Start with the hidden role of the Great Emperor of Fengdu, and immediately unleash 100,000 Yin Soldi

Under the shadow of the withered tree, Chu Jiang closed the panel.

White Soul Points increased by 173, Blue Soul Points increased by 14.

This was a good deal.

He stepped out of the darkness.

The cloak's concealment effect automatically dissipates when the user approaches a target, and the night wind lifts a corner of the hood. Chu Jiang walked to Shen Qingyi's side and stopped.

His gaze swept over her right arm.

Where her sleeve was torn, the Shadow Wolf's claws left three deep, bone-revealing lacerations, and blood was still seeping out, soaking the strips of cloth wrapped around her into a deep red.

The bleeding hasn't stopped; it's just flowing slowly.

Chu Jiang squatted down.

He took his backpack off his shoulder, opened the side pocket, and pulled out a small glass bottle about the size of a thumb.

In the afternoon, while buying Blood Jade Lingzhi at the underground shop in Qingzhou, I also casually spent 300 yuan to buy a low-level recovery potion, which I originally intended to keep for emergency use.

With a flick of the thumb, the cork pops open.

The red liquid glowed faintly in the moonlight.

Chu Jiang tilted the bottle with one hand and poured half a bottle of medicine evenly onto the three wounds on Shen Qingyi's right arm.

The red liquid made a slight hissing sound when it came into contact with the exposed muscle tissue, and the blood at the edge of the wound immediately clotted.

Chu Jiang placed the remaining half bottle beside Shen Qingyi's muddy hands, the bottle resting against her fingertips.

stand up.

He had just straightened up—

Shen Qingyi's eyes snapped open.

The burning pain of the medicine seeping into the wound felt like a red-hot wire piercing her from her forearm all the way to her shoulder blade, forcibly pulling her out of the darkness.

Combat instincts precede conscious thought.

She suddenly grabbed the ice-blue longsword that had slipped to the side with her right hand. The remaining frost on the blade was activated at that moment, and a cold wind arose.

The sword tip, like a venomous snake's tongue, aimed straight at the throat of the crouching figure in front of him.

The sword tip stopped less than three inches from Chu Jiang's Adam's apple, and the icy chill made a few stray hairs on his chin sway slightly.

Chu Jiang did not move.

He didn't even blink.

The cold moonlight shone through the gaps in the clouds, illuminating his face.

Shen Qingyi's pupils suddenly contracted.

Chujiang.

An F-rank Soul Guide, with an assessment score of 742, is the name that everyone is talking about, mocking, and questioning.

The hand holding the sword froze in mid-air.

Her gaze passed over Chu Jiang's shoulder and landed on the wilderness behind him.

Under the moonlight, dozens of monster corpses lay scattered on the ground.

The two elite demonic apes, several fanged beasts, abyssal lizards, and mutated ironback wolves all remained motionless, maintaining the posture they had taken in their last moments before death.

There were no knife wounds, no burn marks, and no signs of freezing.

Its fur was intact, its bones were complete, its mouth was open, and its eyes were wide open.

He died silently.

The last image before Shen Qingyi fainted flashed through her mind—a field of vision filled with ghostly blue phantoms, moving silently through the herd of beasts, the Soul-Hooking Spear slashing down, pulling out soul orbs one by one.

My breathing stopped for a beat.

Many questions came to mind.

What are those dark blue shadows?

How could an F-rank Soul Guide possess such power?

What is your true level of strength?

But Shen Qingyi didn't ask a single question.

She slowly lowered her longsword, the tip touching the ground.

His gaze shifted from the corpse to the half-empty bottle of red potion still glowing in his hand.

She picked up the medicine bottle.

"Thanks."

Two words, spoken softly and hoarsely, but steadily.

There were no follow-up questions, no probing, and no superfluous expressions.

Chu Jiang glanced at her.

On the day of his job change, he was the only one who didn't speak amidst the jeers and mockery.

I almost died from the fists of an elite demonic ape today. When I woke up, my first reaction was to draw my sword instead of screaming.

With inexplicable and bizarre deaths scattered all around her, she chose to remain silent.

A smart person.

Chu Jiang nodded slightly in response.

Shen Qingyi leaned against the broken cement barrier, used her teeth to bite open a new strip of cloth, and wrapped it around the wound on her right arm with swift movements.

Chu Jiang turned around and walked towards the outer edge of the battlefield.

He seemed to be casually surveying the dead monsters on the ground, his steps unhurried, occasionally pausing for a second or two next to a corpse.

In fact, his mental energy was sweeping across every inch of the ground at an extremely fine frequency.

The faint, ghostly aura left behind by the retreating ghost soldiers was finer than a spider's silk, and ordinary people could not perceive it at all.

However, the military's high-level spiritual energy detectors are not ordinary. He had already experienced Pei Hu's cunning once, and he couldn't leave any evidence against him.

The scent was gradually erased.

Chu Jiang stopped when he moved to the area where Shen Qingyi had previously used the "Frost Seal Formation".

The ground in this area was covered with a layer of frost, most of which had melted, leaving only a few pieces of ice hanging on the monster's limbs, gleaming with a dim blue-white luster under the moonlight.

