Shattered Blade and Black Shadow

"So fast! It's so fast I can't even react!" On the vast, motionless land, a Block Horse carried a Block Person as it raced ahead.

The Block Horse was like a phantom. With a light kick of its legs, it turned into a streak of light and shot away at a speed impossible for ordinary eyes to follow.

However, when faced with a small slope on the ground, Fang Zheng quickly used a throwable Slow Falling Potion.

But with a dull thud, red light flashed over the horse's body, and its health immediately dropped to a critical level.

"That was close. I mistimed it again and nearly got it killed."

He immediately fed the Block Horse a Golden Apple to restore its health, lest it die from the fall.

"Although I don't have the patience to breed a Light-Speed Horse for now, a horse that can run 200 kilometers per second is enough for the moment."

"Luckily, although this thing runs fast and jumps high, covering more than 200 kilometers in a blink, it won't fall to its death as long as I don't let it jump. Saves me from having to breed one over and over."

MC's Block Horses were quite interesting. If their speed was repeatedly enhanced with Speed Potions and they were bred, once their descendants became fast enough, they would not only run quickly but also jump high.

No matter how fast they ran or how hard they crashed into other blocks, they would not be hurt. But if they jumped and fell, they would take fall damage.

As a result, the Block Horse Fang Zheng was currently riding was already his third one.

He had accidentally let the previous two jump, causing them to fall to their own deaths.

Although using a Slow Falling Potion would prevent fall damage, the horse moved far too quickly, jumped far too high, and the pits that occasionally appeared in the ground were far too large.

After being used, a Slow Falling Potion could greatly reduce the speed of descent.

Specifically, the affected creature's gravitational acceleration would decrease from 32 meters per second to 4 meters per second, while terminal velocity would decrease from 78.4 meters per second to 9.8 meters per second.

This created a problem: while the Slow Falling Potion remained in effect, Fang Zheng would take a very, very long time to come back down.

A Block Horse could jump hundreds of kilometers high at a time. Drifting down from hundreds of kilometers in the air bit by bit under the effects of a Slow Falling Potion was truly torturous.

Although he could throw an Ender Pearl to return to the ground early, using one while riding a horse would only teleport the player. The horse would remain where it was.

That would make finding the horse again even more troublesome.

Riding the Block Horse as it became a phantom racing across the land, Fang Zheng searched as best he could for the direction of that aged voice.

Fortunately, a Block Person's body was immune to damage and unaffected by the volume of sound waves.

To Fang Zheng's hearing, as long as a sound could be heard, no matter how loud it was, it could not drown out other sounds, nor would excessive volume push it beyond his range of perception.

By comparing the strength of the sounds and using a simple triangulation method, Fang Zheng finally found the general direction: an enormous, pitch-black abyss, as though a star had crashed down and created it.

The Block Horse raced all the way there, and at the deepest point of the abyss, Fang Zheng found the source of the voice.

It was a gigantic dark-red lake of blood, along with a black mountain standing in the middle of it.

(The Immortal Realm has been sealed. There is no road ahead on the immortal path...)

Though it was an unfamiliar language, the sorrow and regret that came from the depths of the heart made it easy to empathize.

Fang Zheng stared at the dark-red blood lake. "Is this the blood of some cultivator?"

He muttered to himself, "Based on what's common in cultivation novels, the blood of such a high-level cultivator should have plenty of uses, right? I'll fill a bucket first."

As he spoke, he casually swung an empty Iron Bucket. A block-shaped gap appeared in the blood lake, and another item appeared in Creative Mode's Inventory.

However, Fang Zheng's act of scooping up a bucket of blood seemed to have disturbed something.

The endless words coming from the black mountain in the center of the enormous lake suddenly stopped.

The huge dark-red lake began to churn for no apparent reason. As if it had come alive, it gradually flowed toward the black mountain.

A tremendous pressure spread outward from the black mountain, growing stronger as it swept over everything around it, causing countless formation patterns to emerge in the Void.

Fang Zheng could see that when the blood flowed onto the black mountain, a faint glow emerged from it and caused it to float.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

A sound like a heartbeat came from the black mountain. Large amounts of golden formation script appeared and flowed through the Void, seemingly contending against the black mountain.

"Huh? This looks like a fragment of something?" Once the mountain floated up, Fang Zheng could see that it had edges and corners. The part that had originally been embedded beneath the lake was a sharp point.

It looked somewhat like the broken tip of a blade.

As time passed, the black mountain floating in the air grew increasingly bright. It changed from pitch-black to pure white, forming a complete blade together with a white phantom.

It was a slender blade, bright as jade from end to end, like a Crescent Moon.

The phantom of the Crescent Moon-like blade gradually dimmed with the passage of time, turning back into a broken black blade tip. The golden formation script in the Void gradually dispersed as well.

The blood clinging to the black fragment also turned into a dark-red waterfall of blood, gathering once more into a gigantic lake.

(The Immortal Realm has been sealed. There is no road ahead on the immortal path...)

That familiar aged, sorrowful voice rang out once more.

"Huh, the color of this blood seems a little darker?" Fang Zheng watched the huge lake surge with waves and noticed that the blood seemed to have grown dimmer.

"Wait, does that mean this blood belongs to the owner of this blade-tip fragment?"

After thinking for a moment, Fang Zheng dismounted and flew toward the center of the lake to examine the black mountain carefully. What he found gave him a fright.

At the peak of the black mountain, Fang Zheng found the thing that had been continuously making that sound.

It was a humanoid phantom made of faint blood mist mixed with dim white light.

The phantom's entire body was exceedingly dim and constantly fluctuated, as though it might collapse at any moment. Its whole form was blurry and indistinct, with only a pair of eyes appearing comparatively bright.

Looking at those eyes, Fang Zheng felt rather astonished. "What the—? They're actually anime Crescent Moon Eyes?"

Those eyes resembled the crescent-shaped pupils commonly seen in anime, like two Crescent Moons embedded in its eyes. They looked quite stylish.

Standing before the phantom, Fang Zheng began muttering questions. "Hey, are you alive? Are you a living person? Can you understand what I'm saying? Can you see me? Are you an NPC? Are you a player? Are you a good guy? Are you a bad guy? What does that thing you keep muttering mean..."

Fang Zheng muttered on like that for quite a while, constantly waving his blocky limbs in an attempt to attract its attention. Yet after a long time, the phantom showed no response at all, leaving him somewhat disappointed.

He sighed. "Sigh, so it's another NPC after all. If this really is some cultivation game, the developers have way too much time on their hands. They put advanced voice lines in a frozen map to lure people over, and when I get here, I find another brainless NPC..."

"Let's go. We'll check somewhere else." With that, Fang Zheng prepared to turn and leave, only to suddenly notice the phantom glance at him from the corner of its eyes.

?!

Fang Zheng immediately became excited. "You're alive? You're alive? You're alive?"

"If you're alive, say something! Say something! Why aren't you talking? Can't you understand what I'm saying? Can you at least move?"

However, the phantom seemed to stop paying attention to Fang Zheng again.

Fang Zheng was frantic. He had finally found someone who might be alive, yet this person refused to acknowledge him.

This made Fang Zheng fly back and forth anxiously. Then, looking at the blood-colored lake below, he had an idea. "Wait, based on the usual xianxia novel tropes, could this guy be something like the remnant soul of the owner of that blood lake?"

"Following the usual cultivation novel formula, some powerful expert's body was shattered, leaving only a little blood behind, while their fragmented remnant soul was protected by a piece of a magic treasure and barely clung to existence?"

"Could he be too badly injured to have much sanity left, so he can't speak?"

"I have to try healing him!"