A Handsome Guy Holding a Young Woman

The two had returned to the mountaintop, to the spot where they had placed the stone portal earlier. It was a square plaza spanning over a hundred square meters, with a portal four meters tall and five meters wide sitting in one corner.

This time, Fang Bie chose another corner of the plaza. In his hands were fourteen stones that had just been smelted back to their original form in the Furnace.

"Yinsen, if anything seems wrong, smash the portal immediately!" Fang Bie instructed him gravely.

Yinsen stood beside the portal, holding an Iron Pickaxe. Its head was poised over a block of Stone; at Fang Bie's command, he could destroy the intact portal in the blink of an eye.

As before, Fang Bie built a four-by-five portal, then took out the Stone Pickaxe he had used at the entrance and lightly tapped the portal.

A strange sound rang out, identical to the one the earlier portal had made. Only then did Fang Bie slowly breathe a sigh of relief. The portal had opened successfully!

Then his nerves tensed again. Unlike last time, he felt space shudder the instant the portal opened.

He hurriedly drew his Iron Sword and signaled to Yinsen nearby. He had just opened his mouth to speak when a young man charged straight through the portal and crashed into him!

"Ow!" Both of them instinctively clutched their heads. Their foreheads had collided with a hard crack, and Fang Bie felt as though he had hit a stone. His whole head was buzzing.

But Yinsen had already swung his Iron Pickaxe, shattering one of the portal's stones. The portal, which had been glowing with dazzling colors, lost its radiance in the blink of an eye and shut down.

"Ow! Teacher, why is there a person in the cave you found?" The young man in front of him also held his head as he slowly got to his feet.

Only then did Fang Bie have a chance to study the young man who had just emerged from the portal. Even if his body suffered pain, it didn't matter; he would recover soon.

Yinsen had put away his tools and taken up the Iron Sword. He returned to Fang Bie's side, cautiously positioning himself in front of him.

"You brat, you ran too fast for me to warn you. You've clearly stumbled into a portal!" An old man with white hair and beard appeared beside the young man out of nowhere. He smacked him on the head. "Get your head on straight! These two seem to mean us harm!"

Looking at the strange pair, Fang Bie felt an inexplicable sense of déjà vu. Why did they seem so familiar?

"Teacher, you hit me on the head again. You'll make me stupid if you keep doing that!" the young man complained, then suddenly turned around. "Teacher? Why do you suddenly have a body?"

"Why would I suddenly have a body? Are you seeing things—" The old man cut himself off midway through his sentence. Only then did he realize that he was standing on the ground. His once illusory, hollow body had somehow been filled in by some forceful rule.

"Who are you?" Fang Bie finally asked, listening to their baffling exchange.

The young man before him looked rather dashing. He wore a short, close-fitting outfit that marked him as someone who practiced martial arts.

When he saw the two of them, his brows twitched, and he muttered, "Good grief, did I travel back? Why's there a foreigner wearing glasses, too?"

His voice was very quiet, though, and no one but the old man beside him heard. He hurriedly clasped his hands in greeting.

"I'm Xiao Yan, a Dou Zhe who stumbled into this place. Could you tell me where I am?" Xiao Yan had been about to speak English to the man who looked like a foreigner, but in the end, he held back and greeted him with cupped fists.

Fang Bie raised a hand to stop Yinsen from asking anything. This wasn't the time for him to ask questions. What mattered now was their exchange.

There was no point pretending he wasn't nervous. His back was already drenched in sweat. Though the two before him seemed friendly, the moment they said their names, Fang Bie remembered exactly where that familiar feeling had come from.

A guy who had an old man with him and called himself Xiao Yan—there was only one person that could be: the Flame Emperor.

Fang Bie wasn't particularly surprised. After meeting Tony Stark, he had already guessed that the next world might be another one he knew.

Sure enough, this young man, born with a protagonist's fate, had suddenly appeared, making Fang Bie's nerves taut.

Unlike Tony and Yinsen, who were both ordinary people and couldn't make much of a splash in a world like this, Xiao Yan was a true practitioner of Dou Qi—a Dou Zhe from the Dou Qi Continent. He could control Dou Qi, a power beyond ordinary people, which meant he could pose a mortal threat to them. Fang Bie couldn't afford to take that lightly.

"My name is Fang Bie. I'm the lord of this place. As for where you are, it's called My World!" Fang Bie answered truthfully. How the other two chose to interpret that was up to them.

"Ahem!" Just as the two sides were still facing off, a crisp cough interrupted whatever they were about to do.

"Oh no!" Xiao Yan thought. He had suddenly entered this world and gotten so caught up in the confrontation that he had forgotten the person he was holding in his arms. After all this time, the woman lying on the ground had finally woken up.

Fang Bie made a point of showing his goodwill. Xiao Yan was the sort of protagonist who tended to be on the side of good; unless someone attacked him, he generally wouldn't harm an ordinary bystander like Fang Bie.

He gently put away his Iron Sword and pointed to the woman lying on the ground. "Did you bring her here?"

"I brought her back because I couldn't leave an injured person behind," Xiao Yan replied with a bitter smile.

"Her condition is terrible. She's pale, her lips are purple—she's showing signs of severe blood loss!" Yinsen had also put away his Iron Sword. He crouched down and examined her face.

"Then... can you save her?" Fang Bie asked hesitantly. By now, he had guessed what was happening.

It wasn't that he was unusually perceptive. The woman's appearance was simply too similar to the scene described in the book.

Fang Bie now remembered the description in the book: fair-skinned and beautiful, with picturesque features, skin like ice and bones like jade, and an air of nobility. Most striking of all was the Phoenix Hairpin formed by her hair, swept high atop her head—a mark of her peerless beauty!

A young man so youthful, a beauty so noble—Fang Bie now understood the time and place of the young man before him.

The young man had arrived in the Magical Beast Mountain Range just as Yun Yun and the Amethyst Winged Lion King were fighting. The woman lying on the ground was none other than the Misty Cloud Sect Master.

"This is quite a delicate moment in the timeline..." Fang Bie thought to himself.