Chapter 6: Freshly Killed

Before bed that night, Nurse Xu brought the nighttime nutritional medicine to Ding Ling’s bedside.

Ding Ling downed the potion in one gulp. Taking advantage of the medical cultivator’s distraction, she smoothly slipped the empty medicine bottle into her sleeve.

Around six or seven medicine bottles were already hidden in her bedside drawer, all “smoothly” stashed away by Ding Ling. It had become such second nature that she even began to wonder if she used to be a thief.

Her memory only reached as far as joining the Sanqing Sect, rising from a chore servant to the outer sect, and then earning her way into the inner sect.

Everything that happened after entering the inner sect remained shrouded in mist.

Yet no matter how many times she looked at them, these translucent jade-like little medicine bottles still astonished her.

Here, medicine containers and window panes alike were made of translucent glazed glass, and even the illumination magical artifacts were exceptionally lavish, with several long strips in every room that shone brighter than pearls from the Eastern Sea^[1].

Why, then, was the spiritual energy here so thin?

Seeing her finish the drink, Nurse Xu took out an instrument for a routine check, scanning Ding Ling’s arm back and forth. The lightning-charred flesh was still covered in a hard crust, showing no new skin or flesh growth underneath, nor any sign of recovery.

Nurse Xiao Xu could not understand it. How could this be?

The cafeteria’s head chef prepared special medicinal meals for her, and Ding Ling ate five times a day!

Yet she hadn’t gained an ounce of weight, nor had her injury improved at all.

Where was all that ingested medicinal food and medicine being absorbed? It was impossible for none of it to be absorbed; even ordinary people without any spiritual root or spiritual power could absorb the active components in spiritual plant medicines.

The cultivation world and the medical field had joined forces to conquer this medical challenge, successfully proving the clinical efficacy and safety of Immortal-grade medicines.

If the nutritional supplements didn’t work, what would happen to Ding Ling’s arm?

They would just have to wait until Professor Song returned from the medical conference.

“Get some good rest,” Nurse Xu said, tucking Ding Ling in and leaving a desk lamp on before closing the door.

The lights-out bell in the student dormitory rang promptly at nine o’clock. Once nine passed, aside from a few lamps left on around the athletic field and outside each building, pitch-black silence enveloped the surroundings.

Ding Ling rested with her eyes closed until midnight, when she finally pulled back the blanket and sat up.

Hearing no one around, she patted her soft pillows under the blanket to form the shape of a person.

Holding her breath and focusing her senses, she slipped out of the small building and unlocked the iron gate with the key.

Following the route she had coaxed out of Yao Beibei over the past few days, she took a side path toward the mountain trail.

In the nighttime mountain forest, mist hung thick in the air, and the stone steps were slick with moisture.

Ding Ling made her way up the stone steps, moving slower and more cautiously with each step. It was not because the path was slippery, but because she had walked for a long time without running into any barrier.

She suspected there should be protective barriers and restrictions set across the mountain.

Normally, after a disciple trespassed into a forbidden zone, even if they were not expelled from the sect, the sect elders should have placed new restrictions. Yet she had walked the whole way without spotting the slightest trace of one.

Just as she was growing suspicious, the wind parted the clouds, and the moonlight revealed a thin halo of light at the mountain summit.

Faint as gossamer, it shimmered with a weak golden glow.

Ding Ling’s steps slowed. A slit had opened in that faint halo of light.

The barrier had been breached; someone had gone up the mountain ahead of her!

She quickly crouched down into the grass and listened intently. Sure enough, voices drifted over from in front of the stone cave.

One of them asked, “Did you take care of the surveillance cameras?”

“Taken care of. I’ll repair the barrier when we leave, don’t worry, it’s fine.” The person scoffed after answering. “Besides, even if they find out, what can they do about it?”

The first person spoke with much more maturity, lowering his voice. “Less trouble is always better. Let me check if anyone is around.”

Ding Ling’s heart tightened!

She had fought through countless fierce battles and had never once known fear, but right now she had neither magical artifacts nor treasures, and one of her arms was crippled.

If it truly came to a clash, her only choice would be to start a forest fire to alert the people below. When the time came, she could claim that pain had kept her from sleeping, leading her to accidentally discover intruders trespassing in the sect’s forbidden grounds…

While she was deliberating, the man had already sent out his divine sense, retracting it a moment later. “No one’s here.”

