Having cultivated myself into an immortal, all I want to do is raise female disciples.

Because these clods of earth, in both shape and their exaggeratedly large size, resembled something she longed for.

—The Three Great Celestial Realms.

……

Everything was pitch black.

A feeling of dizziness followed.

The world before my eyes shattered into millions of fragments in an instant, and the vibrant colors finally returned to my eyes.

She opened her eyes for the first time in a long time.

"woke up."

Immediately, the old man's weathered voice, seemingly tinged with dust, reached my ears.

Ye Yuchan subconsciously tried to get out of bed, but a sudden, intense pain shot through the right side of her body, forcing her to remain lying flat.

"Hiss—" She gasped, looking around in confusion: "What...what's going on?"

The surrounding walls were a deathly gray, and in the very center of the walls were countless neatly written characters. However, these characters did not appear to be the common script of the Lingze era, suggesting a much more ancient origin.

The bed beneath me was a very simple wooden bed, though it wasn't very clean, with some dust of unknown origin on it.

The entire room resembled a woodshed without any firewood. Admittedly, the oppressive overall color scheme and sparse furniture alone were enough to evoke some negative emotions in Ye Yuchan.

and--

For some reason, there were half-broken chains in each of the four corners of the room, which seemed to be used to restrain something, making the whole place resemble a prison cell.

"We are now right in the middle of the gray dust."

The familiar voice of the old rogue calmed Ye Yuchan's somewhat bewildered heart a little.

The young man in white sat down next to Ye Yuchan, helping her to sit against the headboard, and added, "To be precise, it's underground in the gray soil."

"underground……"

“This is the only place that won’t be affected by the miasma.” The old man sitting at the dilapidated tea table crossed his legs and said calmly, “With your current cultivation level and physical body, you won’t be able to hold out up there for long.”

"Besides, no one can say for sure whether that woman will come back."

"woman……"

The old man's words gave Ye Yuchan a headache, and strange images suddenly appeared in her memory—

A blood-stained sky, a tattered robe, a tombstone standing atop the mountain...

And a familiar figure from behind.

She shook her head, and only after confirming that Yun Ping was still beside her did she breathe a sigh of relief and say, "Speaking of which, that woman who called herself Ye Xuanqiu, she..."

“She ran away,” Yunping said as if nothing had happened. “Then you passed out. I guess you couldn’t withstand the miasma, so we brought you here first.”

"They ran away...?"

"Hmm." Yun Ping nodded, then stared solemnly at Ye Yuchan: "Did she say anything to you?"

Recalling what Ye Xuanqiu had told her earlier, Ye Yuchan shook her head in confusion. To be honest, she still didn't understand where the other person came from.

"She said a lot, but it was all strange stuff... I couldn't understand what she was saying."

The old man nodded: "That's true, that guy wouldn't be so generous as to reveal all his intentions."

Ye Yuchan's gaze finally shifted to the old man. She glanced at him with a strange look, then turned to Yunping with a face full of doubt.

The meaning is very clear—

Who is this old man?

Yunping sensed his female apprentice's meaning and introduced with a faint smile, "Let's just call this old man the master of this place. You can call him Huitu."

"Gray soil..." Ye Yuchan's eyes widened slowly: "Isn't that the Twenty-One Ultimate?!"

The old man didn't take Ye Yuchan's surprise to heart: "That's just an empty reputation. If you really want to be honest, I'm just an old man with a little bit of ability."

—What the hell? He's got some ability.

However, the surprise brought by the appearance of the ultimate team only lasted for a few seconds. After all, our Yu Chan is a person who has seen the world. Although the twenty-one ultimate teams are indeed all big shots, we have seen them quite a few times.

This is the principle behind the saying "the familiar is not surprising".

"Speaking of which—" Yun Ping smiled wickedly, narrowed his eyes, and looked at the old man meaningfully: "Have you thought about that matter I told you before?"

Upon hearing Yunping mention that matter, a hint of embarrassment appeared on the old man's weathered face. He changed to a more upright sitting posture, but still looked very slovenly: "To be honest, this is robbery."

"You've been robbed by me before, haven't you?" Yunping chuckled. "What's one more time? Don't you think so?"

—A robber's statement in the fullest sense.

Ye Yuchan blinked, watching the conversation between the two big shots with curiosity. After hesitating for a few seconds, she asked, "What's going on?"

"It's all your fault." Hui Tu glanced at Ye Yuchan, snorted in dissatisfaction, and then angrily pointed at Yun Ping's smug smiling face: "That old bastard said he would reshape your physical body, but he asked me for three handfuls of ash sand. He's a real swindler..."

“Three handfuls…” Ye Yuchan scratched her cheek, pointing to the top of her head in complete disbelief: “Isn’t there a huge patch of dust on our heads? Three handfuls shouldn’t be too much, right?”

"That's dust, not sand."

"What?"

