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

The bluish-gray energy ripples left burn marks on her retina, and Ye Shuli's hearing was the first thing she regained.

The sound of liquid metal colliding leaped on her eardrums. She curled up in some kind of gelatinous protective layer, and the phoenix mark burned a diamond-shaped red mark below her collarbone.

Jiang Ye's tactical suspender buckle was digging into her shoulder blade, and the two of them floated in the air like insects encased in amber.

"Breathing rate increased by forty percent." Jiang Ye's tactical goggles flashed with data as he fumbled for the emergency oxygen canister at his waist. "The air here contains seven unknown energy particles—"

"Shut up." Ye Shuli bit her tongue to stay awake, and the phoenix feather condensed into a hexagonal prism in her palm.

The mirror reflects a 360-degree panoramic view: countless bronze symbols are suspended in the liquid space, each of them undergoing Brownian motion.

She suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's hand, which was about to touch the runes, "These are the equations for the orbits of a collapsed star."

Jiang Ye's tactical gloves stopped half an inch from the distance symbol, and the cuff detector emitted a blinding red light.

The energy readings spiked simultaneously in the two people's tactical goggles. Ye Shuli suddenly kicked a symbol on the left that was expanding, and Phoenix True Fire burned a charred trail along the sole of her boot.

The struck symbol suddenly collapsed into a cluster of crystals, revealing a winding, glowing tunnel behind it.

"How did you find it?" Jiang Ye used his tactical dagger to cut off a piece of crystal to use as a road sign.

“Modern probabilistic cloud model.” Ye Shuli pressed the hexagonal prism against the corridor wall, and the mirror reflected seven shimmering energy nodes. “The water ripples at the nine o’clock position have a 0.3-second delay, indicating that there are spatial folds there.” She suddenly ripped open Jiang Ye’s tactical backpack, pulled out a spare energy bar, and threw it at the floating ice crystal at the three o’clock position.

The moment the ice crystals engulfed the energy bar, the entire tunnel suddenly flipped ninety degrees.

Jiang Ye swung out his grappling hook and wrapped it around Ye Shuli's waist. The magnetic attachment on the sole of his tactical boots sparked blue-purple as it rubbed against the ground.

The two slid along the wall that suddenly turned into the ground, and a honeycomb-shaped energy barrier suddenly appeared in front of them.

"The pressure change point is to your right rear." Ye Shuli suddenly ripped open her collar, and the phoenix mark twisted their spiritual energy into a drill shape. "Three, two, one!"

The moment the golden spiritual drill made contact with the barrier, the honeycomb structure suddenly collapsed into a ring.

Jiang Ye threw out three locating darts that embedded themselves into the edge of the ring, and the tactical goggles immediately constructed a three-dimensional escape route.

As the two filed out of the still-shrinking ring, Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye by the back of the neck and threw him to the right.

The dark purple energy arrow grazed the tactical backpack and struck the ground, corroding a crater two meters in diameter.

The Void Explorer's robes fluttered in the turbulent energy, and lingering poisonous mist remained on his fingertips: "He actually managed to dodge my Void Arrow."

Ye Shuli wiped the blood from the corner of her mouth and stood up. The hexagonal prism split into twelve shields in her palm: "The energy ripples you create when you move are three times louder than Jiang Ye's tactical belt." The twelve shields suddenly formed a polyhedron, deflecting the incoming poison arrows back towards the launcher.

The Void Explorer waved his sleeve to disperse his attack, his boots shattering two floating crystals: "Interesting, but how many layers of disguise can you see through?" His figure suddenly split into seven illusions, each chanting a spell of a different attribute.

The ice cone and fireball collided in the liquid space, creating a cloud of steam, and the thunderstorm condensed into a vortex above their heads.

Jiang Ye suddenly pulled out a metal box and smashed it on the ground. Forty tactical steel balls inside the box exploded in an umbrella shape.

Each steel ball carried a trace of Phoenix True Fire, burning through the steam cloud with penetrating holes. "The third one in the southeast corner!" Before his roar had even faded, Ye Shuli's phoenix feather had already pierced the illusion's throat—but it only shattered a substitute crystal.

The real sneak attack came from directly below.

The Void Explorer's palm pierced through the liquid ground, its poisoned fingernails only half an inch away from Ye Shuli's ankle.

Jiang Ye's tactical grappling hook suddenly wrapped around the enemy's wrist, and the psionic pulse device built into the hook burst out with a bright light.

Taking advantage of the opponent's brief moment of stiffness, Ye Shuli inserted the hexagonal prism into the liquid ground, and the mirror reflected the enemy's true form hidden in the shadows.

"Got you." Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye and pulled him into a backflip.

Suddenly, a cage made of phoenix fire rose up where the two had been standing, and a piece of the Void Explorer's sleeve was scorched.

He squinted at Ye Shuli's still bleeding right hand, his expression suddenly changing to one of realization: "You're using pain to maintain your spatial awareness?"

Ye Shuli held the blood-stained phoenix feather across her chest, and the twelve shields reassembled into a defensive formation.

Jiang Ye silently adjusted the psionic energy reserves in his tactical belt, and a green signal indicating readiness flashed on the edge of his goggles.

