"I'm coming to carry you away now!" The young girl raised both hands, her gaze still fixed on Wei Yuan's eyes.
"After you, Senior!"
"Once you force me to invoke my final condition, if you want to come with me then, you'll have to beg me."
"I know."
The young girl in Moon Lake knitted her brows. The wound on her face had ceased bleeding, lending her an uncanny yet strangely sweet and adorable air.
She frowned in silence, pondering something, before gingerly resting a single hand upon Wei Yuan. Nothing happened.
Wei Yuan looked down at that pale little hand, thinking as well. Then he said, "I have quite a few methods at my disposal, Junior that I am, and I'm still trying to decide which one to use. Please bear with me a moment, Senior..."
"No matter. Think all you like. I have plenty of patience," the young girl said with world-weary gravity.
Wei Yuan suddenly smiled. "Most of my other methods were probably anticipated in Senior's calculations, save for two. Well, let us go with this one. After all, I obtained this by my own abilities."
With a soft roar, a pale azure flame suddenly ignited atop the girl's small hand. Its hue was impure and its heat was far from fierce, yet it was genuine fire of karmic luck—and it burned ceaselessly!
The young girl cried out in alarm and whipped her hand back like lightning, shaking it vigorously several times before finally dislodging the azure flame bit by bit. Even when the flame tumbled to the ground, it refused to die out, instead beginning to burn Moon Lake itself until the karmic luck was entirely consumed.
The young girl's body had turned slightly translucent, noticeably weakened. That burst of azure fire had not looked particularly large, yet fully over a hundred thousand strands of human karmic luck had fueled it, plunging her into a weakened state in a single stroke.
Yet that was not the most terrifying part. The terrifying part was that, for a fleeting instant, she had glimpsed an azure ocean! An ocean vast enough to drown even a Heavenly Shaman.
Startled and enraged, she glared at Wei Yuan. "How... how do you possess so much karmic luck?! How is this possible? Your Qingming holds a mere thirty million souls, yet the karmic luck upon your person exceeds that of all Southern Qi!"
Wei Yuan smiled easily. "Care to guess?"
The young girl fumed, gnashing her teeth. "Then do not blame this seat for showing no mercy and resorting to my ultimate measure! Do you see that sword within the moon? That is one of the swords from your teacher's Dao Foundation, traded to me through a divine ability. I now intend to cast it away. If you follow me of your own accord, I will grant you a chance: I'll banish you to one of the places where it might end up so you can search for it."
Wei Yuan thought for a moment and asked, "Senior won't kill me anymore?"
The young girl snapped pettishly, "To stoop to killing a junior—this seat cannot afford to lose that kind of face!"
To her surprise, Wei Yuan replied, "Don't be shy, Senior. If you wish to kill me, go right ahead and strike."
"I said, I cannot afford to lose face."
Wei Yuan said, "It doesn't matter. No one is watching anyway, so no face will be lost. Just use my master's sword. It's no trouble at all—a single chop and I'm dead. Come on!"
The young girl flew into a rage. "I do not kill juniors! Do you not understand human speech? Is my pronunciation not standard enough for you?"
Wei Yuan opened his large eyes wide and asked with utter sincerity, "But all it takes is one slash! You already have the sword—just lift your hand!"
The round moon in the sky quietly rotated, concealing the sword from view.
Seeing this, Wei Yuan drew a dagger from his robes, placed it on the ground before him, and pointed.
The young girl flared with indignation. "Stop throwing things at me! What is wrong with you juniors? Why is each of you more deaf to human words than the last?"
She snatched up the dagger and hurled it far into the darkness.
Wei Yuan reached into his robes once more.
The young girl shrieked, "Stop! Don't you dare throw anything else!"
Sure enough, Wei Yuan stayed his hand and offered a gentle smile. "It seems Senior truly does not kill juniors. In that case, you wouldn't deceive me either, would you?"
