Chapter 33

When the dark clouds covered the last trace of moonlight, the bamboo forest was almost nothing but shadows. It was the perfect time to infiltrate.

Xie Yu straightened up. She had pushed her control over her body to the extreme, to the point where she could keep her balance with only one foot lightly touching a thin, slender leaf.

After finding her landing point, she exerted force through the tip of her foot and leaped down from above the sea of bamboo. When she landed, there was not the slightest sound, and she did not attract even a bit of attention from the disciples over there.

Of course, even if they had heard something and looked over, they would only have seen a dark shadow flash past in an instant.

Just now, while she had been above them, she had already spread her divine sense outward with herself as the center. Not only could Xie Yu now control the movements of everyone in this area, she could also use her higher-level divine sense to block the probing of many cultivators whose cultivation was beneath hers, just like during the battle against Qiu Yan and the others in the Ruoxu Illusion Realm that day.

However, after her own conversion and cultivation, as well as Immortal Lord Nandou’s instruction, she could now ensure that when casting spells over such a wide area, she would not leak any demonic energy.

Xie Yu recalled the Shadowless Steps Immortal Lord Nandou had taught her that day. She concentrated spiritual power into the muscles of her calves. At this moment, she had to relax her body, lock onto her target, and rely entirely on muscle memory to step through that formation.

In that instant, the passage of time Xie Yu herself perceived was vastly different from the ​Read on BaiLianTales​flow of time in the outside world. This was precisely why, in others’ eyes, the Shadowless Steps looked like teleportation.

Within that time difference, she quickly drew close to the disciple farthest from the rest.

Under the cover of night, Xie Yu appeared behind that person like a ghost and struck his undefended spine at the back of his neck with her palm.

The disciple had no time to react at all. With only a muffled groan, he went limp and collapsed. His body made quite a bit of noise when it hit the ground.

But the other disciples did not take it seriously at all. They thought he had merely fallen asleep and did not even glance in that direction.

Xie Yu repeated the method, taking them down one by one. Before long, she had knocked out several people on the outer perimeter. It was not until one disciple let out a brief cry that Xie Yu cut short that the drowsy disciples finally sensed something was wrong.

They tried to probe with their divine sense, but unexpectedly, all they perceived was darkness. They could only see the figure of the other person lying on the ground. Muttering, they approached this side, wanting to see what had happened.

“Why did they all fall asleep?” one of them said while looking around. Unexpectedly, in the darkness, he suddenly met the gaze of a ferocious rakshasa mask. He was so badly frightened that he collapsed straight to the ground.

Before he could say anything, Xie Yu pressed a dagger against his throat.

Xie Yu held down that person’s shoulder and suppressed him with her aura, transmitting a message to him. “If you don’t want to die, tell them nothing happened here. Have them split up. Don’t let them gather together.”

That disciple was already afraid, and now that he was being threatened, he was even more convinced that the sounds of people dropping one after another earlier were because they had been killed by this person. He trembled and nodded frantically, afraid Xie Yu’s blade might lack eyes and accidentally injure him.

“Don’t come over. These people just drank wine, and now they can’t hold on anymore. They can fall asleep even standing up… Ji Yuran should be coming over soon too. All of you go back and guard your own positions, or else when Ji Yuran sees this, he’ll use it against us and lecture us again.”

Perhaps because Xie Yu’s gaze was even more frightening than the dagger’s bone-piercing chill, that disciple broke through the limits of his fear. He actually spoke very normally, without the slightest sign of being held hostage, timid, or trembling.

Those people had not wanted to move in the first place. Hearing this, they indeed felt there was nothing interesting to see and went back to their own posts, bored and listless.

At the same time, just as that disciple let out a breath of relief, Xie Yu struck him with a knife-hand blow and instantly made his eyes roll back as he fainted.

Having learned from experience, Xie Yu kindly placed him quietly back on the ground. After all, he had been far too afraid. She was helping him find release.

“Do you feel like there are fewer and fewer people?” At last, someone sensed the eerie wind and the faint black shadow that appeared and disappeared, to the point that he almost thought something was wrong with his eyes. Feeling that something was off, he asked in panic.

The positions where the disciples were stationed were not together, but scattered throughout the bamboo forest. At a time like this, not only could they not clearly see whether the others were there, even communicating was somewhat difficult. He did not know how many people could hear his voice.

“It… it does feel that way.”

Another person stammered in reply, his voice also carrying a bit of fear. Not only did he feel there were fewer and fewer people, he even faintly felt that the cold wind had just brushed past the back of his ear.

As if sensing something, he turned his head. Similarly, he fainted from extreme terror at that strange rakshasa mask.

Xie Yu withdrew her hand, which was awkwardly paused in midair. She had not even touched his spine before watching him lose consciousness. She could not help wondering if he had been frightened unconscious by this ghost mask.

The person across from him clearly did not know that his teammate had already met misfortune. Instead, he treated him as a lifeline and kept shouting, “Wait for me!” Then he opened his sea of consciousness to bolster his courage and cautiously felt his way over.

The result, of course, was that he delivered himself right to Xie Yu’s door and was so frightened that his whole body jolted as he screamed.

Xie Yu was not anxious at all. The corner of her mouth curved up, and with an attitude almost bailiantales.comlike watching him perform, she waited until the disciple finished letting out that pig-slaughtering shriek. Only then did she give a cold snort. “See? Is anyone paying attention to you?”

