Life

The breathing method in the Disrupted Scripture took ten breaths as one cycle, or rather, one "Heavenly Cycle." The rhythm of any single breath could not go wrong. If it did, the time spent entering Cultivation Sight had to be reset.

The autumn wind swept up the dead leaves fallen from the old locust tree in the courtyard. Through Cultivation Sight, Qin Yi carefully observed the girl across from him as streams of information rapidly flickered through his mind.

Ruan Su learned extraordinarily quickly.

On her third attempt, she completed a flawless breathing cycle.

But Ruan Su was not Qin Yi.

As a normal person learning something new for the first time, it was inevitable that his elder sister messed up her breathing rhythm several times afterward. Yet by the tenth cycle, she had, like Qin Yi, completely stabilized the breathing method.

It took four hundred breaths in total. Subtracting the hundred breaths of preparation at the beginning, Ruan Su had fully entered Cultivation Sight in roughly three hundred breaths—twice as long as Qin Yi. Yet the scale at which she siphoned in blue Spirit Resonance far surpassed his.

Qin Yi silently gathered comparative data.

But with only himself and Ruan Su as samples, Qin Yi could not accurately determine the connection between the time needed to enter Cultivation Sight and the scale of the siphoning.

At most, he could list several baseless conjectures.

First, the speed of entering Cultivation Sight and the speed of absorbing Spirit Resonance were two separate talents.

Second, his talent for cultivation was higher than Ruan Su's, but differences in physical strength or so-called "realm" caused his siphoning efficiency to fall short of hers.

Third...

As Qin Yi pondered the possibilities, he observed the changes around him. His hands continued spreading sauce over dinner for the three siblings, and it was precisely because of this calm ability to divide his attention that he quickly noticed that, after entering Cultivation Sight, his elder sister across from him had stopped moving.

Thinking back slightly,

Ruan Su had stopped turning the tiger leg on the grill at a steady pace the instant she entered Cultivation Sight.

Ruan Su apparently could not breathe and cultivate while moving normally as he could. What caused this difference?

Was he unusual, or was Ruan Su unusual?

At that thought, Qin Yi missed Qin Ke a little.

If that adopted younger brother were still here, he would have one more sample to dissect and analyze.

Gloomy clouds pressed down over the heavens, while the mountain wind carried the bone-piercing chill of autumn's desolation.

The slightly damp feeling against his skin made Qin Yi raise his eyes at the sky. It seemed it would rain tonight.

When his gaze lowered and settled on Ruan Su again, Qin Yi gradually noticed something wrong.

Apart from the tiny portion at the very beginning that Ruan Su had absorbed, none of the blue Spirit Resonance siphoned toward her entered her body. Instead, it remained suspended across the surface of her body.

In only a few breaths, Ruan Su's entire figure in Qin Yi's sight had become blurred by the gathered Spirit Resonance, a haze of light and shadow.

Several thoughts flashed through his mind. Qin Yi immediately set down the sauce in his hand and walked toward the motionless girl on the other side of the grill.

"Big sis, stop for now."

"...Hm?"

Although Ruan Su could not move while cultivating, her five senses apparently still remained. Nor did she suffer from the so-called danger of going berserk when interrupted. She looked at the boy strangely.

"Wh...at... is it?"

Qin Yi swiftly swept his eyes over the blue Spirit Resonance around her. He did not choose to touch her, standing half a meter away as he quickly asked,

"Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere?"

Ruan Su blinked and lowered her eyes toward her own body. But having been interrupted, she had exited Cultivation Sight and could no longer observe the Spirit Resonance.

"N...no..."

As she spoke, the exposed half of Ruan Su's delicate little face showed faint excitement. Realization came belatedly, and she smiled happily.

"Xiao Yi, I... I can cultivate now."

"..."

Qin Yi remained silent, still observing.

The surrounding siphoning of Spirit Resonance had already stopped, but the blue Spirit Resonance clinging to Ruan Su's body had not dispersed. He did not believe it would naturally fade away.

Not long after,

Amid the dazzling blue glow surrounding Ruan Su, Qin Yi saw threads of crimson.

