Chapter 48: The Crypt

The guards in front of the Meditation Pavilion were in a panic, and A-Yan, holding A-Xi in his arms, was equally panicked.

This was the first time he had so tangibly experienced A-Xi's unfathomable nature. Just as they had managed to evade another group of patrolling guards in the underground palace, A-Xi had suddenly woken up, looked at him for a moment, and then, as if nothing had happened at all, hugged him and giggled.

In an instant, the dim stone corridors around him completely dissolved. The night became brilliantly bright, a full moon hung high before his eyes, and the towering library along with the panicked guards seemed to descend from the sky right in front of him.

A-Yan was filled with shock, thinking how could this be possible... What on earth... is this? What is... A-Xi?

For a moment, he even began to suspect whether the younger sister he held in his arms and regarded as his very life could be a monster.

Just as A-Yan was trembling with fear, his collar was abruptly grabbed, and his feet left the ground. The technique was entirely too familiar. He looked back and, as expected, saw the face of Sister Yun-Chuan.

A-Yan was overjoyed. He opened his mouth to call out to her, but then he remembered "His Reverence the Master of Physiognomy" Cang-Shu, and his voice stuck halfway in his throat. He thought: Is her name really Yun-Chuan? Who on earth is she?

Just as Ye Min-Wei hoisted A-Yan and A-Xi up, the guards finally closed in. Rushing from various parts of the estate, they surrounded the trio tightly and demanded to know who they were.

Ye Min-Wei glanced back to see the disciples of Canglang Sect watching her in shock in the shadows, clearly caught completely off guard by her sudden charge. The round-faced disciple was about to step out, but the elderly Taoist priest held him back.

At this critical juncture, A-Xi waved her arms and legs, looked up, and saw her familiar elder sister. Her eyes lit up happily as she reached out to wrap her arms tightly around Ye Min-Wei's neck.

Whenever A-Xi grew excited, another miraculous transformation of shifting places was bound to take place.

Right under the bright moonlight, the circle of guards suddenly became empty. The ground where Ye Min-Wei, A-Yan, and A-Xi had just been standing was completely bare, save for the pale moonlight, without even a shadow left behind.

The guards whispered among themselves in horror, and the Canglang Sect disciples in the shadows were equally stunned.

Ye Min-Wei felt a wave of dizziness, tightened her grip on the child, and stumbled a few steps. When she closed her eyes and opened them again, she saw a high wall made of grey bricks blocking her path.

Facing the wall in an attitude of reflection on one's past misdeeds, she had returned once again to that underground palace.

The familiar damp smell of earth filled the air, laced with a faint trace of blood. Ye Min-Wei stood in silence for a moment and looked down. A-Xi was blinking her innocent eyes at her, letting out a bright laugh.

A-Xi was demonstrating to Ye Min-Wei through personal experience what it truly meant to have one's body beyond one's own control.

There seemed to be no garrison soldiers or guards here; it was so quiet that only the sound of their three breaths could be heard. The light here was brighter than in any tunnel or stone chamber Ye Min-Wei had passed through earlier.

Ye Min-Wei raised her head to look around and found herself standing upon a high platform. In the center of the platform stood a stone table, and several wooden racks were erected near the entrance, holding numerous cyan stones.

Beneath the high platform lay a massive circular cavern. Countless torches hung along the walls, illuminating the cavern as brightly as day. Taking the stone table on the high platform as the core, blue patterns spread outward, densely covering the entire cavern walls and floor, as though woven from blue vines into a cage.

The cavern beneath her feet was a colossal and exquisite human-炼 (refining) furnace.

She was not unfamiliar with this place. Although she had only seen it once, for Ye Min-Wei, a single glance was always enough to engrave something into her memory forever.

The memory was far too clear, precise down to the tiniest details: red and white, blood and wails. Ye Min-Wei shuddered, an instinctive wave of nausea rising within her.

As she bent over, A-Yan suddenly struggled free from her embrace, snatched A-Xi away, ran to the other side of the stone table, and glared defensively at Ye Min-Wei.

