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Translator: Truth
Editor: Dhael Ligerkeys
Lu Ye shot the Tree of Glyphs a glance before looking back at Hua Ci.
“Why are you trying to poison me, you toxic woman!”
Hua Ci exclaimed in amazement, “Are you really immune to poison?”
“What, you thought I was joking?”
“I don’t believe you!”
“Whatever. By the way, it’s my turn to ask questions. What on earth is this inheritance of yours?”
Lu Ye did not think that Hua Ci was actually trying to kill him, of course. However, he was curious to know how she suddenly gained the ability to poison someone without being noticed. After all, she practically looked the same as before; the only difference was her increased cultivation level.
[No, wait, it’s like her very body is full of poison.]
All she did was grab his hand, and toxins began invading his body. If his assumption was true, then his random jab about her being a toxic woman wasn’t just accurate, but literally accurate.
He grew even more curious about her inheritance at Mount Ying. She had clearly told him that the inheritance was a medicine cultivator’s inheritance, so why on earth had her abilities grown in the opposite direction?
On second thought, Hua Ci’s ability to grow horrifying mushrooms had come from that inheritance as well, so he supposed it wasn’t that strange.
Plus, there were plenty of medicine cultivators in Jiu Zhou who were experts in poison. Toxicology was a part of pharmacology after all.
Still, he was expecting a medicine cultivator’s inheritance to be ninety percent about saving lives, and ten percent about poisoning others. For it to be the other way around… whoever had left behind the inheritance seemed to be pretty suspect.
“Are you sure you’re fine? You do not need to force yourself.”
The duo were holding each other’s hands and conversing just a few inches away from each other’s faces. If it wasn’t for the fact that there was green light flashing around Lu Ye’s wrist again and again, anyone would’ve thought that they were partners confessing their longing for one another after a long separation.
“Oh, I’ve never been better,” replied Lu Ye smoothly while holding Hua Ci’s hand with his left hand and enjoying the sensation. “You’re the one who’s suffered much to come this far.”
On the outside, Hua Ci shot him a beatific smile and said, “It is my responsibility.” On the inside, she swore she was going to show him who’s boss if it was the last thing she did!
After obtaining the full inheritance from Mount Ying, Hua Ci had thought that the days where Lu Ye one-upped her were finally over. However, not only did the guy actually look like he was immune to poison, the first thing he did after they met was to take advantage of her!
She was, in a sense, a walking sac of deadly poison. If she wanted to, there was no one in the world who could touch her without being poisoned. However, nothing she did to Lu Ye was working.
Aquamarine light kept flashing and vanishing from both of Lu Ye’s hands. In his Source Spiritual Point, the Tree of Glyphs was giving off an impressive amount of gray smoke.
Finally, Hua Ci could not stand his “ministration” any longer and uttered, “Let go already!”
Lu Ye merely shot her a sunny grin. He still did not know what kind of inheritance she had obtained from Mount Ying, but she had clearly been trying to take him down a peg, not realizing that the Tree of Glyphs prevented any and all poison from doing him harm. As a result, not only did she go for wool only to come back shorn, she couldn’t even pull away from his grasp.
“Yi Yi!” Hua Ci looked at Amber and cried, “He’s bullying me! I need you to discipline him!”
It was only then that Lu Ye finally let go of her and said with mock seriousness, “Let’s spar again in the future. And you’re not allowed to call for help next time.”
Hua Ci merely glared at him while giving her hand a shake. He had caressed it so much that it was hurting a bit.
With that mini interlude behind them, Hua Ci looked around her before asking, “If I knew you guys were mostly fine, I would not have rushed over. Where is Ju Jia, by the way? I thought that the three of you were together.”
“He ascended to the Cloud River Realm and went back to the headquarters.”
Hua Ci wasn’t expecting that. “Ju Jia ascended to the Cloud River Realm? But how? I thought he was only Heaven Seven!”
“Let’s just say that his talent is extraordinary.”
He did not elaborate because he and Yi Yi were the only two people who knew about Ju Jia’s Mutant core. He saw no reason to spill his secret even between close friends.
Hua Ci nodded before calling out again, “Yi Yi.”
The girl appeared with her head drooped and her cheeks red. That was literally the first time she saw two people acting lovey-dovey with each other so to speak. As a result, she wasn’t quite able to look at Hua Ci in the face even now.
Hua Ci shot her a kind smile as she grabbed her hand. A quick inspection later, she said, “It’s no big problem.”
After pulling Yi Yi to one side and sitting on the floor, the greenish color on Yi Yi’s skin began vanishing at a visible rate. No one knew how Hua Ci had done it, but it made sense that she could cure someone as easily as she could poison them, especially since Yi Yi’s condition wasn’t severe to begin with. It wasn’t long before she was fully cured.
“Thank you, sister Hua Ci,” Yi Yi thanked her with a sweet smile.
Hua Ci gave the cute girl a reassuring pat on the back of her hand before turning back to Lu Ye. The young man was now chowing down on the meat Yi Yi had cooked earlier. “What are your immediate plans in the future?”
“Recover and cultivate.”
“I’m glad you’re not diving head first into recklessness for once.”
The Thousand Demon Ridge was currently in a state of total lockdown, and even with Hua Ci’s newfound power, the three of them plus Amber still weren’t enough to break out. Lu Ye could try executing Glyph: Fire Phoenix again, but the side effects were so that he wasn’t willing to use it as anything but a last resort.