Ruan Su was still smiling, but blood suddenly began seeping from her seven orifices.

Her eyes, ears, nose, and mouth.

Blood trickled out in strands, rapidly reaching some critical threshold...

"Cough—blegh... ah... hah... cough, cough..."

Ruan Su's slender body began shaking violently. A great mouthful of blood surged back up from her throat, and her frail body collapsed onto the ground, curling into a tiny ball in agony.

The tiger leg continued roasting over the bonfire, fat dripping into the flames with a sizzling hiss. The girl's crimson, scalding blood sprayed across the gray-brown soil by Qin Yi's feet, releasing faint wisps of heat into the late autumn air.

Blood continued to seep from Ruan Su's seven orifices, dripping down her fair chin and quickly staining her clothes red. Her black pupils trembled faintly as she struggled to lift her gaze, tracing the boy's legs upward through her blood-red vision, her voice shaking.

"X-Xiao Yi... I... I..."

"..."

There was no response.

Qin Yi quietly looked down at the scene. The mountain wind blew, hiding his eyes behind strands of hair. There was not the slightest ripple in his gaze.

His suspicions had been confirmed.

The risks of cultivation...

Something similar had happened when Ruan Su cultivated before. Her cultivation method had conflicted with her constitution, causing internal injuries and blood vomit. But that had only been blood vomit; it was nowhere near as serious as this.

The pool of blood quietly spread. Ruan Su trembled on the ground in pain, and before their eyes could meet, she suddenly lowered her gaze again.

She... she did not dare look... into Xiao Yi's eyes.

Her bloodstained lips parted slightly. The girl instinctively wanted to tell Xiao Yi that she was fine, that she was the same as before, that she had only vomited blood. But her increasingly blurred vision made the words catch in her throat...

Seeing the girl lose consciousness, Qin Yi slowly crouched beside her. He still did not immediately touch Ruan Su's body.

He had not understood before, but now, with Cultivation Sight, Qin Yi grasped the rough course of events almost instantly.

Clearly, the girl's injuries had been caused by this Spirit Resonance she could not absorb.

Her siphoning efficiency was too high, while the upper limit of Spirit Resonance her body could store and convert was too low. Yet the siphoned Spirit Resonance kept pouring in, causing her to burst apart directly.

The girl lay sprawled on the ground. Even unconscious, her petite figure, curled into a ball, still trembled faintly in pain.

It seemed that unlike those internal cultivation methods from before, if he did nothing now, Ruan Su would probably die here like those previous Calamity Seeds.

And if he wanted to save her, the only way was for him to absorb the Spirit Resonance on the surface of her body.

Qin Yi stared at the blue Spirit Resonance coating her body, rapidly weighing the pros and cons.

He could not be sure whether his body could contain such an enormous amount of Spirit Resonance. Now that his brain illness had improved, Ruan Su's importance had already plummeted.

Furthermore, judging by the amount of Spirit Resonance she could store, Ruan Su's cultivation talent was truly low—one could even say she had no talent at all.

In half a breath, she had reached her body's maximum energy-storage limit.

She had only the ability to gather Spirit Resonance, without a body capable of converting it.

And at the rate her physical abilities were expanding, she would probably never reach the level of the black-armored brute or the sword-wielding scholar in his memories, much less the uncertain possibility that stronger people existed in this world.

So, was it necessary for him to risk himself for her?

His heart continued pumping steadily. Qin Yi's breathing did not fluctuate at all. As these thoughts passed through his mind, his hand unconsciously brushed over the girl's bloodstained cheek.

Huh?

Qin Yi's cold gaze fell upon his own palm.

His body had moved faster than his mind. That often happened with Ruan Su, but it was the first time it had happened to him.

He tried to analyze this absurd change through reason.

Was it because his subconscious believed Ruan Su's value was worth risking his life for?

Or was it that,

like Ruan Su, his instincts had replaced his mind and directly filtered out certain overlooked information?

There was no time for deeper thought.

Where Qin Yi's ink-black eyes looked, the blue Spirit Resonance clinging to the girl's body seemed to have finally found an outlet. Like floodwaters bursting through a dam, it spread from his palm throughout his entire body...