"Do we have to do this?" Li Yao asked, leaning by the door.
"Your acting was pretty good in the Law Enforcement Hall," Yu Han said. "Now do as I say."
"Fine," Li Yao said, stepping inside the room, though he made it amply clear he didn't like the idea. He took a deep breath, and imitating Ma San, Sima Yan's follower, shouted out a few curses.
Fang Zhao followed up with his best impression of a noble young master. He didn't even have to try. He literally was one.
"...Dude, that made me want to punch you in the face," Li Yao said. "You're way too good at this. Don't tell me you used to be like that."
Fang Zhao facepalmed.
The play continued. Huang Niuniu added in some lines as Liyi Tong, the well-endowed suitor of Sima Yan.
"These utterly spineless commoner scum," Fang Zhao said. "They think they can oppose us nobles just because they group together like mutts in a courtyard. One must have the wisdom to know when to bow, but these mutts lack even that."
"Shall we kill this fella?" Li Yao said with a tired drawl. "Not a rookie. Let's slit his throat and be done with it."
"As expected of the young master. So smart!" Huang Niuniu said.
"They dare to touch our prey," Fang Zhao said. "They should be glad that we grant them a swift death."
Yu Han glared at Fang Zhao, speaking through gritted teeth. "I'll throw him in the ditch over there."
"Wait, Pang Jiming," Fang Zhao interrupted. "Take what he has. Such treasures, a commoner does not deserve."
They rehearsed multiple variations of the dialogues. Some more haughty, others less theatrical. Senior disciples dropped in from time to time. Some to mark their shifts, others to select Hidden Realm Missions, and one chippy young man who spent five hours in the hot springs. There were no other females working for the Night Alchemist's Yard besides Huang Niuniu.
Midnight approached. The quartet huddled over the list of Hidden Realm missions suitable for them. Meanwhile, the crab was spinning on the ground.
「The two-legged ones from yesterday didn't come,」 Fei Rui said. 「This is a good hiding place!」
"Thanks." Yu Han patted the crab's shell.
Fei Rui was steaming. He had followed them to the hot spring. Crab flesh would stiffen when heated, so Yu Han had panicked.
Fei Rui had turned more orange as time went by, a truly delicious colour. But other than that change, the crab said he liked the experience. It made his insides feel funny. No decrease in lifeforce, though.
Yu Han shook his head.
"The stinkbug mission looks the best." Li Yao singled out a paper. "Ten contribution points per litre of their inner liquid, or thirty mortal grade spirit stones. The place they spawn is close to the gateway village. We have all the stuff here to protect us from the stink."
Li Yao had used the word sheng for the unit of liquid, which was close to a litre in Yu Han's opinion. As for the gateway village, that was a sizeable community of human cultivators under the Stormy Reef Sect inside the Hidden Realm. It acted as a hub for all who ventured into the Hidden Realm, located right by the entrance on the Hidden Realm side.
"We can test out the white blood thing Tubs mentioned," Li Yao said. "Kinda weird to think that bugs have blood, though. Weirder that Fang Zhao wants to eat it."
"Convert it. Convert into qi," Fang Zhao emphasised. "Not eat. If the goal is to get blood, then we don't need to bother with the insect. I suggest this mission." He pushed a notice forward. It had a picture of a boar with mushrooms growing on the back.
"Rot-Dweller Swine, usually around Levels 2 to 5. A common species of beasts. The mushrooms on its back are valuable for alchemy. Per hunt, we can get five contribution points after turning in the mushrooms. Plus two if we turn in the core, in case the swine is a monstrous beast. We can sell the other materials for around five spirit stones."
"Ain't that less than the stinkbugs?" Li Yao countered.
"The Miasma Shieldbug secretes most of its miasma the moment it senses danger. It's written right here." Fang Zhao pointed at a section of text on the notice. Yu Han had been surprised that the red-eyed boy knew both common and imperial scripts. "The miasma is made from the liquid inside this sack-shaped organ. It secretes the miasma if it so much as sniffs a stranger in the area. After killing it and harvesting its pouch, only a bit of liquid is left. We'd have to kill around a hundred or even more to get a litre of the liquid. The rest of its body is useless too."
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"I'm sure we can come up with a clever way to trap more at once. Like a net?" Li Yao suggested. "They're smaller than cats. What if we knock them out somehow, and then harvest their sacks?"
"No good." Fang Zhao read through the text. "Even if they're unconscious, if their body receives damage, they secrete miasma. In the past few centuries, I don't think anyone at our level has come up with a way to harvest their liquid en masse. If so, the Alchemy Hall would not pay so much for it. I say we still go for the Rot-Dweller Swine. It's a common monstrous spawn near the Second to Last Bog."
They heatedly discussed what mission to take. Yu Han ruled out any with incomplete information or requiring long periods of investigation. Huang Niuniu refused any where the monster was cute.
No missions with snake-headed birds. Yu Han flipped through the notices once more, to no avail. A sideways glance showed Fang Zhao and Li Yao discussing the common strategies of boar hunting.
