Chapter 567: The Paper Cicada Immortals’ Adventure in Chili Hall

A Little Hamster: “Miss Guide, may I ask what I should do next?”

What should she do next? Lu Yibei looked at the message on her phone screen, pondered for two seconds, then lightly tapped the screen and typed a reply.

Calamity: “For now, please don’t be anxious. Wait patiently in the Great Pure Palace for the right opportunity. Once the time comes, I will notify you.”

That damned Society, or whatever it was, was something Lu Yibei had never even heard of. How was she supposed to know how to join it? Still, since the mission description said it was an organization hidden within the Great Pure Palace, then if one wanted to join, staying inside the Great Pure Palace probably wouldn’t be too far off the mark. As for the actual way in…

Let’s wait until I finish exploring the Great Pure Palace with the Paper Cicada Immortals tonight, shall we? Maybe I’ll find something.

Just as Lu Yibei was thinking this, her phone vibrated again.

A Little Hamster: “Eh? I need to stay in the Great Pure Palace? But I’ve already left.”

Lu Yibei looked at her phone and frowned slightly.

Already left? In other words, this person had been staying in the Great Pure Palace before? Was she a disciple of the Great Pure Palace, or a member of the advanced training class?

Calamity: “Hello. Considering that the opportunity to join the Society may appear at any time, we suggest that you return to the Great Pure Palace as soon as possible and wait there. While waiting, you may also ask the disciples of the Great Pure Palace for information on your own. Perhaps there will be an unexpected reward!”

What if she casually stopped some random disciple by the roadside, and that person just so happened to be a member of that Society, and then enthusiastically invited her to join? Though the possibility was very small… Lu Yibei thought.

A Little Hamster: “Understood! I’ll go back first thing tomorrow morning!”

Calamity: “Thank you for your cooperation.”

“…”

Wasn’t she being a little too obedient?

She dared to accept a mission with such an ambiguous description, so her strength was probably nothing to sneeze at. The possibility that she was playing weak while hiding her real strength could not be ruled out!

For safety’s sake, any intelligence received later would probably need to be verified. Otherwise, when the time came, Lu Yibei might get fooled by the other party’s false information and be sold off to Pattaya to work alongside ladyboy dancers.

Lu Yibei nodded, put away her phone, and temporarily set aside the matter of guiding A Little Hamster to her death.

After dark, the replica Paper Cicada Immortal that had gone to school in Hua City in her place had long since returned home and was lying flat, so there was no need to bother with it anymore.

Now, she had enough energy to control the two Paper Cicada Immortals left in the Great Pure Palace. It was time to begin exploring.

If she hadn’t had to split her attention to control the replica Paper Cicada Immortal earlier, the smaller Paper Cicada Immortal wouldn’t have been caught by Fang Ji so easily.

Lu Yibei glanced at Fang Ji in the front row, shook her head, then closed her eyes, focused her mind, and began controlling the Paper Cicada Immortals.

————

After six o’clock, the sky around the Zhenwu Mountain Scenic Area had gone completely dark.

Although the Great Pure Palace had no such thing as a curfew, and there were no fierce dorm matrons warning disciples that they had to return before ten-thirty, by this hour, the figures of disciples among the undulating halls, pavilions, and towers had clearly thinned out.

Under the cover of night, inside the Great Pure Palace, beside a somewhat remote mountain path, a sudden rustling came from the bushes.

Immediately afterward, with two whooshes, two charmingly clumsy pale paper figures darted out from the undergrowth.

As a faint fluctuation of psychic energy flowed through their bodies, brows and eyes were outlined on their pale faces. Upon closer inspection, they even looked somewhat similar to Lu Yibei after her haunting transformation.

They hid behind a stone platform and furtively looked around for a while. Seeing no one nearby, they took advantage of the night and separately sped off in the directions of Qinghui Hall and Chili Hall.

————

A moment later, Chili Hall.

This grand hall had red walls and yellow tiles. From the outside, it was roughly ring-shaped, its layout resembling a tulou that had once been mistakenly identified by a foreign intelligence agency as a nuclear missile silo.

Every dozen or so meters along the outer wall was a window. At this moment, behind some of the windows still lit up, flickering firelight could be vaguely seen.

The vermilion-painted corridor was like a fire dragon, winding and coiling along the outer wall of the hall, spiraling upward all the way to the tower that jutted abruptly from the top of the building.

That tower, occupying about one-third the area of the ring-shaped structure, stood at one corner of Chili Hall.

