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

The bronze bell on Jiang Ye's waist trembled slightly.

Ye Shuli stared at the distorted shadow on the rock wall, then suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist and ran wildly. The fluorescent moss crushed by their boots left two dark blue trails behind them.

The rune array appeared at the end of the cave.

Thousands of dark purple symbols float among the stalactites, forming a constantly changing Klein ring structure.

Ye Shuli wiped the blood from her forehead, the afterimage of the battle still lingering in her retina. "There's a Fermat spiral at twelve o'clock, and a Penrose triangle at three o'clock—these runes are simulating the curvature of space in different dimensions."

“Speak like a human.” Jiang Ye shook his numb right arm; the aftershocks of the curse he had just blocked for her were still burning in his meridians.

“Each area corresponds to a different spatial law.” Ye Shuli took out a notebook covered in sticky substance, and her charcoal pencil flew across the paper. “Do you see those periodically flashing Möbius strip patterns?”

A half-meter-wide safety passage will appear every thirty-seven seconds.

The sound of falling gravel came from behind.

Twelve gray-robed cultivators descended upon the floating compass. The leader, a man with a mechanical prosthetic eye embedded in his left eye, the clicking of gears and the hum of the rune array creating an eerie resonance. "Miss Ye's comprehension of the laws of space is astonishing," he said, flicking a blood-red copper coin from his fingertip. "Unfortunately, the Spirit Pearl can only belong to the Burning Heaven Alliance."

Jiang Ye suddenly laughed out loud: "So you didn't even notice the star map had been tampered with?" A triangular dagger popped out of his sleeve, its tip piercing half a piece of fluorescent coral. "Using living people as spatial anchors, that mysterious person certainly had a clever plan."

The prosthetic eye suddenly contracted.

The leader unleashed a crimson spiritual pressure, and asphalt-like substances seeped from the cracks in the ground, instantly transforming into poisonous vines that coiled around the two.

Ye Shuli dragged Jiang Ye into the newly opened passage, where a rune wall composed of non-Euclidean geometry temporarily blocked the pursuers.

"The Kan position is shifted by seven degrees!" Ye Shuli's birthmark gleamed coldly on her collarbone, and the charcoal pencil in her hand left afterimages.

Jiang Ye swung his sword, severing the bone claw that had emerged from the void, and then slammed an explosive talisman into a topological defect. "They're simultaneously analyzing the rune array!"

In the storm stirred up by the temporal turbulence, the girl suddenly grasped a fleeting coordinate.

She ripped off Jiang Ye's bronze bell and smashed it into the center of the Penrose triangle. The sound waves generated by the bell's impact caused the entire rune array to freeze for a moment—a perfect combination of modern acoustic resonance principles and psionic nodes.

"Now!" Ye Shuli grabbed someone and rushed toward the collapsing Klein bottle node.

A furious roar came from outside the rune wall, and three Soul-Chasing Nails grazed Jiang Ye's ears and shot into the void.

The smell of humus hits you.

The two fell into a canyon filled with glowing ferns, and behind them came a rumbling sound of space folding.

Ye Shuli suddenly froze—her shadow, projected onto the fern leaves, split into six different forms, each exhibiting the characteristics of a cursed creature before being dismembered.

Jiang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and was about to speak when the entire island suddenly flipped ninety degrees.

Hanging on the vertical rock wall, they saw the cave where they had fought earlier disintegrate into countless cubes three hundred meters above their heads, and the members of the Burning Sky Alliance turned into black dots and fell into the bottomless dimensional rift.

"Run!" Ye Shuli flung out the tungsten steel cable wrapped around her waist and drove it into the rock.

As the two ran wildly along the 90-degree cliff face, ice crystals suddenly seeped from the birthmark on her neck—those gray-robed figures who should have fallen to their deaths were now chasing them upside down on the parallel cliff face, their mechanical prosthetic eyes refracting strange light that did not belong to three-dimensional space.

