Chapter 47

Xu Yizhuo lifted her face and asked the woman sitting on the branch, “Fellow Daoist, do you know which direction I should go to leave this place?”

The woman in red lowered her eyes to look at her.

So young. She could not help thinking this.

After cultivators entered the Dao, their growth speed became much slower than mortals, but the girl before her looked far too young even for a cultivator. Had she even reached twenty? Cultivators of this age usually stayed at home or in their sects to cultivate properly. What was wrong with her elders? How could they allow her to come to the Burning Mountain Secret Realm?

Her cultivation was even extremely low. The woman in red began to doubt her own memory a little. Had there ever been Qi Refining cultivators entering the secret realm before?

Xu Yizhuo obediently waited for the woman in red to answer, assuming her silence meant she was thinking.

After a moment, the woman in red said, “Why leave?”

Xu Yizhuo said as a matter of course, “I have to go out and find a token.”

A token.

The woman in red knew very well that these young people who entered the secret realm had all come for these little wooden plaques. Her blood-red nails lightly tapped the two characters “Burning Mountain” on the wooden plaque. “I have a token here.”

Xu Yizhuo nodded with a blank expression. She was not blind. She could see it clearly.

The woman in red asked her, “You don’t want it?”

Xu Yizhuo firmly shook her head and even put her hands behind her back. “Since you found it, it’s yours. I won’t snatch it.”

Xu Yizhuo actually could not quite bear to snatch things from girls… Although saying this seemed a little unfair to boys, if it really came to the point where she had no choice but to snatch one, then Xu Yizhuo could only apologize to the male cultivators in the secret realm.

Afraid that the woman still had doubts, she hurriedly added, “If Fellow Daoist is worried, I’ll leave here right now.”

Xu Yizhuo thought to herself that she really had not come back for the token. She had only accidentally gotten lost.

Watching Xu Yizhuo quickly leave once again, the woman in red’s expression gradually darkened. She clicked her tongue softly, jumped down from the branch, and coldly looked at the wooden plaque in her palm. This token, which made the cultivators who entered the secret realm flock toward it, was like trash in the woman’s eyes. It was not even worth as much as the maple leaves on the ground.

Holding the wooden plaque in her hand, the woman in red closed her fingers. As the strength increased, the wooden plaque let out creaking sounds under the strain. Just as it was about to be crushed directly, the woman suddenly loosened her grip.

The woman in red expressionlessly put the wooden plaque into her sleeve and murmured to herself in a voice only she could hear, “Don’t be impatient. It still has use… If she doesn’t care, that doesn’t mean others won’t come to snatch it.”

The woman took a deep breath, waved her sleeve, and walked in the opposite direction from Xu Yizhuo.

Within the maple forest, a violent wind suddenly rose. The maple leaves on the ground were swept into the air by the wind, like blood-colored butterflies dancing in flight.

Who knew how many cultivators walking through the forest Read on BaiLianTaleshad their eyes blurred by the maple leaves flying past. After everything settled, they discovered that the maple forest before their eyes was no longer the maple forest they had seen before.

And the water mirror monitoring the Burning Mountain Secret Realm had already shifted its view. Aside from the people in the forest, no one knew what change had occurred in the maple forest.

“Did I see wrong?” Xu Yizhuo asked in confusion.

Naturally, no one could tell Xu Yizhuo the answer. In her eyes, the maple forest was full of identical scenery everywhere. Even if she felt the maple tree before her eyes seemed to have suddenly changed into another tree, Xu Yizhuo would only subconsciously think she had remembered wrong.

Xu Yizhuo poked the little snake’s soft body inside her sleeve and said with certainty, “I probably saw wrong.”

The little snake’s tail gently brushed Xu Yizhuo’s fingertip, then rested back on Xu Yizhuo’s arm. Xu Yizhuo did not understand python habits. She only knew that the Rongqing Python was especially quiet. Once it coiled around Xu Yizhuo’s arm, it stayed completely still. Xu Yizhuo often forgot its existence. Occasionally, when she saw that smear of emerald hidden in her sleeve, she would even think it was some accessory she was wearing.

