Li Ban glanced at Lu Qinghe to see how she would handle the situation, only to catch a flash of killing intent in her eyes.
She intended to silence the man for good.
It took Li Ban only half a second to decide to join the fight.
Splash! With a massive spray of water, Lu Qinghe finally tore herself free of the black algae beneath the surface.
Her legs were covered in tangled Cyan Silk Algae, but the moment she scrambled onto the riverbank, she whipped around and flicked her fingers.
From his vantage point on the shore, Li Ban finally got a clear look at the strands of hair Lu Qinghe had shot out.
Like an elongated, slender needle, one whistled through the air toward the rapidly approaching body-salvager.
The body-salvager's eyesight might not have been as freakishly sharp as Li Ban's, but anyone who spent their life fishing corpses from the river was no ordinary man.
Seeing Lu Qinghe launch an attack, the man raised an eyebrow and swung his bamboo pole, sweeping up a thick curtain of water to block it.
The body-salvager suddenly convulsed. The slender strand of hair had pierced right through his eye and into his brain.
Because the wound was so incredibly fine, he didn't die instantly.
Agony flared in his eye. Clapping a hand over it, he hurled himself into the River of Forgetfulness.
If he stayed standing on his small boat, he would be nothing but a living target for Lu Qinghe.
"Help!"
The body-salvager screamed for help.
Lu Qinghe had already plucked three more strands of hair from her head. This time, she intended to kill him on the spot.
However, the body-salvager never managed to finish his cry.
A stalk of black algae—as thick as a man's thigh—suddenly erupted from the water and violently coiled around him.
Wrapping loop after loop, it bound the man into a tight cocoon.
With another heavy splash, the cocoon was dragged into the depths of the river. After that, dead silence.
Li Ban stared at the spot, his eyes wide at the sheer size of the Cyan Silk Algae.
If he had encountered such terrifying Cyan Silk Algae underwater, he likely wouldn't have stood a chance of surviving.
Just what exactly had Lu Qinghe taken from beneath the rocks?
It was as if she had ransacked its lair, provoking the Cyan Silk Algae into a relentless pursuit.
On the other side, seeing the body-salvager dead meant there were no surviving witnesses. Without even bothering to clean the tangled Cyan Silk Algae off her body, Lu Qinghe yanked something out of her mouth and sprinted for the carriage.
Li Ban scanned their surroundings. Seeing no one else, he waited for Lu Qinghe to board the carriage before vaulting up right behind her and driving the horses hard toward the Death Prison.
Only when they were far away from the River of Forgetfulness did he slow their pace and turn back to check on her condition.
"How are you holding up?"
Lu Qinghe was... currently treating her injuries.
The left leg she had pulled out of the water last had suffered severe constriction wounds.
By the time Li Ban turned to ask, she had already cut away the left leg of her trousers, exposing her pale, muscular thigh.
But right now, that pale skin was marred by rings of deep, crimson welts. It was a shocking sight.
Catching a glimpse of this, Li Ban hastily turned back around.
Lu Qinghe was Du An's woman. Whether she was genuinely his bedmate or not, Li Ban had no desire to invite trouble over something so trivial.
Naturally, Lu Qinghe noticed his quick glance and immediate retreat.
However, she didn't react to it.
Having lived for so many years, she was long past the point of being moved by a minor act of propriety.
Still, she spoke up to praise him.
"You did well today."
Li Ban thought she was referring to how he had used his right eye to help her.
Instead, she shifted the topic to something else entirely.
"When your own abilities are insufficient, you cannot mindlessly rush in to help others. Not only will you fail to help them, you will also doom yourself."
"You saw my hand signal and immediately escaped the River of Forgetfulness. When you realized I was tangled up, you didn't rashly approach. Those were all the right choices."
Hearing this, Li Ban thought to himself, That's all thanks to your training.
"Alright, come inside and change your clothes."
Lu Qinghe emerged from the carriage. She had changed back into the clothes she had worn when they first arrived, and her movements betrayed no sign that her left leg was heavily injured.
Li Ban handed her the reins and ducked into the carriage to change.
While swapping out his clothes, he noticed a pile of Cyan Silk Algae, about the thickness of a pinky finger, heaped in the corner.
