The incorporeal shade pounced at Yun Ruoyan and Li Mo, but its body simply passed through them. Yun Ruoyan felt the cold permeate her entire body; Li Mo’s spiritual membrane immediately became clouded with dark, smoky aura.

“Corpse aura? You’re far too arrogant to think that you can deal with me just with this!” A layer of spiritual fire appeared over Li Mo’s body. After he became a sword saint, he could near-effortlessly transform his spiritual energy into its elemental forms. Fire-attuned spiritual energy would appear as spirit fire, water-attuned as ice, wood-attuned as vines, leaves, or barks, and earth-attuned as rocks. As a dual cultivator of fire and ice, Li Mo’s spiritual energy could take a number of different forms.

The corpse aura that the shade spread was quickly burnt to nothingness by Li Mo’s spiritual fire, prompting the shade to respond, “Slaughtering King, your title isn’t in vain. To have reached the level of a sword saint in this lowly realm… but I was just testing you. What follows will be my real attack.”

The shade pounced at Li Mo and Yun Ruoyan again, and then at Yi Qianying, possessing it. Her dull, dazed eyes immediately brightened with a cold, calculating gleam. She unsheathed a steel sword and thrust toward Li Mo as he was distracted with the corpse aura.

With a 

thonk

, an arrow suddenly struck Yi Qianying’s blade and deflected her blow—one of Zhuo Yifeng’s newly crafted tiger-canine arrows.

“You’re asking for death!” Yi Qianying turned to Zhuo Yifeng. “And you’re not even a sword saint yet.”

The shade emerged from Yi Qianying’s body and leapt toward Zhuo Yifeng.

“Zhuo Yifeng, be careful!” Yun Ruoyan cried out. Beside her were the Lin siblings. If Zhuo Yifeng were in danger, the two of them would undoubtedly be dragged into the affair as well.

Just then, however, the passageway became turbulent once more. An eddy had formed ahead of them, and all the students were uncontrollably drifting toward the center of the eddy. Although the shade wasn’t affected, Yi Qianying’s physical body was being swept away as well. When it saw her body heading toward the eddy, it immediately dashed back toward her instead of pursuing Zhuo Yifeng.

During this process, the shade passed through two unfortunate students, whose spiritual membranes immediately turned dark.

“We’re almost about to enter the otherworld,” Li Mo announced, clutching Yun Ruoyan tightly. At the moment, she was very concerned that the eddies and turbulence would split her and the Lin sisters apart.

She closed her eyes as they whirled and whirled. After a seemingly interminable period of time, blinding white light filtered through Yun Ruoyan’s eyelids, then suddenly vanished. She felt her whole body settle down.

“Yan’er, we’re here.”

Yun Ruoyan slowly opened her eyes to see Li Mo soaring through the air. “We’ve arrived?” She was still a little dizzy from the whirling motion and disoriented for the sudden flash of light before they were deposited out the portal.

“Yan’er, look over there.” Li Mo pointed behind them to find a few white, swirling portals in mid-air, from which cultivators were slowly emerging. “We came from the second-to-last portal.”

Yun Ruoyan glanced at that portal to see a familiar person emerging, another student from Kongming Academy. However, she didn’t recognize anyone else from the other portals, and their appearance and attire looked quite unusual to her. 

Some wore gorgeous clothing, with glowing and finely crafted devices for flight. Others looked so breathtaking they might have walked out of some painting or another. Others were dressed in beast pelts and had a wild air about them. They flew on all sorts of spiritual objects: the massive bone of a beast, a clam shell, and even a pair of chopsticks…

“Are these the cultivators from the other low-grade realms?” Yun Ruoyan asked.

“Yes.” Li Mo was staring intently at those foreign cultivators. Although he had learned quite a few things about the otherworld from the first elder and Empress Xue Tong, it was his first time exploring it for himself. 

“Where’s Qingchen, Qingxue, and Zhuo Yifeng?” Yun Ruoyan suddenly cried out. She poked her head out from Li Mo’s cloak and looked all around her.

“Sister Ruoyan!” Lin Qingchen called to her from her back, and Yun Ruoyan hurriedly turned around. Behind her, Lin Qingchen was slowly heading in their direction with a green sword aura. Her skill at swordflight wasn’t particularly honed, but she remained in control of her sword. 

Li Mo slowed down and allowed Lin Qingchen to catch up.

“Sister Ruoyan, have you seen Qingxue?” Lin Qingchen asked anxiously.

“No, I was looking for everyone just now. Is Zhuo Yifeng gone too?”

“Yes. We were separated by the current. I saw Brother Zhuo and Qingxue come out on the other side first. As I exited the portal, a flash of white light blinded my senses. By the time I recovered, I couldn’t see either of them anymore.”