Xu Yizhuo, tired from walking, sat down against another maple tree. The bored human began harassing the sleeping python. Xu Yizhuo pulled the Rongqing Python down from her arm. The little snake did not wake at first. Only after quite a while did it coil itself in Xu Yizhuo’s palm, a pair of golden vertical pupils facing Xu Yizhuo’s eyes.

Generally speaking, the vertical pupils of cold-blooded animals would only make people feel fear, but Xu Yizhuo felt the Rongqing Python’s eyes looked rather dazed.

Xu Yizhuo held the Rongqing Python and said seriously, “Little snake, let me give you a name.”

The Rongqing Python flicked its tongue and hissed. Xu Yizhuo did not care whether it understood her words and simply took it as agreement.

Xu Yizhuo racked her brains. When she suggested naming it, she had completely forgotten that she was terrible at names. After exhausting her mind and still failing to come up with a good name, Xu Yizhuo hesitantly said, “How about I just call you Xiaoqing?”

What a friendly and familiar name!

But although the Rongqing Python’s name contained the character “qing,” it was not actually a green snake. Its scales were a highly saturated emerald color, like clear, translucent jade, glowing with a moist luster.

Xu Yizhuo struggled. “Should I call you Xiaobi instead? But Xiaobi doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as Xiaoqing.”

The Rongqing Python flicked its tongue again, lay down in Xu Yizhuo’s hand, and turned its oval snake head away from Xu Yizhuo, looking as though it did not want to participate in the topic of what name it should have.

Xu Yizhuo made the final decision. “Then it’s Xiaoqing!”

The Rongqing Python rubbed against Xu Yizhuo’s finger, wanting to return to her arm. Xu Yizhuo did not understand what it meant and naturally began the next topic. “Xiaoqing, are you a male snake or a female snake?”

Rongqing Python: “…”

Xu Yizhuo did not expect the Rongqing Python to speak human language. Her hand reached toward the snake’s body and once again lifted it up. To prevent the Rongqing Python from naturally coiling around her arm, she even used her other hand to tug its tail.

The situation took a sharp turn for the worse. Before the Rongqing Python could react, Xu Yizhuo had flipped it over, using her gaze to search for a certain part on its soft belly.

After observing for a while, Xu Yizhuo said uncertainly, “Pythons… Pythons should also be judged by directly looking for that thing… right?”

Xu Yizhuo met the Rongqing Python’s eyes and said seriously, “Xiaoqing, you seem to be a female snake.”

Rongqing Python: “Hiss—”

Although the Rongqing Python had forgotten its entire past under the Fangsheng Lotus Mirror’s effect, a demonic beast of its grade was born with a certain level of intelligence. It could understand human speech and also knew its own most basic information.

It was clearly a male snake!

Xu Yizhuo, who fundamentally did not know how to determine a snake’s sex, firmly decided that Xiaoqing was a little female snake and did not take the Rongqing Python’s frantic hissing to heart at all. The moment she released her hand, the Rongqing Python hid back inside her sleeve, curling up and shutting itself away.

Xu Yizhuo gently rubbed the Rongqing Python’s scales and said softly, “Xiaoqing, there seems to be something wrong with this maple forest…”

No matter how slow she was, after walking for so long, she should have realized that something was wrong with the maple forest.

Xu Yizhuo still had not discovered the illusion formation. She had discovered another puzzling thing. At first glance, a forest seemed to contain nothing but trees, but in reality, there were many other forms of life in a forest.

She had studied biology and knew the richness of biodiversity in forests. But in this maple forest, she had not seen any animals.

There were no insects on the ground, no small animals such as mice in the forest, and not even birds flew overhead.

