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

Jiang Ye flipped his wrist to catch the last falling fragment of the starstone, and the data staircase beneath his feet just as it disintegrated into pale blue light spots.

As Ye Shuli staggered onto solid ground, the countdown timer on her collarbone suddenly emitted the soft chime of a quartz watch winding—the numbers 23:59:59 gleamed with a cold, eerie blue light beneath her skin.

"Looks like the Spirit God bloodline comes with a medical report." Jiang Ye poked her collarbone with the hilt of his sword, and when Ye Shuli slapped his hand away, he suddenly lowered his voice: "The third layer of the southeast canopy, remnants of a Transcendent God's prying gaze."

The newly formed spirit crystal in Ye Shuli's palm was slightly warm.

The malice that emerged from the ruins arrived faster than expected. The shadow beasts raised by the veteran powerhouses were splitting and multiplying in the shadows of the trees 300 meters away, each clone carrying a dark poison that could corrode spiritual veins.

The two tacitly turned into the herbal medicine market in the seventh block.

Jiang Ye suddenly pulled Ye Shuli into the gap of the pawnshop. The damp brick wall shook off the old moss, and the spot where they had been standing was now covered with purplish-black ice crystals—three masked men were jumping down from the roof, with phonographs engraved with "Rumor Bureau" hanging from their waists.

"How about bringing forward the clarification plan?" Jiang Ye used his knee to pry open the hidden door of the pawnshop, and the totem they had seen in Yunlai City three days ago appeared on the bronze door bolt.

Ye Shuli tore off the jade pendant from her neck and threw it at the pursuers. The exploded protective shield turned the entire street amber, and the modern epidemic prevention knowledge sealed in the jade fragments was transforming into antidote spirit patterns.

The stone tablet in the central square of Emerald City is still bleeding.

As Ye Shuli stepped across the cordon, twelve lie detector lamps were simultaneously pointed at her chest, and the sound of blades being drawn immediately rang out from the crowd.

The leader, clad in heavy black iron armor, held up a megaphone and shouted, "How do you explain the evidence that the power of the spirits can cause a reversal of the continent's magnetic poles?"

“Use common sense.” Ye Shuli flicked a cluster of data streams from her fingertips, and a modern geological model spread out in the air. “If my spiritual crystal could truly affect the Earth’s core, the Yunlai River wouldn’t have frozen three days ago—the minus twenty degree Celsius temperature should have already caused the entire riverbed to crack into seven fissures.”

A commotion suddenly broke out in the crowd.

A cultivator wearing a fox mask was stuffing cursed puppets into children's pockets, each puppet bearing Ye Shuli's birth date and time engraved on the back of its neck.

Jiang Ye's sword sheath struck the man's wrist precisely, and the fallen puppet was reassembled by Ye Shuli using chemical formulas into a popular science model, demonstrating the basic principles of magnetic fields.

"Don't touch those puppets!" the woman in red suddenly screamed, slapping away the model fragments that floated in front of her. "My son touched your residual spiritual energy yesterday, and he started coughing up blood this morning!" She pulled out a seven or eight-year-old boy, who indeed had a red mark on his neck that resembled a totem of a spirit.

As Ye Shuli crouched down, twelve spears immediately pressed against her back.

The dark purple hue floating in the boy's pupils reminded her of modern virus microscope images. She pressed her index finger against the red mark for three seconds and indeed touched the residue of a nano-sized poison needle—a hidden weapon that could only be identified with modern medical knowledge.

“Acute urticaria.” She deliberately explained in a way that the ancients could understand, and took out an antidote pill modified from the principle of penicillin. “Have the medicine boy boil perilla leaves in three bowls of water, mix it with this pill, and apply it externally.” As the red marks on the child’s neck faded at a visible speed, the guards holding spears looked at each other and took a half step back.

As dusk fell, Jiang Ye suddenly tugged at Ye Shuli's sleeve.

On the second floor of a teahouse on the west side of the square, a man in a gray robe was rapidly burning letters; the charred ash resembled the bluish smoke characteristic of modern printer ink.

As the last wisp of ash drifted out of the carved window frame, the countdown on Ye Shuli's collarbone suddenly jumped to 23:47:32—thirteen minutes faster than the normal flow rate.

"Looks like someone can't wait to open a new instance." Jiang Ye used the tip of his sword to pick up a piece of paper that hadn't burned completely. The remaining words "Clone Project" gleamed with an eerie metallic luster in the setting sun.

