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

Jiang Ye swallowed back the metallic taste of blood that was churning in his throat.

As Ye Shuli grabbed his collar and rushed into the tributary of the underground river, the star map scroll pressed against his lower back suddenly became hot. The blood vessels corroded by the toxins felt as if they were pierced by ice shards, and every muscle was screaming for a strike.

"Don't sleep!" Ye Shuli ran her fingertips across the side of his neck, and the blue light from the birthmark enveloped the two of them in a spherical barrier.

The psionic energy flowing from the underground river washed over the rock walls. With a flick of her wrist, she used a charcoal pencil to draw the structure of a Klein bottle in the air, and the black scales that had been peeled off from the cursed creature automatically arranged themselves into a Möbius strip.

When the eighth scale was embedded into the circular array, the entire underground river suddenly dropped vertically at a ninety-degree angle.

The moment the feeling of weightlessness came over her, Jiang Ye grabbed her wrist with his other hand, his calloused thumb pressing precisely on her pulsating radial artery.

The fall lasted for twenty-seven heartbeats.

Before touching the ground, Ye Shuli threw out an electromagnetic barrier that shattered the fluorescent moss covering the ground. In the blue-purple smoke from the exploding spores, the two rolled down in front of a bronze door engraved with topological runes.

"Ouch, ouch, ouch—" Jiang Ye grimaced as he propped himself up, but suddenly fell silent when he saw the star-patterned birthmark peeking out from under Ye Shuli's disheveled clothes.

The star trails flowing with cold light resonated with the patterns on the bronze door, and with each rotation of the hexahedral sealing array, a needle-like pain shot through his heart.

Ye Shuli shook off the wet hair sticking to her forehead and drew an electric field distribution diagram on the surface of the bronze door with a charcoal pencil: "There is an energy collapse point in the seventh vortex of the Kan position. Help me cut off the spiritual energy supply." Before she finished speaking, Jiang Ye's scabbard had already plunged into the crevice of the rock wall. Dark red toxins corroded charred marks along the blade, precisely severing three intersecting spiritual veins.

The bronze door emitted a rumbling sound as gears meshed. Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist: "Southwest 30 degrees, the scroll on your back!" Jiang Ye reflexively pulled out the star map scroll and threw it over, but it was intercepted in mid-air by twelve wind blades that suddenly attacked.

"The Spirit Pearl is mine!" The cultivator leader leaped down from the crack in the dome, and the spiritual energy blast he had gathered in his palm shot straight at Ye Shuli's back.

Jiang Ye spun around and threw a short knife that collided with the psionic blast. The resulting shockwave sent the star map scroll flying to the top of the bronze gate.

Ye Shuli didn't even turn her head. With her left hand maintaining the unsealing spell, she popped out a topological rune nail from a hidden compartment in her belt with her right hand.

The moment the talisman nail pierced the ground, the projections of thirty-six Klein bottles formed a honeycomb barrier, trapping the leader's subsequent seventeen attacks into an infinite loop of spatial folds.

"Three minutes left." Jiang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth; the poison had already spread to his collarbone.

He sat down with his back against the bronze door, looking at Ye Shuli's profile bathed in blue light.

The leaping mathematical symbols were reflected in her pupils, much like the way she looked when he first met her in Moonrise Valley deconstructing the ancient formation—sharp and dazzling, even the taut jawline when she frowned was breathtakingly beautiful.

The sudden burst of intense light from the bronze door was so blinding that people couldn't open their eyes.

As Ye Shuli dragged Jiang Ye into the suddenly opened sealing array, he heard the crisp sound of his ribs breaking.

The moment the spirit pearl floated in the dodecahedral crystal, the spiritual energy concentration in the entire cave surged sevenfold, and the sealing array set up by the cultivator leader was directly vaporized.

"Impossible!" The leader cleaved through the remaining barrier with bloodshot eyes, but was thrown back three meters away from the spirit pearl.

Ye Shuli held the base of the spirit pearl with one hand, and the flowing stardust automatically wove into a DNA double helix structure, perfectly matching the star map in her birthmark.

Jiang Ye's knife suddenly began to vibrate at a high frequency.

He tried to stand up, but found that the energy radiated by the spirit pearl was repairing his festering meridians.

As the toxins transformed into black mist and seeped out from his pores, he saw the newly emerging topological patterns behind Ye Shuli's ears—exactly the same as the skull lighthouse rotating in reverse on the star map scroll.

The cave suddenly fell into absolute silence.

The moment the core of the Spirit Pearl collapsed into a singularity, all sound was swallowed up.

Ye Shuli suddenly turned her head to look at the exit of the underground river, where a curtain of water that should have fallen vertically was now frozen into an ice crystal matrix, defying the laws of gravity.

Amidst the countless reflections of light and shadow refracted by the ice crystals, the mysterious visitor wearing a bronze Nuo mask raises his right hand.