A connection, no matter how small, must be nurtured. The red-eyed boy had stuck with them. Besides the one thousand mortal grade spirit stone token, he shared his own sinful past, as if looking for redemption.
Yu Han picked up the Four Meditations on the Hundred Thousand Waterways and flipped to the page that mentioned the pool of boiling blood. It was in a cenote, tucked away between two island-like mountains in a bog near the passageway back to reality. If the author hadn't accidentally tripped into it, he wouldn't have found it; the cenote entrance was covered with lush foliage. He'd fallen in the pool of boiling blood, but was somehow unharmed. But when the snake-headed birds dropped in the dead hunt, they would dissolve immediately, the flesh and blood melting into the liquid, but the pristine bones and scales falling to the bottom.
Here, reality was probably the Sunken Mountains, the passageway being the access point connecting it to the Hidden Realm. Was that bog the Second to Last Bog?
There were still about two weeks until Wen Liujie came back. They were planning to head out immediately after that.
Yu Han turned his gaze back to the table, putting the book back. On the table was another important piece of parchment. A rudimentary map of the Hidden Realm.
In the middle of the map was the gateway village, with words marking the aforementioned access point to the Sunken Mountains. Around it were many mountains, rivers, bogs, lagoons, canyons, and other landforms. One of the bogs right beside the gateway village, between two mountainous areas, was the Second to Last Bog that Fang Zhao had mentioned. Yu Han hoped it was the same bog as in the anecdote in the Four Meditations.
"How the hell is the entrance in the middle of the map?" Li Yao asked. "Or is it an exit?"
"It's another world, my friend," Fang Zhao said. "We enter through an opening on this side, and appear there. Although I would imagine parts of this Hidden Realm overlap with many locations from our world. Considering the number of entrances it has, and the warning about foreign cultivators. From the Great Xia Dynasty, there's the Sword Sacrificing Dragon Gate. All the rest are outside our borders, such as the demonic Ten Thousand Poisonous Thunder Sect and the orthodox Bloodless Hand Temple."
The Stormy Reef Sect didn't own the Hidden Realm. Only a small part of it.
"It's hard to wrap my head around." Li Yao stroked his beardless chin. "Another world. How do they even know where this world ends and the others begin?"
"You'd have to debate with the scholars about that." Fang Zhao shrugged.
"From what Wen Liujie said," Yu Han said, "the danger isn't only the other Sects. Our own Sect fellows might take the chance to even out any grievances. Even without grievances, we have Courtyards like the Mad Bloodhounds."
That night, in his dreamscape, Yu Han Memory Cast a shelf, one he had seen in the Rookie Village Library. The halberd from the previous night was still here, so hopefully this shelf would be semi-permanent too.
After memory casting some paper and a charcoal pen, he created various labels and stuck them on the shelf.
Fights with Monsters, Fights with Humans, Training, Books, Huang Niuniu, Sima Gang, Mad Bloodhounds, and more.
He waited a few breaths. The paper, now ripped into smaller pieces, didn't suddenly eject out a broken memory pearl.
So even if I Memory Cast an object with one pearl, destroying the projection won't destroy the pearl? There was no way to come to a direct conclusion. He would need to conduct more tests.
Yu Han shook his head, focusing on the task at hand.
There was only one shelf for now, and it had limited space. He wrote down the final label, titled Misdirection.
He then echoed memories of relevant events into the pearls, starting with the events falling under the Misdirection category. The memory of today's play flowed into the pearls, each containing a hundred seconds of recordings. He followed it up with echoes of Sima Yan, Pang Jiming, Ma San, and that one time he had heard Liyi Tong speak.
"Remember these," Yu Han said to the crab. Fei Rui nodded.
While Memory Casting, Yu Han tried to project the memory from the pearl by himself again. It didn't work.
All in all, he had seventeen pearls worth of Memory Casting today. Fei Rui needed the rest to save his own memories too. The preparations were far from complete. But this was what he could do for now.
If I train Martial Arts in the dreamscape, it barely gives me any True Qi, let alone real-world proficiency, he pondered. But the Cultivation Art works. Even though it's a Breathing Technique, and I'm not really breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide in my dreamscape. So, what am I breathing?
Martial Arts didn't work, but the Cultivation Art did. His Bloodline Art, Deep Sleep, was a prerequisite to enter the dreamscape. Echoing Dreamscape worked too, of course; he could earn True Qi in it.
What was left was the Psychic Art. Could he train it here?
Yu Han closed his eyes, breathing in the rhythms of Calm Before the Storm Breathing Technique. But this time, his mind focused on each sensation according to the instructions of Thousand Petals Awareness.
First sound, then smell. Sight was blocked. He tasted the saliva in his mouth. Finally, touch. His chest rising and falling. A subtle trickle of something caressing his skin. His face. His throat. Going in and out of his lungs.
Then he isolated touch, letting all other sensations fall mute.