…

The sound of conversation drifted over from afar. Soon, two disciples came walking through the corridor, chatting and laughing.

“Did you hear? Today, Senior Sister Fu actually got a divine beast to acknowledge her as its master!”

“What’s that? I heard today that when Senior Sister was in Tang City, she faced three Class A psychics by herself and escaped unscathed. Truly terrifying!”

“Tsk, the gap between people really is bigger than the gap between humans and dogs… But speaking of which, with Senior Sister’s talent, why does she so rarely use those new technologies to cultivate? With her talent plus advanced cultivation technology, she should improve even faster, right?”

“Exactly! If this keeps up, that guy Gu He is going to catch up to Senior Sister Fu. Lately, I keep hearing him say that only people who can keep up with the changing times deserve to be called geniuses. He’s obviously bragging about himself!”

Lu Yibei: “…”

That’s right! If there’s advanced technology, why not use it? Is Fu Xinyi an idiot? Or is she a die-hard traditionalist?

A short while later, the voices of the two disciples gradually faded away, and the outer corridor of Chili Hall fell quiet once more.

Only after the two disciples’ figures had completely disappeared into the corridor did a little cutie carefully lift the glazed tile covering its body, poke its head out sneakily, and glance downward. Then it flapped its wings and flew up.

From a distance, it looked like an extra-large, extra-fat moth.

Lu Yibei had not intentionally made the Paper Cicada Immortal look like this. The main reason was that, inside such a tiny Paper Cicada Immortal, if she wanted to stuff in an Alchemical Bomb with a sufficient “dosage,” she could only shorten its limbs and enlarge its torso.

Of course, if someone was fooled by the appearance of this two-heads-tall “Calamity” and got sent spiraling skyward, then they could only be said to be too young.

In this world filled with ghost stories, the cuter something was, the more dangerous it often tended to be. Anyone who didn’t understand even that much was doomed sooner or later.

After briefly racing through the night, the Paper Cicada Immortal landed on a second-floor window outside Chili Hall.

It lay on the windowsill and observed the movement inside the room. After confirming that no one was inside, it leapt up, crossed through the window, and landed steadily on the floor.

The room beyond the window seemed to be a drafting practice room. Rows of drafting tables were laid out with simple drawing tools and psychic artifact blueprints drawn by disciples during practice.

What a coincidence? She had just snuck in, and she had already found psychic artifact blueprints?

Filled with anticipation, Lu Yibei searched through the practice room for a while, only to be bitterly disappointed.

Not a single blueprint left in the practice room was usable. Most of them were unfinished, and the few that were finished were drawn in a complete mess. If anyone tried to make something according to those blueprints, there would probably be serious problems.

Absolutely worthless!

The two-heads-tall little figure stamped its feet in anger.

In a fit of frustration, she randomly selected two lucky people, erased the blueprints they had already finished, and thoughtfully placed a certain disciple’s forgotten, unbearably sappy love letter on the lectern, handing it over to their adorable and respectable teacher.

You can’t even draw such simple blueprints properly, and you still want to date? Study hard, you! Otherwise, when you end up taking a post at The Midnight Watchers Society, you’ll just harm other people!

A small favor, no need to thank me. If you absolutely must ask for my name, just call me Little Angel!

Thinking this, Lu Yibei controlled the Paper Cicada Immortal, flapping its snow-white little wings as it flew toward the practice room door.

With a soft creak, the door of the drafting practice room opened a crack. The Paper Cicada Immortal squeezed out through the gap, pressed its back against the door panel, and carefully observed its surroundings.

On both sides of the antique-looking corridor, thick metal doors were tightly shut one after another. The faint sounds of metal striking and machinery operating could be heard from within.

After identifying the surrounding environment and judging the direction, Lu Yibei controlled the Paper Cicada Immortal to follow the remembered locations of various formation nodes and warehouses, proceeding down the corridor toward the depths of Chili Hall.

