Descending lightly into the billowing steam below, Jun Li had yet to see any trace of her opponents through the thick grey cloud that her technique had left.

  When the compressed sphere of ice was removed from Jun Li's Authority, the rapid decompression caused its instantaneous sublimation into water vapor, engulfing the area in momentarily boiling temperatures.

  By exploiting her Authority, Jun Li had used her singularly basic sorcery of "freezing" to flash evaporate water at potentially lethal speed.

  As the rapidly cooling vapor began to clear, Jun Li first caught sight of Guan Heng, laid out on his back and struggling to raise himself upright. His left leg and arm had burst open, the skin cracked and flaking like slate, revealing red flesh beneath, striking a vivid contrast of 'shell' and 'flesh.'

  Those two limbs hung at unnatural angles, clarifying to Jun Li that the bones of his lower leg and forearm had indeed broken through. 'Not enough for his escape talisman to trigger…'

  Further away, half-embedded in a calcified fold of the mountain, Gao Feng was unconscious and bleeding, but seemed surprisingly intact. He was the last to respond to Qin Yihua's call and was the furthest from Jun Li when she released her technique.

  Despite the circumstances, Jun Li was pleased to see he wasn't dead.

  It took her a moment longer to figure out what happened to Qin Yihua, however. She initially looked in the opposite direction to Guan Heng and Gao Feng, but couldn't see a body or any body parts.

  With how close he had been to the explosion, Jun Li was uncertain whether or not he would have been pulled out of the realm by his escape talisman in time.

  'Ah.' Off in the distance, in the direction of the two survivors, Jun Li saw Qin Yihua's sword, its blade embedded almost entirely into the ground, his hand still hanging from its hilt.

  She remembered that Qin Yihua had swung at her the moment before her technique detonated. It was only natural for him to suffer at least this level of damage.

  The lack of a corpse was a testament to his durability; he had surely been pulled out of the realm by his escape talisman.

  Keeping an eye on Guan Heng, Jun Li quickly made her way over to Bai Yuelin's corpse, picking it up by the wrist and pulling the Spatial Ring from its finger. 'She's from the Frost River Sect… so maybe I can learn that invisibility trick for myself…'

  On top of his shattered limbs, Guan Heng seemed severely concussed, and even now, having been able to sit upright, he lacked the sense to perceive Jun Li walking past him.

  Still resting on the handle of his sword, Qin Yihua's hand was torn open like a half-gutted fish. Jun Li peeled the fingers off the hilt and allowed the hand to fall to the ground before she herself grasped the sword's hilt, pulling it up and away from the ground with a lever action that upended the brittle earth and freed the length of the blade.

  Looking at the blade up close and out of motion for the first time, Jun Li was able to consider it not merely as an object of danger, but as an item she could take advantage of herself.

  It was longer than Jun Li was tall, but the blade was only about as wide as her arm. Even so, the dark metal with which the blade was forged caused it to sag in Jun Li's grasp, the sheer weight holding her down. 'Can I even store something this long in my Spatial Ring…?'

  Putting off her doubts, Jun Li turned to Guan Heng while hefting the blade up and bracing the flat on her shoulder. Due to the sheer weight, Jun Li lacked the strength to use the blade with the Sparking Thorn or Drifting Ghost Blade.

  Even so, Jun Li hoisted the blade overhead as she stood behind Guan Heng, before dropping it down onto the arm he had been using to hold himself off the ground, cutting down into the bone.

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  So terribly concussed as he was, he didn't even notice Jun Li's presence until the light of his escape talisman sparked from the chest of his robe.

  When Guan Heng vanished before Jun Li, she let out a deep sigh. 'What a disappointing result… Neither of those two seemed to show me everything they had, even at the end.'

  Lifting the sword back onto her shoulder, Jun Li began to walk up the mountain, unhurried. 'Being subtle and hiding your skill is nice and all… but if you don't have the guts to actually reveal your hand, you're only as strong as you act.'