Jiang Ye threw seven silver darts engraved with anti-topological runes, and the spacetime ripples generated by the explosions temporarily distorted the pursuit route.

Ye Shuli suddenly noticed that all the glowing ferns were lying down in a certain direction, like iron filings being pulled by invisible magnetic poles.

The roar of the underground river came from underground.

The moment they leaped into the underground river, the star map scroll on Ye Shuli's wrist suddenly unfolded automatically.

Countless overlapping projections of Klein bottles appeared on the parchment, each bottle opening pointing to the location of the girl's bleeding birthmark.

Jiang Ye suddenly pushed the person into the shallows, and covered the two of them with a bronze bell.

Through the semi-transparent barrier, they saw the leader of the Burning Heaven Alliance hovering above the dark river, his mechanical prosthetic eye extending spiderweb-like psionic threads—the ends of which were connected to more than a dozen spirit orb sensory users with empty eye sockets.

“Live mapping instrument…” Ye Shuli’s hand, which was covering her birthmark, bulged with veins.

Just as the leader's psionic threads were about to touch them, three golden vertical pupils suddenly opened from the depths of the dark river, and an ancient whisper shook the rock layers, causing them to crumble and fall.

Before the bell shattered completely, Jiang Ye dragged the person into the vortex.

The luminous microorganisms floating in the turbulent current formed a vast star map. Ye Shuli choked on water and saw some familiar topological structures—the geometric shapes of her shadow when it split.

When the two were washed ashore, the island underwent another dimensional shift.

The beach where they lay was melting into a gel-like substance, and a lighthouse made of skulls was slowly rising on the horizon. What rotated at the top of the tower was not fire, but hundreds of compound eyes imprisoned in Klein bottles.

The cold light of the Bone Canyon converged into thin lines behind the two of them.

Ye Shuli leaped up the slope on the water-soaked basalt, and the star map scroll on her wrist suddenly made a ripping sound—the edge of the parchment was carbonizing into ash.

“Thirty-seven seconds.” She ripped the bandage from Jiang Ye’s waist and quickly wrapped it around his burned left arm. “The Soul-Chasing Nails of the Burning Heaven Alliance are dimensionally corrosive.”

Jiang Ye used his teeth to tear open the wax seal of the last half of the antidote pill, swallowing it with his Adam's apple bobbing.

Three bluish-gray claw marks marred his back, yet he still had the strength to poke the melting sand with the hilt of his knife: "Teacher Ye, are the laws of physics just for show here?"

The two looked up at the same time.

The skull lighthouse floating in the air is splitting and reassembling, and hundreds of compound-eye Klein bottles are devouring each other, reflecting countless afterimages of their desperate escape.

Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist, her nails almost digging into his throbbing pulse: "Look at the arrangement of those compound eyes."

On the greyish-white sand, the water trails they dragged out perfectly overlapped with the geometric patterns projected by the lighthouse.

Jiang Ye bent down and grabbed a handful of glowing sand. Phosphorescent light leaked through his fingers, tracing a Möbius strip in the air: "Someone is using our movement trajectories to correct spatial coordinates."

The roar of the underground river suddenly turned muffled.

As Ye Shuli turned around, she stepped on a piece of charred cloth. The runes remaining on the carbonized fabric made her pupils shrink—this was clearly the material of the mysterious visitor's cloak at the auction in Yunlu City three months ago.

“He’s been here.” She tucked the piece of cloth into a hidden pocket close to her body, a sudden sharp pain shooting through the birthmark on her collarbone. “These spatial distortions aren’t naturally occurring.”

Just as Jiang Ye was about to reply, the entire beach suddenly lifted up like a carpet.

The two rolled into the coral reef covered with bony spikes and saw a wriggling black shadow emerging from a spatial fold a hundred meters away.

The moment the twelve pairs of chelicerae tore through the dimensional barrier, a torrential rain of viscous, carrying the smell of sulfur, poured down.