"Naturally! I would never lie to a junior," the young girl said through gritted teeth.
Wei Yuan nodded. "Good. The place Senior sends me to—can I truly find that sword there?"
The young girl started to speak, but meeting Wei Yuan's bright eyes, she suddenly shivered. She remembered that every word and deed at this moment carried profound karma. What was worse, Wei Yuan bore a torrential tide of karmic luck, more than enough to force karmic retributions to cash out instantly. She truly could not afford to tell a casual lie.
Her expression turned grim, yet she said, "The destination will be one among several possible realms. As for which one, I do not know, nor will anyone else."
Having fought the Shamans for so long, Wei Yuan understood great curses far better than the average cultivator. He said, "So it is exile. That makes sense. I have no more questions; we may depart."
Seeing Wei Yuan actually rise to his feet on his own, the young girl's expression turned frosty instead. She let out a heavy huff. "Suddenly, I don't feel like taking you with me!"
Wei Yuan froze, then recalled her earlier words. He promptly bowed deeply until his head nearly touched the ground. "Sister Huiye, I was wrong! Please take me with you, Sister! Sister is the absolute best!"
The young girl clamped her hands over her mouth, struck dumb with shock. She pointed at Wei Yuan. "H-How could you say such things out loud?! Where is your shame?!"
Wei Yuan replied, "In the presence of someone truly beautiful, I never have any shame."
"Someone beautiful..." The young girl blinked blankly, then a smile bloomed across her face. "Do you really think so?
"Well then, I've changed my mind. I'll do my best to send you somewhere relatively hospitable, though I can't guarantee you'll find that sword. Also, once you cross over, you won't be able to access your mindscape world. You will have to rely entirely on your physical body, your origin soul, and your divine sense. Arriving will be the most perilous moment, but once you adapt, it remains possible to survive."
Wei Yuan praised, "Sister Huiye truly has a heart as kind as she is lovely. You never wished to kill me at all."
A trace of awkwardness crossed the young girl's face. Pointing a finger toward Wei Yuan, his body began to turn translucent, gradually detaching from this realm. Yet the process proved unexpectedly slow and immensely draining; Moon Lake shrank back rapidly.
Seeing this, the young girl actually let out a quiet sigh of relief, muttering under her breath in a tone only she could hear, "Scared the life out of me! If I had truly struck just now, the karmic backlash would probably have dropped my cultivation rank on the spot. Still, how could one person possess so much karmic luck?"
While lost in thought, she abruptly saw a surge of azure qi erupt from Wei Yuan's not-yet-vanished form, coalescing into a small black bird. The creature was exceedingly bizarre, bearing three eyes. Flapping its wings, it actually flew straight onto the round moon, and then...
It laid an egg.
The bird flew back into Wei Yuan's body. Startled and furious, Huiye cried, "I spared your life, and you dare make a fool of me?!"
Wei Yuan's body had nearly dissipated completely, leaving him only time to gasp, "Junior didn't mean to! It has a mind of its own, honest..."
Huiye ground her teeth in fury, thinking that the mortal storybooks were right after all: not a single male of the human race was any good, every one of them a compulsive liar who wove tales without batting an eye. This Wei Yuan could not even be bothered to craft a convincing lie; his excuses were utterly half-hearted.
The moment he vanished, Wei Yuan sensed the world shifting around him. Vast swaths of his azure human karmic luck began to burn away, which came as an unexpected blessing. The expenditure of karmic luck meant that karmic outcomes were being altered—the literal meaning of turning disaster into good fortune.
Calculating the rate of karmic luck depletion, Wei Yuan felt thoroughly reassured. With so immense a drain of karmic luck, even the machinations of a Heavenly Shaman would be mostly neutralized. His predetermined fate had been rewritten; the rest now depended on his own efforts.
A blinding blaze of incandescence flashed before his eyes, searing beyond measure. Wei Yuan reflexively squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, an entirely new world greeted his sight.
