Although the sound of Jiang Yong’s collapse was faint, it clearly reached everyone’s ears.
Murong Xue rushed to his side almost right away. She disregarded the blood he’d yet to wipe away and embraced him in a panic. “Jiang Yong, Jiang Yong….”
When the others saw this, they were startled. However, misfortune never walks alone. Shortly after Jiang Yong collapsed, Li Hu’s vision went black. He reached for Luo Zi, but missed and fell to the ground.
“Ol’ Li!” Luo Zi, who’d been just about to rush to Jiang Yong, shouted. When the others saw that Li Hu had collapsed as well, they immediately grew nervous.
Pan Sheng furrowed his brows, then walked up to the center of the altar. “Barrier!”
He roared in fury, then pulled out several divine stones. Using his fundamental blood essence, he carved out a sealed, absolutely impenetrable space around the altar.
Any purple smog within its walls was immediately expelled outside.
“Is this smog poisonous?” asked the two flowers of the Appearance Association. “But didn’t we already take an antidote before we got here?”
They both examined their body’s condition but discovered nothing out of the ordinary.
The others were the same way. Only Jiang Yong and Li Hu wouldn’t wake up.
“Do the two of them have anything in common?” Xue Mo furrowed her brows.
When they first fell unconscious, Ye Zichen also considered that it might be because of the smog. He’d been suspicious about the smog right from the start, so he was naturally inclined to blame it first.
However, if the purple smog was poisonous, as the one with the lowest cultivation, Ye Zichen should have been the first to fall unconscious.
That’s why Xue Mo asked that question.
Did they have something in common? Of course they did.
Ye Zichen said nothing. He simply walked up to Jiang Yong. Murong Xue was already frantically pouring every last drop of her divine power into Jiang Yong’s body. However, his eyes remained shut, and he showed no sign of waking up.
Ye Zichen wiped a finger across the blood covering Jiang Yong’s body. After carefully inspecting it, Ye Zichen’s pupils constricted. He then hurried over to Li Hu and did the same thing.
“As expected.” After examining the blood on their bodies, Ye Zichen nodded as if enlightened.
“Did you discover something again?” Xue Mo rushed over. Murong Xue and the others looked at him as well.
Ye Zichen nodded slightly, then took out two pills and slipped one each into Jiang Yong and Li Hu’s mouths. “Just let them lie there. Don’t infuse their bodies with any more divine power. They should wake up before long.”
Murong Xue and Luo Zi didn’t question him. They hurriedly placed Jiang Yong and Li Hu somewhere more comfortable and let them lie flat on the ground.
However, they didn’t leave. They refused to move even an inch away from their unconscious companions.
“What did you give them just now?” asked Xue Mo.
“It was just ordinary medicine. What else could it be?” Ye Zichen shrugged.
“What exactly is going on with them? Why did they suddenly fall into a coma? Everyone else seems normal!” asked Xue Mo in confusion.
Ye Zichen arched his brows and looked at Li Hu and Jiang Yong. “Let’s wait for them to wait up, then talk.”
With that, he took out several other pills and handed them to Xue Mo. “Please distribute these to everyone. The antidote pills you passed out aren’t enough for this situation.”
She pursed her lips and nodded, accepted the pills, and looked at Ye Zichen…
“Thank you.” Those words came straight from the heart. Just now, she really had been out of sorts. Fortunately, Ye Zichen had been there to oversee the situation. If not, she really wouldn’t have known what to do.
Ye Zichen sensed her sincerely. He smiled and nodded, then gestured for her to distribute the pills as fast as possible.
Everyone received additional pills. Although they were still worried about Li Hu and Jiang Yong, they were willing to trust Ye Zichen’s assurance that they’d wake up soon.
Everyone who was still conscious started recovering their divine power. Two of their number had already fainted, so they had to hurry up and return to their peak condition in case anything else unexpected happened.
The only one who didn’t start recovering was Xue Mo. Instead, she crossed her arms and passed around the altar.
She was the one who’d accepted the mission, and everyone else was here because she’d invited them…
If anything really happened to Jiang Yong and Li Hu, as the team leader, she’d be hard-pressed to escape the blame. She was completely on edge.
“So this is the basic structure of the Devil Dharma Body.” Ye Zichen stood at a corner of the altar. He wasn’t cultivating, but rather trying to model the composition of his dharma body technique in his spiritual sea.
In truth, he’d been researching how to form the Devil Dharma Body technique for days now.
The secret tome listed the necessary ingredients and gave rough instructions for how to form the dharma body, but this sort of thing wasn’t one-size-fits all.
Any dharma body technique required countless failed attempts before success; you had to gradually work your way towards perfection.
But Ye Zichen couldn’t possibly bear a failure; the resources necessary for the Devil Dharma Body were far, far too precious. Even with the Yao-Sealing Pagoda, they were hard to gather up. That meant he had to succeed on his first try.
He’d performed at least a few thousand mental simulations since ascending to the Divine Mountain. Just now, he’d come up with the best, most logically sound construction method yet.
“Is there anything that still needs improvement?” Ye Zichen examined the hundred thousand foot future standing in his spiritual sea. His spiritual body encircled it, examined it, and pondered its every detail.
“Jiang Yong! You’re awake!” Murong Xue’s startled cry shook him out of his revelry. The others all stopped cultivating and saw Jiang Yong push himself off the ground and rise to his feet. He rubbed his head repeatedly.
“What’s going on?” Jiang Yong looked around and murmured in utter bewilderment. He had no memory of what had just happened at all. However, he could dimly recall that he’d been just about to take that white cloth and….
“Waah! The cloth!”
“You’re finally awake! You scared me half to death!” Xue Mo finally sighed in relief.
Jiang Yong gave up searching for the cloth. When he saw the others’ grave expressions, he couldn’t help but arch his brows. “What is it?”
“You don’t even know what just happened to you, do you?” When she saw that Jiang Yong had recovered, Murong Xue returned to her usual, cold, sharp demeanor. “Just now, you passed out all of a sudden. We thought you were about to die. I planned to leave you here to feed the stray dogs, but Little Brother Ye thought we might be able to save you, and refused to give up on you.”
Although Murong Xue’s words were unpleasant to hear, Jiang Yong had spent so much time with her that he’d long since grown used to her way of talking. Furthermore, he immediately picked up on what she was trying to say.
“Brother Ye, for truly great acts of kindness, mere words of thanks are insufficient. I, Jiang Yong, owe you my life.”
