Miss Fairy, Please Hear Me Out

After sensing a certain someone’s source qi fluctuations fade into the distance, Ran Qingmo took her hand off Xu Yuan’s mouth and looked at him, asking softly, “Why does she keep looking for you like this? This is already the seventh time.”

A strange look appeared on Xu Yuan’s face as well. He shook his head lightly. “I’m not too sure. Maybe she wants to set an anchor on me. After all, that was why she came to find me in the first place.”

“Oh.” Ran Qingmo’s eyes flickered. Whether she believed him or not was anyone’s guess, but she did not say anything more.

And then, the Sage’s remnant soul chose the perfect moment to pipe up inside Xu Yuan’s heart, his tone teasing. “Heh, brat, are you sure that girl only wants to set an anchor? It’s been nearly ten days already.”

Xu Yuan glanced at the old man on his index finger and replied inwardly, “What else would it be?”

The Sage’s remnant soul chuckled. “Didn’t you bully the girl using methods that didn’t require cultivation? From what you described earlier, you two spent quite a long time in that illusion.”

Xu Yuan’s gaze lowered slightly. After a moment of silence, he shook his head. “It was just a fleeting dream.”

The Sage’s remnant soul’s voice carried a deeper meaning. “As long as one is still human, one cannot escape the word love. That dream of yours lasted so long. Long enough to carve itself into the bones.”

Xu Yuan shook his head. “No matter how long it lasted, it was still only a dream. Old Luo, would you fall in love with someone from your own dream?”

The Sage’s remnant soul let out a few low laughs. “After this old man became a soul body, I never dreamed again. I’ve long forgotten what that feels like”

“ Sand slipping through the fingers.”

“Hm?”

“I said, things from a dream are like sand slipping through your fingers.” Xu Yuan looked in the direction where the source qi fluctuations had vanished.

The Sage’s remnant soul observed Xu Yuan for several breaths, then said nothing more and fell silent.

Xu Yuan also said nothing. He continued walking forward on foot, his mind drifting back to those memories from the dream.

After a great dream, when one first wakes, the scenes and emotions from within it linger and wander through the heart, making a person mistake them for reality. But as time passes, those memories and feelings fade with frightening speed.

Those recollections were all like sand between his fingers.

The more he tried to remember them, the faster they scattered.

Even in reality, few people could remember exactly what happened on a certain day several years ago, let alone in a dreamlike illusion. Xu Yuan had almost completely forgotten the beginning of the illusion. Even the latter half had been reduced to only a handful of fragmented memories.

As he thought this, Xu Yuan slowly raised one hand. A faint thread of source qi stirred. A blood-colored spiral bone drill, as thick as a toothpick, appeared in his palm. It turned into a streak of crimson light, darting rapidly between his palm and fingertips. It moved as if it were an extension of his own arm.

Several breaths later, he took a deep breath and clenched his hand.

The spiral bone drill instantly dissolved into a wisp of blood colored source qi, scattering into the air.

Watching this, Xu Yuan lowered his eyes. Some things had nothing to do with memory. Certain habits of the body had remained.

After walking in silence for some distance, Xu Yuan suddenly raised his eyes and looked toward the place where the young girl Tian Yan’s source qi had vanished, his gaze slightly complicated.

He could more or less guess why Tian Yan was so angry. Although most of his memories were no longer clear, leaving only a blurry impression, the events at the very end of the illusion were still quite vivid.

After the fall of Splendorbloom Sect had been replayed, he and Tian Yan had abruptly appeared in front of that house on the hillside.

It was the place where he and Tian Yan had lived back then in Splendorbloom Sect.

The wind stirred the grass. Waves of wheat rolled and rustled. Wang Yuchu stood beneath the peach tree outside the courtyard, waiting for them.

Xu Yuan could no longer remember that woman’s appearance. He only remembered that she had been a woman whose smile bloomed as brightly as peach blossoms. She was very calm about her coming death. She even seemed to long for it.

In front of that familiar courtyard, she answered many of their questions. She gave them a detailed explanation about everything in the illusion, including the fact that once they left, the memories from within the illusion would disappear.

Standing beneath the peach tree in full bloom, she looked at the two of them with a gentle smile at the corner of her lips. “You will probably forget what happened in the illusion, like waking from a beautiful dream.”

A beautiful dream. It truly had been a beautiful dream. His thoughts drifting, the corner of Xu Yuan’s mouth lifted slightly, but then he sighed.

At the very, very end, when he asked Wang Yuchu to trap Tian Yan inside the illusion, the woman beside him had flown into a rage exactly as he expected. A very, very furious rage.

Thinking back on it now, Xu Yuan felt that she probably saw it as betrayal.

At that thought, Xu Yuan sighed and shook his head. No need for probably. What he had done at that moment was betrayal. Barefaced betrayal.

According to his memories, at the end of the illusion, even he himself had emotionally believed it was betrayal, and he had been extremely unwilling to do it. But reason still made him do it. For that, he had to thank all the girlfriends he had dated in his previous life, from middle school until the years before he transmigrated.

Xu Yuan had always been rational when it came to love. He did not really believe in the whole one person, one lifetime, one pair nonsense. So he did not regret choosing to run. In fact, he was even somewhat glad that he had not let those illusory feelings sway his decision back then.

Because now, four days later, all the joy, sorrow, pity, and other emotions from the illusion had almost scattered away like sand slipping through his fingers.

Wang Yuchu had not lied to him. This had indeed been a beautiful dream. But now the dream was over, and everything should end with it.

The sun sank westward. A blood red sunset spread through the snow-covered forest.

An iron-skinned boar strolled leisurely between the snowy trees, leaving a trail of tiny, scattered hoofprints in the snow behind it.

BANG! Suddenly, from the forest in the distance came the faint sound of a footfall.

The sound had yet to arrive, but the black shadow had already flashed past.

The woman in black robes swept out with a casual stroke of her sword, and the five foot long iron-skinned porcupine collapsed to the ground.

Seeing this, Xu Yuan slowly wandered out from afar. An iron-skinned porcupine was not that strong. It was only a demonic beast around the sixth rank. With his current strength, he could even kill it across ranks now.

But for safety’s sake, even though his hands were itching to test his present abilities, he still held himself back. If he made a move, he had to use source qi. Ran Qingmo did not.

Although the source qi disturbance caused by a seventh rank cultivator going all out was not particularly large, who knew whether that woman Tian Yan would follow the trail and come sniffing over?

Walking up to the crime scene, Xu Yuan lowered his eyes and glanced at it. The iron-skinned porcupine was dead. Although Ran Qingmo had used the pommel of her sword, she had still smashed the thing’s skull straight in.

Before any blood could flow out, Xu Yuan immediately stored it away in his Sumeru Ring.

This was a lesson written in blood.

For some unknown reason, the demonic beasts in this region of the Myriad Ascents Mountain Range had been terrifyingly dense these past few days. Once they smelled blood, other demonic beasts would quickly track them down.

At first, Xu Yuan had not known this. After slaughtering a thunder-wing wolf at the entrance of their cave, he had simply started a fire and roasted the meat right there. As a result, other demonic beasts soon came after them.

He had not panicked back then, though. After all, Ran Qingmo and Luo Daofan were both beside him. However many demonic beasts came, they could just kill that many.

But as time passed, the situation at the cave entrance grew stranger and stranger. The more they fought, the more demonic beasts appeared.

In the end, hundreds of demonic beasts of all kinds had gathered and surrounded them tightly. In the end, it was Ran Qingmo who took the risk of using source qi to get the two of them out of that beast pile.