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

Rose petals rained down on the ruins of the bronze altar, and Jiang Ye used his fingertip to wipe away the starlight fragments from Ye Shuli's lips.

The lingering resonance of the mental techniques formed a pale golden cocoon around them, keeping the last few pieces of gear dust out.

“This time we can finally enjoy hot pot in peace—” Jiang Ye’s words were suddenly cut off by Ye Shuli’s hand pressed against his chest.

The icy blue spiritual power unique to the Spirit King realm lingered on her fingertips, and she was currently floating between the two of them in a way that defied fluid dynamics.

"The spacetime curvature parameters are abnormal." Ye Shuli stared at the data stream that made up the Klein bottle projection, sparks flying between modern memories and knowledge from the cultivation world in her pupils. "Someone has tampered with the molar concentration of the stabilizer formula."

Before he finished speaking, twelve bronze chains burst forth from the ground.

The chain, which should have turned into flower petals, was now tinged with an ominous dark red. The moment Jiang Ye tumbled through the air with Ye Shuli in his arms, a black hole emitting white smoke was corroded out of the spot where he had just stood.

Dark purple thunderclouds rapidly gathered in the dome, and the leader of the mysterious force slowly descended the lightning-woven staircase.

He still bore the sword wound from the last battle on his left shoulder, but what flowed from the wound was not blood, but curvature particles similar to those seen by the Guardians.

"Did you really think a Transcendent Realm expert would die in a rain of roses?" The leader caught a petal, watching it melt into blood in his palm. "Thanks to the spacetime folds you created, I was able to successfully capture the afterimage of the distorted spacetime sprite."

Jiang Ye shielded Ye Shuli behind him, and his natal spirit sword emitted a clear and melodious dragon's roar.

The azure spiritual energy of a beginner-level Spirit Master coiled around the sword, but it shattered the moment it collided with the opponent's oppressive aura.

The mysterious leader flicked his fingertips, and three spatial rifts coiled around Jiang Ye's limbs like venomous snakes.

"Get out of the way!" Ye Shuli's warning came a beat too late.

Jiang Ye groaned and knelt on one knee. Spiderweb-like spatial slashes appeared on his left arm, and bright red blood beads floated on the surface of the wound, which were drawn together by some force to form binary code.

The mysterious leader approached, stepping on blood-red codes, the blooming mandalas beneath his feet corroding the bronze floor with scorch marks: "Do you know why I spared your life?"

After repairing the last three spacetime anchor points, we'll still need living sacrifices...

In the instant a cold glint appeared, Ye Shuli held the scalpel-shaped magical artifact against his throat.

The blade glowed with a pale green fluorescence that didn't belong to this world; it was liquid carbon dioxide that she had purified in her alchemy furnace.

"Minus 78.5 degrees Celsius." She twisted the hilt, unleashing a second layer of sharp blade. Dry ice mist, infused with spiritual energy, froze the leader's protective aura. "Do you know why your ancestors always lost to science?" The blade tip precisely pierced the opponent's Tanzhong acupoint. "Supercritical fluids can penetrate any cultivation defense."

The mysterious leader's retreating figure crashed into seven bronze pillars, and Ye Shuli took the opportunity to help Jiang Ye up.

Beneath his blood-stained school uniform jacket, Jiang Ye used his last strength to draw a smiley face on her palm: "Next time... let's try a less invasive rescue plan..."

Spacetime turbulence formed a closed loop in all directions, and Ye Shuli stared at the crimson code that violated the law of conservation of mass and energy.

The memory of the modern laboratory suddenly overlapped with the scene before her eyes—the protection program for the particle collider that she had helped design back then used the Fibonacci sequence to arrange the electromagnetic field.

"Give me ninety seconds." She placed her natal spirit jade into Jiang Ye's blood-stained palm, her fingertips tracing a Cartesian coordinate system on the ground.

The periodic table of elements memorized in the 21st century began to merge with the talismans of the cultivation world, with each spiritual energy node corresponding to a specific atomic number.

The moment the mysterious leader tore through the icy mist, Jiang Ye's sword flashed with an unprecedentedly bright white light.

