Five Immortal Sects
Chapter 124: The Blue Prism

Li Yan stared at the blue prism crystal in his hand, his eyes filled with thought. He flipped it over repeatedly, inspecting it again and again.

“Let’s go.”

A cold, clear voice rang in his ears. Li Yan looked up to see a strikingly heroic face scanning the group, though her voice carried a hint of weariness.

While the others swiftly cleaned the battlefield, Gong Chenying herself strode into the field. In the earlier battle against the demonic beasts, their side had lost seven and suffered two injuries. Thankfully, the injured were not seriously harmed and could still fight.

She quickly collected the seven corpses and scattered remains into her storage pouch. So long as they had the strength, Wraith Sect disciples always retrieved the bodies of fallen comrades.

When she looked up again, the others had mostly finished cleaning the field. Her eyes fell on Li Yan who, unlike the others gathering scattered spiritual tools or beast cores from the center, had walked to the earthen platform where the second-rank beast had stood and picked up the discarded blue prism, studying it closely.

Startled out of his thoughts, Li Yan noticed only three or four people remained nearby. He smiled at Gong Chenying, and with a flash of light, stored the blue crystal away before vanishing after the group.

Outside, a bone-piercing wind howled past, causing Li Yan to shiver.

They were now at the center of an isolated mountaintop cliff, with fierce winds shrieking around them and black clouds churning above like stormy waves crashing on a lone sea-bound cliff.

About ten zhang ahead, the ground held a black pit glowing faintly red. The pit extended downward into the mountain’s depths. Looking closely, Li Yan saw surging, vividly crimson lava bubbling below, its glow flickering in and out.

Waves of extreme heat surged upward from the pit, only to meet the cold mountain air and form drifting white mist, making the summit feel even more dreamlike and ethereal.

A narrow path wound through the lava, splitting the molten river in two before vanishing into the depths.

Li Yan could clearly see bubbles of various sizes erupting within the lava. Whenever they burst, streams of molten rock sprayed onto the pit walls, sizzling violently as black smoke curled up, an unending chorus of hiss hiss.

“Use this time to recover!”

Gong Chenying, pale-faced, was the last to emerge from the sphere. She glanced up at the dark, howling sky, then peered into the pit ahead. After a brief survey, she quickly gave instructions.

She also appointed five of the more stable cultivators to keep watch. Having wielded the golden hatchet this round, her spiritual power had been consumed even more heavily than the previous trial. Even her body felt drained, with her bones faintly aching as a sign of overexertion.

Li Yan had also spent a lot of energy this round, with less than forty percent of his spiritual power remaining.

He had intended to break away once inside to create distance, then find an opportunity to poison from the shadows and avoid clashing head-on with the beasts. But the two from Boundless Peak, Mi Yuanzhi and Qi Busheng had rushed in recklessly.

Barely a dozen zhang in, they’d already released their gu insects. Li Yan had been speechless.

Gu were meant for long-range combat. But instead of pulling back to a safer distance, they released the swarms immediately, losing much of their advantage.

At such close range, the gu swarms couldn’t kill the beasts instantly. Several ferocious monsters broke through and closed the gap, killing three cultivators in a flash.

This wasn’t Li Yan’s preferred method of fighting. He preferred to finish enemies with the least effort and greatest speed. If he could think his way out, he wouldn’t lift a finger; if he had to fight, he’d avoid brute force at all costs.

Half an hour later, Li Yan had recovered around eighty percent of his spiritual power through the frantic circulation of his Five Elements mutual generation cycle. Even without further meditation, the last twenty percent would regenerate within an hour. The environment here accelerated the Guishui True Scripture’s Five Elements mutual generation cycle noticeably.

Despite heavy exertion, he was the fastest to recover among them all!

Based on recovery times from the previous stage, they likely had two hours here as well, an hour and a half remaining by his estimate.

Li Yan opened his eyes and saw five cultivators keeping a wary eye on the surroundings. Their exhaustion was written on their faces.

“Go meditate and recover. I’ll take watch.”

He sent them a voice transmission. When the five looked over, surprise flickered in their eyes. Li Yan’s condition seemed excellent. Then again, considering who he was, it wasn’t strange.

They could rely on spirit stones and the abundant spiritual qi in this place. He, on the other hand, might have better pills. His master was a Core Formation cultivator, after all.

After a brief discussion, three of the five began meditating while the remaining two stayed to keep watch alongside Li Yan. Clearly, they weren’t comfortable letting him guard alone.

One of the two remaining was someone Li Yan knew fairly well, Mei Caichu from Old Lord Peak. A deep gash still marred his left arm, though it hadn’t been bandaged.

Li Yan remembered scanning him with his divine sense earlier, his injuries had been quite shocking at the time.

Now, the wound had already scabbed over. He must have used some top-tier healing medicine. As expected, Old Lord Peak lived up to its reputation.

Mei Caichu merely smiled at Li Yan and didn’t approach. Instead, he and the other guard subtly spread out, forming a triangle with Li Yan at one point, encircling the meditating cultivators within.