Chili Hall was originally the forging workshop and storage warehouse for psychic artifacts of the Great Pure Palace. Perhaps because the existing space was already sufficient, the building’s layout hadn’t changed much; only the entire main hall had been renovated, blending a touch of modernity into its antique-style architecture. The map Qing Ji had provided was finally useful for the first time. Who said the old ancestor’s map was less useful than Sesame Biscuit? I, Lu Yibei, will be the first to disagree. Don’t you get the saying, ‘Having an elder in the family is like possessing a treasure’? The old man’s frequency of visiting Chili Hall was absurdly high. Over time, each visit felt like returning home. It was just that the Pure Lotus Sword was a simple psychic artifact, not a special existence between a psychic artifact and a haunting like the jacket. Otherwise, every time Qing Ji visited Chili Hall, he might have ‘borrowed’ a few top-quality weapons for the Pure Lotus Sword to strengthen by ten or eight levels. Guided by the map Qing Ji had drawn, Lu Yibei quickly completed a rough exploration of the second floor of Chili Hall. After this exploration, a sliver of doubt gradually arose in her heart. The second floor of Chili Hall consisted almost entirely of practice rooms for drafting, woodworking, smelting, and similar crafts—processes essential for creating psychic artifacts. Yet, based on Lu Yibei’s exploration, inside those practice rooms, the psychic artifact blueprints, wood carvings, or semi-finished weapon blanks were all absurdly low in completion level. Occasionally, there were one or two decent pieces, but they were barely passable. Something was off! This didn’t quite match what the old ancestor had said. Could it be that when the old ancestor served as a guest elder at the Great Pure Palace, his drawing style had reached the level of an ideological stamp, a deeply ingrained and persistent influence? Lu Yibei wondered, perplexed. According to Qing Ji, the disciples at the Great Pure Palace who specialized in object manipulation were all skilled at making psychic artifacts; their craftsmanship shouldn’t be this poor. Full of questions, Lu Yibei continued her exploration and soon found the answer on the third floor of Chili Hall. The layout on the third floor was roughly the same as the second, a series of individual practice rooms, but the difference was that in these rooms, Lu Yibei saw CAD drawings, 3D models made with 3Dmax, 3D printers, and high-precision fully automatic lathes. Lu Yibei: “…” So, it was somewhat understandable that the Great Pure Palace disciples had let their purely manual psychic artifact-making skills deteriorate? But then, was she supposed to memorize the data from the CAD drawings and 3D models? Although it wasn’t impossible to memorize them, wouldn’t she still need to learn two software programs after going back just to reconstruct the blueprints for the hauntings in Hua City to produce? After pondering for a moment without hitting upon a better solution, Lu Yibei reluctantly memorized two or three psychic artifact blueprints, then thoughtfully helped those careless disciples by turning off their computers. Kids these days! No sense of energy conservation at all. Global warming is all your fault! Lu Yibei thought fiercely, skillfully clicking ‘Don’t Save,’ then left the practice room and continued following the map provided by Qing Ji, exploring deeper into Chili Hall. Finding the Pure Lotus Sword within Chili Hall was the most critical task; there was no need to linger too long in the disciples’ practice and production rooms. According to Qing Ji’s speculation, if the fragment of the Pure Lotus Sword was stored in Chili Hall, it should be kept inside the tower on the top floor. And the true trial would only begin after entering that tower. As the warehouse where the Great Pure Palace stored psychic artifacts and various materials, its security was far stricter than Zhen Ting Hall and the areas where those practice rooms were located. Simply put, upon entering the tower, the open-world exploration game would instantly turn into a horror game with ambushes around every corner. To avoid the disciples occasionally appearing in the corridors and improve exploration efficiency, Lu Yibei maneuvered the Paper Cicada Immortal out from inside Chili Hall, back onto its outer wall. Using the levitation provided by the Paper Cicada Immortal’s tiny wings, she steered it to speed closely along the facade. Thus, against the crimson outer wall, a white dot zipped past, tracing a winding trajectory, deftly dodging the trigger-type solidified spell formations attached to the wall surface. No one would have imagined that the old scoundrel who once wandered in and out of Chili Hall as if it were his own backyard would, over a hundred years later, instigate a young thief to return here. It was like a ‘do whatever one pleases’ idiom relay, rampantly doing whatever they pleased! In just a dozen or so seconds, the Paper Cicada Immortal traversed a hundred meters, arriving outside a certain production room on the fourth floor of Chili Hall. Passing through the room and then a long corridor was all it took to enter the tower. Easy and pleasant, five-star experience! The chubby Paper Cicada Immortal leapt with all its might, its stubby arms grabbing the protruding windowsill of a window, then flipped over, jumping into the unoccupied production room. However, before the Paper Cicada Immortal could pass through the room into the corridor, faint footsteps sounded through the iron door, followed by the soft click of the lock turning. With no time to think, Lu Yibei immediately controlled the Paper Cicada Immortal to scurry into a nearby toolbox and hide. Then, through the slightly opened crack of the toolbox, she vaguely saw two figures walk in…