Ding Ling was taken aback, but thinking about it further, she understood.

The person had released his divine sense to search for any cultivators nearby.

A renowned great medical cultivator like Professor Song had determined that her spiritual root was ruined. With a ruined spiritual root, in that person’s divine sense, she was probably no different from the wild birds and beasts on the mountain.

One of the two entered the cave while the other stood guard outside. The one who went in emerged shortly after. “There’s nothing in there.”

The person outside hesitated. “Nothing at all? How could that be? Didn’t the young master say there was a stone platform in the cave, with a Stone Gourd on it?”

That clearly sounded like an ancient magical artifact. Finding a treasure like that in an A-rank secret realm was exceedingly rare.

“If you don’t believe me, go in and look for yourself.”

The man indeed went inside himself, and like the other, came out a moment later. There truly was nothing.

The two looked at each other. The more mature one said in a deep voice, “This is only an A-rank safety secret realm. The higher the safety rating, the more ordinary the items.”

Whether this so-called Stone Gourd was even a magical treasure remained uncertain.

“That may be true, but if we go back empty-handed, how are we going to report back?”

“Isn’t the expert panel coming tomorrow? If there really was something, they wouldn’t fail to hand it over.”

“Would that man surnamed Li really agree to hand it over?”

“Whether he’s willing or not, he’ll have to.”

Ding Ling didn’t understand the first few sentences, but she recognized the surname. Principal Li was the sect leader of No. 1 High School, and Dean Chen Dahai was an elder of No. 1 High School.

Young master? Did they mean Ye Yibai?

These two were sent by the Ye family.

The two exchanged a few more words and hurried down the mountain.

Ding Ling waited until they were far away. She waited for a long time until no human sound remained in the mountains.

Just as she was about to step out, an old and teasing voice echoed in her mind: “Little Bell, in our line of work, you must be able to wait. Never be impatient.”

Ding Ling couldn’t recall whose voice it was for a moment, but she couldn’t help holding her breath and freezing in place.

Then came several soft rustles in the grass, followed by Chen Dahai’s voice: “They really came. The Ye family’s reach extends too far.”

The other voice was unfamiliar to Ding Ling. That person merely gave a soft sigh. “Let’s go.”

Only when silence fell over the surroundings once more did Ding Ling slowly walk up to the stone cave.

With the barrier formation broken, she entered the cave smoothly. Standing inside, her mind went completely blank; she couldn’t remember anything.

Raising her hand to touch the rocky wall of the cave, she felt a smooth surface, and the faint sound of rising and falling tides echoed in her ears.

Just as she stood lost in thought, the salty brine of seawater reached her nose. Following the scent, she saw several fluffy little grass balls growing in a corner against the stone wall.

Several clumps of grass balls glowed with a faint green light in the dark night. To think high-grade spiritual plants grew in a place like this!

Had those people missed them out of carelessness? Or did they simply not recognize them?

They probably didn’t recognize them. That textbook, something called 《Compendium of Spiritual Plants》, didn’t have this kind of grass ball.

Without stopping to think, Ding Ling immediately squatted down to harvest them, placing the herbs into the translucent jade medicine bottle she had secretly hidden away, before putting the bottle into Yao Beibei’s shimmering pink low-grade cosmos bag.

Having finished this, she swiftly made her way down the mountain. By the time she returned to the school infirmary, the ending theme song of a TV drama was playing from Nurse Xiao Xu’s room.

There were six grass balls in total. Without an alchemy furnace to refine pills, she could only chew the herbs raw.

Standing before the mirror in the ward’s bathroom, Ding Ling took one out and washed away the damp mud on it.

She stuffed the fluffy ball of grass into her mouth and chewed until the juices flowed, its refreshing bitterness carrying a distinct herbal fragrance.

Reluctant to waste a single drop, Ding Ling swallowed it all down as the medicinal sap flowed down her throat and into her stomach.

She lay down on the bed, feeling waves of steaming heat billowing within her spiritual manor.

The next morning, Nurse Xiao Xu yawned as she pushed the door open. “Time to eat and take your medicine! The cafeteria steamed red date cakes today, so I grabbed you two extra…”

Before she could finish her sentence, her eyes widened in shock.

