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

The moment the iron gate closed, Ye Shuli threw the Kunlun Mirror, now broken in two, into the air.

The shards of mirror grazed the hanging iron chain from the vent, refracting three intersecting paths of light—this was the Morse code she had taught Jiang Ye.

The spiritual energy, carrying the scent of hawthorn, suddenly solidified, and the Triple Seven Star Lock made a crisp sound.

When Jiang Ye kicked open the iron gate, he was still clutching half a candied hawthorn skewer in his hand, the sugar frosting on the tip of the skewer corroding the last lock core.

"Your improved antidote..." Before Ye Shuli could finish speaking, her calf suddenly twitched and she crashed into the alchemy furnace.

When Jiang Ye caught her, his fingertips touched the purple spots oozing from the wound, and his pupils suddenly contracted into vertical lines like a wolfhound.

The seven corpses suddenly convulsed and bounced up.

Jiang Ye flung out three candied hawthorn skewers, pinning down the nearest shadow guard. The moment the skewers pierced the black iron chains, the spiritual energy coated in sugar frosting suddenly burst into crimson-gold flames.

Ye Shuli recognized that this was the Burning Heaven Flame, which only a Spirit King could control, but Jiang Ye was clearly still at the early stage of a Spirit Practitioner.

"Don't look." Jiang Ye wrapped her eyes with candy wrappers, and the gauze on his palm was soaked in a cinnabar-scented hemostatic agent.

Ye Shuli heard the sound of tearing fabric, followed by a sensation of both ice and fire on her calf—this guy had actually wrapped the wound with the icy sugar coating of candied hawthorn and scorched the poisonous spot with a red-hot bamboo skewer.

As the last scream faded, Jiang Ye was squatting on the ground piecing together the fragments of the jade pendant.

Moonlight streamed through the ventilation vents, illuminating his bloodstained canine teeth. His usually smiling eyes were now frosty: "The teleportation array in the courtroom, the revealing water mixed with squid ink—the formula stolen from the Chen family's weapon-refining workshop three months ago."

Ye Shuli picked up the photo stone engraved with the Nangong family's mark and turned it to face the moonlight.

The image of her appraising pills at the auction house three days ago appeared on the surface of the stone, but a certain segment was replaced with a scene of her trading with a rival family using spiritual magic.

“Twenty-seven frame errors.” She sneered, her nails digging into the cracks of the Kunlun Mirror. “How stupid, to use Qingzhou cinnabar as a developing agent.” Suddenly, a dark shadow flashed past the window in the mirror, and the two of them simultaneously crushed the Breath-Avoiding Pill.

Jiang Ye flicked a hawthorn pit to the southeast, and the seventh spy fell from the sycamore tree 800 meters away.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Ye Shuli stuffed the recording stone into the candied hawthorn grass target. The spirit stone, coated with sugar, rolled into the beggar's broken bowl on the street corner—this was the emergency signal they had agreed on last month.

When the third watch gong sounded, the two men squatted in the drainage ditch in the alley behind the courthouse.

Jiang Ye was repairing the Kunlun Mirror with sugar threads when he suddenly broke off three strands of hair and tied them to the frame: "With this on, those revealing waters will... hiss!"

Ye Shuli pinched his ear and lowered her voice: "Have you had enough of pretending to be innocent but actually cunning?"

The tracking powder from your hair got on my hairband. She took off her gilded and kingfisher feather hairpin and threw it into the air. The luminous pearl inlaid on the hairpin head suddenly turned into three hundred fireflies, drawing the patrol guards' attention towards the library.

The process of infiltrating the secret room went unusually smoothly.

Ye Shuli stared at the unsealed letter on the table, then suddenly stopped Jiang Ye's hand as he was about to touch the file: "The ink is wet." She took out half a piece of osmanthus cake and crushed it. The cake powder fell into the blank space and revealed bloody words—it was the rubbing of the clan leader's private seal that had been lost half a month ago.

Jiang Ye suddenly sneezed towards the roof beam, and the hawthorn-scented breath, imbued with spiritual energy, shook the hidden compartment concealed in the carved crevices.

When Ye Shuli used a candied hawthorn skewer to pry open the hidden compartment, she suddenly felt a burning sensation on her fingertips—three whole rows of inactive memory stones, each engraved with a star chart corresponding to her birth date and time.

"Don't touch it." She stopped Jiang Ye from biting into the sugar coating. "These stones have been tempered with my natal spirit fire." As she spoke, she pricked her fingertip, and the drop of blood on the stone surface immediately revealed images of the clan leader meeting with the heads of various families. Each image contained half of a forged covenant.

As the second drumbeat sounded at midnight, Ye Shuli had already finished making copies of the seventh piece of evidence.

Jiang Ye suddenly grabbed her and dragged her to the corner of the wall. Three poisoned hidden arrows were embedded in the spot where they had just been standing—the arrows had the tassels of the ribbons that the clan leader had bestowed upon outstanding disciples that morning tied to their tails.

“Seven Star Lock.” Ye Shuli stared at the arrangement of the hidden arrows and suddenly tore off Jiang Ye’s hair tie.

The hairband soaked in icing sugar wrapped around the sleeve arrow, which unexpectedly etched half of the spiritual vein distribution map onto the blue brick floor.

The location marked with a red dot is the center of the arena for Tomorrow's Family Championship.

At dawn, Ye Shuli stuffed the rubbings of the scrolls into a specially made candy box.

