Chapter 111 - The Dome Palace (1)

For now? Xu Yuan let out a quiet breath, finally understanding.

“So, you want to use me to verify something.”

The young woman Tian Yan stared at him for two seconds, then smiled with her lips pressed together. “Of course. And if you want to ask what I’m trying to verify, then I can’t tell you. But if you’re willing to beg me, I might consider it.”

She leaned close to Xu Yuan’s face and blinked. “Well? Want to try begging?”

Xu Yuan looked at the golden-eyed girl smiling sweetly in front of him and shook his head.

“Actually, compared to that, I’m more curious about you.”

After a second of silence, Tian Yan pointed at herself, her expression a little strange. “Me?”

Xu Yuan said nothing. He raised his hand, held his palm flat, and measured it against her current height. Then he measured it again against the height of the little-girl version of Tian Yan.

Tian Yan froze for a moment, then burst into soft, breathy laughter. “That’s just because of my cultivation art.”

As she spoke, her beautiful eyes curved into two bright crescent moons. She looked at Xu Yuan with a teasing smile. “Do you like the other me better?”

Xu Yuan felt that this woman in front of him had something seriously wrong with her head. Unfortunately, he also could not beat her at all, which made the whole thing rather depressing. With a sigh, he shook his head, turned, and walked away.

Tian Yan quickly followed after him. Her crystal-clear bare feet stepped across the soft grass as she leaned forward and asked with a grin, “Hey, hey, did I guess right? That version of me is pretty cute, isn’t she?”

“No. I think the current you is much cuter.” Xu Yuan glanced at her.

Tian Yan blinked. “Why?”

“Guess.” Xu Yuan did not answer and kept walking.

The little Tian Yan was even colder than Ran Qingmo. It was almost impossible to tell what she was thinking. So yes, he really did prefer this young-woman version of Tian Yan. She talked more. And the more someone talked, the more he could learn.

Still, the cultivation arts of this world were even more complicated than he had imagined. He had once thought cultivation arts were merely the circulation of source qi through the meridians. But now the appearance of the Heaven Deriving Art had smashed that rigid idea to pieces.

There’s actually a cultivation art capable of controlling one’s age and even one’s personality.

As he thought this, Xu Yuan glanced again at the flat-chested girl beside him, who had been chattering nonstop. If she were the second phase of the boss fight, he wondered whether there might be a third phase too, something in the form of a mature beauty.

Tian Yan noticed his gaze. She suddenly stopped talking, covered her chest, and backed away. “I feel like you’re thinking something very rude.”

“I am.” Xu Yuan nodded without hesitation, then asked back, “You expect a wastrel like me to act as polite and refined as those noble young masters? Isn’t that a little disrespectful to who I am?”

The young woman Tian Yan rolled her eyes at him.

The secret realm was enormous. In Azure Point, the Goddess Mountains only stretched across four maps. In reality, that was already a distance of 1,000 miles. Calculated by that scale, this secret realm had to be at least 1 million square miles. Xu Yuan honestly could not imagine how anyone had carved out a space this vast back then.

They traveled west for five straight days.

Ran Qingmo was still lost somewhere, heaven knew where. At first, the young woman Tian Yan had chattered beside his ear nonstop, but since Xu Yuan rarely responded, she gradually spoke less and less.

After five days on the road, the jade towers and grand pavilions hidden among the clouds where they had first entered the secret realm had long since vanished beyond the limits of sight. Yet what stretched before Xu Yuan was still an endless sea of grass.

Under the noonday sun, Xu Yuan crouched on the lawn with Clear Whisper, the famous sword his maternal uncle had given him, and calmly processed the corpse of a wolf demon. Skin it, gut it, debone it, rinse it, season it, then leave it to marinate.

Once the whole routine was finished, Xu Yuan took a roasting rack out of his Sumeru ring, skewered the prepared wolf meat onto it, lit a fire, used source qi as fuel, and happily began turning the whole roasted wolf over the flames.

