Chapter 11

Xie Qingrang pressed a hand to her forehead and shoved her away. "You're not allowed to touch me either."

Yin Xianyu spread her hands. Unable to see the look on Xie Qingrang’s face, she could only soften her voice and admit fault. “All right, Senior Sister. I shouldn’t have done that.”

Xie Qingrang’s aversion to being approached was nothing new; she had always been like this, even back when Yin Xianyu used to act out. Xie Qingrang had brushed it off every time, never seeming to think there was anything wrong with it.

Still, Senior Sister didn’t seem to have changed much. That thought let Yin Xianyu quietly breathe a sigh of relief.

The two of them sat in silence for a while. Yin Xianyu swallowed all the Essence-Condensing Pills in one go, feeling very satisfied. The more spiritual power she had in her body, the more firmly the power of the Chongyuan Pill was suppressed.

Now she was no different from anyone else. After she finished meditating and opened her eyes, she found Xie Qingrang studying her.

Yin Xianyu looked herself over from head to toe but couldn’t find anything unusual. “What is it?”

Xie Qingrang said, “Are you feeling all right?”

There seemed to be some strange aura inside Yin Xianyu’s body. Xie Qingrang couldn’t quite make it out, and she didn’t want to probe with her divine sense rashly either. That would be too rude, so she could only ask directly, then explain the reason as well.

Yin Xianyu knew what she meant, and she was a little confused herself about exactly what had happened before. She no longer remembered clearly why she had been so desperate to take the medicine. “It was the Chongyuan Pill, but I think I only ate a little of it.”

She couldn’t remember the exact amount. If she had taken too much, she would probably already have exploded from the inside out. Besides, the pills had been stored for a long time, so their potency had naturally weakened a great deal.

Yin Xianyu felt nothing was wrong, but Xie Qingrang’s brow still furrowed.

"Chongyuan Pill?"

Seeing that her expression was bad, Yin Xianyu hesitated before answering, “What’s wrong? Is there something wrong with it?”

Xie Qingrang closed her eyes for a moment. It seemed rare for her to be this speechless, and Yin Xianyu couldn’t help watching her curiously. “Senior Sister doesn’t need to worry. I’m fine now, aren’t I?”

Xie Qingrang ignored her completely. She simply stepped in front of her, lifted a finger, and pressed it to the center of her forehead, saying in a tone that brooked no refusal, “Let me take a look.”

Yin Xianyu immediately understood the downside of sharing divine sense. She had no way to resist Xie Qingrang’s divine sense; in an instant, the two of them connected their consciousness seas.

Xie Qingrang saw the spiritual power surging chaotically beneath the Bone-Engraving Stone. This force was extremely dangerous and overbearing, not easy to control, and even she would not be able to dissolve it lightly.

A golden core self-detonation could injure even a Dao Transformation cultivator, let alone Yin Xianyu, who was now at the Nascent Soul stage; it was even harder to handle.

Many cultivators who relied on Chongyuan Pills failed to survive the aftereffects after breaking through their realm. Seeing that the chaotic spiritual power was more than just a single thread, Xie Qingrang immediately withdrew.

She pulled back her finger. The icy touch of her fingertip was still lingering on Yin Xianyu’s forehead when Xie Qingrang asked, “Exactly how much did you eat? Do you want to die?”

Yin Xianyu was somewhat angry and did not answer. She only looked at her. “That’s my business.”

She was a little stubborn; she felt that Xie Qingrang shouldn’t have entered her consciousness sea to check without her permission. What was more, even if she were asked now, she herself didn’t know how much she had taken. Most of her memories were in complete chaos, and her consciousness sea had suffered some damage while expanding.

Xie Qingrang held her breath, pressed her lips together, and met her glare. The rebellious look on her face almost made her laugh in anger.

In the end, neither of them said anything more. Yin Xianyu was the first to feel guilty and back down, her gaze flickering away. “I know you’re doing this for my own good, Senior Sister. I was wrong. It’s just that I really don’t remember how much I took.”

She pointed to her own head, the meaning obvious enough.

The tense atmosphere between them was broken by the noise outside.

The formation had already activated, and the two of them flew out from inside the ship. Looking down, they saw Bo Wenyu and the other two waving at them.