Even setting aside how this maple forest could exist with such a fragile ecosystem, even if these maple trees had such tenacious vitality that they did not need any animals, before Xu Yizhuo entered this forest, she had seen all kinds of living creatures along the way.

After stepping into the forest, those animals vanished without a trace.

No… not only after entering the maple forest.

Xu Yizhuo frowned and recalled carefully. When she approached the maple forest, at some point, she had stopped seeing any animals around her.

It was as if there were some terrifying existence in the maple forest, causing the lives in the secret realm to keep their distance out of fear.

“Are there demonic beasts in the maple forest?” Xu Yizhuo guessed. However, she had walked all this way without seeing any traces left by animals.

If there were demonic beasts living in this maple forest, it was impossible for them to leave no traces at all.

Clearly, her eyes were full of blood-red maple leaves. Aside from maple trees, there was nothing else at all.

A guess suddenly came to Xu Yizhuo.

What if the thing that made this maple forest frightening was the maple trees here?

Xu Yizhuo immediately stood up and looked around warily. She realized that having been lost in the maple forest for so long was probably not solely because of her poor sense of direction.

With the naked eye, she could only see maple leaves falling. Everything was so normal. But when Xu Yizhuo opened her spiritual vision, the complicated flow of spiritual energy moving through the maple forest immediately made her eyes ache.

It was like a messy ball of tangled threads being shoved right in front of Xu Yizhuo’s eyes.

She reacted at once. It was a formation. Perhaps from the moment she entered the maple forest, she had stepped into a formation. She had walked through the maple forest for so long, and [Read on BaiLianTales]perhaps she had only been circling the same area nonstop!

The formation in the maple forest was actually not more complicated than the formation in Konglong Mountain. But at Konglong Mountain, Old Li had been beside her guiding her, and later, Xu Yizhuo had obtained the complete formation diagram. The impact the two formations had on Xu Yizhuo was entirely different.

Just looking at it already made Xu Yizhuo’s head hurt. If she had to break it too?

With just one glance, Xu Yizhuo knew this formation was not something she could break—at least, she had no means other than breaking it by force.

Xu Yizhuo could not distinguish which of those threads belonged to the formation and which were simply spiritual energy naturally flowing between heaven and earth. She only felt that every strand of spiritual energy was flowing extremely fast. Even though Xu Yizhuo had only a partial understanding of formations, she did not know that this was the sign of the formation being activated.

It was not the formation’s natural circulation state, but rather it had been forcibly pushed to its utmost limit!

Xu Yizhuo threw out the Xuanwu Sword, stepped onto it, and prepared to fly out of the maple forest. However, she had risen less than two meters into the air when suddenly lengthening branches blocked her path. Spiritual power turned into a blade. Xu Yizhuo tried to cut down the branches before her, but her strike hit empty air.

Xu Yizhuo froze.

Fake?

Just as she thought this, a branch swept past her waist. Xu Yizhuo instinctively dodged, but forgot that she was currently riding a sword. One foot slipped off, and she fell toward the ground.

Xu Yizhuo supported herself with spiritual energy and landed steadily on the ground, raising her hand to catch the Xuanwu Sword.

She looked up. The crisscrossing branches that had covered the sky above her [unauthorized copy]had already disappeared. Xu Yizhuo knew she had cut an illusion, while the branch that made her fall off the Xuanwu Sword had been real.

True and false, false and true. This was an illusion formation.

If she wanted to know what was real and what was fake, she only had to take out the Delusion-Breaker Mirror.

But before entering the Burning Mountain Secret Realm, Xu Yizhuo already knew that people would be watching the secret realm through the water mirror. Using it on the Eastern Continent was one thing, but there was no way she could casually take out the Delusion-Breaker Mirror on the Western Continent.

For the same reason, Xu Yizhuo was still hesitating over whether to try cutting the maple trees down directly… With the cultivation she had shown, she was probably not strong enough to cut down the maple trees here.

Before Xu Yizhuo could make a decision, she first heard a familiar voice.

“Why is it you again?”