"Who... who on earth are you! What do you want!" A-Yan demanded with a fierce expression that masked his inner cowardice, his eyes devoid of even a fraction of trust.

His voice echoed through the empty "furnace." The two of them stood separated by the yard-long stone table on the high platform, staring at each other from a distance—one filled with anger, the other with pain and bewilderment.

Though Ye Min-Wei figured it was useless for A-Yan to know her purpose in coming here, she suppressed her nausea and answered honestly: "I am here to save you and A-Xi, and I need to use this cavern to confirm a few things before destroying this place."

She had intended to come to this furnace all along.

It was as if Ye Min-Wei had suddenly realized something. She looked at A-Xi, who was kicking about in A-Yan's arms, and an epiphany struck her like a bolt from the blue.

She stepped forward two paces: "A-Xi, she..."

"Don't come closer! You're all liars! Not a single word you say is true... Are you lying to me too? I—I don't believe you!" A-Yan retreated, his eyes bloodshot as he gritted his teeth and glared at Ye Min-Wei.

A-Yan's overly agitated state caused Ye Min-Wei to halt her steps.

She looked at him serenely, tilted her head in confusion, and said, "I have lied to you, but didn't you lie to me as well? A-Xi is not your biological sister, right?"

A-Yan froze.

Ye Min-Wei voiced her own skewed yet logical reasoning: "Most of the stories I've heard over the past few months have been about deception, which shows that deception is a common occurrence in this world. I think trust is simply handing someone else the right to deceive you. When you trust someone, surely you don't believe they will never make use of that right?"

"Of course not... If you've been deceived by me, would you..."

"I would think you have your reasons. Because I believe in you, you are allowed to deceive me, and that doesn't matter."

Ye Min-Wei's gaze was clear and candid, her logic completely inverted, yet her tone was utterly sincere. A-Yan stared at her in a daze, trying to find even a shred of falsehood in her eyes, but found none.

A-Yan's throat bobbed, and tears welled up in his eyes: "It's not the same... I... I can't do that."

Ye Min-Wei briefly averted her gaze toward the sole exit of the high platform, where the stone door remained tightly shut. Since they had already appeared in front of the Meditation Pavilion, a wide-scale search of the underground palace would likely begin soon. There was no place to hide in this wide-open space; she had to get A-Yan and A-Xi away quickly.

"A-Yan, A-Xi's ability..."

Before she could finish her sentence, a dull thud broke the silence, and the tightly closed stone door at the far end of the high platform slowly began to rise.

A-Yan turned around in panic to see dust flying and the high platform trembling as a pair of familiar black boots emerged beneath the rising door.

Those were Wei Jing's black boots.

In a flash, Ye Min-Wei strode toward the wooden rack by the door, her white robes fluttering, and snatched a cyan stone from the shelf. She turned back, pulled out a blue crystal shard, and pressed it into the groove on the stone table.

The groove and the blue crystal fit together seamlessly, as if tailor-made for each other.

The moment the crystal was embedded in the stone table, it was like a fuse being lit. A blinding blue light surged upward, racing along the patterns carved into the walls and floor. The entire cavern, along with the patterns traced upon the high platform, lit up completely, as blinding as a sea of blue fire—turning day into night with its glaring radiance.

Right at that moment, the stone door reached the top, and the Nightmare Master Wei Jing locked his gloomy gaze upon the three figures on the high platform.

Flanking him were two bizarre and ferocious beasts, possessing human faces, the compound eyes of flies, snake-like tongues, and the bodies of horses and bears, looking like grim monsters clumsily sewn together from shredded parts.

As soon as the door opened, the monsters let out the laughter of children—utterly hair-raising—and lunged swiftly toward A-Yan and A-Xi.

Before A-Yan's scream of terror could escape his lips, a figure flashed before his eyes. Ye Min-Wei drew a long line across the ground in front of A-Yan and A-Xi, severing several of the blue veins.