“If Qingxue’s with Zhuo Yifeng, then they won’t be in danger,” Yun Ruoyan consoled. 

But what if Zhuo Yifeng didn’t catch up to Qingxue? She had never left on a journey herself, let alone a journey to an entirely new world!

“Let’s keep searching,” Yun Ruoyan suggested, and the three of them began flying in loops through the portals. The cultivators who had just come out of the various portals began gathering in the air. Most of them were warily inspecting the people all around them, clearly unfamiliar with this new world and the cultivators that had arrived alongside them.

“Senior Sister Guan’s up in front!” Yun Ruoyan called out. Li Mo and Lin Qingchen both glanced in her direction. He sped up to try to get to her, and Lin Qingchen followed suit.

Li Mo tried to fly past the cultivator in front of them, but that man seemed deliberately intent on blocking Li Mo’s path. As Li Mo swerved left, so did he; when Li Mo then veered right, so did he. Up, down, left, right—no matter which direction Li Mo tried to maneuver in, the cultivator continued blocking his path. 

The cultivator was tall and fat, built like a small mountain. He flew on a pair of thin chopsticks that somehow managed to support his weight and allowed him to move agilely besides.

“Qingchen!” Yun Ruoyan made a hand gesture at Lin Qingchen, who nodded. While the fatso veered right to block Li Mo off, Lin Qingchen rushed left and squeezed past the fatso.

“Ah, damn!” The fatso’s voice was as deep and loud as a bull’s. He rushed forward and sped toward Lin Qingchen.

Li Mo likewise sped up, surpassing the fatso from above, and planted himself between the fatso and Lin Qingchen. Yun Ruoyan couldn’t identify the fatso’s cultivation, so she guessed that it was more advanced than her own. Since his top speed couldn’t seem to exceed Li Mo’s, however, she pegged him as a mid-ninth-rank blademaster.

“Where did you bastards come from? Aren’t you familiar with traffic rules around here?!” the bull-like voice shouted at them. “Watch me ram your ass with my chopsticks!”

Yun Ruoyan and Li Mo both frowned at his language. Li Mo turned back and waved a hand, revealing a sparrow that shot toward the fatso’s face like a throwing knife.

“What the hell’s this?” The sparrow moved so quickly that the fatso didn’t get a good look at it, and he instinctively held up a hand to ward it off. It agilely flew past the fatso’s defenses, then skewered the fatso’s nose with its long, sharp beak.

“Ah, shit! You—” The fatso began to cry out in pain. He clutched his nose in one hand and made to catch the bird with the other, but it simply fluttered around him and flew back to Li Mo. “Just you wait! I’ll choke you to death with my own hands!” 

“Don’t chase it, Fatty.” A buxom woman caught up to him from behind, dressed scantily and provocatively in a few beast pelts. “That’s a soul-stealing bird. One caw from it would leave you unconscious, and none of us would be strong enough to catch you if you were to fall—you’d have died from the impact!”

“Ah! In that case…”

“His cultivation’s more advanced than yours! This isn’t our old Liyuan continent, so you need to stop being so rash! Now, come with me and help me search for our missing teammates,” the woman commanded, then turned her beastlike eyes to Li Mo’s back.

Li Mo felt a pair of eyes focused on him, but he didn’t turn around. Before he developed a good understanding of the strength of the cultivators on this continent, it would be best not to interact with any strangers.

“Good work, Mo’er,” Yun Ruoyan praised. Mo’er fluttered its two wings, chirped, then began to fly by Yun Ruoyan’s side. 

“This little glutton’s gotten used to the wild,” Li Mo commented. The moment Li Mo had brought Mo’er back to the Chenyuan continent from the forest of giant trees, it had vanished. A few days before the trip to the alternate dimension, it suddenly returned and had been hiding in Li Mo’s robe until it was awakened by the turbulence during the passage to the otherworld.

In front of them, Lin Qingchen had already caught up to Guan Ruliu, and Li Mo sped up until he was right behind them.

“Have any of you seen Zong Yang?” Guan Ruliu asked. She had followed Zong Yang into the portal, but they had been separated by a sudden current. 

The group left in search of the missing students, but Zhuo Yifeng, Lin Qingxue, and Zong Yang seemed nowhere to be found. Just as they were about to panic, a cry sounded from their left, causing a commotion.

The four of them all turned in the direction of the shout, only to see a person slamming into people left and right, a yellow aura by his feet. 

“Where did this demon come from?”

“Kill him! That demon bit me!”

Glancing at the scene, their hearts sank: the person who was being surrounded by a group of enraged cultivators was none other than Zong Yang...

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