I'll make you the furnace and the cauldron, so you can refine Yin and Yang and prove the Great

Ye Feiyan did indeed enter the sea.

On the day she escaped into the endless sea, she silently counted a number in her heart: three months and ten days.

She had never been so miserable in her life, with everything going smoothly under her nose. The blood and dirt under her fingernails had been replaced time and time again, her high bun had long since fallen apart, and her bright red palace dress had been torn to shreds by the strong wind. Only in her peach blossom eyes did a light still burn that refused to go out.

Her savings are almost gone.

The Blood Escape Talisman only had half its power left, and her spirit stones were almost gone—she crushed her last few high-grade spirit stones on the ninetieth day, exchanging them for a rapid escape. Now, all she had left was one last thing: the Blood River Teleportation Talisman bestowed upon her by the sect leader.

She wouldn't use it unless she was absolutely desperate.

And the dead end lay three hundred miles behind them.

That bitch is still chasing him. Even though he was so badly injured, she chased him for over three months, and she's still going.

Ye Feiyan gritted her teeth, lowered her body to an extremely low position, and skimmed along the hundred-foot-high black waves, soaring into the sky above the endless sea.

The waters of the Endless Sea are not blue, but a deep, inky black, so black it seems to swallow the light. No reflection of the sun, moon, or stars can be seen on its surface; only a layer of grayish-white mist drifts along the waves. Even more deadly is divine sense—a Void Refinement cultivator's divine sense, capable of covering thousands of miles, is like probing into a pot of boiling lead when it enters this sea; it's viscous, scorching, and beyond a hundred feet lies only chaos.

But Ye Feiyan dared not dive down. She couldn't afford to mess with those things in the deep sea, nor did she have the strength to do so.

She could only fly close to the sea surface. She dared not fly too high—the clouds above were shrouded in fierce winds; she dared not fly too low—the gaping maws of sea monsters might emerge from the waves at any moment. With her cultivation level, she was not afraid of ordinary demonic beasts, but that would waste her time.

She flew close to the narrow gap between the sea and the sky, like a fish swimming along a knife's edge.

She flew day and night, and the further north she went, the fiercer the sea became.

The waves surged from a hundred feet to several hundred feet, and amidst the roar, a fine, sharp clang, like metal clashing, gradually emerged. The gale, carrying salty, fishy vapor, lashed her face like countless whips dipped in salt water. Her protective aura had long since thinned to the point of being as flimsy as a sheet of paper, clinging to life by sheer willpower.

And on the horizon, a white line appeared out of nowhere.

The white line was extremely faint and thin, like a layer of mist blown away by the wind, stretching across the east and west, with no end in sight.

Ye Feiyan's heart skipped a beat after just one glance.

She recognized the thing.

Those are the sword-qi ravines of the Endless Sea. Legend has it that a peerless master once cleaved the Central Continent in two with a single sword strike, and the lingering sword intent has not dissipated for thousands of years.

Now, this ravine of sword energy is her way out.

A light rekindled in Ye Feiyan's eyes. No matter how closely Luo Hongying pursued her, would she dare enter that sword aura? If she could just pass through, reach the other side of the sword aura, this vast black sea would erase all traces of her. Then, no matter how vast the world, no one else would be able to find her.

Seven days after she entered the sea, a storm came.

A black wall of clouds rolled in from the north, its waves towering hundreds of feet high, and the gale-force winds churning the void like countless blunt knives. Ye Feiyan hovered on the edge of the storm, the wind whipping her disheveled hair. She glanced down at the cracked teleportation talisman in her palm, then suddenly threw her head back and burst into laughter.

The laughter was sharp, unrestrained, and carried a kind of frenzied euphoria born from despair.

"Fallen Cherry Blossoms! Li Hanshan!" she shouted towards the direction she had come from, her voice carrying spiritual energy that pierced through the roaring wind and waves. "Did you see that?!"