Chu Jiang raised his toes and gently kicked away a piece of ice that was wrapped around the leg of a fanged beast.

The ice shattered.

The moment it shattered, a chill ran up my toes.

It's not cold.

Chu Jiang stopped in his tracks.

The chill had no temperature sensation. It wasn't piercing, it didn't numb, and it wasn't a physical low-temperature reaction.

It penetrated directly through the skin, muscles, and bones, sinking deeper into the body.

The spiritual level.

A desolate, lifeless feeling, as if all sound and emotion had been drained away, seeped from the broken ice.

Chu Jiang squatted down.

He lowered his head, his gaze piercing through the surface of the broken ice.

The soul guide's perception of the soul was operating at full capacity.

Beneath the ice, the muscles in the Razortooth's legs were frozen to a bluish-gray color, which was normal.

But between the muscle fibers, those vital pathways invisible to the naked eye—every single one of them was frozen.

It wasn't frozen inside.

The veins themselves were frozen and cracked.

Fine, spreading ice cracks, radiating outwards from the inside, covered every vein of the soul, completely solidifying them into a semi-transparent state of nothingness.

The soul is frozen.

Chu Jiang's pupils contracted slightly.

The Ice Seal Technique of an A-Rank Ice Awakener only affects the material level.

Freezing muscles, freezing blood, freezing bones—even at its strongest, it's still only the limit of the physical layer.

The freezing of the soul is a completely different realm.

He went through almost all the textbooks for the three years of theory courses and only found a similar record in a restricted-level book called "The Secret Scroll of the Abyss".

The subject of that record was not any known Awakened profession.

Chu Jiang condensed a wisp of Netherworld power at the tip of his right index finger.

Extremely faint. So pure that there is not a trace of impurity.

Fingertips touch the remaining ice.

There was no rejection.

There is no energy conflict.

There was no aggressive feedback.

The Fengdu Emperor's authority, which had been dormant within him for twenty days, suddenly jolted.

It's not a warning, it's not sensing a threat.

It's resonance.

Chu Jiang had only experienced that feeling in two scenarios—once at the moment the Blood Moon descended on the day of awakening, and once at the instant the projection of the Book of Life and Death appeared in the Wasteland of Bones.

The pulsation of authority spread upwards from the very foundation of the soul, surged to the top of the head, then fell back down, surging through the depths of the chest.

At the same moment, a voice resounded from the depths of his soul.

This is not a system notification sound.

It's the sound of water.

The sound of flowing water is extremely subtle, slow, and seems to have been flowing continuously since time immemorial.

The water flowed neither fast nor slow, but each drop carried a desolate feeling that could sink memories, emotions, and will to the bottom of the river.

River of Oblivion.

Volume 7 of The Abyss Scrolls, in the chapter "The Ancient Underworld: Core Waters," describes a river that runs through the entire underworld.

Forget Chuanhe.

The dead forget their past lives when they cross the river, while the living lose their senses when they touch the water.

River water itself has no temperature or form; its essence is the absolute freezing and stripping away of "soul memories".

Chu Jiang suddenly turned his head.

His gaze pierced through the twenty-meter distance and landed on Shen Qingyi, who was leaning against the guardrail bandaging her wound.

The moonlight shone on half of her profile; her eyelashes drooped as she intently bit the end of the strip of cloth with her teeth.

Rank A Ice Spirit Swordsman.

The evaluation of the job change stone.

Just like his "F-rank Soul Guide".

Shen Qingyi noticed that gaze.

She paused for a moment, turned her head, and met Chu Jiang's gaze.

That gaze was different from before. Before, it was indifferent, a fleeting glance.

Now it carries a certain depth that she cannot fathom, as if it is looking through her skin and bones to see something deeper.

Shen Qingyi's back straightened slightly, and her right hand unconsciously tightened its grip on the sword hilt.

Not hostile, but wary.

She didn't ask any questions, but simply looked back quietly.

Their eyes met for less than two seconds in the darkness.

Chu Jiang withdrew his gaze.

The Netherworld power at his fingertips withdrew into his body. Without the stimulation of the Netherworld power, the broken ice cracked rapidly, shattered into water stains, and seeped into the soil.

It's just an ordinary puddle of water, nothing special.

In the distance, towards the main defensive line in the east of the city, another high-frequency energy explosion resounded, and an orange-red beam of light shot into the sky, illuminating half of the sky.

Chu Jiang stood up.

"The surrounding area is still dangerous, take care of yourself."

The voice wasn't loud, and the tone was no different from saying "The weather is nice today."

After saying that, he pulled his cloak hood tighter, turned and strode toward the wilderness on the other side.

Soon, Chu Jiang's figure disappeared into the night, vanishing completely.

Shen Qingyi gripped her sword, leaned against the barrier, and stared into the direction where he had disappeared, her gaze lingering for a long time.

The warmth of the medicine lingered on the wound on his right arm, alternating with the cold of the night wind as it seeped into his skin.

She glanced down at the half-empty bottle of medicine beside her, then looked up at the desolate wilderness.

Shen Qingyi stuffed the medicine into her pocket, slowly stood up while holding onto the barrier, and headed back towards Jiangcheng No. 1 Middle School.