The liquid space suddenly began to vibrate at a high frequency, and a crisp sound like shattering glass came from afar.

"An energy storm is coming." The Void Explorer suddenly withdrew from his attack stance, and the seven illusions merged into a single entity. "How about we call a truce for now?" He flicked a fragment of a star map from his fingertip. "I know three escape routes."

Ye Shuli used a hexagonal prism to refract the star map projection, and suddenly sneered: "Each passage hides three killing formations." She seemingly casually took half a step, and her boot heel landed precisely on a rotating bronze symbol.

Suddenly, spatial coordinate correction data flashed in Jiang Ye's tactical goggles. He pretended to check his equipment but actually adjusted the frequency of his psionic shield.

As the Void Explorer glanced at the energy vortex in the southeast for the fifth time, Ye Shuli made a tactical hand gesture to Jiang Ye with her left hand hanging at her side.

The Phoenix True Fire burned scorch marks along the symbols she stepped on, and the entire liquid space suddenly emitted a grinding sound like gears jamming.

(Continued from above)

Ye Shuli's staggering gait as she retreated caused the Void Explorer's pupils to shrink slightly.

The Void Chains hidden in his sleeve shot towards the liquid ground, only to be suddenly frozen three inches from the girl's ankles—the Frosty Jade Beads that popped out from Jiang Ye's tactical belt were emitting eerie white steam.

"You deliberately disrupted the spiritual energy three times." Jiang Ye used his tactical dagger to cut open the bandage on his right arm, the blood seeping into the Phoenix True Fire and bursting with a golden-red halo. "Just to make him believe that we only have 30% of our fighting strength left?"

Ye Shuli wiped away the blood from her nose, and the hexagonal prism fragments reassembled into a spear in her palm: "He touches the ring on his left pinky before each killing formation." The spear tip suddenly pierced into a rotating bronze symbol on the right side, and the liquid space immediately echoed with the grinding sound of gears jamming.

Before the seventh illusion of the Void Explorer could take shape, it twisted into a spot of light, and its true form staggered out of the energy vortex.

The phoenix spear, imbued with a trajectory of modern fluid dynamics, pierced towards the enemy's throat, only to be blocked at the last inch by the void shield.

Ye Shuli suddenly released the gun handle, letting the weapon be shredded into starlight by the energy field—those fragments automatically adhered to the weak points of the enemy's protective aura, forming three hundred micro-explosion points.

"Now!" Jiang Ye threw out a psionic storm grenade, which exploded at the same time as the detonation point.

The protective aura of the Void Explorer cracked for 0.7 seconds, and Ye Shuli's right palm, which had been gathering power, passed through the barrier. The heart pattern on her palm lit up with DNA chain-like light patterns—this was a sealing technique she modified using modern gene coding principles.

Dark purple blood mist gushed from the enemy's shoulder blades, and the Void Explorer was forced to retreat thirty meters, crashing into seven crystal pillars.

The elegant mask on his face finally shattered, revealing a mechanical gear-shaped pupil in his left eye: "How dare you..."

The liquid space suddenly collapsed into a black sphere, and the protective layer of Jiang Ye's tactical goggles was instantly scratched by the energy turbulence.

Ye Shuli felt as if a ton of pressure was crushing her spine, and the phoenix mark under her skin smelled burnt.

Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of sparks flying from Jiang Ye's tactical backpack and suddenly remembered how stupid he had been three days ago when they were repairing their equipment at the supply station, using a psionic welding torch to roast sweet potatoes for himself.

"The energy tide from Southwest District 11 will arrive in five seconds!" Jiang Ye suddenly used his tactical grappling hook to wrap around her waist, and the two of them used gravity to flip over and barely avoid the spatial rift.

While in a state of weightlessness, Ye Shuli bit her fingertip and used the blood droplet to draw the Pascal's Triangle model in the air—an astrological technique she modified by combining modern mathematics.

The blood droplets suddenly gathered toward a bronze symbol that was rotating counterclockwise.

Ye Shuli's pupils shrank: "There's a 0.03-second spiritual energy vacuum there!" Phoenix True Fire burned into a drill along the clasped palms of the two, and Jiang Ye simultaneously activated the boosters of his tactical boots.

The dual acceleration transformed them into crimson-gold meteors, while the rain of void arrows chasing behind them was swallowed up by the sudden distortion of space.

Amidst the roar of the Void Explorers, Ye Shuli suddenly slammed the hexagonal prism into Jiang Ye's back.

The mirror reflects seven layers of composite protective shield, barely blocking the enemy's final self-destruct attack.

The moment the shockwave from the explosion propelled them into the spatial rift, Jiang Ye suddenly pulled out a miniature oxygen mask and placed it over her face.

The chaotic turbulence lasted for what seemed like an entire century.

The first thing Ye Shuli regained was her sense of smell—a fishy smell, like a mixture of amber and rust, entered her nasal cavity.

When she opened her eyes, she found the two of them kneeling on a bronze-colored moss-covered ground, surrounded by countless fist-sized glowing jellyfish.

