"Are these the remains of the Mutated Element? Is there no point in destroying it?" Cat Girl asked, confused.
"The laws of this place are already in chaos," Priest Qian Que told her. "The ice crystals here are merely an amalgamation of cold air and mist."
A nearby priest from the Mist Realm agreed. "Shattering the ice crystals would only scatter the gathered air. It wouldn't achieve anything. The original Mutated Element fused with the entirety of the Nihility State long ago, and the situation is beyond recovery now. Otherwise, we wouldn't have left such a massive expanse of land to sit idle."
The group prepared to move on, but Cat Girl kept staring at the ice crystals before her, still finding them an eyesore.
She gathered spiritual rhinoceros into her fist and threw a punch, directly shattering the ice crystal.
Priest Ai Jing, who had already walked past, saw this and smiled helplessly. "She's still a child."
Priest Qian Que, however, found it a little strange.
Cat Girl was never an impulsive or willful person. She always knew exactly what needed to be done and how to do it.
Why would she suddenly vent her frustrations on something so useless today?
Priest Qian Que raised his hand and summoned a gentle breeze, blowing away the freezing mist in front of them.
But when the mist cleared, two figures stood in front of him instead of one.
The rest of the group had been watching Cat Girl and Priest Qian Que, so they naturally saw the third figure appear between them.
Everyone stopped immediately and readied themselves for battle.
However, when the group got a clear look at the third figure's face, someone could not help but cry out.
"Priest Xiu Ye?!"
At the same time, Priest Ai Jing noticed movement stirring in the surroundings.
"Watch your surroundings! Monsters are appearing!"
Li Ban had never seen ice crystals like this before. He raised his hand and cast the Rending Technique, planning to break off a small piece for study.
To his surprise, the moment the chunk of ice fell, it abruptly dissolved into mist and drifted away.
"It gathers into ice and scatters into mist? What an interesting phenomenon."
His interest in the ice crystal deepened.
"If it can attract the mist to condense, there must be something inside."
Li Ban raised his hand again and cast the Spatial Oscillation Technique.
He deliberately restricted the spell's area of effect; without causing much of a disturbance, he pulverized the towering ice crystal before him into powder.
However, when he sensed that something else seemed to exist within the ice, he immediately pulled back his spell to avoid destroying it.
As the mist dissipated, Li Ban raised an eyebrow.
"There was actually a person inside this ice crystal. Was she the one who caused the ice to form?"
A woman stood amidst the shattered ice.
When the ice crystal shattered, she surprisingly did not collapse. Instead, she stood firmly on the ground.
Li Ban placed a hand against the woman's neck to examine her.
"No divine soul. Is this nothing more than a corpse?"
"Inside this body... she was a priest when she was alive."
Right at that moment, the cloak draped over Li Ban's shoulders fluttered without any wind.
He pressed a hand to the fabric, thinking it was trying to detach from him, but the cloak merely billowed for a moment before settling back onto his shoulders.
"Do you know her?" Li Ban turned his head and asked the cloak, but it offered no further reaction.
But when Li Ban looked back up, he saw that the woman before him had opened her eyes.
He reached out to examine her body again, but the woman drifted backward, evading his fingers.
"Interesting." Li Ban retracted his hand. "Do you possess consciousness right now?"
The woman blinked. She reached up and lightly touched her own face before looking back at Li Ban. The confusion in her eyes faded, replaced by steadfast clarity.
"I am Xiu Ye, the priest stationed in Yun Province by the Imperial Dynasty. Who are you?"
Li Ban had limited knowledge regarding the priests of the Imperial Dynasty, so he naturally had never heard the name "Xiu Ye."
"I am someone looking for the cause behind the destruction of Yun Province. You can call me Zhong Ye."
He had, of course, borrowed the name of Priest Zhong Ye from the Trash Realm.
Li Ban never expected to encounter any "living" person other than Xiao Suo in the Nihility State, so he hadn't bothered to prepare an alias.
Hearing the name Xiu Ye simply reminded him of Priest Zhong Ye on the spot, so he temporarily borrowed the name to cover for himself.
Li Ban assumed she would press him for answers after such an ambiguous introduction.
Instead, Xiu Ye only cared about one thing.
"Yun Province has been destroyed? How is that possible? I explicitly called upon the three great factions for reinforcements."
"Yun Province was turned into the Nihility State by the Mutated Element. And that happened decades ago." Li Ban watched Xiu Ye's expression closely. She didn't seem to be faking her reaction.
Xiu Ye's body trembled. "I don't believe it."
She spun around, intending to fly off and investigate the state of Yun Province herself. But when she pushed off the ground, she barely managed a jump of half a meter before dropping back down.
"What is happening?" She looked down at her hands.
"Have you forgotten that you are already dead?" Li Ban ruthlessly pointed out the truth.
Even though the Xiu Ye standing before him could move and speak, it could not hide the reality of her death.
"What?" Xiu Ye snapped her head up to glare at Li Ban, a burst of frigid air erupting across her face.
The surrounding mist suddenly came alive, converging on Xiu Ye as if trying to freeze her into a permanent ice sculpture.
Li Ban stepped forward and swept his sleeve, directly dispersing the surging mist.
He looked at Xiu Ye, whose body was already coated in a layer of frost, and slapped his palm against her back.
With a series of sharp cracking sounds, he shattered the layer of ice covering her body once again.
Xiu Ye stared at Li Ban in bewilderment, no longer insisting on leaving.
"I—what exactly happened to me?"
"To put it simply, Yun Province was annihilated by the Mutated Element and reduced to the Nihility State. You likely died during its destruction. As for why you still possess consciousness now, the ice layer from earlier must have protected you. It froze your body and prevented your shattered divine soul from dissipating. However, in your current state, I am afraid you won't last much longer."
Unlike Li Ban's previous experience of having his soul separate from his body, Xiu Ye's divine soul had been completely shattered.
Once a divine soul shattered, it could never be reassembled, meaning the dead could not be resurrected.
The only reason she had survived until now was that the freezing ice had suspended time just moments before her soul collapsed, trapping her in a state of indefinite near-death.
If she didn't want to die immediately, her only option was to remain sealed in ice until her divine soul was slowly and painstakingly exhausted over a vast span of time.
But how was being frozen in ice any different from death?
Xiu Ye swayed and clutched her chest.
She had only just awakened and could not immediately process it all.
Now that Li Ban had laid out the facts, she finally realized her current condition.
"I am indeed already dead. My divine soul cannot last much longer." She closed her eyes, overwhelmed by boundless grief, yet found that she could not even shed a single tear.
"They must all be waiting for me right where I left them, but even in death, I could not return."
Hearing Xiu Ye's sorrowful murmurs, Li Ban suddenly remembered the various caves the cloak had dragged him to earlier.
Was the older sister that those countless skeletons had been waiting for... the Priest Xiu Ye standing right in front of him?