Volume 1, Chapter 60 – Instruction

The illusory realm shared the same day and night as outside. At first light, Bai Xiang woke from a light sleep, feeling a bit foggy in the head.

But her ability to reset was strong. She’d slipped into a short stretch of deep sleep in the middle; after a shake of her head and a wash with dew, she was back to normal and began rechecking her cultivation progress.

As for the wrist wound, it had scabbed over and healed before she slept. She’d confirmed it before lying down; in a strange wilderness like this, she had no idea what the scent of blood might draw.

Her cultivation progress was the same as before—just as it had been when she checked before sleeping, with almost no change.

Still stuck at “a bit over twenty-five percent, but still a ways off from thirty.”

Which meant Bai Xiang’s experiment had failed.

She’d taken the first pill around 7 p.m.; progress went from just over ten percent to just over twenty.

Around 2 a.m., in the fight with Lü Ran, she took a second pill to trigger potential and refill losses; after digesting it, progress went from twenty to twenty-five percent.

For the experiment, she took a third pill a little after 3 a.m.; at best that only pushed the progress up to twenty-seven percent.

What’s more, when she went to take another pill, a sudden feeling rose—her body seemed to reject the idea.

Short-term tolerance?

She shook her head inwardly, but felt no real dissatisfaction.

【Nurture the Spirit Pacifying Tablets】 were, after all, the best restorative training supplement available in the southern regions. Everything from storage method to dosing cycle had surely been established by proper studies.

If it says one per day, it’s one per day. Taking extra might top up temporary losses, but in the end you lose out—disrupting the dosing cycle and hurting subsequent cultivation progress.

Take Bai Xiang now, for example: even if she took a fourth pill today, she’d at most push to a bit over twenty-eight percent.

Given that even proper dosing builds tolerance, the progress would be about the same—only now it cost twice the medicine.

The more frequently you dose, the more this efficiency gap widens.

But Bai Xiang didn’t think she’d truly lost out.

In the fight with Lü Ran, without that extra pill, her final burst wouldn’t have been so fierce. She might well have been just that hair slower, giving Lü Ran time to react and turn his head aside.

So with medicine—take it when you need it.

Never mind “value”—so long as I live, it has value to me. If I die, no matter how much is left, it’s worthless!

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“And you.”

Lifting the wooden sword for a look, Bai Xiang ran her hand over the blade with a sigh.

If this thing could really keep growing and keep pace with her, she wouldn’t mind paying even more to raise it.

But as things stood, that road was a long one. Even after taking in more of her “medicated blood,” it had only ticked up a sliver.

Which said one thing: its ceiling wasn’t decided by how much it could grow on its own, but by how much Bai Xiang herself could grow—whether she could condense a more refined qi to bless it.

“In the end, it’s still an external tool.”

“Can’t put too much of my mind into it.”

She pulled two packs of compressed biscuits from her belt pouch, ate them with dew, filled her stomach, and went to find Huang Qian, who was bracing his war sword and keeping watch a little behind and to the side.

“Commandant Huang,” she came straight to the point. “I’d like to ask your advice on close combat.”

“Mm?” Huang Qian blinked, not sure why she’d suddenly brought this up.

“Here’s the thing,” Bai Xiang said frankly. “From the Demon Pool at No. 1 High to Lü Ran—twice now—I’ve quickly broken free of demonic techniques, so I suspect I have something special in terms of mental will.”

“Not bad,” Huang Qian nodded, thinking everyone probably suspected the same.

“But I can’t always face enemies like that,” Bai Xiang went on. “There will definitely be times I have to fight head-on. If I keep those two fights as my mental baseline, I’ll probably die under some demonfolk’s sword sooner rather than later.”

“That’s a great way to think!” Huang Qian was genuinely surprised; he hadn’t expected a seventeen-year-old sword-track student to think that far ahead!

Shouldn’t a normal kid who cut down a three-tribulation great demon be riding the high for ages?

Surprised or not, he quickly steadied himself, rubbed his chin, and studied Bai Xiang, asking for details of her exchanges in combat.

“When you evade, do you tend to go to ground or stay on your feet?”

“When you shed force, do you habitually dump it left or right?”

“When you burst, do you go all-out? Do you hold anything in reserve?”

He drilled down into details, and Bai Xiang answered every one earnestly.

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“I’ve got a rough sense of your style,” Huang Qian frowned. “Your shedding direction isn’t fixed—that’s very good. It keeps opponents from reading your habits. But during your burst you can actually hold back a sliver, to prepare for emergencies.”

“What if holding that sliver gets me killed?” Bai Xiang didn’t get it.

To her, close combat was like this: unless the gap was so big you couldn’t fight at all, a split-second edge in output decided life and death.

So what if Lü Ran was a proper three-tribulation?

