Five Immortal Sects
Chapter 129: The Cold Mountain Path

Li Yan cast one last glance at the blackened and bloody ground, littered with grotesque, multicolored organs, then slowly drifted toward the other corpse that clutched a blue prism crystal.

Just as he arrived beside the body, a slender, jade-like hand reached toward him.

“Here, for you.”

Gong Chenying had already retrieved the blue crystal from the corpse. Upon seeing Li Yan approach, she simply handed it to him.

Li Yan gave a faint smile as he accepted it. But after lowering his gaze and getting a closer look at the crystal, his eyes froze for a moment, and then he looked back at the ground, scrutinizing the scene once more.

The corpse was sprawled face down, his clothing relatively intact. At a glance, clearly a sword cultivator from Ten-Step Court. Yet his body was grotesquely bloated, like a swollen carcass, puffed up like a pig…

On the other side, Gong Chenying reached out her hand, and two objects one near, one far flew into her palm. They were the storage pouches from the two Foundation Establishment cultivators. The next moment, they disappeared into her robe.

After pocketing the bags, she looked up toward the top of the sphere, where a loud sizzling noise began to sound. The massive shadow had already begun pressing down over them.

Without delay, Gong Chenying dashed off to investigate elsewhere inside the sphere, leaving Li Yan alone beside the corpse of the Ten-Step Court sword cultivator.

Li Yan seemed particularly intrigued by this Foundation Establishment corpse. Enveloping his hand in spiritual energy, he gently flipped the body over.

This powerful sword cultivator in life now had a pitch-black, bloated face that was barely recognizable. He seemed to have been a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. His neck was covered in an eerie ring of red blotches.

Even in death, his face was frozen in bitter resentment, his eyes still burning with hatred. One hand was clenched in a sword-form gesture, fingers bent mid-technique. There was no sword case on his back, clearly, he was an inner sword cultivator, one who refined swords within his body.

Meanwhile, the cultivators within the defensive formation at the passageway had slowly quieted down. Many stared at Li Yan in growing disbelief, he was casually walking about inside the death sphere.

His expression was calm, unaffected. More and more cultivators exchanged glances, reading the same shock and confusion in each other’s eyes.

This was supposed to be their most lethal trap. The poisons deployed here weren’t guaranteed to kill outright, but they would at least leave one in unbearable agony. Even other poison cultivators would have to tread carefully.

But Li Yan, he wandered through a zone soaked in dozens of kinds of deadly toxins as if he were taking a stroll in a garden. Had their poisons failed?

Or could it be that a mere protective aura was enough to block them?

If so, how would one explain the dozens of corpses, some of them confirmed Foundation Establishment cultivators? Those bodies, even after being flipped and inspected, showed no signs of life.

“He must’ve been given some powerful spiritual pill by Peak Master Wei. Otherwise, there’s no way he could walk around like this.”

Mi Yuanzhi muttered to himself.

“Definitely. He must’ve taken the antidote beforehand, we just didn’t notice,” Qi Busheng added bitterly.

This explanation seemed to ease many hearts. After all, it was too hard to accept that this Little Uncle Li from Little Bamboo Peak could stroll through their poison field unscathed.

Even the ones who laid the traps were only confident about their own poisons, not the deadly mixtures made from several poisons clashing together.

Who knew what kind of strange reactions might occur from such a mix?

“Maybe the poisonous miasma was already used up by the time he got there, nothing lethal left in the air,” one cultivator from Old Lord Peak suggested tentatively.

Some nodded at that too. Slowly, they began to accept these excuses, anything was better than admitting Li Yan might truly be immune to the poisons.

To acknowledge that would be to invalidate all their efforts, their skills in poison making. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

As these rationalizations spread, Gong Chenying had already swept once more around the inner sphere, her brows knit tighter with each pass.

“Twenty-seven sword cultivators from Ten-Step Court… twenty-four Daoists from Grand Profound Sect… Did something go wrong with the Life-and-Death Wheel? A three-way conflict? Or is this… the three sects’ secret weapon against us?”

She had mostly accepted the third possibility in her heart, though she still resisted believing it.

If it were a three-way fight, there’d be chaos, survivors. But if the three sects had cooperated…

Then this was a deathtrap. A complete slaughter.

The thought of two Foundation Establishment cultivators appearing together made her heart sink. All those who came here were elite, but even she had no confidence in taking on two peers alone.

Still, she couldn’t understand why this had happened. No clues yet. At least she was glad they had made the right move by charging in early and laying the trap. If they’d followed the old strategy from the previous two rounds, they’d have walked right into annihilation.

No doubt, they would’ve been slaughtered.

As she mused, Gong Chenying returned to Li Yan’s side.

He was still drifting back and forth between the two Foundation Establishment corpses, as if measuring something. He hadn’t even glanced at the other fallen cultivators, his focus was absolute.

“Find anything?” Gong Chenying asked quietly.

“I have some suspicions,” Li Yan replied, heartbeat quickening. He looked up. Since the blue crystals hadn’t been activated, the top of the sphere was already pitch black.

“The exit’s that way. Let’s talk outside.”

Gong Chenying had already located the passage during her earlier flight. With a nod, she turned and shot off toward Wuliang Sect’s defensive formation.

“Clean up the battlefield quickly. We’ll head out first. Be mindful of the poisons inside the sphere, especially those four locations I pointed out. I don’t have any antidotes for those areas either.”

As she spoke, Gong Chenying pointed toward four specific spots.

The moment her words fell, a few cultivators surged out ahead. Looting the battlefield was their favorite thing to do and the source of their earlier discontent watching Li Yan leave first.

