The mist inside the platform thickened, twisting into blooming patterns of color green, gold, violet.
Yunfan stood on the edge of a ruined stone bridge, watching vines move on their own across the floating valley ahead. Roots coiled around statues like nooses. Blossoms pulsed like beating hearts.
A half-burnt inscription slab read:
"踏错一步,万毒穿心."One wrong step, ten thousand poisons pierce the heart.
He didn't blink.
This was the Spirit Garden of the Void.
Some disciples believed it to be a resting place for alchemy legacies.Others thought it a burial ground for failed cultivators consumed by their own medicine.
Both were wrong.
This place wasn't made to be understood.
It was made to test resolve without strength.
And it had just opened.
Three disciples from Crimson Night Sect had already entered before Yunfan arrived.
Their screams didn't last long.
Yunfan stepped forward.
As soon as his foot touched the cracked, vine-covered stone, the garden came alive.Flowers turned. Petals opened. A faint whisper stirred the air.
"Soul... heartbeat... Qi... rhythm..."
He exhaled.
Lifted his zither.
And played a soft, unstable chord just one.
The petals paused.
Moved aside.
A path opened.
Far above, hidden by a curtain of toxin-colored mist, Yao Ling'er lay across a high beam of fractured marble, lazily playing with a poison dart between her fingers.
She saw him.
And she smiled.
"You're supposed to die here, Yunfan. Why do you keep ruining it?"
He walked carefully, every step placed between pulses of the zither's rhythm.Poison vines reached for him but hesitated.
He kept playing.
His Sword Intent remained buried, silent, calm.
He didn't want to kill here.
Yet.
He reached the center of the garden: a jade pool surrounded by flowers that glowed with dense medicinal light.Several were rare even by alchemy standards:
Lightningroot Lotus
Black-Fang Orchid
Skyburn Petal Ginseng
His eyes narrowed. These were enough to forge three life-saving pills, two enhancement formulas, and possibly a spiritual poison suppressant.
He moved to pick them
And stopped.
A petal flickered.
Not naturally.
Intentionally.
And then… Yao Ling'er's voice came, soft and smug.
"I wouldn't touch that one if I were you. She bites."
Yunfan didn't turn around.
"Are you the flower or the poison?"
"Today?" She said, dropping from the beam like a falling feather, robes swirling. "Both."
She landed beside him, her hair brushing his shoulder.
"You look good with blood on your chest," she said, eyes tracing the cut from his earlier trial.
"You look better when you're scheming behind a smile."
"Flattery, Yunfan?" She pouted. "You're slipping."
"No," he said. "I'm stalling."
His left hand flicked the zither once.
The flowers to the left recoiled violently.
He plucked a second note.
A glyph activated beneath them, revealing a sealed jade case hidden under layers of poisonous moss.
Yao Ling'er's eyes sharpened.
"What is that?"
"Don't know," he said, reaching calmly. "You gonna stop me?"
"If I did…" She stepped forward, her breath close to his neck. "...you'd like it too much."
He took the case.
She didn't stop him.
But she left with a smile he didn't trust.
As he left the garden, the petals slowly closed behind him, trapping the path once more in living vines.