yuan could not do it. Maybe in the future, the two of them would end up at odds. Maybe one day they would fall out over something and turn against each other. But it absolutely could not be now.
Call him soft-hearted if you wanted. Call him a simp if you wanted. A person might not always be able to repay kindness, but the very least he could do was not return kindness with betrayal. She had helped him so much along the way, and in the cave she had silently done even more. Without her, the heteropathy alone would have been enough to kill him right here and now.
Ran Qingmo stood inside the cave with her sword in hand, watching that blood-red figure at the entrance. Her red lips pressed together slightly.
Cloud and mist swirled around them. Beneath their feet lay the bottomless abyss of Suspended Heaven Cliff. For a moment, the cave entrance fell into utter silence.
After seeing that wisp of scarlet source qi, a trace of surprise flashed through Ying’er’s cold eyes, but it vanished just as quickly.
“Third Young Master, we’re trying to save you. What exactly are you doing?”
Xu Yuan shifted his gaze to her and answered softly, “Saving me and letting Miss Ran leave do not conflict in the slightest.”
After that brief exchange, silence fell over the entrance again.
For the four people hovering outside, the fact that the Third Young Master now had source qi in his body was unexpected, yes, but at their level, it was nothing worth worrying about.
Knocking him out and taking him away would be simple. Just one flash of movement.
The real problem was that none of them knew what art the Third Young Master had cultivated, nor did they know whether the blood-red source qi wrapped around his neck would run wild the moment he was knocked unconscious.
Of course, the gap in strength was so great that they could forcibly suppress it with their own source qi before it truly erupted. But… what if? What if things did not go the way they expected? What if something happened to the Third Young Master? Who would bear that responsibility?
If the Third Young Master died by their hands, it would be about the same as dragging their entire families into the grave with them. No one dared shoulder that kind of blame. No one knew how long the stalemate lasted.
Then, all at once, a sigh drifted down slowly from the top of Suspended Heaven Cliff. It was very light, but every person present heard it clearly. As the sigh faded, a warm, jade-smooth voice followed, “Ying’er, if Miss Ran wishes to leave, then let her leave. Just bring Changtian up.”