"Tactical goggles damaged 82%, psionic reserves 17%." Jiang Ye ripped off his smoking tactical glove, revealing his burned hand. "But I found three hemostatic herbs—should I chew them up and apply them as a poultice, or…"

Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed the back of his neck and rolled him to the right.

Dark red vines suddenly rose from where they had been standing, and the sap dripping from the tips of the vines corroded honeycomb-like holes.

As Jiang Ye swung his grappling hook to entangle the stalactite above his head and swung Ye Shuli to a safe area, his tactical belt suddenly began to vibrate at an abnormal frequency.

Fluorescent blue liquid was seeping from the rock wall at the twelve o'clock position, and this liquid condensed in the air to form the scene of their battle.

When the screen showed Ye Shuli activating the sealing technique, the liquid suddenly boiled and formed warning text: Those who spy will die.

"Holographic projection? Quantum memory material?" Ye Shuli used a phoenix feather to pick up a drop of liquid and found that it turned into solid crystal the moment it came into contact with spiritual power.

Jiang Ye suddenly used his tactical dagger to pick up a piece of moss: "The veins of these bronze-colored plants... are exactly the same as the pattern on the Void Explorer's robe."

A suppressed rumbling sound came from underground, and the moss beneath their feet suddenly began to grow in reverse.

Ye Shuli pulled Jiang Ye onto the floating glowing jellyfish and discovered that these creatures were all wrapped in miniature star maps.

As the seventh jellyfish swept overhead, Jiang Ye suddenly reached out and punctured its air sac—the bursting fluorescent powder formed a broken Bagua (Eight Trigrams) array in the air.

"The Kan position is missing a corner, and the Zhen position has two lines." Ye Shuli used her blood to complete the hexagram in her palm, and suddenly a bottomless crack appeared in the ground.

In the instant of their fall, Jiang Ye threw out his last three locating darts, which embedded themselves in the rock wall. As the two slid down the steel cable into the depths of the earth, they saw countless bronze coffins embedded in the rock strata.

The lid of the top coffin suddenly slid open, revealing a mummified corpse inside wearing the same robe as the Void Explorer.

Ye Shuli noticed that all the corpses' left pinky rings were flashing with the same frequency of blue light. Suddenly, she grabbed Jiang Ye and slammed them through the fragile rock layer on the right: "These are clones! The energy resonance is about to begin!"

As they tumbled into the cave filled with fluorescent mushrooms, a series of explosions roared behind them.

Jiang Ye used his tactical vest to protect Ye Shuli's head, while his own back slammed heavily against the stalactites.

The blood splattered on the mushrooms caused these creatures to begin playing fragments of their childhood memories.

"Don't look!" Ye Shuli waved her sleeve and burned down the entire mushroom forest. The burning spores formed a picture in the air of Jiang Ye being seriously injured and on the verge of death.

She suddenly realized that every grain of dust here stored memory data, and the rings of the translucent giant tree in the distance contained the entire process of their battle with the Void Explorers.

Suddenly, the roots of the giant tree burst out of the ground, and Jiang Ye rolled into the tree hole with Ye Shuli in his arms to hide.

The resin seeping from the cracks in their growth rings enveloped them in an amber-like form. Before suffocating, Ye Shuli used Phoenix True Fire to burn out breathing holes.

Through the translucent resin layer, she saw a bronze compass suspended deep within the tree's heart—inlaid in the center of the compass was the half of the jade pendant her mother had held before her death.

"Jiang Ye." Her voice trembled without her even realizing it, "Help me maintain my spiritual energy stability for three seconds." As the Phoenix True Fire burned a human-shaped gap along the resin, the entire tree's rings suddenly began to reverse.

The moment Ye Shuli grasped the compass, countless streams of memory data surged into her brain through her fingertips.

The final shot is of a cliff under a starry sky.

I am wearing a modern hoodie and my mother in ancient costume. We stand back to back, each holding half of a jade pendant.

Just as she was trying to see her mother's face clearly, the compass suddenly erupted with a wave of resisting energy, ejecting her and Jiang Ye from the tree hole.

They crashed onto the mudflats covered in bone meal, and before them appeared a bronze gate illuminated by the moonlight.

The door was embossed with phoenix and dragon patterns, but gray mist, like modern car exhaust, seeped out from the gaps.

Ye Shuli touched the jade pendant around her neck that had suddenly become hot and found that it fit perfectly into the groove on the door.

"Want to gamble?" Jiang Ye wiped the spore residue off his tactical dagger. "The smell coming from behind this door..." He twitched his nose. "It smells like the last time you burned the kitchen while cooking instant noodles."

The moment Ye Shuli pressed the jade pendant into the groove, the gray mist overflowing from the door crack suddenly condensed into a phantom image of a car dashboard.

The speedometer needle swung wildly, and the smell of gasoline mixed with the turbulent flow of spiritual energy slapped against my face.

As the bronze door emitted a roar like a subway train entering a station, she suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's hand, which was preparing to detonate the explosive device.

"Wait." Blood was seeping from the phoenix mark beneath her collarbone. "This door is mimicking my deepest memories—"

Before the words were finished, countless pale arms made of data streams suddenly stretched out from inside the door.