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

The bronze countdown reverberated in the space, producing a metallic echo. Ye Shuli was dragged by Jiang Ye and fell into a spatial rift that suddenly opened up.

Countless crystals grazed their ankles and exploded, while the turbulent flow of spacetime condensed into a jagged band of light behind them.

"Head northeast!" Ye Shuli suddenly pressed her hand against the burning bronze pattern behind her ear, where a needle-like stinging pain was coming from.

The fragmented sheepskin scroll she had discovered three days earlier on the ancient battlefield suddenly came to mind; the patterns that had been mistaken for decorative designs perfectly matched the bronze crystal she was looking at now.

Jiang Ye's palm flames surged into the form of a blue phoenix, carrying the two of them as they broke through the crystal cluster encirclement.

The falling, shimmering white dust ignited into eerie blue flames upon touching the wings. Ye Shuli stared at the distorted images within the flames and suddenly clenched her fist: "Old Jiang, there's something wrong with those memory fragments."

She conjured ice crystals at her fingertips and traced molecular structures on the burning tail feathers.

This was a tracking technique she improved upon using modern chemistry after her transmigration. The moment the ice crystals collided with the ghostly blue flames, a bronze star map suddenly appeared in the air.

"The missing hexagram!" Jiang Ye whistled, and the Spirit Flame Azure Phoenix suddenly turned and rushed towards the gap in the star map.

As the turbulent flow of time and space brushed past their backs, Ye Shuli suddenly saw the bronze mask of the memory restoration master flash in the flames—it was the same totem at the end of the parchment scroll from three days ago.

When the Azure Phoenix shattered the seventh crystal, they fell into a circular altar filled with bronze gears.

An old man wearing half a bronze mask was adjusting a floating hourglass device, with twelve bronze chains extending from under his black robe down to the ground.

"A quarter of an hour earlier than expected." The old man's hoarse voice had a grinding quality to it. Behind him floated hundreds of memory crystal spheres, each reflecting the bronze patterns behind Ye Shuli's ears. "Your spiritual roots aren't pure enough to withstand the complete torrent of memories."

Jiang Ye wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and laughed heartlessly: "Grandpa, we'll settle the score for using us as experimental subjects later."

"Just tell me how much spiritual essence you want to extract?" He rolled up his sleeve, revealing his forearm, where the pale blue spiritual patterns of an early-stage spiritualist were faintly visible beneath his skin.

Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed his wrist.

A bronze star map suddenly rose from the altar floor, resonating with the patterns behind her ear.

The moment the stinging pain shot up her temples, she saw a flash of Jiang Ye covered in blood, lying in the lightning tribulation, in the memory crystal.

"If you use spiritual essence as a catalyst, you will never be able to break through to the Spirit Master realm in this lifetime." The chains beneath the old man's black robe suddenly tightened, and the seven hourglasses began to flow backward simultaneously. "Even more cruelly, the restored memories may overwrite your existing knowledge—are you sure what you're trying to retrieve is truly what you want?"

Jiang Ye's fingertips ignited with a blue flame as he pressed them against his heart, but Ye Shuli's icicles suddenly froze his wrist. "It's me who lacks love, not you. What kind of hero are you trying to be?" Her voice was colder than the icicles, yet blood began to seep from the bronze patterns behind her ears. "Can't you live with incomplete memories?"

The altar suddenly trembled violently.

The old man's single eye beneath his mask flashed with surprise. He saw Ye Shuli crush three memory crystals with her bare hands and use ice crystals to draw the catalyst structure in the pool of blood.

The instant the modern chemical formulas overlapped with the bronze star map, three of the twelve chains suddenly unlocked automatically.

“Use my spiritual root as a reaction carrier.” Ye Shuli pressed the ice shard against her neck, the bronze patterns spreading along the ice crystals like circuit board designs. “The special energy fluctuations I brought when I transmigrated are enough to act as a buffer for the flood of memories.”

Jiang Ye suddenly burst out laughing.

His palm was enveloped in azure flames, which encased Ye Shuli's ice shards. The two energies collided and sparked tiny fragments. "Miss Ye, you don't actually think my initial Spirit Master rating is my true level, do you?" Dark golden spirit patterns suddenly appeared on the side of his neck. These were protective auras that only a Spirit Venerable-level expert could activate.

The hourglass in the old man's hand suddenly stopped completely.

Under the astonished gazes of the two, seven bronze chains suddenly bound Jiang Ye's dark gold spirit patterns, and an upside-down spirit root testing tablet appeared on the dome of the altar—Jiang Ye's spiritual light broke straight through the scale line of the Spirit King Realm.

"This seemingly innocent but actually cunning young man has been hiding his true strength well." The old man smiled for the first time, his bronze mask cracking with spiderweb-like patterns as he laughed. "But if you were to use your true power, this girl's modern soul would be shattered instantly."

Ye Shuli's sharp tongue was stuck in her throat.

As she watched the dark gold spirit pattern on Jiang Ye's neck gradually fade, she suddenly realized that his seemingly "coincidental" rescue attempts during each dangerous encounter might have been carefully calculated deceptions.

As the eighth hourglass turned inverted, a roar of temporal turbulence echoed outside the altar.

Jiang Ye toyed with the spirit flame, which had returned to its pale blue color, tilting his head and grinning like a wolfhound that had just stolen some cream: "Teacher Ye, do you remember the movie 'The Butterfly Effect' we watched in modern times?"

