Jun Li didn’t sleep that night, but it was something she had grown used to over the years, replacing sleep with cultivation, that is.

  It worked well enough, though at her level, fatigue would build up anyway over the course of a few days.

  For her near-mortal body, sleep couldn’t be replaced, only delayed. But as things stood, retaining her alertness was of the utmost importance.

  Whether you were fatigued or not wouldn’t matter if you woke up with a knife in your back or jaws around your throat.

  That, however, wasn’t a lesson Jun Li needed to hear.

  ‘So careless…’ Jun Li wiped the blood off a Spatial Ring she had torn from a Frost River Sect disciple, one who had been sleeping in a frozen cradle, far above the surface of the marsh.

  Strung up between vines and roots as they were, it was difficult for common beasts to reach them, even if they wanted to. Even flying pests would simply be chilled to death when they landed on the frozen bed they had been resting in.

  But for a human, a cultivator, their defences were worse than nothing, only drawing the eye of any who passed by.

  ’They looked young, but… really? Putting your faith in the courtesy of others, even in a competition between friendly sects… You’re still in the Jianghu, you know…?’

  Jun Li felt torn between sentiments of disappointment and satisfaction at the poor senses of her ‘peers,’ and the relative bounty she had gained from the Spatial Ring she now held.

  ’Medicinal plants, roots, fruits, beast cores, trash pills, clothing… Ah, a decent saber, Peak Mortal Grade? Way better than my sword...’ Jun Li wondered if there was some sort of store she could go to to sell Spatial Rings, contents and all.

  ”New alchemy fodder, and a good sword…’ Even faced with a saber that was far stronger than the sword she had trained with for the past five years, Jun Li hesitated to mentally make the swap and use it.

  After all, she had been training with her straight sword for five years and had grown quite familiar with its exact dimensions. To swap to a saber, even a decently long one, was difficult to consciously do, especially when she had yet to run up against the limits of her own blade.

  ’I’ll keep it as a backup for now…’ Jun Li pulled the saber from the Spatial Ring and felt it in her hands for a moment. It was long for a saber and had a great heft to it, despite its less-than-bulky appearance. ‘The hilt’s thicker, and the guard is going to take some getting used to…’

  Placing the saber in her old Spatial Ring, Jun Li slid the new Spatial Ring onto a finger of the other hand, as nesting Spatial Rings into one another was quite impossible.

  'I found four people here, five including me… It's pretty unlikely anyone else is left in these marshes.' With only nine people in the Secret Realm, Jun Li having already removed three personally, it was rapidly becoming less likely that Jun Li would find any more targets by sitting and waiting.

  'It's the second day now… I think.' Although it was difficult to keep track of the hours without some sort of timepiece, Jun Li was fairly confident that only twenty to thirty hours had passed since the dozen disciples entered.

  'Someone's bound to have head north by now…' Rationalizing her choice with the passage of time, Jun Li decided to leave the marshes not by heading south, nor by bypassing the mountain and heading east, but instead by heading north to an area of the Grave she had yet to see.

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  … … … … … …

  As Jun Li moved north, the sodden wetlands that had defiled her shoes for so long finally gave way to solid, dry ground. Of a sort.

  Bursting out from the northwestern edge of the Earth Dragon's Grave, a great undulating of stone-like wood stretched out, piercing into the mountain of calcified viscera that comprised the Secret Realm's center , dividing the north and west as a massive, living wall.

  Without a doubt, it was the largest living thing Jun Li had ever seen with her own eyes. 'That's… just one root…?' Having studied her inherited alchemical knowledge for years, Jun Li was an expert when it came to identifying plants, and even at the sight of an unfamiliar plant, she could quickly analyze just what kind of features it would possess.

  This root that loomed over Jun Li, easily three times the height of the walls that surrounded the Zhao Kingdom's Capital, belonged to a tree. And even from a moment's glance, Jun Li knew that this tree was the sort to possess a great network of roots.

  What stood before her was not unique, and there must be dozens beneath the earth. 'How could I… not have seen this tree on the horizon? It would have to be absurdly large, and yet…'

  'No, the Earth Dragon's Grave might not actually be there…' The rift that the dozen disciples entered through was only viable for one week every ten years, and the natural spatial distortion those rifts contained was powerful, so much so that it was impossible to tell how near or far it might project an entrant.

  The true location of this tree's trunk could be anywhere in the world. 'This Secret Realm really is a wonder…' Contemplating the realm's nature, and her avenues for escape from it, Jun Li steadily traced the surface of the tree, looking for a path Little Yun wouldn't struggle to follow.

  'Could I…?' Pulling a carving knife from her Spatial Ring, Jun Li raised it to the root before stopping. '...No, even on this scale, the tree might have some sort of defence mechanism… I don't want to test it.'

  "I suppose I'll just trail up the mountain. The root seems thinner there."

  … … … … … …

  Looking down towards the northern biome of the Grave from on high, Jun Li held a large, beetle-like bug by the head. In its half-frozen state, Jun Li had no qualms holding it with her palms between its mandibles.

  Clenching its head between her fingers, cracks ran across the frozen chitin as it fell apart like rotten wood, revealing the chilled flesh that had been frozen down to the ganglia, now unable to even bleed.

  Tossing the remains aside, Jun Li let out a huff at how busy she had been on her ascent. 'I suppose the only reason we encountered little resistance on the first day is because of how fast we were moving…'

  The visceral mountain was filled to the brim with life in its most unsightly forms.

  "I think I get it now…" The northern biome Jun Li was looking towards was covered in half-melted orange stone. Lumps and folds of near molten rock surrounded an immense cauldron of sourceless fire, from which massive pillars of stone jutted out, like stepping-stones over a lake of fire.

  'West was the marsh, then there was the root that covered the north-west, and now the north is covered in fire? The whole Grave is… in the shape of the Wuxing?'

  It seemed somewhat uneven and lopsided, but when it came to arrays and formations, even natural formations, the exact shape and spacing didn't matter. All that mattered was that the pattern was correct.

  Looking up to the distant roof of the Grave, Jun Li saw the skeletonized corpse of the Earth Dragon, which weaved up and down, piercing the grave like uneven stitching sealing a bag shut.

  "If the head is there… and the body leads north, then it weaves south, east, north-west, then west…" Carefully observing the length of the corpse, Jun Li mapped out its path and referenced it to the positions of its yin organs. "Heart, lung, pancreas, liver, and kidney… the site of each yin organ is perfectly suspended over each biome of the Grave…"

  "This place… wasn't some incidental, natural creation… the Earth Dragon made this formation intentionally, in their dying moment…!" Jun Li was shocked by how carefully designed the Grave truly was, and her mind ran wild with theories as to why the Earth Dragon spent its last moments creating it.

  "There might be more than just blood here…!"