Chapter 608 - 379: Jealousy

The labyrinthine corridors of the seventh floor stretched into an oppressive, suffocating infinity.

Towering walls hewn from colossal, pitch black obsidian rose hundreds of spans into an unseen, starless ceiling, their polished surfaces slick with an ancient, oily condensation that smelled of sulfur, iron, and dead leylines.

Narrow, twisting passageways turned at sharp, impossible right angles, winding through an endless subterranean nightmare designed to disorient, entrap, and grind the souls of intruders into dust.

At this moment, Qian Yunxi and Qing Yan were running through a maze, bleeding and exhausted and soon found a corner to rest.

Their ragged, uneven footsteps echoed off the damp stone with frantic desperation.

Qian Yunxi’s pristine white battle tunic was shredded into blood soaked tatters, revealing deep, jagged lacerations along her ribs and forearms where dark energy still sizzled against her torn skin.

Behind her back, only two of her six magnificent celestial wings remained manifested, their golden feathers dim, frayed, and leaking faint wisps of white gold light that flickered like dying embers in a storm.

Beside her, Qing Yan looked like a corpse dragged from a sunken tomb.

His robes were completely caked in dried gore, bile, and pulverized marrow.

His left shoulder hung at an unnatural, dislocated angle, while his forehead was split open from hairline to brow, dark blood pouring down into his left eye socket, blinding his vision in a warm, sticky red haze.

He was wheezing with every stride, his chest rattling violently as if his lungs were filled with broken glass.

They rounded a blind corner into a sunken, shadowed alcove tucked behind the shattered remnant of an ancient pillar, collapsing onto the freezing stone flags in unison.

"...damn it!" Qing Yan cursed.

The ascent through the ascending tiers of the ancient imperial tower had been an unbroken parade of sheer, unadulterated hell.

After barely slaying Michael on the first floor, the second floor had pit them against an archangel of pure azure lightning who had shattered three of Qian Yunxi’s wings in the opening clash.

The third floor had brought a gargantuan sentinel of vast earthen law, forcing Qing Yan to burn forty percent of his system points just to crack its adamantine core.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth floors had escalated the brutality into realms of cosmic absurdity—guardians wielding conceptual authorities of absolute cutting, soul scouring judgment, and temporal stagnation.

Every single victory had been bought with broken bones, ruptured meridians, and gouged flesh.

They had bled liters of vital blood upon the cold stone; they had screamed until their vocal cords tore, crawling from one ascending staircase to the next solely on the raw, animalistic instinct to survive.

And they did.

But the seventh floor...

The seventh floor was different

The seventh floor held no grand, honorable duel upon an arena.

Instead, its territory was a nigh-infinite maze with countless traps, and it was chasing them around like rats.

The instant their battered boots had crossed the threshold of the final tier, the spatial reality of the tower had warped, unfolding into a boundless, shifting labyrinth of black mirrors, spatial dead-ends, and murderous mechanisms. Floorboards had split open into bottomless pits of space devouring flame; ceilings had rained down millions of needle-thin lances forged of spatial-shattering iron; walls had snapped shut like massive iron jaws to crush them into pulp.

And stalking them through the darkness was the final guardian: a faceless, towering entity of pure black shadow who moved through the walls without a sound.

It did not rush to slaughter them in open combat; it stalked them with the cruel, agonizing patience of a predator playing with wounded prey.

It chased them down blind corridors, sprang lethal ambushes from the ceiling, and herded them deeper into the maze like terrified rodents awaiting the slaughterhouse mallet.

Thankfully, they managed to escape for now.

Qing Yan leaned back against the freezing wall, his battered spine sliding down the damp surface until he hit the floor.

He clutched his dislocated left shoulder, his teeth gritting together so hard that fresh blood welled from his gums, his breath hitching in a wet, ragged cough.

Then, with a "pop", he fixed his shoulders and returning them back in place.

