The ancestral tombs lay in the hills behind the old estate. The patriarch and his men arrived quickly, and the clamor outside the tomb was already audible. "You're saying that beast took Zhi into the ancestral tombs?"
A guard reported, "Y-yes."
"The little beast has lost his mind, walking into the jar himself. Ha..." The patriarch opened the great doors and led everyone inside.
They passed through several burial chambers and reached the entrance to the main tomb, where they immediately saw Qi Yan gripping Qi Zhi by the throat, pinning him inside a blood-red circle of light.
Seeing the patriarch lead everyone in, Qi Yan gave them a radiant smile. "Hello, everyone... Ah, not enough of you came. What a pity, what a pity."
The patriarch froze for a moment, then his heart shook violently, and he blurted out, "The Mutual Destruction Restriction! Run!"
Unfortunately, it was too late. Qi Yan had already shoved Qi Zhi into the bloody light.
With a thunderous rumble, what looked like a small mushroom cloud rose above the burial hill. The entire hill was razed to the ground, and everyone on it died in an instant, without even a chance to leave a final word.
Amid the ruins, Qi Yan alone remained standing where he had been, completely unscathed.
Even the immortal Dao spoke of leaving a thread of hope for survival. Naturally, the final restriction the ancestor had left his descendants did more than merely ensure mutual destruction. At its activation point was a safe zone barely large enough for one person, a chance for the last trace of the bloodline to survive.
Never mind the patriarch and his family-even if their ancestor from thousands of years ago had known of this from beneath the earth, he would probably have been dumbstruck.
Was this how you were supposed to use the ancestor's final restriction for preserving the lineage?
Yet Qi Yan showed no expression at all. This was exactly how the ancestral restriction was meant to be used. The only difference lay in who counted as the enemy, and who represented the greater good.
Clutching his stomach, he slowly searched through the ruins until he found the patriarch's mangled, bloody corpse. After searching it for a while, he knitted his brows tightly.
There were a few medicine bottles, but unfortunately, all had been blasted apart. He could no longer tell which clump of debris was his antidote.
Eating things at random might only kill him faster. What should he do?
There was nothing to be done about that. With life and death staring him in the face, this had been the only solution Qi Yan could think of. How could he have spared a thought for whether the medicine would be blown to pieces...
Qi Yan took a deep breath and simply went to where the main burial chamber had been, to see whether the ancestor's burial goods held anything worthwhile.
The ancestor had been a Golden Core cultivator, after all... To Qi Yan, who was merely at the first level of Qi Refinement, practically anything he found would be a treasure. Hopefully, nothing was buried too deep...
The main burial chamber had also been destroyed. A few Law Treasure fragments and Spirit Stone shards had been flung out by the explosion and lay scattered among the ruins.
Qi Yan silently gathered them all. Law Treasure fragments had value too. Someone might be able to smelt their materials down and reuse them, and some people on the market bought such things. Spirit Stone shards could likewise aid cultivation.
Unfortunately, he still could not find anything resembling the antidote he wanted.
There was no time to dig farther down.
"Go and look! What happened?" A clamor came from the distance. Other clansmen were already racing toward the ruins from the old estate. Knowing he could not linger, Qi Yan turned to leave.
As he turned, he suddenly spotted something jade-colored in a crack between the bricks and stones. It looked like a jade pendant, though he had no idea how badly it had been damaged in that enormous explosion.
Qi Yan snatched up the jade pendant and quickly fled.
Above the clouds, Jiang Jinyue, whom her master had sent to Tianliang Continent to find someone, was watching the drama unfold below.
She had been on Tianliang Continent for several days, but had no idea where to begin with this supposed search, and had spent those days wandering aimlessly. Passing by this place by chance, she found this spectacle quite a show amid her dull journey and watched with great enjoyment.
From so far away, she could not make out what the jade pendant Qi Yan had picked up amid the wreckage looked like. She merely enjoyed the show and gave her approval. "Decisive and ruthless. A little interesting."
After a pause, her beautiful eyes turned toward the ruins, and she murmured, "Strange. My Heavenly Evolution Sect has never had any connection with Tianliang Continent. Why would the tomb restrictions here bear a slight resemblance to our sect's origins? This method of activation through a living sacrifice..."
Qi Yan, who had been praised as "decisive and ruthless," was having a real pain in the balls right now.
All those ferocious moves, yet the Seven-Day Heartbreak Powder's poison remained completely unresolved. It was already late at night, practically the sixth day. He had less than two days left to live.
Not only that, the other clansmen were surely searching everywhere for him. He had blown up their ancestral tombs and killed the patriarch along with a group of elites-a hatred approaching that of having their clan exterminated. If they found him, he would not even have those final two days.
However anxious he was, there was nothing he could do. Still poisoned, with his stomach pain never subsiding, he ran across two mountain hollows before his strength gave out. Qi Yan could only find a hollow beneath a mountain rock and hide inside, resting for a while first.
With some difficulty, Qi Yan sat down and leaned back, examining the jade pendant he had just picked up in the moonlight.
The jade pendant was moon-white. Despite many of the burial Law Treasures having been blasted to pieces, this pendant was completely intact, without even a scratch. He had no idea what kind of jade it was... Its design was also very unusual. Rather than the familiar auspicious dragons and phoenixes or decorative flowers and birds symbolizing wealth, it seemed to be carved with a sun.
Very few people carved that on jade pendants, and the carving technique did not resemble any style currently known to him. Instead, it looked a little like something from some ancient tribe.
Hmm... The ancestor had been dead for thousands of years, after all. However unchanging the cultivation world was, thousands of years still qualified as the recent ancient past. Some changes in craftsmanship and style were hardly surprising. Besides, supposedly, nearly ten thousand years ago, heaven and earth had undergone a great upheaval that had even caused changes in cultivation methods. Qi Yan did not know much about the details.