Li Yan couldn’t help but admire him inwardly. For someone who looked like a spoiled noble, Mei Caichu clearly had brains. A true talent indeed.

Li Yan sat cross-legged with his back to the others, gazing out toward the dark sky beyond the cliff. That stretch of blackness wasn’t the looming shadow from before, it was churning clouds, thick as ink, rolling restlessly across the heavens.

From below the cliff, ashen mist surged upward. Li Yan couldn’t clearly see what lay beneath. He extended his divine sense downward, but after a while, his expression changed slightly. He had heard a strange, rhythmic sound.

It resembled the quiet sobbing of a woman. As he listened more intently, his heart began to waver. A strange urge welled up in him, he felt as though he wanted to rise and leap from the cliff without hesitation.

Startled, Li Yan bit the tip of his tongue hard, regaining a measure of clarity. He immediately withdrew his divine sense, no longer daring to probe further. Sure enough, anywhere outside the designated path of each trial was undoubtedly the most dangerous area.

He looked around, carefully checking the circulation of spiritual power within himself. Finding no abnormalities, just the harmonious cycling of the Five Elements, he finally relaxed.

After a moment’s thought, Li Yan patted his waist. With a flash of blue light, a blue prism appeared in his palm.

This blue prism was different from the one Gong Chenying possessed. Its core shimmered with a black hue. Li Yan had sensed familiar auras from it the moment they entered the spherical mountain’s passage. He had felt a strong urge to hold it.

But only the leader of each team was allowed to carry one. After the first trial, Li Yan had even searched for one in the yellow sphere, but that monk Zhi Zhong had crushed his into powder, leaving no trace.

Naturally, he wouldn't ask to borrow Gong Chenying’s either, after all, it held their team's fate. She would never agree.

Holding the prism close, Li Yan examined it intently. Not long after, a flicker of suspicion passed through his eyes. Quietly channeling his spiritual power, he injected a trace into it.

The moment he did, a sudden shock overwhelmed him.

As soon as his power entered the prism, it blazed with intense blue light and to his horror, his spiritual power began pouring out uncontrollably. He couldn’t stop it at all.

In just half a breath, a full tenth of his spiritual power had been forcibly drained. Li Yan panicked and tried to sever the flow, but to his dismay, it was no use. His power continued to pour into the prism like water from a broken dam.

A bitter curse welled up in his heart. At this rate, in just ten more breaths, he’d be sucked dry and left a lifeless husk.

To make matters worse, the other two on watch had their backs to him, while everyone else was meditating. Earlier, to avoid disturbing anyone, he had even shifted to the cliff’s edge.

Although the prism now blazed brilliantly, unless one looked from the side or front, it would go unnoticed.

His power was draining away, Li Yan found even opening his mouth to shout had become difficult.

His mind raced. After several breaths, desperation settled in, he could think of no solution. His power had already dropped below twenty percent.

What Li Yan didn’t know was that even a powerful Foundation Establishment cultivator like Gong Chenying could barely last two hundred breaths while feeding spiritual power into the prism.

The gap between a great perfection Qi Condensation cultivator and one in Foundation Establishment was like a creek versus a vast lake.

Just as Li Yan felt death drawing near, a sudden transformation erupted within him!

His Guishui True Scripture, which had become nearly impossible to circulate, suddenly surged to life. In that critical moment, the water-element spiritual vat boiled over, producing an overwhelming suction force.

It pulled what little remained from the other four elemental vats into itself, and in an instant, a shallow pool of murky black water formed in the water chamber. Due to the low amount of energy, the water was faint, almost translucent.

Strictly speaking, it looked more like a pool of grey water.

Yet even this thin layer of grey water began to push back against the prism’s pull. It clung to the chamber like it had grown roots, resisting stubbornly.

Then, between the two opposing forces, a spiral vortex slowly began to form inside the water vat.

At first, the two forces clashed and tugged, locked in place. But gradually, the vortex began to spin in reverse.

Its speed picked up steadily, faster and faster. As this transformation played out, the light began to return to Li Yan’s eyes, his earlier despair giving way to hope.

As the vortex spun, it began to pull spiritual power from the prism, channeling it back into his dantian.

And not just his own lost power. Mixed within the stream was spiritual energy that didn’t even belong to him.

That discovery made Li Yan uneasy.

Yet there was nothing he could do to stop it. The foreign energies felt out of place in his body, incompatible with his own.

Li Yan had once read in the archives of Little Bamboo Peak that certain demonic cultivation methods allowed one to refine the power of others for personal use, enabling meteoric advancement.

Just like the spirit-draining technique that Strategist Ji had once intended to use on him.

But all such techniques had a critical flaw, unless that foreign power could be perfectly assimilated, the clashing of incompatible energies would lead to chaos and eventual deviation into madness.

And now, to his disbelief, this was happening within him.

His dantian had become chaotic. The dissonant spiritual forces inside the purple palace strained and surged, as though they wanted to break free.

If that happened, his meridians would rupture, and his blood would flow in reverse. He’d be dead before he could scream.

He had barely pulled himself out of one deathtrap, only to fall headlong into another.

(Chapter End)