The boy wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth and laughed arrogantly: "Have you heard of quantum entanglement?" The tip of his sword picked up the hair ribbon that Ye Shuli had left behind. "Guess how many entangled states of spiritual energy are on this?" (To be continued)

The coordinate system that Ye Shuli traced with her fingertips suddenly lit up with a silver-blue light, and the suspended spiritual energy nodes were arranged into a lattice structure according to the periodic table of elements.

The moment the mysterious leader broke free from the ice, the entire bronze altar was suddenly enveloped by a hexagonal energy field, and the curvature of spacetime collapsed under the precise control of the mathematical model.

"Fibonacci sequence superimposed with Maxwell's equations—" Ye Shuli channeled her last bit of spiritual power into the ground, "Welcome to experience the dimensional reduction attack of the 21st century."

The mysterious leader's purple-gold crown suddenly shattered, and he staggered and crashed into the edge of the energy field.

Those meticulously woven spacetime rifts, like earthworms hitting glass, twisted into comical braids within the energy matrix.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Jiang Ye threw out three explosive talismans, with the words "Explosion is art" written in Martian script faintly visible on the talisman paper.

"You ants!" the leader roared, tearing open the jade pendant on his chest. The forbidden runes, as black as ink, crawled up his neck along his veins.

The gravitational parameters of the entire space suddenly became disordered. Dark matter lurking in the spacetime turbulence, like a swarm of sharks smelling blood, attacked the two of them, carrying sharp fragments of spacetime.

Jiang Ye rolled over and shielded Ye Shuli with his body, instantly tearing dozens of bloody gashes across the back of her school uniform.

He bit his tongue and drew a blood symbol on his palm: "Here comes a VIP customer of the Heaven and Earth Bank. Is it too much to ask for some merit and golden light?" The suddenly surging golden barrier barely blocked the second wave of attacks, and the electronic payment QR code that appeared on the surface of the barrier almost caused Ye Shuli to lose her composure.

"At a 45-degree angle to the southwest, Planck's constant shows a fault!" Ye Shuli suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye's wrist.

The moment their palms touched, the spiritual power of quantum entanglement surged through their veins, and the data flow in her eyes resonated with the dragon's roar from Jiang Ye's sword.

Just as the mysterious leader was about to launch the third attack, he suddenly discovered that the rampaging dark matter was canceling each other out.

Ye Shuli guided the repulsive energy nodes to collide with each other, like using a demagnetizer to deal with iron filings, and the dangerous energy tide was dissolved by 70% on its own.

"This is impossible!" The leader's pupils contracted violently. He frantically activated the black star map that appeared on his chest, "The Space-Time Annihilation Array that I've been planning for three hundred years..."

“You overlooked the modulating effect of the Compton wavelength on spiritual power.” Ye Shuli tossed out an icosahedron composed of eighteen jade slips, each face engraved with the Lagrange equation. “And this—” She suddenly grabbed Jiang Ye’s collar and kissed his bloodied lips in the boy’s astonished gaze.

The entangled spiritual energy suddenly erupted, and Jiang Ye's natal spirit sword automatically split into twelve illusory images.

The sword formation precisely blocked all escape routes, following the Pauli exclusion principle. The mysterious leader was horrified to find that he couldn't even move his fingertips.

Finally, what caught his eye was the Klein bottle pattern that Ye Shuli had drawn with a scalpel.

"Goodbye." Jiang Ye pointed his fingers like a sword, piercing the other's mind. The forbidden runes went out section by section, like a faulty neon light tube.

As the leader's body dissipated into pixelated particles, a beam of red light suddenly shot out from the bronze compass at his waist, tearing open a thousand-meter-long spatial rift in the sky.

Just as Ye Shuli was about to check Jiang Ye's injuries, she suddenly felt the person in her arms trembling violently.

The veins at Jiang Ye's temples glowed eerily with a blue light, and fragments of memory flickered in his pupils like static on an old-fashioned television.

He forced a smile, his fingers unconsciously drawing smiley faces repeatedly on the girl's palm.

"Shuli..." the boy's voice suddenly became ethereal, "I think... I've forgotten how to make hot pot dipping sauce..."