As Xu Yuan and Su Jinxuan walked up the long, narrow stairway leading back to the surface, deathlike darkness pressed in from every side. Their footsteps were light, so light that Xu Yuan could clearly hear the uneven breathing of the woman beside him.
She was clutching his wrist. Both hands wrapped around it, gripping so tightly it was as if she feared that this tiny scrap of something real might suddenly vanish.
Xu Yuan continued upward in silence. The seductive charm that had filled Su Jinxuan’s eyes and brows when they first met was gone. All that remained now was a trace of helplessness that made her look painfully pitiful.
“In such a peaceful and secluded place, Miss Su, have you been sleeping well these past few days?” The man’s gentle voice suddenly broke the silence of the long stair passage. This time, he did not call her Jinxuan.
After two seconds of silence, her trembling voice came through.
“Xu... Xu Changtian, you... you’re a monster. If you’ve got the guts, then just kill me.”
And she did not call him Third Young Master either. That superficial sort of intimate politeness, all the circling and pretense, was useless now. She was afraid. She hated him. She wanted to kill the man beside her, this devil of a man.
Xu Yuan did not get angry when he heard that. He only gave a soft laugh. “If I’m a monster, then why are you holding on to me so tightly, Miss Su?”
Su Jinxuan fell silent, but she did not let go.
Seeing that, Xu Yuan casually tugged his arm free from her tightly clasped hands.
“Ah...” The solid sensation in her hands vanished, and Su Jinxuan immediately let out a panicked cry. Then she began desperately groping through the darkness, searching for him as though her life depended on it.
Xu Yuan softened his footsteps and quietly stepped aside. Source qi flowed into his eyes as he silently watched the woman fumbling around in the dark corridor. Was her reaction exaggerated? Not at all.
Back when he had tried this in one of those sensory deprivation centers, he had only lasted a few hours, and that was counting the time he spent asleep. For the first few minutes, it had felt novel. Harmless, even. The softness all around him had actually been rather comfortable.
But as time dragged on, the soundless darkness let irritability spread through the heart with terrifying speed. At that point, the only way to endure was to distract himself, to think about things from the past. That was exactly what Xu Yuan had done back then at the center. He had let his mind wander, and thanks to the fatigue from the day before, he had eventually fallen asleep.
But would everything be fine once the person fell asleep? No. Not even close. Waking up was the real beginning. That mute world around him, that feeling of being sunk deep in something soft, unable to struggle free, unable to make a sound, the loneliness of it, like falling forever into a bottomless abyss, that was what truly drove people into despair.
And all of that tangled, crushing despair had come even when Xu Yuan had been mentally prepared for it, even when he knew he could free himself at any time. When Su Jinxuan woke up, there had been no trained staff nearby to loosen her restraints when she struggled.
She had no idea how long she would be tied up in a place like that. All that waited for her was struggle. Struggle until she was exhausted and drifted off in a daze. Then waking in terror, only to be swallowed once more by that dead silence without time, without space.
And so it went, over and over again.
After ten full days of that, the fact that Su Jinxuan had not gone mad yet was already enough to earn Xu Yuan’s respect.
After fumbling around for quite a while and still failing to find him again, Su Jinxuan finally wrapped her arms around herself and crouched down, shivering on the floor. She did not beg for mercy. She only bit her lip stubbornly, hugged her legs, and curled up against the wall.
Xu Yuan watched quietly for a few breaths, then rubbed at his brow. Looking at her like this, why did it make him seem like the villain? She was the one who had attacked him for no reason in the first place. If his soul had not been naturally tough and solid, he would already have become her dog by now.
“Hmph.” At that soft snort, Su Jinxuan immediately turned toward the source of the sound. A faint mist had gathered in those seductive peach blossom eyes of hers. But she had no cultivation. The strange soul spores born of her Bewitching Soul Devil Body had all been sealed away. She could not even turn her senses inward, much less see through the darkness.
Xu Yuan looked at her and stopped masking his footsteps. Maybe she was acting. Maybe she really had been frightened out of her wits. But none of that mattered. That secret report from Embrocade was already enough to justify many things he might do to her.
“Miss Su, stop being stubborn, all right?” He slowly walked over to Su Jinxuan’s side and crouched down. Then he slowly reached out and gently laid a hand on her drawn-up knee. “Take hold of me. Let’s go up.”