That single line instantly erupted with blue light. The monsters were injured by the radiance, caught off guard as they burst out in cries of pain and retreated to Wei Jing's side. In the blink of an eye, Ye Min-Wei had drawn a closed circuit of blue lines around A-Yan and A-Xi. The spiritual energy erupting from the lines formed an unbreakable shield, protecting them within.

Wei Jing narrowed his eyes as he looked at the woman in white standing amidst the spiritual veins. She was clutching the cyan stone they used to engrave the spiritual veins, her expression calm and inscrutable, her fingers moving rapidly at her side.

The entire human-refining furnace beneath the high platform shone as bright as day; anyone caught within the cavern at this moment would have already been melted away.

She had actually used a Cang Crystal to activate this cavern and rewritten the spiritual veins in a split second, erecting a barrier strong enough to block his nightmare arts. Yet at this very moment, she stood outside the barrier, completely exposed to his nightmare arts.

"Who are you?"

Beside his surprise, vigilance stirred in Wei Jing's heart. The monsters he had summoned from the nightmare turned and lunged at Ye Min-Wei. Ye Min-Wei turned and bolted, her fingertips never stopping their movement. Just as the monsters were about to sink their teeth into the back of her neck, she grabbed the railing and leaped straight off the high platform.

"Sister Yun-Chuan!" A-Yan cried out with wide eyes.

Wei Jing was taken aback and immediately rushed to the edge of the high platform to look down. Activating the spirit array and entering the cavern was courting death—yet she had jumped down without the slightest hesitation!

Amidst the hall-full of blue light, Ye Min-Wei waved her hand to drive the cyan stone into the stone wall, dragging a long scratch across the complex blue patterns as she fell. The damaged spiritual vein circuits erupted with uncontrollable power, the frantic blue light surging back and forth across the cavern, yet instead of claiming Ye Min-Wei's life, it cushioned her fall and landed her safely on the ground.

She rolled across the floor just as Wei Jing's monsters leaped down right behind her. The moment she steadied her stance, she carved several more patterns onto the ground. The rewritten spiritual veins shot out blue light like sharp blades, instantly piercing the monsters through.

Amidst the dying wails of the monsters and Wei Jing's profound shock, Ye Min-Wei shouted loudly: "A-Yan!"

A-Yan trembled inside the barrier and responded, "Yun... Yun-Chuan."

"A-Xi's power relies entirely on will! If she wants to fulfill the wish of someone she likes, she will take them wherever they want to go!"

Initially, in the refugee camp, she had wanted to know the whereabouts of the missing disaster victims, and A-Xi had brought her to this underground human-refining cavern. When she could no longer bear to watch their refining process and A-Yan shouted for A-Xi, A-Xi had transported them back to the refugee camp.

When Wei Jing appeared, A-Xi had wanted to escape, so she fled into the underground palace.

Just now, perhaps because A-Yan wanted to find an exit, A-Xi had caused them to appear outside the underground palace. And when she herself wished to find the human-refining furnace she had seen before, the moment A-Xi embraced her, she had instantly arrived in this cavern.

Ye Min-Wei ran through the cavern, continuously rewriting the spiritual veins with the cyan stone. The spiritual energy unleashed by the damaged veins was extremely violent, yet it completely obeyed her command, acting just like loyal hunting dogs in her grip as she fought the monster's sharp claws and teeth.

The furnace had already been destroyed and could no longer refine people. Wei Jing leaped down from the high platform, landed before Ye Min-Wei riding atop a monster, and looked at her with a probing gaze.

"A-Yan, you must figure out clearly where you want to go, and let A-Xi take you away from here! Your belief must be strong and your will firm for A-Xi to perceive it. Do you hear me!" Ye Min-Wei shouted aloud as she ran.

Wei Jing sneered, and he too raised his voice: "A-Yan, are you actually going to listen to her? She is your enemy! Apart from Lin Xue-Geng, there is only one person left in this world who can rewrite spiritual vein circuits at will."