Wei Yuan surveyed his surroundings with vigilant caution.
Before him stretched a barren gravel wasteland. Three suns hung in the sky, and far in the distance, a colossal celestial body occupied nearly half the celestial dome.
Blistering sunlight beat down on the shelterless earth, hot enough to fry an egg. In mere moments, Wei Yuan was drenched in sweat. He wiped his brow, then paused in surprise. He could sweat?
He scanned himself once more. Indeed, his physical Dharma body had been brought along. That being the case, Wei Yuan dared not be careless. With a single thought, he instantly reabsorbed all his sweat and insulated himself against the scorching heat outside.
As far as the eye could see lay desolate emptiness—not a speck of green, not a single drop of water. Beneath the silent, sweltering heat, lethality lurked in every direction. Wei Yuan felt a nagging sense that he had seen this place before, or at least heard of it.
He searched his memories, only to discover vast patches of unexpected blankness. Many things he assumed he had committed to memory were now reduced to mere book titles, their contents utterly devoid of text.
Wei Yuan took fright and hurriedly examined his memory in detail before breathing a sigh of relief. Those blank books were all works cataloged by the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World that he had not yet had the time to read himself. Originally there had been no rush to read them, as he could consult them at a moment's notice whenever needed; he had only required the titles to know they existed. But now that the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World was sealed, only the titles remained.
As for the books Wei Yuan had personally read, he still remembered eight or nine-tenths of their contents.
Sifting through his memories, Wei Yuan finally realized why the place looked familiar: Tianyu had spoken of it more than once, specifically recounting the awe of laying eyes on that colossal celestial body for the first time.
This was the Great Wilderness Realm.
A strange feeling welled up in Wei Yuan's chest. Having just visited the Nether Cold Realm, he had now arrived in the Great Wilderness Realm. It seemed he truly shared an affinity with the Shamans; he had barged straight into the home turf of the Power Shamans.
Wei Yuan looked down at himself, wondering whether his slender frame could hold its own against those hairy-limbed Power Shamans.
Since he was here, he might as well make the best of it. Wei Yuan put all idle worries out of his mind, not fretting overly much about the Smoke and Fire of the Mortal World or Qingming.
Yet the truth behind this peace of mind was somewhat disheartening: both places seemed to function quite well whether Wei Yuan was there or not.
Wei Yuan examined his karmic luck once more and discovered that all of it had crossed over with him. As it turned out, karmic luck did not reside within the mindscape world; it clung to the soul. However, when he took stock of the amount, something seemed off.
Judging by the rate of consumption during the exile, Wei Yuan had estimated that around ten million strands of human karmic luck would be spent to offset the Heavenly Shaman's measures. Yet now, only around four million had been consumed—less than half of his initial projection.
Could someone have covertly assisted me? Wei Yuan mused.
That was hardly surprising. When immortals placed their pieces upon the board, tripping up one another was standard practice. This held true not only among humanity, but among other races as well.
Immortals not only tripped up immortals of other races, but also tripped up their own allies, all while guarding against having their own feet kicked out from under them. Thus, immortals were exceedingly busy beings.
Looking around at the utterly alien environment, Wei Yuan frowned. With his mindscape world suppressed, he lacked even a handy tool at his disposal. He needed to find a way to fashion a weapon first.
Just as the thought crossed his mind, a sudden wave of killing intent descended from above!
He dodged to the side. A spear plummeted from the heavens, grazing Wei Yuan's scalp before slamming into the earth, nearly skewering him like candied hawthorn on a stick. His fright swiftly gave way to a sense of familiarity. Looking closer, he realized—wasn't this the very spear, Compassion, that he had just recently forged?
Unharmed and newly armed, Wei Yuan hoisted the spear and set out, beginning his search for that sword.
That was no ordinary blade; it was Zhang Sheng's path to the Dao.
Chapter 866