Ye Shuli felt an unbearable burning pain on the bronze pattern behind her ear.

She saw a flash of her first encounter with Jiang Ye in the memory crystal. The boy was roasting a sweet potato with spiritual flames—but the cross-section of that sweet potato clearly had the perfect curve that only molecular gastronomy could produce.

(Continued from above)

The grinding of gears suddenly intensified threefold, and the suspended hourglass device began to leak bronze-colored liquid.

The blue flame in Jiang Ye's palm flickered, casting an eerie blue-purple hue on the blood beads seeping from behind Ye Shuli's ear.

"Those burnt spirit beast meats of yours were just a deliberate attempt to cover up the flaws in your molecular control, weren't they?" Ye Shuli suddenly pressed an ice shard against Jiang Ye's throat, her fingertips trembling slightly.

The surface of the ice crystal reflected the scene of the lightning tribulation that kept replaying in the memory crystal. Each time Jiang Ye "luckily" avoided the fatal wound, the location was suspiciously precise.

Jiang Ye's Adam's apple bobbed beneath the ice blade, and dark gold spirit patterns suddenly crept up his neck and onto his cheeks: "When you dissected my roasted sweet potato, didn't you notice the starch caramelization layer was accurate to 0.1 millimeters?" A cluster of azure flame suddenly flicked from his fingertip, outlining a double helix structure between the two of them. "Who do you think altered the star map coordinates of the ancient battlefield?"

The bronze chains of the memory restoration master suddenly snapped.

Seven hourglasses shattered simultaneously, and the splashed molten bronze condensed in the air into countdown numbers—three-quarters of an hour remaining.

"Flirting can wait until reincarnation." The old man's black robe surged with countless bronze gears, enveloping the two in a star map projection. "The torrent of memories and the spiritual energy circuits must be perfectly aligned; even a slight mismatch will turn them into living dead."

Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's collar and kissed him.

Ice crystals and blue flames exploded into tiny specks of light between their lips and teeth. The bronze patterns behind her ears suddenly spread out into a circuit board pattern, precisely enveloping the entangled spiritual roots of the two.

“Eighty-one spiritual energy resonances.” She bit Jiang Ye’s lower lip during a breath, the blood droplet suspending and drawing Maxwell’s equations. “Using my modern energy field as a buffer, and your dark gold spiritual runes as a conductor.”

Jiang Ye chuckled and deepened the kiss by holding the back of her neck, dark gold spirit patterns growing wildly along their touching skin.

As the twelfth spiritual rune wrapped around Ye Shuli's waist, the old man suddenly slapped three bronze gears into their foreheads.

The excruciating pain was more ferocious than the turbulence of time and space.

Ye Shuli saw the scene of her first meeting with Jiang Ye replaying itself—quantum entanglement symbols clearly flickered in the spiritual flames of the boy roasting sweet potatoes, and the sparks that "accidentally" splashed on her skirt all avoided the arteries.

"When did you start...?" Her question was scattered into fragments by the torrent of memories.

The scene of the modern laboratory explosion overlapped with the scene of the lightning tribulation, and Jiang Ye's blood-covered appearance suddenly had a new interpretation—each time he was seriously injured, the location precisely protected the key nodes of her spiritual energy circuit.

Jiang Ye's dark gold spirit patterns were bleeding, yet a cynical smile still lingered on his lips: "Does Miss remember saying that the soul fluctuations of a transmigrator resemble a Klein bottle?" He suddenly ripped open his shirt, revealing a bronze pattern on his chest identical to the one behind Ye Shuli's ear. "I've been waiting for this intersection of spacetime paradoxes."

The old man suddenly lifted the entire altar up from the ground.

Countless bronze gears floated in a Dyson sphere structure, enveloping the two people in the center of an energy vortex.

As Ye Shuli's modern memories began to materialize into a data stream, the dark gold spirit pattern on Jiang Ye's neck suddenly erupted with the pressure of a Spirit King realm expert.

"Catch this energy jump point!" Ye Shuli suddenly plunged an ice crystal into her heart, and the splattered blood droplets formed a Schrödinger equation in the air.

The quantized fragments of memory collided with the bronze star map, creating a flare that shattered the old man's mask completely.

The moment the spacetime turbulence tore open a crack, Jiang Ye, holding Ye Shuli, crashed into the torrent of memories.

They saw the sweet potato stall from the day they first met being reassembled at the quantum level, with each carbonized crack precisely corresponding to a star map coordinate; those "lucky" moments during the tribulation were all traces of Jiang Ye using his Spirit King realm cultivation to withstand the backlash from the Heavenly Dao.

When the last piece of the memory puzzle was put in place, the old man suddenly spat out bronze-colored blood.

All the levitating gears reversed, and mysterious totems they had never seen before appeared on the altar floor—the patterns were exactly the same as the laboratory badge Ye Shuli wore on the day she crossed over.

"Energy overload!" Ye Shuli's scream was swallowed up by the spatial collapse.

She saw Jiang Ye's dark gold spirit patterns begin to quantize, and her modern memories were eroding his spiritual essence.

The old man tried to fix the spacetime coordinates with bronze chains, but all the gears suddenly began to mesh in reverse.

Before completely losing consciousness, Ye Shuli's fingertips touched the bronze patterns on Jiang Ye's chest.

Suddenly, the patterns revealed the curvature engine formula she was calculating before she transmigrated, and amidst the rumbling of the collapsing altar, the faint ticking sound of a modern hospital electrocardiogram monitor could be heard.