Ding Ling looked as if she had just been dragged out of water. Her clothes were soaked through and clinging to her body, and she kept breathing out plumes of hot air.

Temperatures in the mountains were low, dropping to just over ten degrees at night, requiring a thick quilt to avoid catching a cold. How could she have sweated so much?

Ding Ling simply shook her head. “I don’t know either.”

Nurse Xiao Xu’s cultivation as a medical cultivator was limited; she wouldn’t be able to detect anything.

Nurse Xu examined her with medical instruments for quite a while, but indeed found nothing unusual. The hard crust was still the same hard crust, and the flesh beneath showed no signs of regenerating.

However, when she sanitized Ding Ling with alcohol cotton pads during the examination, the iron-black tint on her skin faded considerably wherever the cotton wiped.

She pushed Ding Ling into the bathroom to take a shower and even contributed her own whitening body wash. “Use plenty of it! Scrub yourself a few more times!”

Ding Ling turned on the showerhead. Hot water poured down over her head and cascaded across her skin, washing away dark, murky water and visibly lightening her complexion by a shade.

When she came out of the bathroom, Nurse Xiao Xu was all smiles. “Looks like the medicine you’ve been taking is working after all! Rest for a few more weeks and you’ll be fully recovered!”

When Yao Beibei came to visit Ding Ling after self-study class, her jaw dropped the moment she stepped inside. Ding Ling used to be pitch-black, but now she was gray, and she still had no hair or eyebrows.

She had gone from one kind of bizarre to another.

In truth, when Ding Ling first arrived at the summer camp, her snow-white skin, delicate features, and gentle demeanor whenever she stayed silent had prompted quite a few boys to secretly ask around for her name.

After the first mini-exam, even more people started inquiring about her.

How could someone from a small mountain village in the South Polar Continent tie for first place with Ye Yibai?

Later on, though… no one asked anymore. Ding Ling’s sharp tongue spared no one, firing indiscriminately at boys and girls alike.

Whether she was fair or not did not matter to Ding Ling. Her skin had lightened because the high-grade spiritual plant had taken effect, purging turbidity and filth to expel the impurities from her body.

Unfortunately, there were only six of them. At most, they could strengthen her physical constitution, but they couldn’t help her undergo a complete metamorphosis.

“Didn’t you say yesterday that the expert panel was coming?” Ding Ling was quite curious about this expert panel.

“They’ve already visited.”

The guardian array of the mountaintop secret realm had been utterly destroyed, leaving it without even the value to seal away for further study. As soon as the expert panel’s assessment came out, the school issued a 《Notice to Parents》 and partnered with the television station to broadcast a news report.

Yao Beibei switched on the TV, where the midday news was currently airing.

“…According to the experts’ investigation and exploration, this Class-A secret realm has a history of tens of thousands of years. The experts also discovered what are suspected to be the remains of marine creatures on the cave’s stone walls…”

“At present, no traces of the legendary Stone Gourd have been found.”

The news report did not mention a single word about any victims in this secret realm collapse incident.

The girls in the dorm all said that the Ye family must have paid to settle the matter.

Yao Beibei unwrapped a small French bun and pressed it into Ding Ling’s hand. Holding back her urge to complain, she simply continued discussing the news: “The expert panel couldn’t figure out where that lightning bolt came from that day either.”

The news hadn’t mentioned it at all, though the notice sent to parents had glossed over it with a vague sentence or two.

This wasn’t something Yao Beibei had noticed on her own; Cheng Lu had mentioned it in the dorm.

Ding Ling pressed her lips together in silence.

Where had the lightning come from? Even she did not know.

“By the way.” Yao Beibei studied Ding Ling’s expression.

She couldn’t read anything from it. Ding Ling looked a little paler, and her eyebrows hadn’t grown back yet. Yao Beibei had never realized before how much of an impact eyebrows had on a person’s facial expressions.

“What is it?”

“Ye Yibai is back.”

Ding Ling lifted her eyelids slightly.

Should I kill him? she asked the remnant soul inside her once again.

There was no response.

Though the other gave no answer, Ding Ling still spoke with utmost politeness in her mind: Since I have borrowed your mortal vessel to nourish my soul, I must repay you in some way. Whenever you ask, I will kill him.