"Damn it... are we really going to die here?" Qing Yan rasped, his voice trembling with a pathetic, broken frailty that scraped against the quiet alcove. "The seventh guardian... it’s not something meant for mortals to kill, we’re just rats trapped in a cage..."

He said that, but truthfully, he was searching for items and abilities from the system to see if there is any that can help in this situation.

Beneath the pathetic, weeping facade of the battered scholar, Qing Yan’s downcast eyes were darting frantically across an internal, translucent blue screen that scrolled with blistering speed.

Qing Yan wasn’t proud of how he obtained these items, but now, he was very thankful.

High grade artifacts, forbidden skills, pills...all sorts of items and skills that can help him were displayed in front of him.

Meanwhile, Qian Yunxi was seated on the side, eyes clouded from exhaustion as she breathed heavily.

Her slender back was propped against the base of the broken pillar, her head tilted upward against the cold stone.

Her pale throat was slick with sweat and streaks of dried crimson, her chest heaving in rapid, agonizing gasps that sent searing needles of pain through her fractured ribs.

Her breath came out as a pale, shivering mist in the freezing subterranean air.

Her fair face was completely devoid of color, her usually luminous, blue eyes dim, unfocused, and heavily glazed with profound physical and mental exhaustion.

The healing pills inside her spatial ring were completely hollowed out.

The Nine Orchid Rejuvenation Pills, the Sacred Solar Dew, the marrow cleansing salves given to her by the elders of the Spirit Hall and Shen Ying and Huo Yue—every single scrap of medicine had been chewed, swallowed, and burned away during the brutal war of attrition across the previous six floors.

Even the common low-grade spirit stones she had carried for auxiliary arrays had been drained of their essence, turned into piles of useless, gray powder sitting at the bottom of her storage pouch.

Her primary meridians felt parched, cracked, and brittle like dried riverbeds during a thousand year drought.

Her spiritual sea had dwindled down to a stagnant puddle that could barely support the faint, shivering glow of her two remaining wings.

Right now, she honestly doesn’t know what to do.

A profound, helpless ache weighed upon her heart.

She was a proud daughter of the Spirit Hall, a Holy Maiden who had striven all her life to stand tall on her own feet without leaning on the benevolence of others.

Yet, trapped within this lightless, blood soaked labyrinth with an invincible shadow breathing down their necks and her body completely hollowed of strength, all her pride felt utterly fragile.

In the quiet, dark corners of her mind, a solitary silhouette kept rising through the fog: that tall, immaculate figure clad in imperial black and gold; the unbending posture that looked down upon ancient kings with effortless disdain; the golden eyes that promised that no sky, no god, and no destiny could ever bar his path.

’Young master Haoran...’ she called out silently in the stillness of her soul, her eyelashes trembling against her cheeks. ’Where are you...?’

DING!

A soft, crystalline chime—a sound fundamentally foreign to the ancient, blood stained architecture of the prehistoric tower, chimed directly within the sanctum of her consciousness!

Then, a translucent blue interface snapped open before her retinas, pushing away the encroaching darkness of her vision with a gentle, azure luminescence.

Across the center of the hovering pane, bold, glowing golden characters pulsed with absolute clarity.

[Sub-System 04: Master Signal Acquired!]

[Main System Host Ling Luochen has successfully established a connection!]

[Current Status: Main System has entered the local dimensional sector alongside the entity known as Shen Haoran!]

[Tracking lock engaged. Real-time spatial coordinates transmitting to the Young Master!]

Qian Yunxi’s eyes widened.

The heavy, suffocating glaze of exhaustion over her pupils vanished in a fraction of a heartbeat.

Her breath hitched in her throat, her lips parting as she read the message once, twice, three times, ensuring that her bruised mind was not spinning a cruel, dying hallucination out of desperate longing.

Soon, a breathtaking, radiant smile blossomed across her pale, blood stained face—a pure, incandescent warmth that seemed to banish the freezing, sulfurous gloom of the entire labyrinth in an instant!

The profound terror that had weighed upon her chest like an iron slab completely dissolved, washed away by an overwhelming, surging tide of profound peace and safety.

