“However, I was worried that spending days drinking with me might delay your cultivation, so I initially wanted to advise you against it.”
“But observing your open-minded nature, I believe you know your limits well. Thus, I’ll refrain from saying more.”
Sima Changkong rested briefly, recovering some of his vitality before continuing.
Li Fan’s gaze flickered but said nothing more, only pretending to be remorseful. “Brother Sima’s heartfelt words truly shame me!”
“Haha! If you keep acting this way, you’re treating me as an outsider!” Sima Changkong feigned anger.
Li Fan could only sigh in silence.
After this heartfelt exchange, the bond between the two grew even stronger.
After a short pause, Li Fan brought the topic back to the battlefield in the Tianling Prefecture.
“Brother Sima, what exactly did you witness on the battlefield?” He frowned as he asked. “Given your comprehensive understanding of the history of the Xuanhuang Realm, to receive such high praise from you, it must have been an immensely terrifying force.”
“The Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance has deployed a truly devastating weapon this time.”
As he spoke, he activated a drop of his blood, attempting to create a blood screen to show Li Fan what had transpired, as he had done before.
Images indeed began to appear on the blood screen.
But then, Sima Changkong’s expression abruptly changed.
“How can this be?!” he exclaimed in shock, his face full of disbelief.
Li Fan fixed his gaze on the blood screen.
It showed the overwhelming Five Elders Association cultivators forming a formation and encircling a group of Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance cultivators.
The Alliance’s side, despite being surrounded and numbering only about a hundred, showed no trace of fear. Each was incredibly valiant, as if empowered by some mysterious force.
They charged fearlessly toward an enemy outnumbering them a hundredfold.
This seemingly one-sided battle with a foregone conclusion suddenly shifted dramatically.
At the center of the Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance cultivators, one individual raised something high.
And then…
Without warning, swathes of Five Elders Association cultivators fell from the sky.
They crashed to the ground, bloody and immobile, groaning in agony.
The Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance cultivators appeared to have anticipated this. They swiftly and mercilessly harvested the lives of their enemies.
For a moment, the sky was filled with a strange, overlapping phenomenon of falling bodies, forming a bizarre and grim tableau.
“How could this happen?” Sima Changkong murmured in disbelief as he stared at the recorded scene on the blood screen, his expression dazed.
Seeing Sima Changkong’s strange reaction, Li Fan suddenly thought of something and asked, “Brother, does the scene on this blood screen differ from what you witnessed with your own eyes?”
“Precisely!” Sima Changkong nodded immediately.
“What I saw was a cultivator holding a small, square mirror aloft.”
“From the heavens, countless green threads descended.”
“It was precisely these inexplicable green threads that instantly disabled the Five Elders Association cultivators.”
“But why…”
Even after explaining, Sima Changkong remained unsettled, clearly struggling to accept what had happened.
For someone like Sima Changkong, whose purpose was to faithfully record historical events, this inability to document the truth was a significant blow.
“Unrecordable… green energy…” Li Fan narrowed his eyes.
“So, it’s really the Mysterious Net. I had speculated before that the net had descended upon the world. Indeed, once the war escalated, the Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance couldn’t resist using it.”
“However, the current Mysterious Net differs from the Tianxuan Spirit Locking Formation I encountered in my previous life.”
“It’s surprising that a single handheld mirror can summon it.”
“Is it an incomplete prototype, or…”
Li Fan fell into deep thought.
“No, I must find a way to document it,” Sima Changkong muttered, still visibly shaken, seemingly on the verge of obsession.
“You’re overthinking this, Brother Sima. Even if you can’t directly record it through images or language, you can still indirectly describe its existence,” Li Fan reminded him.
Sima Changkong froze momentarily.
Then he lit up with joy. “How foolish of me!”
He smacked his forehead, forced out a few drops of blood, and fused them into the blood screen.
The blood merged into distorted text that became part of the screen.
> “The Ten Thousand Immortal Alliance and the Five Elders Association clashed in the northeast of the Tianling Prefecture…”
> “Threads of green light descended from the heavens…”
> “Those affected lost their spiritual powers and fell to the ground.”
…
As the characters on the surface gradually stabilized, they seemed about to merge completely with the blood curtain.
Suddenly, a faint green line emerged from the distorted blood characters.
“Not good!”
Sima Changkong’s face turned pale instantly as he cried out in alarm.
Before he could finish his sentence, the green line had already transformed into a torrent of green light.
The green light wreaked havoc, distorting the scenes recorded within the blood curtain beyond recognition. Then, it abruptly withdrew and condensed into a single point of light.
For a moment, there was silence.
The green point suddenly erupted.
“Retreat—”
The moment the green line appeared, even before Sima Changkong could shout his warning, Li Fan had already pushed the Purple Cloud Divine Thunder Escape to its limit.
At the same time, two bony wings emerged from his back, augmented by the ‘Soaring Peng’ technique.
Using the fastest speed he had ever achieved since stepping into the world of cultivation, Li Fan fled into the distance.
However, Li Fan hadn’t anticipated that the Mysterious Net’s reaction would be this intense—more violent than the uproar it caused previously in the Ten Thousand Immortal Island’s Martial Hall.
The green point exploded, and the shockwaves swept out in all directions in an instant.
As the green light neared his body, Li Fan felt a pang of unwillingness but still prepared to invoke his protective technique, [Truth].
However, he quickly swallowed the remaining “Truth” part of the chant.
Because he realized that the charging energy of [Truth] for body protection hadn’t changed at all.
“Hmm? Was it just a false alarm?”
Li Fan stopped fleeing immediately and hovered in mid-air.
After waiting for a while and finding nothing unusual, with the surroundings as calm as before, he hesitated briefly but decided to return and investigate.
Inside the Crystal Palace, everything appeared as it was before.
But an eerie silence pervaded the space.
Sima Changkong remained in his spot, the expression of terror frozen on his face, his body utterly motionless.
“Brother Sima?”
Li Fan called out from a distance.
There was no response.
After a moment, Li Fan cautiously approached. “Brother Sima?”
Although he could still faintly sense the vitality within Sima Changkong, for some reason, there was no reaction from him whatsoever.
Moreover…
That trace of vitality seemed as though it had solidified.
Feeling that something was amiss, Li Fan began to back away slowly.
“Pop!”
At that instant, Sima Changkong’s entire body suddenly burst from within.
What sprayed out was not fresh blood and flesh but pools of viscous green liquid.
The green fluid splattered all over the floor of the ‘Crystal Palace’.
Li Fan narrowly avoided the green liquid’s assault.
Staring at the obliterated remains of Sima Changkong, his face twitched slightly.