“Wh-wh-wh… where are they?!” The disciple, grabbed by the back of his fated collar, had completely forgotten how to run. He looked tearfully at the rakshasa before him.

That was right. He was already the last person in this ten-man guard squad. Only because of this had Xie Yu rarely refrained from greeting him with a knife-hand chop the moment she came up. Instead, she tugged him by the collar and pushed him forward. “Go bring some reinforcements. This gate of yours was far too easy to break through.”

Watching the disciple’s scrambling, crawling figure, Xie Yu only found it boring. These disciples were all as easy to cut as cabbages. One-on-one, the gap in strength was simply too large. Who knew they would be this weak? She had even wasted time choosing such a good timing and location to lie in ambush and observe them.

Next time, if she wanted practice, she should openly come out and fight them in a group battle…

Just then, the divine sense she had spread out suddenly detected movement. Xie Yu lifted her eyes toward Buzhou Mountain. Why had that person come so quickly?

That person was alone and was not any reinforcement. It was Ji Yuran, who had no idea what was happening—the captain of this ten-man squad.

After Xie Yu had slapped Ji Yuran in anger that day in the Ruoxu Illusion Realm, she had thought he would retaliate against her. Who would have known that from then on, she would never see Ji Yuran again?

He seemed to have gone into seclusion to cultivate, and that seclusion lasted several months. Even during the time Xie Yu was in the limelight at Buzhou Mountain, she had never seen him.

Now, for some reason, Ji Yuran had come to guard the mountain gate. As the semi-immortal being enshrined by Buzhou Mountain, he should not have fallen to this point. Xie Yu casually guessed that he had probably emerged from seclusion with a qualitative leap in strength and was preparing to block her path and repay the grudge from before.

At this moment, there was no longer the cover of dark clouds obscuring the moon. Xie Yu also stopped hiding. Holding her sword, she stood in the bleak wind and looked straight toward Ji Yuran.

Calmly facing Ji Yuran like this would indeed have been somewhat difficult before she awakened. Back then, Xie Yu’s feelings toward him had been very complicated. On one hand, she hated his deception and betrayal to the bone. On the other, in front of him, she would often easily expose the timid, love-starved weakness in her heart.

But after merging with that broken soul fragment, that little bit of melodrama had long since scattered with the wind. What remained was only the vengeful certainty that, after settling the accounts clearly, she would make him repay everything.

Love-starved? After all, the affection of a scumbag would only make one feel disgusted.

Moreover, Ji Yuran had once been regarded by others as Senior Sister’s childhood sweetheart, a match made in heaven.

Thinking of the discussions Buzhou Mountain disciples usually had about the two of them, Xie Yu’s relaxed fingers abruptly tightened. A current of air swept up around her. The bamboo leaves drifting through the air suddenly froze in midair at that instant and gathered around her as the center.

Ji Yuran walked closer and discovered that something was wrong. Not a single disciple was guarding [bailiantales.com]his own post. He grew alert and was just about to find the source when his gaze met Xie Yu’s, who stood openly opposite him.

Almost in that instant, all the blood in his body boiled. An exceedingly clear thought surfaced in his mind.

The person here was Xie Yu!

Ji Yuran did not know how to describe his current mood, but his heart had never beaten this fast before. It was as if a treasured thing he had lost had reappeared before him. He even thought that if this person really was Xie Yu, he was willing to forgive all the ugly things she had done and start over with her.

At this exact moment, far away on Wuwang Island, Gong Dongling heard the system suddenly report:

【The plot is currently correcting itself. Corrected plot: After Xie Yu has been missing for many days, Ji Yuran reunites with her. The two can no longer control the feelings in their hearts, and in this instant, they realize they like each other.】

“What? Correcting what?!” Gong Dongling stood in her room, dumbfounded, and cried out in shock.

Before the system could repeat itself, she frantically searched through her mind for this part of the plot and remembered that it really did exist!

After Xie Yu blackened, she was forced into the Demon Realm and from then on became the target of the entire righteous path’s pursuit. Ji Yuran, under Buzhou Mountain’s ​unauthorized copy​orders, also participated in the operation to capture Xie Yu and bring her back to justice. But in truth, what he harbored was the desire to meet her again.

When fate finally allowed the male and female leads to reunite, all the conflicts between them from before their long separation dissolved in that moment, and they finally understood their own feelings.

But if readers thought this was the beginning of a sweet romance for the two of them, they would be wrong. After all, the author…

No, that was not the point. The point was, why would the plot correct itself to this scene?! Gong Dongling gnashed her teeth. She had guessed before that the two of them might redevelop their fate while she was absent, but she had not expected things to fast-forward eight hundred times straight to mutual confession!

That was right. All of Ji Yuran’s psychological and physical reactions were nothing more than the plot correcting itself, manipulating this character into changing his own setting.

But on the other side, Xie Yu seemed to have walked onto the wrong set. Her eyes were especially dark, and the long tails of her eyes were red. She looked as if she had just been fished out of an ice cave. At that instant, every bamboo leaf swirling around her pointed its sharp tip toward Ji Yuran, like ten thousand arrows ready to fire.

Author’s Note:
A-Yu: It’s over. Now I really can’t explain this clearly. When I get back, I’ll have to kneel on a washboard.