Just like in Azure Point, this grassland was crawling with demonic beasts, mostly rats and wolves.

They were not very strong. With Xu Yuan’s current seventh rank cultivation, dealing with them was more than manageable. Thanks to that, his journey had not fallen to the miserable level of surviving on military fasting pills.

As time passed, the rich aroma of roasted wolf soon spread through the air.

Xu Yuan used Clear Whisper, sharp enough to slice through iron like mud, to cut off a wolf leg, then began eating with great enthusiasm.

The young woman Tian Yan crouched beside him and stared for a long while before suddenly speaking. “Hey.”

Xu Yuan turned his head. Tian Yan raised one pale, jade-like finger and pointed in the direction of the palace in the distant mountains.

“Where exactly are you trying to go? Isn’t the Cloudtop Immortal Palace over that way? If you keep walking another 100 meters, you’ll reach the border of the secret realm.”

Xu Yuan put down the wolf leg, thought for a moment, and said, “Ahem. First of all, I...”

“Cut the nonsense. I know your name is Xu Changtian.”

The young woman Tian Yan rolled her eyes and interrupted him.

Xu Yuan instinctively almost laughed, but then froze. This world should not have that meme, right? He narrowed his eyes, then instead asked with a quiet smile, “Aren’t you able to predict the future? Why don’t you predict it yourself?”

Tian Yan answered without the slightest hesitation. “It would be very troublesome.”

Xu Yuan neither agreed nor disagreed. He stared into Tian Yan’s eyes and smiled with narrowed eyes. “Little Sister, even if it’s troublesome, I’m afraid you’ll have to rely on yourself. We’re enemies right now. Do you really expect an enemy to clear up your confusion for you?”

Their gazes met. Golden light shifted through Tian Yan’s eyes. She sighed. “Mhm. Fair point. But I’m older than you, so you should call me Big Sister.”

Xu Yuan looked at her slightly youthful face and smiled. “At least right now, you look younger than me. Turn into a proper big sister, and I’ll call you that. How about it?”

A soft little hum came from Tian Yan’s delicate nose. “No.”

“You really can change?” Xu Yuan asked, surprised. So she could be a loli or a mature beauty in the most literal, physical sense. Truly, in this vast world, there was no shortage of wonders.

Tian Yan did not seem inclined to avoid the question. She thought for a moment, then suddenly flashed a toothy smile and crawled over in front of Xu Yuan. “Are you very curious?”

“Mhm.” Xu Yuan nodded as their eyes met at close range.

Tian Yan smiled sweetly and made her suggestion, her voice like a devil whispering temptation. “I ask you one question, then you ask me one. Anything is allowed. How about it?”

Xu Yuan raised an eyebrow. He did not reject it right away either. “Not a bad proposal.”

Golden light once again flowed through Tian Yan’s eyes. “Good. I’ll go first. Why are you walking toward the outside?”

Having obtained the information he wanted, Xu Yuan sighed. “What was your previous question?”

“Hmm?” Tian Yan made a soft sound of confusion.

“Wasn’t that the first question?”

“It was indeed the first.”

Xu Yuan nodded. “So what was your previous question?”

The young woman Tian Yan’s delicate brows furrowed slightly. She murmured, “I ask you one question, then you ask me one. How about it... that one?”

“Right. That one.”

“I don’t think much of it.” Xu Yuan nodded and answered. Then he went back to gnawing on his wolf leg.

Tian Yan froze for several seconds. Then she puffed out her cheeks and said unhappily, “Xu Changtian, aren’t you curious why I came to find you?”

Xu Yuan turned back, stopped, and nodded very seriously. “Of course I am.”

“Then why won’t you agree?” Tian Yan asked.

Xu Yuan gave her the kind of look one reserved for a fool. “Although we’ve been getting along quite happily, I think there’s a high chance we still count as enemies right now. And if an enemy wants to do something, then of course I should ruin it. You’re asking me this? Are you stupid?”