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

The moment the icy mist enveloping the bronze coin nails exploded, Ye Shuli felt her lower back slam against the damp rock wall.

After the blue light of the teleportation array faded, the fishy smell of the underground river hit her face. Water droplets dripping from the tips of stalactites splashed on the back of her hand, reflecting the glowing moss on the cave ceiling.

"This is much more exciting than the subway line 10." Jiang Ye wiped the ice crystals off his face, and the jade pendant at his waist suddenly emitted a bluish light.

His backhand motion as he drew his short blade created afterimages, the blade barely managing to deflect the dark arrow that hurtled through the air—the arrow twisted into a venomous snake in mid-air, its fangs grazing his neck and embedding themselves in the rock wall.

Ye Shuli's Ice Soul fragments automatically formed a hexagonal shield, and the cold air seeping from the cracks froze the water droplets within three zhang into ice crystals.

A crisp sound of jade clashing came from the shadows. A dark green brocade robe swept across the glowing moss, and the family crest on the newcomer's jade crown made Ye Shuli's pupils shrink.

“The Xiao family?” She dug her fingertips into her palm.

The bloody words "eternal nemesis" in the family genealogy of his past life suddenly materialized into the pale, sinister face before him, the star-shaped spots on the other person's neck strikingly similar to those of the leader of the psionic organization.

Xiao Mingyuan stroked the silver-embroidered mandala on his sleeve, and suddenly the vines on the ground grew rapidly: "I never thought that the last bloodline of the Ye family would be reduced to keeping company with wild dogs." The poisonous thorns that burst from the tips of the vines struck the ice shield, corroding holes that made a sizzling sound.

Jiang Ye spun around and chopped off the vines that were wrapping around his ankle. Sparks flew as the blade clashed with the poisonous thorns. "Do you villains have a standardized script training class?" he joked, but his back was already pressed against Ye Shuli's trembling shoulder.

The ancient painting in his storage ring was getting hot, and the soul-guiding lamp in the woman's hand reflected in the painting made his eyes turn bluish.

"So-called destiny is nothing but the shroud of the losers." Ye Shuli suddenly sneered, and ice shards burst from the cracks in the shield, piercing straight at the opponent's brow.

She was all too familiar with that look—it was exactly the same as those old fogies on the board of directors in her previous life who used "family tradition" to force her into a marriage.

Seven bone nails flew out from Xiao Mingyuan's sleeve, and the talismans hanging from the nails ignited with ghostly blue flames.

The icicles turned into black water the moment they touched his clothes, the corrosive liquid burning a Big Dipper-shaped crater in the ground. "The Ye family's Profound Ice Technique is truly a waste in your hands." He raised his hand to form a seal, and the rock beneath Ye Shuli's feet suddenly softened like mud.

Jiang Ye threw out bronze coin nails to try and pull her out, but three gray-clad men wearing Nuo masks rushed out from the side.

Their chains creaked and groaned as they wrapped around his wrists, clearly indicating they were alive—the scales on the chains were greedily devouring his spiritual power.

Ye Shuli's shield cracked under the pressure of the swamp, making a teeth-grinding sound, while modern chemical knowledge surged wildly in her mind.

She stared at the flickering flames on the bone nail and suddenly realized that the flashing frequency of those flames was strikingly similar to the resonance frequency of the benzene ring structure.

The moment the last layer of ice crystals in the shield shattered, she caught a glimpse of the mist rising from the surface of the underground river, which, guided by some force, refracted into a double-helix pattern of light in the air.

Ye Shuli's fingernails dug deeply into her palms, and the double helix of light refracted by the mist from the underground river left a residual image on her retina.

The similarity between the eerie blue flames of those burning bone nails and the resonant frequency of the benzene ring was like a thunderbolt splitting the chaos—the molecular vibrational frequencies of modern chemistry may have some kind of mapping relationship with psionic fluctuations.

"Give me three seconds!" She gritted her teeth and pressed the Ice Soul fragment into the mud. The stinging pain from her spiritual veins felt like a high-voltage current passing through her bone marrow.

Jiang Ye's bronze coin nails suddenly emitted a sharp buzzing sound, and the chains of the three gray-clad Nuo masked figures were shaken back half a foot.

Xiao Mingyuan's jade crown gleamed coldly in the dim light of the cave, and the bone nail talisman fire he controlled with his fingertips suddenly trembled slightly.

Ye Shuli caught the 0.3-second gap in spiritual energy, and her calf, which had been swallowed by the swamp, suddenly burst out with an icy blue aura—this was the result of her adjusting the frequency of the Xuanbing Technique to resonate with the benzene ring.

