MJWCATFPITWOC Chapter 26
by Volare“I felt something was off when the Lingfeng Sect remained silent for three days. Now it seems, they’ve indeed turned the tables in one fell swoop,” a man said indignantly.
“Senior Brother, what can we do? They actually took down a Nascent Soul realm monster leader. What ability do we have?”
“Yeah, forget killing it, we’d be lucky to escape if we ran into one,” another junior brother chimed in.
The man was so angered by his unmotivated junior brothers that he almost exploded. He huffily waved his sleeve and stormed off.
Far away, Nie Yue was still staring at the announcement in the sky. She remembered that the Lingfeng Sect hadn’t obtained a single treasure in the past three days, but now they had surpassed the Qionghua Sect by killing a demon beast. Lingyi, standing with his back to her, had a face as cold as water. A fist-sized hole was visible in the rock in front of him, and he kept muttering the words “Lingfeng Sect,” his mind in turmoil.
.
Mo Yifeng sliced open the left chest of the Scaled-Back Beast. The purple skin was torn open, forming leaf-like flaps. Through the opening, Li Juemu’s sword was seen stuck in a crystal-like hard stone.
“High-level demon beasts develop crystal hearts,” Mo Yifeng said. He neatly extracted the crystal, tucked it under his arm, and pressed down on it with the sword. With a snap, the crystal broke in half.
Shen Yucheng approached for a closer look. A fiery red bead was embedded in the center of the crystal. “What’s this?”
“The Scaled-Back Beast’s core, but it’s only usable for demon beasts.”
The fiery red core emitted a faint glow, as if stimulated by some kind of resonance. It began to pulsate and slowly rose from its socket. At the same time, Shen Yucheng felt a burning sensation in his palm, and the Crimson Scaled Lion’s contract mark also glowed red.
He involuntarily raised his palm, moving it closer to the core. As if sensing each other, the two gradually approached, and finally, the core directly merged into Shen Yucheng’s palm, burying itself within the contract mark as if absorbed, and disappeared. The crimson light also dimmed.
The two who witnessed the entire process were speechless.
Mo Yifeng thought, “Yucheng-ge, are you even human?”
Shen Yucheng actually heard it and responded in his mind, “What do you think…”
In any case, the core had been absorbed, and Shen Yucheng’s body didn’t show any abnormalities, so they temporarily put this incident aside.
The two didn’t find any other treasures inside the demon beast’s body. Behind them, Li Yuan’s voice was heard: “Fu Junxuan! Put me down!”
The previously small Li Yuan had returned to his original form and was being held in Fu Junxuan’s arms. The grown man’s body was only covered by a small piece of cloth.
The two exchanged glances and quickly averted their eyes. It was too much to bear.
Li Yuan was making a scene in Fu Junxuan’s arms, but Fu Junxuan was able to calmly soothe him, as if he were still coaxing a child.
After a bit of commotion, Li Yuan straightened his collar, understood what had happened after he turned into a child, picked up the unconscious Li Juemu on his back, and casually said, “That idiot can even use Yin Sword?”
Li Juemu’s sword style was too righteous; no wonder Li Yuan thought so.
They entered the cave passage. The depths were devoid of light, dark and cold. Their footsteps echoed crisply on the stone floor, making the passage seem incredibly wide.
In this environment, Shen Yucheng clearly felt the cold Qi in his body becoming heavier. He was about to use golden thread to probe Mo Yifeng’s body temperature, but before he could touch him, his hand was grabbed by the other party.
Shen Yucheng’s heart skipped a beat. Mo Yifeng was still staring ahead, but he firmly held his hand. Shen Yucheng wanted to pull away, but his hand was gripped even tighter.
“Let go,” Shen Yucheng whispered.
Seeing that the other party remained silent, he was about to forcibly break free when Mo Yifeng suddenly leaned close and whispered in his ear, “Then Yucheng-ge, tell me first, why are your hands so cold?”
Fortunately, there was no light in the passage, otherwise, the distance between the two would surely be noticed.
Shen Yucheng swallowed, feeling guilty. “Your hands are cold.”
The other party chuckled softly. “How does Yucheng-ge know my hands are cold?”
Shen Yucheng’s mind raced, searching for an excuse. After a while, Mo Yifeng didn’t get an answer. His deep eyes lowered to look at the person beside him. He couldn’t see his expression in the dark, but he seemed to imagine Shen Yucheng’s embarrassed face and smiled inwardly. “Yucheng-ge’s heartbeat is so fast.”
“!!” Shen Yucheng’s alarm bells rang loudly. He instinctively felt that Mo Yifeng knew something and was constantly setting traps in his words. He suddenly pulled his hand back, but failed again. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re annoying?”
“No, maybe I just like annoying Yucheng-ge.” Mo Yifeng’s fingertips caressed the lines in Shen Yucheng’s palm.
Shen Yucheng didn’t know what had hit his head; he was especially strange today.
He inadvertently recalled the days when they shared a bed, secretly feeling nervous. Had he been discovered?
The group walked for a long time in the empty passage, but they didn’t see the end.
Suddenly, vibrations came from underground, and the stone ground turned into soft fabric again. Li Yuan, tightly carrying Li Juemu on his back, looked at the strange phenomenon beneath his feet and asked in confusion, “Area changing?”
Mo Yifeng held Shen Yucheng’s hand. This time, the shaking of the soft ground was particularly rapid. Before long, they were getting farther and farther away from the other three.
