A magical journey of a sharp-tongued woman and a goofy man

The bronze mirror hovered three inches above the ground, trembling, and the inverted stars rearranged into a ring-shaped constellation.

Ye Shuli could clearly feel Jiang Ye's arms around her waist trembling. The boy's warm breath brushed against her earlobe, but it carried a chilling sensation.

"Don't let go." She grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist and pulse, her fingertips touching the chaotic spiritual energy surging beneath his skin. "This mirror is draining your spiritual energy."

As soon as he finished speaking, a thousand phantom images suddenly burst forth in the mirror.

Each phantom was repeating the scene after they stepped into the Land of Inheritance: the moment Jiang Ye's ribs were broken by the mechanical vines, the scene of Ye Shuli breaking the restriction by drawing blood from her heart, and even the whispers between the two of them as they bandaged each other by the campfire last night.

"Rewind memories?" Jiang Ye swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing. The bloodstains remaining in his left eye gleamed eerily with a golden-red hue in the illusory light. "Does this mean we have to relive all the hardships?"

The voice from the mirror suddenly turned shrill: "Those who defy fate must face the cycle of cause and effect—"

Ye Shuli suddenly kicked the edge of the bronze mirror.

Her knowledge of modern mechanics allowed her to pinpoint the resonance point precisely, and a painful shriek immediately echoed from the ripples spreading across the mirror-like surface.

She pulled Jiang Ye back to the northeast position of the star array, and the black iron beads hidden in her sleeve shot out into an array: "Playing tricks, it's just an artificial intelligence that verifies the program!"

"What artificial intelligence?" Jiang Ye coughed and laughed, while the lightning-summoning spell that lit up his palm drew defensive runes in the air. "Thinking about romance at a time like this?"

"Shut up!" Ye Shuli flung three abacus beads into the ground. Modern mathematical modeling and Xuanmen formations rapidly deduced in her mind. "It's using causality to create a logical loop. If we follow the illusion, we'll be trapped in a Möbius strip forever."

The chill suddenly materialized into icicles that pierced the vital points of both of them.

Jiang Ye spun around and pulled Ye Shuli into his arms, but the crimson flames that rose behind him were strangely extinguished when they touched the ice shards.

He groaned and knelt on one knee, a cracking sound coming from his shoulder blade: "My spiritual power... is sealed?"

"The test begins." The voice in the mirror reverted to its emotionless, mechanical tone. "The Gate of Life will open after the seventy-three thousandth reincarnation."

Countless bronze mirrors emerged from the void, and in each mirror walked out a figure with the same appearance as them.

Ye Shuli watched as "herself," wielding a poisoned dagger, lunged at her. Suddenly, she grabbed Jiang Ye's left hand and pressed it against her chest: "Count to three and run towards the Zhen position!"

"Are you crazy? At this hour—"

"three!"

The moment the blade pierced Ye Shuli's back, Jiang Ye tossed her into the air.

The over-the-shoulder throw of modern combat sports perfectly complements the Xuanmen stepping technique. As the girl's skirt, embroidered with golden cicada patterns, swept across the mirror, all the phantoms suddenly froze into distorted slow motion.

"Just as I expected!" Ye Shuli leaped up, stepping on the edge of the mirror, the jade hairpin in her hair shattering into twelve star trails. "These mirror images copy our movements with a 0.3-second delay—Jiang Ye! You're cursing me!"

"what?"

"Use your most venomous words now!"

A dark blue glint flashed in the boy's eyes, but his words were laced with a mocking smile: "Miss Ye is all bark and no bite, except for her stubbornness. Last night, when the vines wrapped around her waist..."

The mirror group suddenly emitted a piercing buzzing sound.

The moment the replicas opened their mouths to speak, Ye Shuli's golden cicada silk had already shattered the seven bronze mirrors.

She kicked away the lunging "Jiang Ye" and pulled her real body into the Star Array's Life Gate: "Emotional module redundancy error—the old-fashioned system really can't handle trash talk!"

The bronze mirror array began to collapse, and the phoenix phantoms sealed by the stars suddenly broke free of their confinement.

Jiang Ye grabbed Ye Shuli's wrist amidst the turbulent spiritual energy, only to find a swastika symbol, identical to the one on the bronze mirror, appearing on her palm: "Shuli, you..."