Yin Xianyu stepped forward. Around them, cultivators in small groups had already activated the formation.

Most were five-person formations; only a few cultivators, either completely confident in their own strength or unable to gather enough people, entered in pairs or threes.

To ensure that everyone in a team landed in the same place, they had no choice but to form a formation and enter together.

Bo Wenyu had a treasure used to lock in the positions of several people, called the Sea-Calming Pearl. It was a low-grade magical treasure, and using it required all of their spiritual energy to be poured into it.

Yin Xianyu sent a thread of spiritual power into it, and saw the three of them place their hands on top of one another in neat succession, one atop the next, all silently looking at her with expectant eyes, waiting for her hand to join in.

Yin Xianyu immediately understood. She covered Bo Wenyu’s hand with her own, then turned to look at Xie Qingrang.

Xie Qingrang seemed to have only just eased the furrow in her brow; she turned slightly away, not looking at her.

The other three didn’t dare urge her, but Yin Xianyu couldn’t wait that long. She seized Xie Qingrang’s hand at once. “This is fine, right?”

The three of them fell silent, staring at Yin Xianyu in shock. Before they could say anything, a flash of light swept past, and all five of them vanished from the spot together.

The surrounding space warped and shifted. At times, even the hands of the people around them were hard to distinguish, like looking at flowers through a veil of mist; yet the figures beside them remained clear as ever.

Yin Xianyu could feel the coolness in her palm. She lowered her head to look at the fingers she was holding. They were a far cry from the usual warmth of her hand.

As far as she knew, Xie Qingrang did not cultivate any other technique. The Qingxu Sect’s Jade Purity Crossing Method was pure yang and intensely fiery; her palm should have been warm, the same as hers.

Yin Xianyu looked at her earnestly and couldn’t help asking, “Senior Sister, when did you become so weak?”

Xie Qingrang’s body swayed. It was as if she couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Yin Xianyu only felt the pressure on her hand intensify; she cried out in pain and almost shook it off, but forced herself to endure it.

“Yin Xianyu.”

“Mm?”

“Shut up.”

“..."

The five of them arrived safely. The scenery here was even more desolate than outside.

The yellow earth beneath their feet had hardened into a single mass; walking on it felt like stepping on a huge drumskin, and every step carried a faint tremor from the ground. This land seemed almost alive.

The sky was in pieces, as though countless mirrors had been pieced together. There was no blazing sun hanging overhead; only a dim, murky light made it impossible to tell day from night.

The Five Elements Land trial lasted a total of three days. If no one passed, everyone remaining would be teleported out by the formation.

All around them were rolling yellow earthen mountains with no vegetation at all. Bare rocks, illuminated by the dark-golden sky, glowed red. On the middle slopes of several mountains, huge ring-shaped stone arrays floated in the air, the stones hanging suspended as they slowly revolved under the force of spiritual energy.

“Metal domain.” Ji Xingchen crouched down, dragging a finger across the ground. A layer of fine golden powder clung to her fingertip. “The concentration of metal qi here is much higher than outside.”

Before she had even finished, Liu Xinlan was already vigorously restraining her aura. In just a few breaths, her whole presence had become taut and refined.

This time it was obvious at a glance. Xie Qingrang’s water spiritual root was also quite comfortable here, and all of them, to varying degrees, had absorbed some metal qi from the area. The ones having the hardest time were Yin Xianyu and Ji Xingchen.

The metal qi here was stronger than Yin Xianyu’s fire spiritual root, and Ji Xingchen’s wood spiritual root was being suppressed flat by it.

Yin Xianyu tried circulating her spiritual power.

As expected, the flow through her meridians had slowed noticeably, like a rushing river suddenly dammed upstream.

She frowned but said nothing, only resting her hand on the hilt of her sword.

In the Metal domain, Hanguang Sword was more useful than any spell.

“Move forward.”

Xie Qingrang led from the front. The others tacitly refrained from flying on their swords to conserve energy. After about the time it took to burn one stick of incense, the terrain began to change.

The flat land gradually rose, forming one low ridge after another. Between the ridges lay dried-up riverbeds, and no trace of water could be seen in the channels.

They were covered in dark red gravel, and something within it gleamed faintly. Yin Xianyu bent down to pick up a piece; it turned out to be a fragment from a broken sword.