Never mind three—say four or five… even if it were Bai Xiang herself, blessed by fate with a spirit-soul ability, then with the right opportunity learning a new method and breaking into higher realms later… so what?

If you get careless, don’t give it your all, expose a weakness, and someone splits your skull with one stroke—you’re still dead!

“When I say emergency, I mean something far more dangerous than what you faced last night,” Huang Qian said with a grin. “Picture this: if there had been another dozen demonfolk with Lü Ran, each at first or second body tribulation, what good would it do to burn yourself down just to kill Lü Ran?”

“You might say you’re only a sword-track student, and at least you traded for a great demon. But that’s not how the ledger is kept.” He shook his head and tapped his chest. “The Chilong Army can play it that way because we’re soldiers!”

“But you—if you can already stand against Lü Ran at this stage, that says you are Great Yu’s future! Your prospects are far broader than ours! How can you trade your life for a mere three-tribulation ‘small fry’?”

“Not worth it!”

“Bleeding loss!”

Bai Xiang was moved; she could hear that Huang Qian meant every word.

“Come on, come on—let’s have a bout.”

Grinning, Huang Qian raised his broad-bladed war sword, still “lecturing” as he did. “Even if you hadn’t asked, I’d tell you this… Next time you hit a situation that dangerous, why are you still fighting? Run first!”

“There’s still me and my lot behind you! Afraid we can’t catch up? If you can break free of her demonic control, you can sure as hell run south, can’t you?”

Bai Xiang raised her wooden sword in step, but said, “If I withdraw, more people to the north might die.”

“…” Now Huang Qian couldn’t smile.

She’d saved his men by fighting—that wasn’t something he could fault her for.

You gifted kids—why set the bar so high on yourselves?

It vexed him, but he didn’t hold back his hand. He and Bai Xiang started with probing exchanges to warm up, then he ramped up the offensive hard.

In his hands, the broad-bladed war sword opened and closed like a mountain-splitting axe. Bai Xiang felt the force coming through the blade grow with each clash, and it got harder and harder to answer.

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Huang Qian, for his part, only grew more at ease; toward the end, he even had time to talk, correcting her power application and imparting habits from sword techniques he’d distilled.

“Use structured sword moves more.”

“Are sword moves just rote? If a ‘routine’ were useless, why would it be codified?”

“You rely too much on lunging. Lü Ran was careless… If she’d transformed to fight you and her head were two meters higher than in human form, she’d absolutely have reacted to your leap.”

The teaching bout lasted under ten minutes, but Bai Xiang gained a lot.

She confirmed it: against a well-rounded Condensing-the-Aspect fighter like Huang Qian, she truly held no advantage.

There was always a thin film of blood-qi sheathing the broad blade; even the formless twist of her force got nothing out of clashing with it.

Cultivation, experience, weaponry… the gap was across the board. No cheat could bridge it.

When they finished, she thanked Huang Qian with real gravity. He waved it off. “Nothing to it.”

What she didn’t know was that he was the more shaken party.

Bai Xiang had said that in close combat, inches decide life and death. On that point, Huang Qian agreed completely. There are plenty in this world who can decide life and death in an instant; Huang Qian himself had done it many times.

But ask them if they’re willing to do it again? Most would say no.

Too risky.

No one can guarantee they’ll outperform their opponent every single time. So in mindset— even among the strong—many are “unafraid of battle, but not the ones to seek it.”

I don’t fear life-and-death bouts, but I won’t seek them out.

But this girl?

The feeling Bai Xiang gave Huang Qian was that she savored the process.

Every detail had to be reviewed; every shortcoming had to be understood and corrected.

She felt no boredom, and showed no fear of the kill-or-be-killed.

A sword fanatic?

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Even a bit deranged, demon-obsessed.

That mindset was scarier than her talent.

Looking at Bai Xiang, Huang Qian couldn’t help feeling he hadn’t been devout enough to the sword.

“I’ve one more thing to ask, Commandant.”

After thanking Huang Qian, Bai Xiang asked the next question: why the reinforcements still hadn’t arrived.

They were resting in an area near the tunnel mouth; any movement there would be audible.

But even now there was no sound at all, and Bai Xiang suspected something had gone wrong.

“This…” Huang Qian hesitated, then said, “I’ll tell you, but don’t tell the others… When I sent men out after we came back last night, they found the road at the end was blocked.”

“Blocked?”

“Yes,” Huang Qian nodded.

“A hundred meters in and it’s sealed. We dug three more and still saw no way through.”

“I’ve temporarily pulled everyone back from inside and set camp a bit further out.”

So for now there were no reinforcements, and no heavy firepower.

Bai Xiang frowned.

A mechanism?

Chai Xuan’s doing? Or the Demon-Immortal Dao?

Rumble…

Just then, a tremor came from beneath their feet.

Like the earth itself shaking—the soil between them split open with a crack, and a black shadow burst out, lunging straight at Bai Xiang.