"Lu Qinghe, what should we do with the algae in here?"
A moment later, her voice drifted in from outside.
"Find a place to bury it before we go back. We made too much of a scene this time; it will definitely attract the attention of the Myriad Ancient Pagoda. We won't be able to return for a while."
"Got it. I'll pack it up for now." Li Ban stuffed the pile of algae from the floor into his pack.
Once he was dressed, he hurried back outside.
"Will we be going back later? I saw you retrieve something."
Lu Qinghe sighed softly. "What I grabbed was the Cyan Silk Algae's seed disc. But the seeds I was looking for weren't on it."
"You want the seeds? Are you trying to cultivate it yourself?" Since Li Ban happened to have something that looked suspiciously like a seed, he eagerly asked her how she intended to handle it.
"Fully mature Cyan Silk Algae cannot be fused with. So, my original plan was to cultivate a seed, wait for it to take root and reach its infant form, and fuse with it then."
As she spoke, she pulled a black object from her robes. It resembled a sunflower head.
"This is the breeding disc. As you can see, the seeds inside were washed away by the river a long time ago. Who knows how many years it'll take for new ones to sprout."
Lu Qinghe looked somewhat disappointed.
Given her personality, admitting this to Li Ban was already a sign of profound frustration.
Li Ban took the empty disc and examined it. There were four or five small crevices inside, and they looked perfectly sized to fit the seed the Silver Kingfisher had brought him earlier.
It seemed he had been one step ahead, snagging the most important treasure.
In other words, a seed really could be cultivated into an element.
Li Ban didn't ask her for the cultivation method.
If he didn't have a seed, he had no business caring about such things.
Lu Qinghe didn't throw away the Cyan Silk Algae disc; perhaps it still had some other use.
The carriage rocked back and forth all the way to the Death Prison. Along the road, the withered trees had begun to sprout new buds; from a distance, they painted the landscape in a wash of tender green.
Only the short peach trees in the grove remained bare, devoid of new leaves.
Li Ban stepped off the carriage here, while Lu Qinghe continued forward to enter through the main gate.
Li Ban needed to stay behind to dispose of the black algae Lu Qinghe had brought back.
He jogged deep into the small grove, dug a hole with his bare hands, and took out the bundle, shaking the black algae into the dirt.
A handful of thumb-thick black algae tumbled to the bottom of the pit.
However, as Li Ban bent over to bury it in the soil, he covertly absorbed the black algae instead.
Only a patch of overturned earth remained to prove he had done any work at all.
Because his right eye contained the Spiritual Rhinoceros Fruit, which boosted his cultivation efficiency, Li Ban funneled all the spiritual rhinoceros he absorbed this time directly into his trump card: the Blazing Flame Art.
To his pleasant surprise, this single session almost maxed out the experience bar for the Blazing Flame Art.
This finger-thick Cyan Silk Algae had to be the most essential portion of the plant to provide such an immense amount of spiritual rhinoceros.
If one day Li Ban could absorb that thigh-thick stalk of Cyan Silk Algae that had killed the body-salvager—he'd have to chop it into sections to absorb it without wasting any—he guessed it would fully replenish all five of his current elements!
It felt as exhilarating as swiping a credit card in a pay-to-win game.
It was just a pity that they had made such a huge commotion this time. The people from the Fanggu Pagoda would likely come and clear out that patch of Cyan Silk Algae, so it was unlikely it would be left there for him to continue farming.
Having finished absorbing the finger-thick Cyan Silk Algae, Li Ban finally had time to check on the Silver Kingfisher.
The little silver bird's belly was bulging once again. He wondered if it had brought him back anything good.
Thinking of the empty Cyan Silk Algae disc in Lu Qinghe's hands, Li Ban wondered, Could the Silver Kingfisher have brought back the rest of the Cyan Silk Algae seeds?
Even if it brought back a hoard of them, Li Ban couldn't plant them right now.
He currently didn't have any private space. Even if he managed to grow the Cyan Silk Algae, he would only be handing the fruits of his labor to someone else.
The Silver Kingfisher hopped excitedly in Li Ban's palm before suddenly opening its beak and spitting out a... silver ring!