This might be something from before that upheaval.
However he examined it, the jade pendant showed no sign of any power. Still, since a Golden Core ancestor had chosen it as a burial good, there had to be something to it... Qi Yan tried pouring in his pitiful amount of Law Power to investigate. Could it contain an inscribed cultivation method?
The moment his Law Power entered it, a woman's sobbing reached his ears, startling Qi Yan so badly that he nearly sprang to his feet.
He looked around. No one... Was the sobbing coming from inside the pendant?
Could there be a Medicine Elder inside? No, a woman-would that make her a Medicine Lady?
Qi Yan ventured, "You are..."
The girl on the other end was even more startled than he was. Sniffling, she stammered, "Y-you, what kind of monster are you! How are you inside my jade pendant!"
Qi Yan: "?"
Who was inside whose jade pendant?
Having come from the smartphone era, Qi Yan only froze for a moment before immediately catching on. There might not actually be someone inside. It could be something like a communication talisman.
But there had been no call, so how had this communication talisman connected to whoever was on the other end? Hmm... Perhaps the pendants themselves were a pair, linked to each other? Possible.
Qi Yan was rather disappointed.
A communication talisman would have been fine. If some big shot were on the other end, perhaps he could ask them for help curing his poison. But this was just a girl still sniveling and sobbing. However he looked at it, she could hardly know much. What could she do?
What kind of big shot cried!
"Miss, do you mean you're holding a jade pendant?" Qi Yan confirmed again.
"Y-yes. My mother left this to me! She never said there was someone inside." The girl's voice was panicked.
Qi Yan sighed. "Miss, I just obtained a jade pendant... From the looks of things, our pendants might be a pair that lets us communicate, rather than either of us being inside the other's pendant."
The girl hesitated to speak.
That made sense, but how could one of a pair of "love-token jade pendants" have been with her mother, and the other with someone outside? Her mother had never mentioned it... Oh, perhaps she really would not have mentioned this.
The girl grew deeply worried about the color of the hat on her late father's head, to the point that she forgot to cry.
"Forget it. Whatever the case, fate brought us together." Qi Yan slumped wearily against the rock wall and sighed. "What were you crying about just now? Who bullied you?"
The girl said timidly, "N-nothing... Private sect matters..."
"Heh." Qi Yan scoffed. "Don't air the family's dirty laundry, just swallow your grievances yourself-is that it? Someone swallowed his for over ten years, only to receive a dose of Seven-Day Heartbreak Powder. Just as stupid as you."
The girl asked cautiously, "Was that a reward? Seven-Day Heartbreak Powder does taste quite nice, sweet and sour, but it's still a poison, after all. Eating too much isn't good for you. Using that as a reward really isn't very fair..."
"?" Qi Yan sat bolt upright like a spring.
Wait, what did you say?
"Well..." Qi Yan carefully chose his words. "Do you know a lot about this poison?"
"This is very basic."
"Then let me test you. Without an antidote, how would you quickly cure this poison?"
"Does it need curing? It's actually quite tasty..."
A vein throbbed on Qi Yan's forehead. "For a mortal."
"Then... you could use something like the Concordance Pact or Tribulation-Transferring Incantation to transfer it to someone else. That's the fastest way." On the other end, the girl pursed her lips. "But doing that isn't good... Right now, I..."
Qi Yan narrowed his eyes.
These references to pacts and incantations felt rather different from the concept of Immortal Methods. Was the girl on the other end from the Wu Clan in some remote backwater?
Who cared whether it was Witchcraft or an Immortal Method, as long as it worked? Qi Yan paused. Worried that she might refuse if he directly asked for the secrets of her techniques, he followed her lead instead. "You mean someone's used this on you?"
"More or less..." The girl began to open up, no longer as anxious or guarded as before. Sniffling, she said, "Someone put an Essence-Draining Incantation on me. No matter how much power I take in, it all becomes cultivation for him. All the medicinal herbs and treasures I've obtained through so much hardship over the last six months have gone to waste. All these injuries for nothing, sob..."
Qi Yan frowned. "No one in your family intervened?"
"I don't have a family anymore..." The girl grew even sadder. "The sect doesn't believe me. They say I don't cultivate properly and even slander my fellow disciples..."
"A fellow disciple... So that's why you're crying here? Are you crying because you're helpless against the incantation, or because the sect won't uphold justice for you?"
"B-both. It hurts even more that they won't believe me." At this point, the girl suddenly froze. "Y-you believe me? When all I've done is say this through a jade pendant?"
"I do. What do they have to do with me? You're the one talking to me."
The girl pressed her lips tightly together.
Qi Yan smiled. "Besides, why do you need anyone to believe you? If others won't uphold justice for you, uphold it yourself."
The girl said quietly, "But no one's helping me. I can't break this incantation."
"If the other party needs to steal your fortuitous opportunities, that means he wasn't as strong as you to begin with, right?"
"Y-yes. He's still not as strong as me."
"How many pills or Spirit Stones do you usually use to support your cultivation?"
"For things like Qi-Replenishing Pills, one at a time. I can't withstand any more."
"What's your upper limit?"
"T-two or three?"
"No vague numbers. I need an exact figure, right down to the point where even a tiny bit more would burn all your meridians to ashes."
The girl froze, her eyes slowly widening.
Qi Yan said leisurely, "Take them now. See who dies first."
"But..." The girl swallowed. "If something happens to him, that would make me guilty of harming a fellow disciple..."
"But the sect believes you've never been under an Essence-Draining Incantation. However recklessly you choose to take your own pills, what does that have to do with anyone else?"