Chapter 326: Meeting Once Again
They were sucked into the spatial vortex of the Illusory Shattered Realm, a pocket dimension specifically designed by Lin Ji’an to be a shrinking meat-grinder of environmental torture.
Before the teleportation flash had blinded her, Xie Wangchen had gripped her wrist.
His ruby eyes had burned with determination. "I will anchor our coordinates, Brother Ji’an. The arrays cannot separate the Flawless Ice from its core."
It was a bit too arrogant a promise.
And it had been utter garbage.
THWUMP!
Lin Ji’an plummeted out of a tear in the dimensional fabric, falling ten feet through the misty air before landing face-first in a thick, squelching patch of glowing, neon-blue swamp moss.
For three seconds, silence reigned in the eerie, bioluminescent forest.
And then, Ji’an slowly pushed herself up onto her hands and knees.
She spit a mouthful of glowing blue mud onto the ground, wiping her face with the sleeve of her blazing Szechuan Red combat silk.
She looked to her left.
A terrifying, multi-eyed illusory toad blinked at her from a rotting log.
She looked to her right.
A patch of toxic, flesh-eating orchids snapped their petals at her boots.
She looked behind her.
There was no silver-haired prodigy to protect her from the elements.
"I demand a refund on my party-sync!" Ji’an roared at the murky, gray sky, her voice echoing through the twisted, petrified trees of the Whispering Woods biome. "He promised! He literally swore on his Dao! What kind of cheap, discount dimensional server are we running here?! The lobby is broken!"
«Stop shouting, you uncultured ape. You are going to attract the aggro of every beast in a five-mile radius,» the haughty, telepathic voice of the two-tailed Nekomata chimed in.
The glowing silver kitten untucked itself from the collar of her robes, shaking the blue mud off its pristine fur with a look of aristocratic disgust. «Your silver-haired guard dog clearly overestimated his hacking abilities. Now we are alone.»
"We are not alone," Ji’an grumbled, pushing herself to her feet and drawing her Black Iron Spatula. "We are trapped in a shrinking death-zone with three thousand people who want to mount my head on a pike because they think I’m a subterranean assassin. I need to find Wangchen before someone tries to fight me."
But as Ji’an began to trudge through the squelching mud of the Whispering Woods, her frustration morphed into a deep, irritated regret.
She shouldn’t be in this situation.
She should have had all the answers by now.
The night before the tournament, after recovering from Wangchen’s accidental marriage proposal, Ji’an had formulated a flawless, illegal covert-ops plan.
She had intended to sneak out of her quarters at 3:00 AM, bypass the perimeter wards of the central peaks, and ambush the newly returned Senior Apprentice, Shen Zechuan.
She needed to know why the Sect Leader’s supposedly corrupted disciple possessed the exact face of her older brother, Lin Feng.
She had intended to corner him in his pavilion, put a spatula to his throat, and interrogate him until the cosmic lore spilled out.
But her Master, Jiu Zui, possessed the terrifying radar of an exhausted single father.
Just as Ji’an had slipped her leg over the bamboo wall of the Drunken Peak, dressed in all black with her face painted in black, she had felt the paralyzing grip of a hand gripping her ankle and locking her in place.
"Do not even think about it, you feral little rat," Master Jiu Zui’s voice had rumbled from the darkness of his hammock. "If you attempt to commit preemptive treason and assassinate the Sect Leader’s prized apprentice twelve hours before the tournament, I will not just ground you. I will personally spank you with the flat side of my broadsword in front of the entire Outer Sect until you cannot sit down for a fiscal quarter. Get back in bed, spoiled brat!"
Ji’an had been forced to retreat, her interrogation plans entirely thwarted by the threat of humiliating, public corporal punishment.
"Damned old man," Ji’an muttered, swiping her spatula to sever a venomous vine that tried to wrap around her ankle. "If he had just let me commit a minor felony, I wouldn’t be walking blind into this plotline."
She hiked over a massive, rotting tree root, sliding down a steep embankment into a wide, sunken clearing illuminated by the eerie, filtering gray light of the realm.
She stopped dead in her tracks.
The universe, it seemed, was determined to make up for its earlier matchmaking failure with a dose of pure narrative irony.
Standing in the center of the clearing, surrounded by the dissipating, shadowy ashes of three freshly slaughtered Rank 5 Illusionary Panthers, was the very man she had been trying to ambush.
Shen Zechuan.
The Senior Apprentice was standing perfectly still, his back turned to her.
He wore the flowing white and silver robes of his rank, unbothered by the toxic mud of the environment.
His long, raven-black hair cascaded down his back, swaying gently in the stagnant breeze.
He didn’t have a sword drawn.
He hadn’t used a weapon.
The panthers had been... erased.
Absorbed by the terrifying, invisible vacuum of the Void-Devouring Mantra.
Ji’an’s breath hitched.
Her transmigrator instincts immediately screamed at her to retreat.
This was the new major villain.
This was the abyssal clone.
She was currently separated from her glacier, and she was well within the aggro-range of an endgame boss.
’Sneak away,’ her logical brain whispered. ’Use the Wind-Step. Fade into the fog. Find Zhiwei or Wangchen.’
But then, Shen Zechuan slowly turned his head.
He looked over his shoulder.
His dark, bottomless eyes locked onto her small, red-robed figure standing on the embankment.
It was Lin Feng’s face.
The same sharp jawline, the same straight nose, the same aristocratic brow.
But it was devoid of the Vanguard Commander’s rugged, battle-hardened warmth.
It was a face of tragic, pristine, melancholic beauty.
And yet, as his eyes met hers, that same, subtle, incredibly infuriating ghost of a smile touched his lips.
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