A master of both medicine and martial arts, he picked up a beautiful CEO as his wife.

Xie Shao and his party descended the mountain at dusk.

Before leaving, Xie Shao stood at the mountain gate for a long time, and finally bowed deeply towards the direction of the courtyard.

"This person isn't entirely beyond saving," Shen Yu said, watching the retreating figure. "At least he knew to turn back."

"He's not turning back," Ye Feng said, leaning against a pillar. "He's settling accounts."

"What accounts are we set up?"

"Is the embarrassment he suffered today worth his old man's life?" Ye Feng smiled. "He figured it out: yes."

Shen Yu shook his head: "You have such a big mouth."

"I'm not bad with words," Ye Feng said. "The key is that his elder is genuinely injured in the area of ​​softness. If I'm not right, I'll be the one who loses face today."

That night, something happened. It started at midnight.

Ye Feng and Lin Yuqing, as usual, were in the quiet room to combine their meridians. This was the third night, and Ye Feng himself was surprised by how fast they were progressing—the path of "guiding" was becoming smoother and smoother. By the ninth cycle, the moon-like radiance between the two of them could condense into a palm-sized halo, which hung steadily between their palms.

The tenth cycle. The eleventh. Just as the twelfth cycle was about to be completed, the halo suddenly trembled.

Ye Feng's heart skipped a beat, and he was about to stop when Lin Yuqing let out a muffled groan and leaned back.

Ye Feng grabbed her waist and pulled her into his arms.

"Yuqing?"

She didn't answer.

Ye Feng looked down and saw that her eyes were tightly closed, her brows were furrowed, and her face was as white as paper. At this moment, the pure yin energy within her body was surging out wildly—not out of control, not agitated.

It was pulled.

Something was pulling her. Following the invisible line of the Meridian Connection, Ye Feng could clearly "see" the direction of the pull—not the main peak, not the underground.

It's a much farther place. So far that it's not even in this mountain.

"Yuqing, wake up." Ye Feng's peak Yang True Qi surged out, sweeping along her meridians and hitting the pulling force.

That force remained completely still.

It wasn't even a "resistance"—it was like a thread falling from the sky, hanging down from the void, hooking onto her pure yin energy with neither too much nor too little force, and pulling it upwards.

Ye Feng's back was instantly soaked with sweat. He had met Cheng Jiuyuan, Shang Zhi, and those reclusive masters who could shatter stone pillars with a single palm strike.

He'd never seen anything like it before. This thing doesn't rely on strength or technique. It's just a line hanging down, and there's nothing you can do about it.

"Senior Brother Shen!"

Shen Yu kicked open the door and rushed in. Upon seeing this scene, his expression changed drastically: "What is she doing—"

To draw them in, not to reject them.

Ye Feng withdrew the force of the colliding sun.

"What are you doing?!" Shen Yu exclaimed in horror.

Ye Feng did not answer.

He closed his eyes and channeled all his energy, along the meridians, to the front of Lin Yuqing's pure yin energy.

I won't stop you.

paving.

The line hanging down from the void sank downwards—into Ye Feng's body. In an instant, Ye Feng's consciousness went completely black.

It's not dizziness.

It was "seen" as black. Boundless, surging, bottomless black. Something was moving in that black, moving extremely slowly, as slowly as a mountain breathing.

Then, the darkness noticed him. Ye Feng had never felt anything like it before—to be gently glanced at by something so enormous that it was unimaginable.

Just one glance.

His blood had gone cold. Then, Lin Yuqing in his arms stirred. She slowly opened her eyes. Those eyes had no pupils.

There was only one patch, exactly the same black as the one he had just "seen".

"Ye Feng," she said.

That was Lin Yuqing's voice, with her usual cool tone, and the slight upward inflection at the end of her voice when she called his name—exactly the same.

But every word that came out of that mouth was cold and devoid of any human warmth.

"Her blood," she said, "smells very good."

Shen Yu crashed into the medicine shelf behind him with a loud thud.

"Back then," the voice continued, "it took your master three months to figure this out. You're faster than him."

Ye Feng held her tightly, his bones cracking.

"Get out," he said, enunciating each word clearly.

Those dark eyes "looked" at him, as if trying to decipher the meaning of those three words. Then, a smile appeared on that face.

That was Lin Yuqing's face, Lin Yuqing's smile—the corners of her mouth move first, then her eyes curve. But that smile on that face made Ye Feng's stomach churn.

"You can't protect him."

"That's what the person said twenty years ago too."

Ye Feng roared. He released all the death energy within him. Not suppressing it, not drawing it in. He simply unleashed it.

The death energy that he had tamed for three days and had just learned to circle was suddenly unleashed by him, covering Lin Yuqing's entire body from head to toe.

To meet death with death. Those of the same kind clash, those of the same nature repel each other. The line hanging down from the void swayed for the first time.

Taking advantage of the moment, Ye Feng smashed down five of the eight squares without even blinking.

Peak Yang, extreme Yin, and deathly energy—the three forces of nature intertwined within his body, surging fiercely along his meridians and crashing into him.

With a loud "boom," all the lights in the quiet room went out at once.

In the darkness, Lin Yuqing let out a muffled groan and softly collapsed into his arms. Ye Feng dared not move, panting heavily, and placed his fingers on her neck for a pulse.

Jumping.

Hot.

It was a pulse. Only then did he realize his hands were trembling, so much so that he could barely press the pulse point. Shen Yu crawled over in the dark, his voice hoarse: "Junior...Junior Brother, what is that?"

Ye Feng did not answer. He picked Lin Yuqing up and carried her step by step to the wall, letting her sit down against him.

In the darkness, he could hear his own heartbeat, each beat striking his eardrums. He understood the phrase, "the one from twenty years ago."

The one from twenty years ago was Lin Yuqing's mother.

The woman surnamed Zhao, who was poisoned to death by the Li family with the Seven Star Begonia, who believed until her death that she had died in a power struggle within a wealthy family—it turns out that before she died, someone had whispered something like this in her ear.

Some people told her: I've been waiting for you for a long time. Others told her: The person who was supposed to protect you couldn't be protected. Ye Feng closed his eyes and rested his forehead on the top of the head of the person in his arms.

Shen Yu fumbled in the darkness to light an oil lamp. The flame flickered, illuminating the mess of medicinal herbs and broken porcelain scattered on the floor of the quiet room.

He looked up, gazing out the dark window. Three days. He had been practicing the Meridian Therapy for three days, and five of the eight extra cycles on the record had been burned away overnight.

From that night on, he stopped talking about "individuals". In his mind, he drew grids on that account book - each grid is a cycle, burning one grid means one less grid, visible and inescapable.

But something else was even colder. That line just now was hanging down from outside the mountain. It found her first, and then it found the mountain.

"Senior Brother Shen," Ye Feng's voice rang out in the darkness, "I understand one thing."

"What?"

"This 'meridian connection' thing," he said, "is something we're not practicing alone."

"For every minute we practice, it smells the scent and moves closer to us."

"It's waiting for us to become stronger."