  "Wait…!" Stopping Jun Li in her tracks, a hoarse voice called out from behind. When she turned, she saw Gao Feng, who had seemingly crawled out of the crater he had left, and stumbled over to her. "I'm not done yet…"

  The sight caused Jun Li to furrow her eyebrows. "...You seriously want to fight?" Silence followed Jun Li's words, but the way Gao Feng grasped his saber made his answer clear.

  "Well, I don't want to." Jun Li spoke clearly, taking a step closer to Gao Feng. For a moment, her words caused him to lose some of his carefully maintained tension. In that brief moment, Jun Li's foot shot out, embedding itself into Gao Feng's face and sending him flying back through the air.

  Landing heavily on the ground, Gao Feng spat up blood as he rolled over onto his front, breathing raggedly as he struggled to get back up.

  From afar, Jun Li's voice rang out as she continued walking up the mountain, not even turning back to speak. "If you want to fight, you're going to have to force me!"

  … … … … … …

  Reaching the summit of the Grave's central mountain, Jun Li finally laid eyes on the mutant beast that had caused Qin Yihua to gather the remaining disciples together for this day.

  Rising over the ridge that bordered the summit, Jun Li grasped her new sword and threw it aside, allowing the blade to embed itself into the ground a small distance away. Impressive though it was, she wouldn't be able to fight at her best with it, and she had found it was indeed too long to be stored in her Spatial Ring.

  The beast seemed oddly motionless as Jun Li approached, but she knew it could explode into motion at any moment. "Come on… go ahead and strike first…"

  Long moments of silence passed as Jun Li approached the beast as closely as she dared, only to be rewarded with an utter lack of response. 'Is it… dead? No, I saw it respond to me before I landed on the mountain…'

  "...huh?" Within half a second, Jun Li's movements, shifting arms, swaying hair, and steady breathing, all slowed to a halt.

  Without warning, Jun Li found herself trapped in a motionless body, staring out over the summit of the mountain, and looking towards the mutant beast that loomed like a hill of flesh.

  The dust that drifted through the air, the flames in the distance, and the beast before her all seemed frozen in place.

  Only one thing in her perception seemed to retain its movement. She could feel it in her body and see it in the body of the beast before her, the steady, rhythmic pulse of blood that remained uninterrupted in this frozen world.

  Beneath the flesh of the immense beast, Jun Li could see blood flowing in thin, unnatural streams, trailing in every direction, shooting back and forth through the same distended veins as if there was no logic or coherence to be found in that body.

  Within moments, those thin streams thickened and grew more defined, before rupturing the beast's skin, cutting great ravines in the flesh that revealed the nature of the blood below.

  With immaculate clarity, those streams of red bore defined scaled patterns that flowed like binding ropes beneath the flesh of the beast, intermittently surfacing and diving back down through the tears in flesh, revealing the serpentine features that headed each stream.

  In time, as those blood serpents grew to maturity, they rose fully out of the beast's body, coalescing into a stream of entwined bodies, before rushing towards Jun Li and splitting apart a few steps away, the bodies bursting as they impacted empty air, like a cup of wine thrown at a pane of glass.

  The spuming mass of broken blood split in five directions as it scattered into the air, condensing once more into the silhouette of a man.

  Slowly, that silhouette became more defined, as the torso gained a robe, and the shapeless limbs gained digits, and eventually that silhouette even gained a head of hair.

  Although Jun Li knew from the start who this was, when she saw his facial features slowly manifest, as inhumanly fair and immaculate as in her vague memories, it caused her heart to sink.

  "You know…" The man spoke, testing his voice and clenching the hands of his own physical form, savoring the sensations that he had few opportunities to. "...I wouldn't have been able to manifest like this outside, Heaven really is too watchful."

  With his monocolored body of blood, he smiled with an expression as pure and radiant as sunshine. "Thank you, Jun Li."

  His expression slowly depressed, as if pained to now be delivering bad news, the immortal let out a gentle sigh. "But… I'm terribly disappointed in you."