Chapter 346: Not a Hero
Zechuan’s bright smile immediately fell, replaced by a look of tragic disappointment. He looked at the deadly flower in his hand, his lower lip actually jutting out in a subtle, pathetic pout.
"But it is pretty," Zechuan mumbled sadly, dropping the Death-Bloom into the fire pit, where it instantly exploded in a plume of toxic purple smoke that Ji’an had to hastily dispel with a wave of her spatula. "I just wanted to give you a gift. The maidens in the Azure Crane pavilion said that giving flowers was a sign of deep camaraderie."
Ji’an rubbed the bridge of her nose, a long, exasperated sigh escaping her lips.
She looked at him. The drooping shoulders, the messy raven hair, the unyielding desire to just make her happy.
Whatever he was, a clone, twin, or soul fragment, he was incredibly, dangerously endearing. The frustration and anxiety she had been harboring entirely melted away, replaced by that familiar, reluctant, deep affection.
"You’re an idiot, Shen Zechuan," Ji’an chuckled softly, reaching across the fire to lightly flick his forehead. "But I appreciate the sentiment. Next time, just find me a shiny rock. Rocks don’t melt my boots."
Zechuan’s face instantly brightened, the tragic pout vanishing. "A shiny rock! I can do that! I am excellent at finding rocks!"
Ji’an smiled, shaking her head as she began to clean up the cookware. The distraction had worked perfectly. Her mind was grounded back in the present, focused on the immediate, ridiculous reality of babysitting the server’s most powerful airhead.
But as the campfire died down and the pearlescent mist grew thicker, her thoughts inevitably drifted away from the Lin family drama, pulled by an entirely different, incredibly heavy, gravitational force.
’Where is he?’ Ji’an wondered, staring into the dark mist, wrapping her arms around her knees.
Xie Wangchen.
They had promised to find each other. He had sworn to anchor their coordinates. But it had been more than forty-eight hours, and there had been no sign of the silver-haired immortal.
A sudden, unfamiliar pang of sharp anxiety twisted in her chest.
’Is he okay?’ Ji’an bit her lip. ’Of course he’s okay. He’s the Ice Demon. He has the highest merit score in the sect. Nobody can touch him.’
But the rationalization didn’t soothe her. She didn’t care about his power level. She cared about him, thought about his confession on the balcony, his proposal in the array room, and the devastatingly vulnerable look in his ruby eyes when he thought the other women were taking her away from him.
He was incredibly strong, but emotionally, he was walking on a razor’s edge. If he was alone in this dimension, separated from her, surrounded by hostile forces... how was he reacting? Was he searching for her? Was he panicking?
"Be safe, Little Puddle," Ji’an whispered softly to the mist, pulling her gray cloak tighter over her red robes. "Don’t do anything stupid."
***
Somewhere on the absolute opposite side of the Illusory Shattered Realm, in the center of the brutally unforgiving Glacial Tundra biome, Xie Wangchen was currently doing something stupid.
He was being nice.
The Glacial Tundra was a wasteland of jagged, towering ice spikes, howling blizzards, and temperatures that froze the spiritual energy right out of a cultivator’s meridians. It was a hostile, lethal environment designed to cull the weak.
But to the Sovereign of the Eternal Cloud Peak, it was essentially a comfortable living room.
Xie Wangchen strode through the blinding blizzard, his pristine white robes untouched by the snow, his cascading silver hair blending perfectly into the whiteout conditions. His ruby-red eyes pierced the storm, scanning the horizon with a frantic, obsessive, deeply agitated intensity.
He was in an exceptionally foul mood.
His spatial anchor had failed.
The realm’s arrays had forcefully severed his connection to Ji’an during the drop, depositing him in the Tundra and his Chef somewhere in the woods.
He had spent the last twenty hours carving a path of devastation through the ice, ignoring the loot drops, the Sovereign Tokens, and the illusionary beasts. He was marching relentlessly toward the center of the map, driven by one obsessive directive: Find and protect Ji’an. Erase anyone who looks at Ji’an.
However, his quest for a romantic reunion had been irritatingly compromised.
"S-Sovereign Xie! Please, wait for us!"
The delicate, shivering, teeth-chattering voice echoed from behind him over the howling wind.
Wangchen stopped walking. He closed his eyes, taking a slow, deep breath of the freezing air, his jaw clenching so tightly a muscle ticked in his cheek.
He slowly turned around.
Trailing thirty paces behind him, huddled together for warmth, looking absolutely miserable and entirely out of their element, was a group of twelve female disciples from the Azure Lotus Pavilion.
They were the veiled, ethereal maidens from the allied sect. They had spawned in the Tundra, unequipped for the cold, and were rapidly succumbing to hypothermia. They would have been eliminated by the environment hours ago, forced to use their escape talismans...
If they hadn’t stumbled upon the Ice Demon.
Because Wangchen possessed the Flawless Ice Root, his mere presence created a stabilized zone of atmospheric control. The immediate ten-yard radius around him was perfectly calm, devoid of the biting wind, acting as a moving, thermal sanctuary in the middle of the blizzard.
The maidens, realizing their salvation, had immediately latched onto him like freezing barnacles to a ship.
"Sovereign Xie," the lead maiden, a beautiful girl named Fairy Xue, who had apparently recovered from her encounter with Ji’an in the woods and teleported to the Tundra, stepped forward, wrapping her arms around her shivering frame. She looked up at him through her frost-covered veil with adoring, deeply romantic eyes. "Your... your mastery over the ice is truly peerless. We would have perished without your benevolent protection. You are a true hero of the orthodox path!"
Wangchen stared at her.
Internally, the territorial monster that ruled his soul was screaming.
’I am not a hero, not a gentleman; I never was!’
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