She only had to pinch lightly before it crumbled apart, clearly having lain here for a very long time.

The Five Elements Land was still extremely dangerous. The great sects had merely worked together to open this ancient ruin; once the trial in this section ended, the remaining disciples would be sent out.

As for the deaths and injuries in the middle, there was nothing the sects could do about them.

Now that they had seen the remains strewn everywhere with their own eyes, the atmosphere in the group immediately turned solemn.

Yin Xianyu dusted off her hands. When she stood up, she noticed something across the riverbed. She narrowed her eyes and looked for a while, confirming that it wasn’t a rock. It was a row of humanoid statues, toppled in a mess across the far side of the channel.

Some were half-buried in gravel, some lay on their backs facing the sky, and some were frozen in the act of crawling forward, even the shape of their fingers clawing into the ground preserved in place.

Every statue had a twisted face, their expressions contorted in agony and terror. They did not look like objects carved by human hands; rather, they looked as if living people had been stripped of their vitality in an instant and turned into dead things where they stood.

Bo Wenyu was just about to walk over to examine them when Xie Qingrang stopped her. “Don’t go over there. Up ahead is the Mistaken Killing Array.”

A disciple riding a sword streaked overhead. When he reached the air above them, he suddenly plunged downward. After a few screams, everyone heard a series of clangs and crashes; the cultivator who had just been alive and well instantly became another statue lying on the ground.

Bo Wenyu immediately drew back her foot. If they hadn’t been walking below instead of flying above like those people, they probably wouldn’t have had a chance to stop in time at all.

Bo Wenyu laughed dryly. “I really can’t stand this. We’re not actually going to walk all the way there, are we? We’re still a long way from the formation core.”

The others looked toward the formation core far off in the distance. More and more cultivators were gathering around it, all dutifully walking ahead. Some who were suppressed by the metal qi found even walking difficult.

Who would have thought that after cultivating all this time to fly on swords, entering the Five Elements Land would still mean making their way to the formation core on foot in such a miserable state?

It wasn’t just Bo Wenyu who couldn’t stand it. Liu Xinlan also impatiently drew her sword, trying to find traces left by others so she could ride her sword forward.

Ji Xingchen patted both of them on the shoulders. Unlike her two friends, she didn’t search for a suitable route. Instead, she pointed up into the air and said, “Forget it. The formation is shifting. The ones flying up there are all rogue cultivators. Do you see any disciples of the Ten Great Immortal Sects riding swords?”

At her words, the two of them looked over. A dark mass of people behind them was trudging along in miserable fashion. Flying required staying high; if they flew too low, they would be sucked down by the metal qi and unable to move.

But if they flew too high and fell, it would be a terrible crash. Those people couldn’t even see the Mistaken Killing Array below, and could only die in vain.

In such a short stretch of road, there were already quite a few cultivators who had died without even figuring out the rules.

There was no way the five of them could follow in their footsteps. They could only keep walking while thinking through the problem. Yin Xianyu had initially wondered why this trial would require so much time; only now did she realize the first level was already this time-consuming.

As she walked, she thought about it. If they wanted to speed things up, should she look for a shortcut and think of some clever trick?

She tugged on Bo Wenyu’s sleeve and, under her puzzled gaze, spoke up. “Let’s fly on our swords.”

Everyone: “What?”

Yin Xianyu said, “Senior Sister, can I borrow your Chiling? I won’t touch it; I’ll just use it.”

Bo Wenyu couldn’t quite gauge Xie Qingrang’s attitude. Earlier, when the two of them had been holding hands, Xie Qingrang had also seemed somewhat unwilling. What was more, this was Xie Qingrang’s life-bound sword; even her own sword, Kuan Nian, she didn’t let people touch, let alone Xie Qingrang’s Chiling.

Just as she was thinking about how to comfort Yin Xianyu for the inevitable rejection, Xie Qingrang looked at her instead. Chiling left its sheath and circled once in the air, actually granting permission.

The words stuck in Bo Wenyu’s throat and were swallowed back down. The expressions of the others looked as though they had just seen a ghost.

Ji Xingchen leaned over and asked, “Did you ask the wrong person? Is that really Xie Qingrang?”

“Uh, I think so...”