Perhaps realizing that Ye Yuchan wouldn't understand without providing real examples, the old man sighed helplessly and then flicked his hand away.

A large amount of gray sand appeared out of thin air from his palm and piled up into a small hill on the floor.

His fingers danced as if in a dance, and strange waves echoed through the hills made of gray sand: "The gray sand is the essence of my body. If the gray soil is my skin, then the gray sand is my internal organs."

"If we really want to reshape the physical body, mere ash and soil won't suffice; we need sand and ash..."

As the fingers danced, the dust on the ground slowly began to condense into a human shape. Although it looked very blurry, it did indeed have a human form.

With a snap of the old man's fingers, the humanoid figure made of dust and sand collapsed instantly, returning to its initial loose state and scattering across the ground.

"I think I understand..."

Ye Yuchan nodded knowingly, then looked at Yun Ping: "So this ash is valuable, and it is also a necessary condition for me to reshape my physical body?"

The old rogue grinned in a way that was utterly infuriating: "That's right~"

"so……"

Yu Chan's expression suddenly turned strange: "To reshape my physical body with ash and sand means..."

Am I going to turn into a sand sculpture?

…………

Just how incredibly bizarre is her imagination?!

And most importantly, Yunping found that he couldn't even refute her.

"Ah..." The old rogue sighed and shook his head. "Let's not talk about whether you're an idiot or not. Instead, we can prepare to head to the Emperor's Pavilion."

"The Imperial Pavilion... Ah, it's that Soul-Binding Lock..."

"And we need to hurry."

When this matter was mentioned, Yunping's expression froze again.

Noticing the old rogue's strange expression, Ye Yuchan frowned as well: "What do you mean?"

“While you were unconscious, Yuan’er and the others contacted me.”

"Senior Sister Lin Yuan and the others?" Ye Yuchan asked in surprise, "Could something have happened to them?"

"Do not."

Yunping shook his head. "They used the magic array I left for them to show me a letter."

"Faith? What faith?"

In response to Ye Yuchan's question, Yunping took out an old-fashioned envelope from his storage ring.

Then, it was placed next to Ye Yuchan.

It was a letter from the eldest disciple of Yuntian Academy, whom she had met once before but had little chance to see a second time.

Similarly, it was also a letter—

A distress signal.

76. The only way

"Honestly, how stupid do you have to be to go up against a sage? If I hadn't reacted quickly, this girl might have really died there."

In a room on the second floor of the pharmacy, in a dark and ghostly place.

A woman dressed in bright colors and draped in a veil looked helplessly at the black-haired girl lying on the bed, barely alive, and the petite loli who had completely fainted and was in a daze.

—Zhang Ruoxue and Zhang Xiaohan.

If Xiao Chunjie had noticed that strange aura any later, Zhang Ruoxue's life might have truly ended there.

With her frail body and negligible cultivation level, it would be an honor for her to survive even a second under that Buddha's light. Even now that Xiao Chunjie has rescued her, her condition is still far from optimistic.

Although he had helped her get rid of the divine threat, the power from Buddhism and Taoism still clung to Zhang Ruoxue, tormenting her soul and body at all times.

"Buddhism and Taoism... what troublesome paths they truly are..."

Looking at Zhang Ruoxue lying on the bed, clinging to her last breath, her expression still filled with immense pain, Xiao Chunjie felt helpless.

If the wounds were left by other paths, even divine punishment from the Heavenly Dao, Xiao Chunjie might have been able to heal them with a little effort. But the wounds she suffered were from the Buddhist path.

That is the most troublesome and troublesome of the three thousand great paths. Its nature is very strange. It does not judge from the outside, but from the fundamental inside.

For example, it's like encountering some unreasonable evil spirits. The heavens might just unleash a divine lightning bolt that obliterates your physical body and soul. But that's only the external effect. Some old rogue once faced a divine lightning bolt from the heavens and simply slapped it back at you.

But Buddhism and Taoism are different. Once you are struck by that Buddhist light, the mark of Buddhist and Taoist judgment will be directly imprinted on your soul and body. This thing cannot be blocked. Although its power may not be as merciless as God, it is extremely difficult to remove it after being struck.

Xiao Chunjie paced back and forth in the guest room with an unfriendly expression, unconsciously biting her fingernails and cursing viciously, "These bald monks went too far! They even dragged out the incarnations of Buddha and Tao! This injury isn't something ordinary Buddhist light could leave behind. To completely remove it, we can only..."

Thinking of this, she seemed to find it very troublesome—indeed, even if she were to take action to heal Zhang Ruoxue's injuries, it would be extremely troublesome.

Recalling what Yunping had told her earlier, Xiao Chunjie shook her head rather unhappily: "Forget it, anyway, all that guy told me was to help her when she was about to die. In other words, as long as I save her life, that's all that matters. Let that old bastard worry about the rest."

"It's just that this silly girl is suffering."