"This sea is endless; when a storm arises, even divine sense cannot penetrate it for hundreds of miles, and sea beasts will devour anyone who dares to challenge them—you two wretches, you'll never catch me again!"

She laughed, then slapped the Blood River Teleportation Talisman onto her chest. The instant the blood light exploded, her figure, enveloped in a raging storm, shot straight toward the white line on the horizon.

In the midst of the storm, tracking became a form of torture.

For a month or so, Yin Yue followed the trail of blood-red light, heading north, deeper and deeper. Li Hanshan stood beside her in the escaping light, while Xiao An drifted outside—but the closer she got to the white line, the closer she shrank.

"Senior, that thing terrifies me." Xiao An's voice was weak. "My soul couldn't withstand even a single breath in that sword energy."

The seawater changed from pitch black to dark green, and then from dark green to a near-solidified dark purple. The creatures in the sea gradually increased: giant whales with bony spines on their backs swam close to the crests of the waves, and schools of strange fish with crimson eyes leaped out of the water, each of them possessing an aura no less than that of a Nascent Soul cultivator.

These monsters are not a great threat; the main problem is that the presence of the storm has weakened Yin Yue's aura.

Yin Yue was not feeling well. Her old wounds had not yet healed, and she had been forcibly drawing on her spiritual power in the storm for a month, so her lips remained pale and bluish. Every three days, Li Hanshan would send her a wisp of pure yang energy to suppress the surging demonic energy in her meridians, but each time she would just shake her head and say, "Chasing someone is more important."

The scent of Night Frost grew fainter and fainter.

At first, a wisp remained every few hundred miles, then it became a tiny remnant in the gaps of the storm. The closer the white line got, the stronger the sharp whistling of the sword energy became, and the more fragmented the remnant became. In the end, even that tiny remnant broke off—completely, like a drop of water merging into a boiling ocean.

On this day, the light of the hidden moon stopped on a black reef protruding from the sea.

She stood atop the reef, her long, silvery-white hair whipped straight by the gale, her divine sense sweeping over the storm from all directions again and again.

No.

There was nothing there.

"...I lost them." She said, her voice flat and devoid of emotion.

She did not turn around.

After standing still for three breaths, she activated her escape light again and continued northward through the gaps in the storm. Even if she lost him, she had to keep going—if he succeeded, there would be movement ahead; if he failed, she would use her own methods to turn this sea upside down, inch by inch.

"I know where she's going," Li Hanshan suddenly said.

He stood on the edge of the reef, gazing at the white line that stretched across the horizon from east to west, his gaze strange—not as if he were looking at a dead end, but as if he were looking at an old acquaintance.

"Many years ago, I crossed the sea from the Northern Wilderness to the Central Continent in a spirit boat. The final hurdle in crossing the Endless Sea was passing through this sword energy." His voice was calm.

"With the protective array of the spirit boat on the outside, the sword energy seeped in like needles. The people on the boat, those at the Nascent Soul stage, turned pale, and those at the Spirit Nascent Soul stage almost went mad. The steward who was rowing the boat said that those sword energies were fragments of laws left behind by ancient powerful beings, and told us to calm down and sense them. If we could even touch a trace of sword intent, it would be an immense blessing."

He paused, his tone as indifferent as if he were talking about someone else's affairs.

"I touched it for two hours."

Yin Yue suddenly turned her head.

“Every few decades, the sword energy will become milder.” Li Hanshan squinted at the white line. “Back then, we happened to encounter it during a milder period. Now—” he paused, “it’s several times more violent than it was back then.”

"She's planning to cross the ditch. And that's the only way."

He paused, then a smile suddenly appeared on his lips.

"Coincidentally, I know this road well."

The silvery-white light shone again, chasing straight after the white line.

Hundreds of miles ahead, a streak of blood-red light was speeding desperately, heading straight for the white mist that even the He Dao had to detour around—like a moth drawn to a spider web.