Jiang Ye was spreading honey on the box when he suddenly looked up and stared at her calf: "The purple spots have turned into the Big Dipper." His fingertips, still coated in icing, traced her ankle. "If the chief asks later, just say we caught fireflies all night."

Before the morning mist had dissipated, Ye Shuli kicked open the ancestral hall door.

The seven-inch-thick huanghuali wood threshold shook, causing incense burner ash to fall in a flurry, and the cushions of the twenty-three core disciples all cracked open—the very cushions they had used when they slammed their fists on the table and accused her at the elders' meeting.

"March 16th, East Market Auction House." She tossed out a rubbing of the scroll; honey-soaked pages stuck to a gilded pillar, the forged covenant gleaming with the distinctive bluish-black of squid ink in the morning light. "The Second Elder traded 30% of the spirit mine's profits for the Nangong family to provide false testimony."

The arrogant young master Ye Cheng'an suddenly stood up, but the black iron sword at his waist suddenly came out of its sheath.

Jiang Ye leaned against the doorframe, half-eaten candied hawthorn berries, the sugar strands clinging to the inscription "Upright and Unyielding" on his sword hilt. "Be careful," he said, "your natal sword is stained with Qingzhou cinnabar."

Ye Shuli flicked her finger and shattered the recording stone, and three hundred images intertwined in the air to form a net.

Every bribe received by the arrogant young men in the scene was wrapped in a sugar coating specially made by the rival family—the same packaging as the disaster relief supplies they questioned Ye Shuli about embezzling last month.

"So it turns out we're the parasites..." Ye Cheng'an staggered and fell to his seat, his sword sparking as it struck the ground.

The seven disciples who had jointly impeached Ye Shuli suddenly vomited black blood, and a curse mark appeared on their chests that was the same as the one that had been used to forge the covenant – those proclamations that questioned Ye Shuli had become the medium through which they were cursed to death.

The patriarch shattered the curse seal with a flick of his sleeve, and the overwhelming pressure of his transcendent realm caused the family genealogy hanging between the pillars to flutter without wind: "From this day forward, the Hall of Enforcement will be renamed the Hall of Atonement." He removed Ye Cheng'an's direct descendant jade token and tied it to Ye Shuli's blood-stained sash. "The next elders' meeting, which you all listened to while kneeling, will be presided over by Shuli standing."

When the sundial pointer shifted by half an inch at noon, Ye Shuli kicked open the black iron gate of the courtroom.

The spiritual tea in front of the representatives of the twelve families was still warm. She raised her hand and slammed the sugar box onto the gilded table. Three hundred honey-coated photo stones rolled into the Big Dipper formation.

"The theft at the Chen family's weapon-refining workshop." Jiang Ye licked the hawthorn skewer from the tip, the sugar threads suddenly tangling around the jade slip the referee was trying to destroy. "Should I remind you that the squid ink presented as tribute by the Nangong family is hidden in the third secret compartment on your right?"

Cold sweat beaded on the referee's forehead; his spiritual power, at the early stage of the Transcendent Realm, had been sealed by the sugar coating.

Ye Shuli pointed her fingers and opened the specially made candy box. The clan leader's private seal and the images of the heads of various families intertwined to form a light screen, burning twenty-seven unique talisman holes into the forged covenant.

"The Ye family's innocence is restored today." She flung out the Kunlun Mirror, now broken in two, the beams of light refracted from its surface piercing through the clouds above.

The twelve pillars of fortune belonging to each family collapsed with a crash, leaving only the Ye family's crimson-gold pillar piercing straight through the Milky Way.

The jade crown of the rival family leader suddenly shattered, and the disguise paste on the face of the woman using the honey trap began to melt.

Jiang Ye whistled, his sugar-coated fingertips tracing the referee's trembling Adam's apple: "You just said you wanted to apologize in public?"

As dusk painted the clouds red, a thousand gilded lanterns rose from the Ye family's martial arts training ground.

Ye Shuli stood in the center of the rebuilt altar, with the repentance spiritual power of all the disciples of the clan surging beneath her feet at the Big Dipper array eye.

Jiang Ye tossed a hawthorn pit coated with sugar into the center of the formation. Amidst the exploding crimson-gold flames, the family totem, dormant for a hundred years, emerged in the night sky.

"Then," the clan chief handed over the luminous cup filled with fine wine, but suddenly a fine crack appeared on the rim of the cup.

Ye Shuli instinctively leaned back, the spilled wine condensing into ice crystals in mid-air, reflecting her suddenly pale face—the spiritual energy vortex in her dantian suddenly rotated counterclockwise.

Jiang Ye paused as he took the cup, the candied hawthorn skewer piercing his fingertip almost imperceptibly.

He caught Ye Shuli's waist as she staggered, the bloodstains on his palm seeping into the star-patterned embroidery on her hem: "Want to eat a hawthorn?"

Just coated with icy sugar...

As the midnight drum pierced through the celebratory sounds, the luminous cup between Ye Shuli's fingers suddenly shattered into dust.

She barely managed to grasp the gilded beast head beside the altar, a burning, metallic taste rising in her throat—the crimson-gold spiritual power flowing in her spiritual veins was strangely seeping into the sugar strands Jiang Ye had tied to her wrist during the day.

"Shuli!" The clan leader's exclamation was drowned out by the sudden explosion of fireworks.

Jiang Ye turned to help her up, but the fragment of the Kunlun Mirror hanging from his waist suddenly tore his clothes. Dark red bloodstains meandered down the tracking talisman drawn with icing sugar, carving the outline of the seventh star of the Big Dipper on the altar.