"Click!"

The frozen swamp exploded with ice crystals, and the moment Ye Shuli flipped and leaped up, the hexagonal shield reorganized into a honeycomb structure.

The poisonous stingers that could have corroded spiritual energy struck the honeycomb shield as if they had crashed into countless miniature vortexes, their energy being dispersed and completely devoured.

Xiao Mingyuan took a half step back and bumped into a stalactite pillar, the silver mandala thread on his sleeve being torn by ice crystals: "This is impossible!"

"You old fogies always mistake magic for truth." Ye Shuli wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth, and the hexagonal light patterns that appeared on the surface of the shield were flowing in the pattern of the Fibonacci sequence.

She deliberately crushed the unburnt talismans on the ground with the tip of her shoe. "You can't even calculate the phase difference of energy clashes, yet you dare to call yourselves eternal enemies?"

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Jiang Ye threw out three bronze coin nails, the lightning wrapped around the nail tails precisely severing the spiritual energy nodes of the gray-clothed man's chains.

As the last masked figure dissipated into black smoke, he flashed to block Ye Shuli's path, his short blade gleaming green in his palm: "The villain dies from talking too much, you know that?"

The moment their backs touched, Ye Shuli suddenly switched her spiritual energy frequency to the beta band.

This was a special electromagnetic wave frequency band that she had discovered in the laboratory in her previous life. When the fragment of the ice soul resonated with it, the glowing moss in the entire cave suddenly went out.

As darkness descended, the ancient painting that flew out of Jiang Ye's sleeve suddenly unfolded.

The soul-guiding lamp of the woman in the painting illuminated a three-zhang radius, just enough to envelop Xiao Mingyuan in a blue light—they had already devised this tactic by using the vibration frequency of the storage ring when the double helix light spots were refracted on the surface of the underground river.

"break!"

Ye Shuli's ice spikes pierced through the area shrouded in blue light, but this time they were not corroded into black water.

Xiao Mingyuan's brocade robe was torn in seven bloody marks, and his jade crown fell to the ground with a crisp sound.

The vines he summoned were withering at a visible rate, clearly indicating that the spiritual veins were being interfered with by some special frequency.

"Remember to update the knowledge base next time." Jiang Ye blew away the ice shards that had fallen on the blade; the lightning net made of bronze coin nails had blocked all escape routes.

The fragments of Nuo masks left behind by the three gray-clad men when they collapsed are hissing and vaporizing in the blue light of the ancient painting.

Xiao Mingyuan suddenly crushed the jade pendant at his waist, and the burst of blood mist instantly corroded half of the lightning net.

As he transformed into a streak of light and vanished into the rock crevice, his hoarse roar shook down countless stalactites: "The remnants of the Ye family..."

"Can't the villain's exit line be a little more original?" Ye Shuli raised her hand to freeze the falling stone cone, but staggered and grabbed the rock wall as she turned around.

The backlash from forcibly altering the frequency of her spiritual energy caused the ice crystals that formed on her fingertips to be tinged with blood.

When Jiang Ye put away the ancient painting, he noticed that the soul-guiding lamp of the woman in the painting was much dimmer than usual.

He stuffed a piece of glowing moss into his storage ring as a temporary light source, and suddenly caught a glimpse of the ice-blue pattern that appeared on the back of Ye Shuli's neck—the pattern was completely identical to a seal mark in the corner of an ancient painting.

The sound of the underground river suddenly became viscous, and a kind of noise similar to electronic interference echoed deep in the cave.

The two looked at the water at the same time and found that the water mist, which refracted the faint light, was forming a blurry star map. But when Jiang Ye tried to locate it with the bronze coin nail, the pattern broke into irregular ripples.

"It's time to go." Ye Shuli crushed the last fragment of Ice Soul. As the blue light of the teleportation array enveloped them, no one noticed that the bone nail Xiao Mingyuan had left behind was absorbing moisture.

The remaining runes on the nail tip glowed faintly, reflecting the crimson pupils slowly opening in a tower a hundred miles away.

The moment the cave returned to darkness, the bone nail suddenly stood up and pointed north.

The embers of the incantation cast distorted shadows on the damp rock wall, vaguely revealing the outline of an ancient altar.

Meanwhile, deep within Jiang Ye's storage ring, a fragment of a Nuo mask that he had taken from the gray-clad man of the Xiao family was leaving glowing cracks on the back of the ancient painting.