"Don't get distracted!" The girl pressed the talisman against his chest. "The system is forcibly loading the inheritance data package. I need you to keep your spiritual energy flowing in reverse—just like when you broke the spirit-unlocking array last time!"

Extreme cold turns into intense heat.

As Jiang Ye watched his blood condense into three-dimensional runes resembling those of a quantum computer under Ye Shuli's control, he suddenly recalled how she explained the "binary array-breaking principle" three months ago.

At that time, she referred to the vast array of mountains and rivers as "the 0 and 1 of our ancestors," which angered the elder guarding the array so much that he vomited blood on the spot.

"Three inches to the left, a gap in the Xun position!" Ye Shuli suddenly shouted.

Her hair was already disheveled, but the blood-stained white jade abacus spelled out a diagram of the sixty-four hexagrams in the air. "Jiang Ye! Do you believe me?"

Despite the excruciating pain from the backlash of spiritual energy, the boy laughed loudly: "I believed you the day you used the lightning talisman to blow up the latrine to save me!"

The moment their spiritual powers connected in the form of a Klein bottle, the bronze mirror exploded into a shower of light.

Ye Shuli saw those phoenix phantoms swooping down, only to turn into golden code when they touched the data streams surrounding them.

Jiang Ye's blood and tears had somehow crystallized, reflecting countless crisscrossing binary light bands.

"Certification passed." The mechanical voice showed emotion for the first time. "The rebel meets the compatibility requirements of the inheritance core."

The stardial projection that enveloped the altar suddenly collapsed into a singularity, and Ye Shuli felt something explode deep within her mind.

Modern memories and ancient traditions collided fiercely in her sea of ​​consciousness. She saw Jiang Ye reach out to her in terror, but behind the boy, a phantom image of half a bronze mirror appeared.

The remaining star fragments suddenly began to rotate in reverse, piecing together a fragmented star map above the two of them.

Just as Ye Shuli was about to touch the nearest star, a sharp alarm suddenly sounded throughout the entire inheritance space.

Jiang Ye's exclamation and the mechanical warning pierced his eardrums simultaneously:

"Warning! Article 73 of the core protocol has been altered—"

"Shu Li, be careful! The mirror is devouring your soul fire!"

Golden codes poured down like a galaxy, and Ye Shuli's skirt suddenly burst into azure flames.

The flames gently licked her blood-stained fingertips, and the broken abacus beads were reassembled into an eighteen-sided star chart in the flames of rebirth.

Jiang Ye staggered back half a step, a metallic taste rising in his throat—the girl's figure, suspended in mid-air, was gradually blurring, as if it were about to merge with the starry sky.

"Shu Li!" The lightning-summoning technique that exploded in his palm was as fragile as a firefly in the face of the inherited power, but it triggered a strange resonance the moment it touched the star chart.

The shattered fragments of the bronze mirror suddenly rolled back and pieced together at Ye Shuli's feet to form a constantly deforming Klein bottle structure.

The excruciating pain caused Ye Shuli's pupils to shrink to pinpoints.

Modern physics knowledge and ancient traditions collided fiercely in her mind, and she saw every vein in her body glow with the light of binary code.

When the phoenix phantom swept across the top of the head for the eighth time, the shackles that had been dormant in the dantian for many years suddenly shattered—the mid-stage and late-stage Spirit Master, and the early-stage Spirit Venerable!

"It's done!" Jiang Ye suddenly grabbed her loose hair ribbon.

The blood-stained silk stretched taut like a string in the tide of spiritual energy. As the boy leaped up, ring-shaped star trails suddenly appeared around the two of them.

The shattered lens, like a prism, refracted countless rays of light, illuminating the entire heritage site as if it were a divine kingdom.

When Ye Shuli landed, she stumbled and fell into Jiang Ye's arms.

The lingering sparks from her fingertips burned scorch marks on the boy's clothes, but he held her even tighter: "Spirit Venerable Realm?"

You almost exploded like a firework, you know that?

"Isn't it you who can be my human shield?" Ye Shuli laughed in a hoarse voice, but tears uncontrollably fell onto the other person's collarbone.

The fragmented diagrams of formations that he had deduced nightly for the past three months, the 720 near-death experiences with traps and mechanisms, and the days and nights of fear and being hunted down by various forces, all now transformed into a warm current surging deep within his mind.

Jiang Ye suddenly cupped her face in his hands.