It was as if just hearing that Haoran was here, everything will be alright.

It defied all logic.

It defied the rules of cultivation, the terror of the seventh guardian, and the fact that they were still trapped in a sealed, nigh-infinite maze in a forbidden wasteland.

Yet, the mere knowledge that the man wearing that black and gold dragon robes were walking the soil of this realm was enough.

To her, Shen Haoran was not merely a cultivator; he was an immovable pillar of reality itself.

If the sky fell, he would hold it up with one hand; if an ancient god stood in his way, he would carve it into pieces and feed it to the stars.

From his position in the shadows, Qing Yan blinked through the blood crusted over his eye, utterly bewildered.

One second ago, she had been a dying bird leaning against a ruin, her life-force flickering on the threshold of collapse.

Now, her posture was light, her eyes were sparkling with vibrant, crystalline life, and that radiant, heart stopping smile was curving her lips.

Qian Yunxi looked at him with a bright smile that left him stunned.

The pure, unreserved joy on her face hit Qing Yan like a physical blow to the chest.

For months, across the courtyards of the academy and the trials in the lower realm, she had always looked upon him with polite, distant courtesy—a gentle, impenetrable mask of noble etiquette that kept him ten thousand leagues away.

Never once had she smiled at him with such raw, unguarded warmth.

For a fleeting, ecstatic microsecond, his twisted, delusional heart leapt, wondering if this smile was meant for him—

But then, her words shattered his delusion to dust.

"We don’t have to be afraid anymore, Qing Yan," she spoke softly, her voice light as a morning breeze, brimming with an unshakeable, triumphant certainty that rang clear against the obsidian walls. "Hold on just a little longer. Young master Haoran... Young master Haoran has arrived. He entered this realm, and he is coming for us right now. Everything will be alright."

CRACK.

Qing Yan subconsciously clenched his fist so violently that his ragged fingernails punched through the skin of his palms, dark crimson dripping between his bruised knuckles onto the stone.

The frantic search through his system interface ground to an absolute halt.

The name Shen Haoran struck his fractured, jealous mind like a bucket of boiling oil poured over an open wound!

His chest heaved with a sudden, suffocating tremor, his teeth locking together so hard that his jaw ached.

He forced a weak, strained rasp through his throat, trying to keep the violent tremor in his vocal cords from turning into a feral shriek.

"You... you seem to really trust him that much, huh?"

Qian Yunxi nodded without a fraction of hesitation.

She turned her gaze back toward the dark, twisting corridors of the maze, her smile softening into an expression of profound, reverent devotion that made her look like an empress gazing upon her sovereign.

"I do," Qian Yunxi answered, her clear voice carrying a weight that brooked no argument in heaven or earth. "For me, Shen Haoran is someone who is capable of everything. A person before whom no mountain can stand, no scheme can endure, and no cage can hold. He is someone I trust with every fiber of my being."

Every single word she spoke landed like a searing branding iron against Qing Yan’s soul.

Someone capable of everything.

Someone she trusts with every fiber of her being.

Not the Spirit Hall, not her ancestral bloodline, and not the heavens.

To her, all of Qing Yan’s frantic struggles, his strange items, his bleeding shoulders, and his desperate displays of loyalty were nothing more than dust—completely overshadowed by the mere shadow of that golden haired demon!

Qing Yan’s expression darkened.

The forced smile on his face completely collapsed, peeling away into an expression of cold, terrifying, and rancid malice.

His head sank low between his bruised shoulders, his tangled, blood matted hair falling over his forehead to cast a pitch black shadow over his eyes.

Beneath that fringe of a hair, his pupils dilated into wide, unblinking circles of pure, rabid hatred.

The dark entity lurking within his sea of consciousness whispered with shrill, manic laughter, wrapping its cold, serpentine coils around his heart.

His bleeding fists shook against his knees, his jaw twitching with silent, homicidal fury as he stared at the damp stone flags, the poison of jealousy rotting away the last fragile thread of his sanity.