ᯓ➤
Everbow Valley, secret realm.
This was already Qin Mo’s third day inside this independent realm, and also his first day fully recovered from his injuries. He hid inside a mountain cave, secretly peering outside.
A blood-colored, eerie mist filled the entire realm. Within it, vague black shapes drifted to and fro. And besides that, there was the booming sound that came with the trembling earth.
Thump… Thump… Thump… Looking up, he could vaguely make out several enormous, blurred figures wandering aimlessly through the crimson fog.
“Old man, old man...” Qin Mo called inwardly through his soul.
Very soon, a deep middle-aged man’s voice replied to him in a lazy drawl, as though it came with its own built-in bass. “Hmm? What is it now?”
Qin Mo’s voice in his heart was practically gritted through clenched teeth. “You never said there’d be monsters in here. What the hell are these things?”
The middle-aged voice chuckled, utterly unhurried. “Don’t make such a fuss. They’re just demonic beasts that were corrupted by wraithfiends. They contain devil crystals. For the cultivation art you practice, those things are excellent nourishment.”
Qin Mo nearly exploded. In his heart, he laughed in fury instead.
“Nourishment my ass. I’ll be lucky if I don’t get stomped flat by one of them!”
“Heh heh...” The middle-aged voice gave another amused laugh. “Relax. This realm was breached by wraithfiends back then. There should have been some ordinary mortals living here at the time. With your current strength, killing the corrupted mortals ought to be well within your abilities.
“Besides, if you want to borrow my power to save your little sweetheart, you’ll have to take some risks. Still, I should warn you, throwing away your head for a woman is a very stupid thing to do.”
After a pause, the middle-aged voice added in a casual tone, “That coachman you saw last time was probably a third rank Grandmaster. The people backing that Third Young Master should be fairly capable. If you kill him, that grudge is going to become a truly massive one.”
Qin Mo steadied himself, let out a breath, and asked in a low voice, “Miss Su saved me. She was being forced. I can’t just stand by and ignore it. Besides, you saw it yourself before. Even if I don’t kill that wastrel, he’ll never let me go.”
The middle-aged voice gave a faint sigh, then chuckled in that shameless old rogue manner of his. “If you’d listened to me back then and gone to take that Grand Dual Cultivation Yin-Yang Art, would there be this much trouble now? One dose of Joyous Union Powder and the rice would’ve been cooked already.”
Qin Mo fell silent.
Seeing that, the middle-aged voice stopped teasing him and said in a lower tone, “I was joking, don’t get mad. That little girl has a succubus constitution. By my guess, that Third Young Master is probably already under her control by now. As long as the so-called Third Young Master’s third rank guard doesn’t notice anything off, she should be safe.”
Qin Mo let out a slight breath of relief. “Old man, you said these things are demonic beasts corrupted by wraithfiends. What are wraithfiends?”
“You don’t even know what wraithfiends are?” The middle-aged voice sounded a little surprised, but then let out a long, faint sigh. “Seems quite a lot has happened over these past few thousand years. Ah, back in my day...”
“Old man, can you cut the nonsense?” Qin Mo interrupted, unable to resist complaining.
The middle-aged voice sounded aggrieved. “I’ve been stuck inside this Soul Nurturing Ring for thousands of years with no one to talk to. All I could do was study cultivation arts. Now I’ve given the art to you, and you can’t even spare a few words for this old man...”
Qin Mo said nothing.
“Hahahahaha!” The middle-aged voice burst into laughter. Then he reined it in and spoke sternly. “All right, enough joking. Wraithfiends come from the depths of the Great Wasteland. They’re an extremely dangerous kind of thing. If not for the surge of qi in that era, when heroes rose all across the land, those wraithfiends might well have slaughtered every last human alive.”
Qin Mo frowned. The Great Flame Empire bordered the sea to the east, barbarian tribes to the north, the great desert to the northwest, and the Ancient Abyss to the southwest. Only the south was truly stable… because its back was to the Great Wasteland.
From everything he knew, the Great Wasteland was merely a barren land where no living thing could survive.
“The Great Wasteland is that dangerous?”
“What, you thought otherwise?” The middle-aged voice sounded rather emotional.
“Boy, only Sages can open up independent spaces. And yet this secret realm was breached by wraithfiends. What that implies... surely you’re not too dense to figure it out?”