But now that they had seen him take two blue prism crystals and Martial Aunt Gong only collect the storage pouches from the two Foundation Establishment cultivators, their impatience had reached its peak.

They charged out, subconsciously buying into the recent theory that the sphere’s poisonous miasma had already thinned and weakened. Even if some remained, it would likely be bearable.

However, just a few steps out, their faces changed drastically. They immediately sat down cross-legged, panicked, and began swallowing antidotes.

Black, red, and purple hues had already begun to creep across their faces. Though it was too late for full detoxification, the pills they took were enough to temporarily suppress the poisons. They could only hope to find specific antidotes later.

The other cultivators who had been about to rush out stopped in their tracks, stunned by the sudden turn of events. They instinctively looked toward the cultivators from Old Lord Peak and Four Symbols Peak.

Those cultivators, too, were visibly shocked. Reality was clearly not aligning with their assumptions. But their reaction was swift they took out antidotes, exchanged them quickly, and swallowed them down.

Then, tossing a few more to others, they cautiously stepped beyond the array. After some careful probing, and finding nothing immediately wrong, they rushed to aid the poisoned cultivators.

Only once they were outside the array did they realize how truly foul the air had become, it was saturated and violent like standing at the edge of a volcano that could erupt at any moment.

They swept their divine senses toward the four locations Gong Chenying had warned about. Those places were oddly quiet, more so than the rest of the battlefield, and the air there seemed even clearer. But this only chilled them further.

If poison couldn’t even drift into those areas, that only meant they were even more deadly, strange and unpredictable. The piles of corpses there felt especially eerie and menacing under their divine sense scans.

Unconsciously, many of them cast another glance at Li Yan, who was crouched down among the bodies, inspecting them.

Three breaths later, Li Yan also moved, quietly heading toward the four areas he himself had arranged. In mere moments, he collected twenty-three storage pouches.

And within those short breaths of time, he was the only one left inside the sphere.

He continued examining the corpses, sending bursts of spiritual energy into them. A strange expression flickered across his face…

Then the sizzling overhead grew sharp and close, and Li Yan immediately darted toward the exit tunnel.

...

Outside the sphere, icy winds howled. Snowflakes the size of fists danced from the sky.

Li Yan looked around. They had emerged onto a snow-covered mountain path, enclosed on both sides by towering snowy peaks that stretched endlessly into the heavens.

Thick snowfall blanketed the landscape, obscuring the narrow mountain trail in a blur of white.

The group of cultivators stood there in silence. Within moments, a soft layer of snow had accumulated on each of their robes. All eyes turned to Gong Chenying, waiting to see what she would say next.

They had already recovered their spiritual energy during the previous round. The last challenge had ended with all their opponents dead, and though they had reaped a good number of storage pouches, every face was now etched with unease.

If not for Gong Chenying’s sudden tactics, which had caught the enemy off guard, all of them would likely be corpses right now.

“Martial Aunt Gong… will we charge ahead again this round and set an ambush afterward?”

The silence was broken by a soft, hesitant voice. Everyone looked toward the speaker, Cheng Jingnian from Old Lord Peak.

Her raven-black hair was dusted with snow. Her pale, delicate face was tinged with fragility, almost pitiable. Whether from the cold or from fear of what lay ahead, her voice trembled slightly.

Everyone’s gaze once again focused on Gong Chenying, nervous, uneasy, fearful, uncertain…

“It seems we must charge ahead ten li and lay down our traps there. Only then can we return to the sphere’s edge to rest.”

Gong Chenying stood in the snow, her figure flickering amidst the falling flakes. Meeting their gazes directly, she offered what she believed to be the best plan.

“But if we do this, we’re gambling everything on always being faster. If the enemy beats us even once… we can only say fate has spoken.”

Her voice, like the snow and wind, seeped into their bones, cold and ruthless.

The mountain path fell silent again, wind howling between the peaks. The cultivators all lowered their heads, bitter helplessness rising in their hearts.

Just as Gong Chenying had said, if the enemy beat them to it even once, the result would be inescapable death.

“I still don’t know what method they used to merge two sects into one force. So we have no choice… We must fight our way through.”

She stretched out a fair hand, catching a giant snowflake in her palm, murmuring like to herself.

“Then we’ll fight!”

The scarred Senior Brother Wu’s face twitched. He growled lowly, veins bulging.

“Kill!”

“Kill!”

“Kill!”-voices rose in quick succession.

“You old bastard… this is the day I throw away this body of mine! You happy now?”

Mei Caichu’s voice shook, all trace of his once-princely elegance gone.

“Looks like this little Taoist is heading to meet the Three Pure Ones. Might as well bring a few alchemy apprentices to the Grand Supreme Elder along the way!”

Ding Yiwei lifted his chin, a grin still on his face.

Mei Jingnian and Hu Ziyi, the two female cultivators, had red-rimmed eyes. Their white, delicate fingers were clenched so tightly they had lost all color.

“M-Martial Aunt Gong… how many more rounds do we have to pass?”

Hu Ziyi’s voice quivered. Her question made the rest of the group suddenly realize, none of them had asked that yet. By their count, they had passed three rounds already. Perhaps only one remained?

But Gong Chenying’s answer left them disappointed.

“Five rounds in total.”

Their eyes dimmed. Two more rounds. And with the situation as dangerous as it was, each one might very well be their last.

Gong Chenying took a deep breath. In that case, there was no need to sit down and recover. Better to press ahead and gain more time.

Just as she lifted her foot to move, she suddenly paused.

She turned her gaze toward Li Yan, who had been standing silently in the snow, head lowered.

He had said earlier that he’d discovered something… but since they exited the sphere, he hadn’t spoken a word.

What exactly was he thinking?

(Chapter End)