The cursed creature's compound eye array flickered with non-Euclidean geometric light spots, and tiny skulls kept falling from the gaps in its carapace.

Ye Shuli threw out three explosive talismans, and the defensive matrix that appeared in the firelight actually showed a Penrose triangle structure.

"Step back!" Jiang Ye's blade grazed her ear, severing the translucent tentacles that emerged from the void.

The toxin crept up the back of his hand along the pattern on the hilt, instantly covering his entire right arm in frost. "This thing is synchronously replicating our attack patterns!"

The cursed creature emitted a hissing sound similar to the turning of rusty gears.

Ye Shuli was thrown onto the coral reef by the sound waves, and the broken bone spurs on her lower back drew blood from her palm.

She suddenly noticed that the splattered blood droplets were suspended in a Fibonacci spiral, and the skulls on the cursed creature's carapace were rearranging themselves.

"Jiang Ye!" She swung out a tungsten steel cable that wrapped around the boy's waist. "Run towards three o'clock!"

The two ran wildly along the suddenly bulging rock strata.

As Ye Shuli ran, she used her blood to draw a topological model on the rock wall. The moment the cursed creature's third pair of chelicerae pierced the ground, the entire area suddenly underwent a cantor-like spatial collapse.

Jiang Ye coughed up blood and laughed: "You're treating it like a solution to a differential equation?"

"Shut up and watch where you're going!" Ye Shuli dragged him into the suddenly appearing Klein bottle passage.

As the cursed creature tore through dimensions to pursue her, she suddenly slammed the blood-stained notebook onto a spatial node—the superposition of modern fractal geometry and psionic circuits instantly plunged the pursuer into an infinitely recursive microscopic maze.

Before he could catch his breath, Jiang Ye suddenly tackled him to the ground.

Three bone spikes flew past overhead, and the poisonous mist that exploded as they embedded themselves in the rock wall corroded honeycomb-like holes.

The cursed creatures reformed from the ley lines before them, their compound eyes blazing with furious topological flames.

"The law of conservation of energy is a joke here." Jiang Ye wiped the black blood from the corner of his mouth and used his backhand to drive the last three silver darts into his acupoints to forcefully boost his spiritual energy.

Ye Shuli saw that the claw marks on his back had spread to his neck, and suddenly grabbed the hand holding the knife.

The cold, icy blue light emanating from the birthmark enveloped the two of them.

The moment the cursed creature launched its charge, Ye Shuli ripped open her collar to reveal her collarbone—it wasn't a birthmark at all, but a projection of a Klein bottle embedded in her flesh.

"Do you remember the quantum tunneling effect?" She pressed Jiang Ye's blood-stained palm onto the birthmark.

The moment the cursed creature collided with the light barrier, the two transformed into countless probability clouds that passed through the enemy's body, creating spatial ripples as they reassembled ten meters away.

As Jiang Ye's knife pierced the core of the cursed creature's energy, Ye Shuli was drawing Maxwell's equations in the void with a charcoal pencil.

When the last symbol was completed, the flow of psionic energy across the entire island momentarily stopped.

"break!"

The resonant shockwave of modern electromagnetic theory and psionic circuits tore the cursed creature apart into elementary particles.

Jiang Ye staggered and knelt on one knee, his body trembling slightly as he supported himself with the blade, the poison on his back already reaching his heart.

Ye Shuli's trembling hand pressed on his carotid artery, and the cold light of the birthmark and the star map scroll lit up at the same time.

The skull lighthouse that appeared on the scroll suddenly began to rotate in reverse, and hundreds of compound-eyed Klein bottles projected the silhouette of the mysterious visitor—what the person was holding was clearly the Spirit Pearl itself.

A sound of space tearing came from the direction of the underground river, indicating that something was breaking through dimensions to get there.

Ye Shuli suddenly touched a black scale that had slipped out of the hidden compartment of Jiang Ye's belt. The topological runes engraved on it were exactly the same as those on the charred black cloth.