Fu Junxuan wanted to use an orange formation to bring the two back, but before he could activate it, they disappeared.
.
“How are you going to compensate me for this? This is made of top-quality silk!” A man in a brown-yellow robe, holding a wooden-carved paper fan, was covered in various valuable pendants. He pointed at the water-stained fabric at his feet and loudly scolded the boy kneeling on the ground.
A crowd of people surrounded them, their eyes filled with gossip. Although he couldn’t hear what they were saying, the boy understood that it wouldn’t be anything good.
He looked down at the dark black, tattered clothes he was wearing, and a familiar feeling washed over him. He cleared his throat and said in a cold voice, “Then what do you want?”
Actually, what Shen Yucheng was thinking was, “Where is this? How did I get sent to such a strange place again?”
The man was furious and kicked the boy hard in the stomach. Shen Yucheng couldn’t dodge in time, raised his hand to block, but he didn’t remember that his current body was just a thin, starving boy. The kick landed heavily in his abdomen, and he coughed violently, clutching his stomach and collapsing on the ground.
It had been a long time since he had felt the pain of a mortal body. The scene before his eyes flickered, and his head spun. At this moment, several whispers suddenly came from the depths of his mind.
“Aren’t you feeling very unhappy?”
“Why do these people treat other people’s lives like ants every day?”
“Kill him.”
“If you kill him, no one will dare to bully you again.”
“Come on, do it.”
Shen Yucheng was bombarded by these voices, his ears ringing and his vision blurred. When he came back to his senses, the man’s insults were still ongoing. Finally, he stomped on his back a few times before angrily leaving.
The crowd also dispersed, leaving Shen Yucheng clutching his abdomen. What were those voices just now?
His mind was in a chaos. He remembered experiencing a change of area just now. His vision went black, and when he opened his eyes again, he was in his current situation.
Looking around, it was clearly a folk market street. Stalls lined both sides of the street, and it was midday. Passersby were indifferent to the beggar on the ground. Shen Yucheng felt that he had some impression of such streets.
He was currently in a mortal body, and after the pain subsided, he was overwhelmed by hunger. He would believe it if someone told him that this body hadn’t eaten for ten days.
He searched his entire body but didn’t find a single copper coin, but he had expected as much. He withdrew his disappointment and slowly moved to the shadows in the back alley. His sharp eyes scanned the vendors on the street, finally locking onto a middle-aged shop owner who was laughing heartily.
Shen Yucheng bent over, pretending to be desperately hungry, and mingled with the crowd. As he passed the vendor’s stall with several women, he quietly reached under the wooden table and gently pulled the tablecloth with his fingertips, the movement as skilled as if he had practiced it a hundred times.
The buns on the table rolled to the ground. The shop owner was focused on talking and glanced at the fallen buns. Helplessly, he retracted his gaze and moved the wooden table inward a little to prevent the crowd from bumping into it again.
By the time the women had walked away, Shen Yucheng had quietly slipped back into the back alley, holding several steaming buns in his hand. The fallen buns were just a diversion to prevent the shop owner from suspecting anything.
After filling his stomach, he saw in a mirror that he was in his teenage form, unchanged at all.
From the conversations of the people on the street, he learned that the man who had made things difficult for him was a wealthy young master from the area, known for being lustful and having a bad reputation, with a fondness for young boys. Today, he had accidentally bumped into the thin Shen Yucheng while traveling, and the two had fallen to the ground. The man had vented his anger over getting his clothes dirty on him.
As night fell, Shen Yucheng instinctively returned to a small, dilapidated wooden hut. The wooden planks on the walls were moldy and rotten due to years of dampness.
“Even a dog wouldn’t want to live in this environment.”
Even though he said that, he obediently entered the house.
No matter where he was, he realized that he was real. Perhaps he had entered a mechanism or illusion of a secret realm. He planned to explore the area after waking up tomorrow.
As for where Mo Yifeng was, their Dao Companion Contract should…
Thinking of this, Shen Yucheng suddenly woke up, almost forgetting the range limit of the Dao Companion Contract. He and Mo Yifeng shouldn’t be more than five hundred meters apart.
However, he didn’t know what form the other party was in at the moment, and five hundred meters was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
He was about to close his eyes again when he heard a cry coming from the door.
Shen Yucheng listened carefully; it was a child.
He peeked out of the small window and saw a boy, about five or six years old, standing outside the door.
However, in this unfamiliar place, Shen Yucheng didn’t plan to easily give in to compassion. He turned around and went back to the small wooden bed.
“Save… me, someone, someone is going to kill me.” The soundproofing of the house was extremely poor, and the sound clearly entered Shen Yucheng’s ears. The boy was crying intermittently.
Shen Yucheng simply covered his ears with a thin cloth, but soon after, he heard a burst of hurried footsteps outside. “I saw him go this way!”
“Don’t care! Search!”
The voices of several burly men echoed through the street, sounding aggressive. It wasn’t hard to imagine the consequences of being caught.
The crying outside had stopped at some point. Shen Yucheng waited for a while and couldn’t help but secretly peek out through a crack in the door.
Unexpectedly, the moment he opened the door, his eyes met a pair of crystal-clear jewels, the tears clinging to the lower eyelids shimmering.
The boy saw a handsome older brother open the wooden door, and his eyes turned even redder. He suppressed his tears and choked out, “Brother, someone is chasing me.”