Just as Ye Shuli was about to take a closer look, screams suddenly erupted from all along the street—the Emerald City emblem on all the shop signs had now been transformed into a mirrored projection of her collarbone counting down.

Ye Shuli's fingertips brushed against a withered wisteria vine by the square, and the spiritual crystal shimmered with a warm light in her palm.

The vines, corroded by the dark poison, visibly lost their black spots, their curled leaves unfurled, and in the blink of an eye, three clusters of pale purple flower spikes appeared.

The nearest guard with a spear gasped – he had seen the plant corroded by the poisonous fog with his own eyes that morning.

"A withered tree comes back to life!" The old man selling candy suddenly knelt down, the scars on the back of his hand from the aftershocks of spiritual energy fading away.

The light from the twelve lie-detecting spirit stone lamps softened, making Ye Shuli appear as if shrouded in a thin mist. Several young cultivators put away the hidden weapons they had aimed at her.

The boy in the woman in red suddenly broke free and rubbed the half-eaten piece of malt candy against Ye Shuli's skirt.

As the child tiptoed and slipped the candy into her hand, the countdown projected in the air by the Emerald City emblem skipped exactly 23:32:11, and the blue light around Ye Shuli's neck coated the surface of the malt candy with a layer of starlight.

"Be careful, the sugar will melt and stick to your hands." Jiang Ye hooked the sugar cube with the end of his sword sheath and tossed it to the spirit bird circling the eaves. "Last time you fed the stray cat half a piece of mung bean cake, and I got scratched for three days." A few suppressed laughs came from the crowd, and the three cultivators who were holding spirit-catching nets released the noose.

Suddenly, a glass cup shattered on the second floor of the teahouse.

A rumor-monger wearing a fox mask leaned out from behind the carved fence, and the paper cranes that fell from his sleeves instantly covered half the street: "The blessings of the gods are nothing but a mirage!"

When the blue light fades in three days, Emerald City will be a wasteland!

The wisteria, which had just regained its vitality, suddenly trembled violently, and the newly opened flower spikes fell off in a flurry.

Ye Shuli bent down and caught a petal, her fingertips tracing the broken veins of the leaf as she sneered: "The fake withering made with the Soul-Devouring Gu, the cost of which could buy half of the medicinal herb street, right?" She flicked the petal toward the teahouse window, the Gu worms being burned to ashes by the residual power of the penicillin pill.

Jiang Ye leaped onto the eaves of the teahouse, using the clothesline as a springboard. The tiles swept down by his sword precisely intercepted five paper cranes carrying messages. "Gentlemen," he said, unfolding an account book he'd bought three days prior in Yunlai City, "it takes seven taels of Ghostly Grass to create a Gu worm capable of poisoning half a city, and the market price of Ghostly Grass is—"

"That's more than half a year's salary from the Rumor Bureau," the herbal medicine shop owner suddenly interjected, the poison-testing stone he was holding reflecting the black market mark on the paper crane's wings.

The crowd stirred. The rotten vegetable leaves that were originally meant to be thrown at Ye Shuli were replaced with hemostatic herbs, and several masked men quietly tore off the collars of their clothes embroidered with the Rumor Bureau's mark.

Nine thunderclaps suddenly exploded in the twilight, and the projection of the Emerald City emblem twisted violently into a blood-red vortex.

The old man, clad in Xuan Tian Python scale armor, landed with a thunderous thud, his overwhelming divine power causing cracks to appear on the bluestone slabs of the entire street.

His judge's pen swept across Ye Shuli's collarbone, marking the countdown. The twelve lie-detecting spirit stone lamps exploded into dust.

"Those who contract with the Spirit God must undergo the baptism of divine punishment." Thirty-six Binding God Chains flew out from the old man's sleeve, and the illusory images of all the divine artifacts Ye Shuli had touched in the ruins appeared on the dark gold chains. "Meet me at the Punishment Platform in three hours—unless you can prove that you are not the source of the calamity."

Ye Shuli held down Jiang Ye, who was about to draw his sword, and the spiritual crystal condensed into a deep blue reagent tube between her fingers.

As she displayed the spiritual power model that visualized the principles of modern vaccines in the air, the unburnt paper cranes in the teahouse on the west side suddenly burned to ashes, and the Xuan Tian Python scales on the back of the veteran powerhouse emitted a harsh friction sound.

The countdown projection under the blood moon jumped to 23:15:09, and thunderclouds carrying dark purple lightning began to gather above Xingtian Platform.