————

After entering the room, the two didn’t turn on the lights, letting the darkness swallow their forms. After locking the door behind them, they immediately began arguing in low voices. “Damn it, tell me, why did you let Wu Yutang get away? If he returns to the Great Pure Palace and tells those old fossils what he knows, we are all finished, you understand?!” a man with a rather gloomy voice hissed. “So, are you blaming me? You’d better understand one thing: if you hadn’t been so hasty and let Wu Yutang come into contact with that esteemed person, he never would have noticed anything wrong!” a woman retorted coldly. “Fine, fine, I won’t argue that now. I’m just asking what we do now?” the man said in a deep voice, strange soft clicking sounds interspersed with his words. Judging by the silhouette’s motion of raising a hand to his mouth, he seemed to be biting his nails due to extreme nervousness, each bite making a faint, crisp sound. “Right now… silencing him is the only option.” Lu Yibei: “???” Damn! Had she just stumbled onto something serious? What were you two doing? My Paper Cicada Immortal is still young, why are you forcing it to endure these terrible things? If it gets scared, it’ll spontaneously combust! Lu Yibei grumbled irreverently in her mind, but she also mentally noted the details of the man and woman’s conversation. Wu Yutang, that esteemed person, and the fact that the man had bitten his fingernails during the exchange. If it became necessary to identify him among the numerous Great Pure Palace disciples, this detail could serve as a clue. However, just as she was about to eavesdrop for more details, she suddenly realized the two had stopped talking and vanished from their spots. The entire room plunged into dead silence. There was no sound, and an unsettling atmosphere permeated the air. In the darkness, a pair of icy eyes stared at the toolbox on the workbench in the corner. After contemplating for a few seconds, she turned to her companion, gestured for silence, then soundlessly walked forward, placing one hand gently on the lid of the toolbox while the other hand drew a short sword from her waist. Waiting for a mere two seconds, a fierce glint flashed in her eyes. As one hand flipped open the toolbox lid, the short sword in her other hand stabbed down swiftly and viciously. “Slash!” With a sound, the exquisite indigo short sword accurately pierced through the Paper Cicada Immortal’s head. “This is… a Paper Cicada Immortal?” Who would make a Paper Cicada Immortal like this? Such a tiny Paper Cicada Immortal could probably only be useful for eavesdropping, right? Seeing the impaled Paper Cicada Immortal in the toolbox, the woman froze for a moment. Before she could react, the little bobblehead creature suddenly moved. Ignoring its head being split by the short sword, it leaped up, fluttered its small wings, and darted quickly toward the window. However, the Paper Cicada Immortal’s flight speed, barely faster than a common bird’s, was utterly inadequate against a psychic.

No sooner had it risen into the air than a fair, delicate hand reached out from behind it, swift as lightning, and in an instant seized it tightly.

“Still trying to run?” the woman said viciously.

The next moment, she saw the Paper Cicada Immortal, whose skull had been split in two, turn around. On that damaged face, with brows and eyes sketched in simple strokes, there appeared a smile that made her uneasy.

“Hee-hee-hee!”

Accompanied by a burst of unpleasant, sinister laughter, crimson blazing light instantly erupted from between the woman’s fingers.

“Boom—!”

A tremendous sound burst forth, deafening.

————

At the same time.

On the bus traveling from Zhenwu Mountain Scenic Area to Shizhou City.

Huá Sāng, who had been dozing lightly by the window, suddenly woke with a start, a faint yet rapid gasp escaping her small mouth.

Just now, she had only intended to close her eyes and rest, but before she knew it, she had drifted into a light sleep.

After falling asleep, she had a dream. She dreamed that she seemed to be in some cramped and dark space, and vaguely heard two people arguing.

Because the dream was far too hazy, she had not been able to make out the specific details of their argument. She had only barely managed to remember a few key words.

Wu Yutang, that esteemed person, and silencing someone by killing them…

Immediately after that, before she could hear any more details, a burst of strong light swept over her, and she woke with a start.

Huá Sāng: “…”

According to the old man, Senior Brother went to Shizhou City early this morning, yet I saw him inside the mountain gate this afternoon…

And now, for some inexplicable reason, I dreamed that he was involved in something like murder to silence someone…

This is far too strange!

After a brief silence, Huá Sāng secretly made up her mind to first contact her senior brother—Wu Yutang.