Their surroundings were hardly friendly, but at least they were in no danger of dying. Now that Hua Ci was here, they had even less to worry about the poisonous fog around them.
Lu Ye had told Yu Lianzhou in his message that he was going to cultivate until Heaven Nine before breaking out, but honestly, he did not think that was going to happen. At his current level, it would take ages to make it to Heaven Nine.
No, he was going to break out when he was Heaven Eight. He thought he would be able to do it at that cultivation level.
Yi Yi was sitting next to Hua Ci while the latter was catching up with Lu Ye. For some reason, the girl kept shooting Hua Ci’s tummy an odd look from time to time. Finally, she caved to her curiosity and gave Hua Ci’s tummy a rub…
Hua Ci’s arrival had undoubtedly given Lu Ye and Yi Yi an additional layer of security.
Inside the ward, Lu Ye was resting and cultivating as usual. Outside the ward, Hua Ci and Yi Yi were running about and busying themselves with something. Just a day later, the women had constructed a simple, three-floor high wooden building and even a wooden fence outside the building, effectively forming a courtyard.
Finally, Lu Ye established a number of wards surrounding their new residence before moving in. With this, their quality of life had skyrocketed by several leagues.
Lu Ye could not help but think how different his quality of life was with and without a woman.
Yi Yi… Yi Yi was just a girl, so she didn’t count.
If Lu Ye’s life in the Myriad Poison Forest was as plain as it was boring, then Hua Ci’s life was the opposite. He didn’t know what she was doing in the norm, but she was so busy that he only got to see her a few times a day, if at all. One thing was certain though, her presence had brought the Thousand Demon Ridge much suffering.
How could he tell? It was because she always returned with dozens of Storage Bags around her waist. Sometimes, she “only” brought back a dozen or so Storage Bags. Sometimes, she brought back as many as thirty Storage Bags. She always handed him the Storage Bags so that he could unlock them all and split the loot.
As a result, Lu Ye grew even more interested in Hua Ci’s inheritance. Just what did she obtain to allow her, a Ninth-Order medicine cultivator, to slaughter the Core Circle cultivators like helpless chicks? In just a few days, the amount of Storage Bags she brought back had exceeded a hundred!
Time passed slowly, and the Thousand Demon Ridge… wasn’t feeling very good as of late, to be honest.
For one, the Vanquisher of Sects was still alive. Although he had vanished from the Scroll of Supremacy, there were other ways to check his status. And he was definitely still alive. Somehow, the young man was still breathing even though it had been half a month since he was trapped in the Myriad Poison Forest.
Currently, the Thousand Demon Ridge had arrived at two popular theories. One, the Vanquisher of Sects had a method to resist the deadly poison of the Myriad Poison Forest. This theory was deemed unlikely though. The forest was deemed a forbidden area for a reason. It should not be possible for a Spirit Creek Realm cultivator to resist its poison for so long.
The second theory was that he had found a safe area that was untouched by the poison of the Myriad Poison Forest. That was how he was able to live until now.
If that was true, then that bastard must have used up all of his luck to find it. Such a place should not exist within the Myriad Poison Forest, but since Lu Yi Ye was still alive, they had to assume that it did exist, and he had somehow stumbled upon it, the lucky bastard!
The Thousand Demon Ridge had never stopped sending people into the Myriad Poison Forest in search for Lu Yi Ye. At first, the exploration proved to be difficult but not particularly dangerous. Their cultivators always managed to exit the forest before they succumbed to the poison.
However, things took a turn for the worse on the third day. First, they had lost an entire squad of over twenty cultivators. By the time someone had found their remains, they had already rotted into skeletons.
The next day, another squad had vanished without a trace. Since then, they kept losing people to the forest no matter what precautions they took. It was as if this forbidden area was a sleeping giant, and their presence had awoken it from its slumber. Now, it was killing them continuously to appease its own rage.
No one knew how their allies had died. Looking at the info they had gathered before things went to shit, the locations they went to should not have resulted in total annihilation even if the cultivators in question were complete idiots. Moreover, they had never gone deeper than a few kilometers.
In any case, their casualties had hiked to previously unthinkable levels due to Lu Yi Ye. Not only that, they were now faced with a difficult choice.
It had been half a month since they gathered outside the Myriad Poison Forest, and their cultivation progress was suffering because of this. That they were all Core Circle cultivators only made things worse. They were all people who were expected to have a bright future, but it was impossible to make any progress so long as they remained at the Myriad Poison Forest. They were effectively stunting their growth for one Lu Yi Ye.
On the other hand, few people could bear leaving without confirming Lu Yi Ye’s death. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the Grand Sky Coalition had been harassing them this whole time. While the Grand Sky Coalition was unable to amass enough numbers to pose a threat, they kept ambushing the comrades who were coming over to join them. Despite their best attempts to mitigate this, they were still losing people every day.
The Thousand Demon Ridge cultivators could not understand why this was happening. The situation should have been overwhelmingly in their advantage. It should’ve ended with Lu Yi Ye being lured to the Myriad Poison Forest and killed with little resistance. So how did it turn out like this?
That was when they received even worse news. Ju Jia, the body-tempering cultivator who should’ve been trapped in the Myriad Poison Forest just like Lu Yi Ye, had been sighted in the Cloud River Battlefield!
They felt like they were going insane…
It’s a complete mystery to them as to what has been happening to the cultivators who enter and never return. Yet, no one has taken notice that when the remains are located there’s not a single storage bag to be found?
Yes! I caught up! How’s it going guys?