The boy's left eye, still bearing traces of blood, refracted a strange, iridescent light as his thumb gently wiped away the tears from the corner of her eye: "Miss Ye looks really ugly when she cries."

"Shut up!" Ye Shuli raised her foot to kick, but found that the flow of spiritual energy brought with it a phoenix afterimage.

The spiritual energy within a radius of a hundred miles suddenly surged like a sea, and countless beams of light pierced through the clouds and plummeted down, forming a dazzling solar corona around them.

On the Star-Picking Tower, thousands of miles away, seven life lamps that had been silent for a hundred years suddenly blazed on.

The white-haired high priest trembled as he stroked the cracks in the tortoise shell: "The phoenix rises from the ashes, the celestial orbits shift... the spirit realm is about to change!"

The place of inheritance is unusually quiet at this moment.

Jiang Ye played with the newly grown phoenix feather in Ye Shuli's hair, then suddenly took out half a piece of osmanthus cake from his pocket: "Want some?"

I passed through Qingzhou City last time.

"You actually kept it hidden away..." Ye Shuli's words were abruptly cut off.

The pastry between the boy's fingers suddenly shattered into gold dust, and a tremor beyond the five senses swept through the earth's veins.

The lingering star array remnants suddenly twisted into a vortex, drawing spiritual energy into a vacuum within a ten-mile radius.

"Something's not right!" Ye Shuli threw out the star chart with her backhand.

After being upgraded and reassembled, the abacus beads formed a three-dimensional hexagram in the air. At the moment when the modern topological model overlapped with the Hetu Luoshu, she saw countless scarlet threads burrowing into the back of Jiang Ye's neck from the ground.

The boy, seemingly oblivious, looked up at the sky and said, "Shuli, look, the stars are bleeding."

Above the heavens, the Phoenix constellation of the Land of Inheritance is emitting dark golden light.

Those stars that should have burned eternally are like worm-eaten fruits, collapsing in different directions in a way that defies the laws of physics.

Ye Shuli suddenly pressed her throbbing temples—she clearly saw that the arrangement of a certain constellation was exactly the same as the pattern on the Sanxingdui gold staff she had seen in a modern museum three months ago.

The warm and peaceful spiritual energy field began to become disordered.

Jiang Ye's left eye's blood crystal suddenly peeled off, condensing in the air into the shape of a bronze mirror fragment.

The moment the shards touched the ground, huge inverted swastikas suddenly appeared beneath their feet, creating a terrifying resonance with the mark on Ye Shuli's palm that had not yet faded.

"Warning! Article 73 of the core protocol has been tampered with—"

The moment the mechanical voice sounded again, twelve bolts of blood-red lightning pierced through the heavens and earth.

As Ye Shuli pulled Jiang Ye away, she saw half a jade slip slowly rising from the deep crater where she had just stood.

The terms written in oracle bone script were twisting into modern computer code under her gaze, finally settling into two lines of scarlet text:

[System Error: Illegal data exists in the Inheritor's Memory Module]

Force formatting process

The phoenix phantom, which had not yet dissipated, suddenly let out a mournful cry and transformed into chains that wrapped around Ye Shuli's neck.

Jiang Ye's lightning-summoning technique struck the chains but backfired on him. The young man, vomiting blood, pushed her toward the gate of life: "Go!"

Go to the core of the stardial array!

"We'll go together!" Ye Shuli's phoenix feathers suddenly swelled, and the flames of rebirth burned the chains into a stream of data.

As she grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist and sped away, the ground beneath her feet suddenly became transparent—deep within the earth's crust, countless fragments of bronze mirrors were being pieced together to form a giant mechanical eyeball, its pupils shimmering with familiar binary light.

When the last star fell below the horizon, the spiritual energy concentration in the entire spirit realm plummeted by 30%.

As Ye Shuli gazed at the dark red star ring that suddenly appeared in the night sky, she suddenly remembered the high-dimensional space model she had seen in the laboratory before her transmigration.

Jiang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and gently hooked his fingertip around her little finger: "What are you going to fry this time?"

There aren't enough latrines.

“This time…” Ye Shuli stared at the star ring that had begun to rotate in reverse, and a forbidden term suddenly surged from the inherited memories deep within her spiritual platform.

She slowly raised her still-bleeding palm, watching the blood droplets condense into symbols of quantum entanglement under the moonlight.

"This fake sky might just explode."