The spirit pearl embedded in the second joint of his index finger resonated with the projection in Ye Shuli's hand, creating a quantum-entangled resonance.

The ripples radiated by the spirit pearl form standing waves in the ice crystal matrix.

The mysterious visitor's Nuo mask cracked with spiderweb-like patterns, and Ye Shuli suddenly realized that the refracted light and shadow contained hexadecimal codes—which belonged to the same algorithm as the star map in her birthmark.

“Fermat’s spiral trajectory.” She suddenly gripped the base of the spirit orb, her fingertips drawing a golden ratio angle in the double helix of star sand.

Jiang Ye's scabbard suddenly emitted a buzzing sound, and the spiritual pearl projected a holographic sand table onto the bronze door, showing that the underground spiritual veins of the entire island all pointed to a certain coordinate in the southwest sea area.

The mysterious visitor's laughter was accompanied by metallic resonance: "Miss Ye should thank me. Without those altered ancient scrolls..." He raised his hand and tore open the solidified water curtain, revealing hundreds of rotating black hole models within the ice crystal matrix. "Why would you obediently activate the topological key of the Spirit Orb for me?"

Jiang Ye's pupils suddenly contracted.

He finally saw clearly the skull beacon etched on the surface of the other person's index finger spirit orb, which perfectly matched the reversed totem they had previously discovered in the cursed creature's lair.

Ye Shuli felt a sudden burning pain on the star-patterned birthmark on the back of her neck—those so-called family-inherited ancient books on breaking formations had actually been implanted with a inducement program.

“The law of conservation of energy.” Ye Shuli suddenly drew Bernoulli’s equation in the air with a charcoal pencil. “You deliberately used the Klein bottle structure to mislead space folding, actually to cover up the real energy cycle gap of the Spirit Pearl.” The Spirit Pearl in her palm suddenly split into twelve phantoms, each of which moved along a Möbius strip of a different phase.

The mysterious visitor's mask shattered completely, revealing a cyborg face covered in electronic circuits.

Jiang Ye's blade suddenly changed direction and pierced the ground, the psionic energy flowing back from the dark river forming a Tesla coil along the blade.

When the thirteenth phantom of the spirit orb passed through the gap in the cantor set of the opponent's energy field, the entire cave resounded with a high-frequency resonance shriek.

"Now!" Ye Shuli dragged Jiang Ye into the singularity of the Klein bottle.

The instant the physical and illusory forms of the Spirit Orb complete the Pauli exclusion principle, the skull lighthouse on the mysterious visitor's mechanical arm suddenly rotates in reverse.

The curse codes he had hidden erupted from the energy gap, instead binding his own quantum spirit.

Jiang Ye coughed up blood and threw out the star map scroll, the dark red toxin condensing into non-Euclidean geometric chains in the air.

Ye Shuli pressed the spirit pearl into the singularity point of the bronze gate's topological pattern, and the entire sealing array suddenly unfolded into a four-dimensional hypercube structure.

The mysterious visitor roared in a synthesized electronic voice, his mechanical body being devoured by the curse he himself had unleashed, turning into a Hilbert curve.

When the seventh spatial fold was completed, the Klein blue light erupting from the Spirit Orb core engulfed all the abnormal energy.

Ye Shuli dragged Jiang Ye into the suddenly appearing wormhole. The last thing they saw was the mysterious visitor being compressed into a two-dimensional Poincaré regression model.

The fluorescent moss at the outlet of the underground river suddenly went out.

Ye Shuli knelt on the beach, panting heavily. The Spirit Pearl in her palm was in an unstable binary system state.

Jiang Ye used the broken knife to support himself as he approached to observe, and discovered that the DNA chains composed of stardust were replicating some unknown base pairs.

"The passage he mentioned..." Jiang Ye suddenly used the tip of his knife to lift the skull lighthouse projection that appeared on the surface of the spirit orb, "...and the ancient teleportation array you repaired in Moonrise Valley..."

Twelve waterspouts suddenly rose from the sea level.

The star map in Ye Shuli's birthmark was automatically projected into the air, forming a sixty-four hexagram array with the topological patterns released by the spirit pearl.

As the third vortex in the Kan position began to rotate in reverse, the two simultaneously felt an unusual vibration coming from the depths of the continental shelf—like some colossal creature that had been sleeping for millennia adjusting its breathing frequency.

The spirit pearl suddenly floated up to a height of three meters on its own, and the double-helix star sand split into two entangled energy streams.

Ye Shuli discovers that her birthmark is starting to draw a map of an unfamiliar star field, while the dark red toxin on Jiang Ye's broken sword is gradually fading into an eerie Klein blue.

Behind them, in the lingering mist, an energy ripple not belonging to this dimension was quietly spreading below the horizon.