"Ha! And here I thought you'd found yourself a savior—turns out he's even weaker than you!" The young man swept his gaze over Andy and let out a dry laugh. "One at the fourth layer, one at the fifth—put together you're still no match for me. Just surrender quietly. Show me a good time and I might even let you both live."
His intentions were clear enough—he had his eyes on the young woman and was set on taking her by force.
"In your dreams!" The young woman spat at him in fury. White light flashed, and a deep-yellow token-shaped artifact appeared in her hand. "You dare assault people this close to Liuyun Market? Aren't you afraid a high-stage cultivator might pass by and execute you on the spot?"
"Hmph! Don't go hoping someone will come to your rescue. It's nowhere near the start of the month—nobody will be passing through here. Just be a good girl and come have some fun with me. Who knows, afterward you might not want to leave." The man wasn't fooled in the slightest, and continued with his brazen provocations.
"I'd sooner take a eunuch than you!" The young woman shot back without backing down.
"You're asking for it!" The young man flipped his right hand. Spiritual light flashed, and from thin air a small crimson sword appeared in his palm, roughly a chi in length. "Go!" he barked. The crimson sword streaked forward in a blaze of red light, hurtling toward the young woman like a shooting star—then suddenly changed course mid-flight and came at Andy instead.
Andy's heart lurched. He slapped two Diamond Shield talismans onto himself, instantly activating two additional layers of golden protection on top of the one already in place, and tried to send the Immortal-Slaying Blade out to block the crimson sword. But he was too late. The crimson sword's power was far greater than he had anticipated—the three layers of Diamond Shield barely slowed it, absorbing less than half its force before tearing apart like wet paper. The sword struck his chest with its remaining momentum.
A strange metallic ring—neither metal nor wood—rang out. Something had blocked the sword. It did not pierce him, but the impact sent him flying several meters backward.
The young man had assessed the situation and decided to eliminate the weakest threat first—the youth who had appeared out of nowhere—before dealing with the beauty at his leisure. He had feinted at the young woman with the crimson sword, then redirected it in a sudden strike at Andy. Though the blow hadn't punched a hole clean through the boy as expected, it must have caused serious injury. He paid Andy no further attention and turned the sword on the young woman.
She had raised her token-shaped artifact, which projected a deep-yellow barrier of light around her entire body. The crimson sword hammered against it but could not penetrate.
The young man was in no hurry. He simply poured a steady stream of spiritual power into the sword, gradually wearing down the barrier's energy. He knew that controlling an offensive artifact consumed less spiritual power than maintaining a defensive one—since a defensive artifact had to protect the user's entire body. With his cultivation several layers above hers, he had no fear of losing a battle of attrition. Though it had become a temporary stalemate, with both sides feeding spiritual power into their respective artifacts, a close observer would have noticed the deep-yellow barrier's glow growing weaker by the moment. It clearly wouldn't hold for long. At this rate, in less than a quarter of an hour the barrier would collapse, and the young woman's fate would be entirely in his hands.
The one variable the young man had overlooked was Andy—who was climbing back to his feet. A trace of blood stained the corner of his mouth, indicating that the earlier blow had caused a minor injury, but he seemed largely unharmed.
The young man paid him little mind. He simply added a protective barrier of his own and continued channeling spiritual power into the crimson sword.
Andy surveyed the situation and immediately began forming hand seals, chanting under his breath. A Fireball Technique shot toward the young man. It struck with a thud—the man didn't bother to dodge, and his barrier barely flickered before stabilizing. A fireball from a mere fourth-layer cultivator posed no real threat to the barrier of an eighth-layer cultivator.
Andy seemed unwilling to give up. His incantation continued, another fireball gathering in his palm. If Andy kept pelting him with fireballs, even his barrier would crack eventually. The young man simply poured more spiritual power into the crimson sword, pressing for a swift victory.
Sure enough, the young woman's deep-yellow barrier had grown dangerously faint, teetering on the edge of collapse. Her face was deathly white, beads of sweat rolling down her forehead one after another—she was clearly at her absolute limit.
Then, with a thunderous boom, a fireball half a meter across detonated right where the young man stood. When the smoke cleared, the young man's clothes had been burned away entirely, his skin charred black, his breath gone. His features were no longer recognizable—only his wide-open eyes could still be made out, frozen in an expression of utter disbelief.
The young man had been killed by a fireball—blown apart where he stood. His crimson sword, with no one left to control it, clattered to the ground.
The young woman, who just moments ago had been barely holding on, was stunned by the sight before her. White as a sheet, chest heaving, she sank to the ground and stared at Andy in a mixture of shock and relief.
What Andy had done was this: while the young man was focused entirely on breaking through the young woman's barrier and paying Andy no mind, Andy had used his fireballs as cover. In that moment of inattention, he had simultaneously activated every last one of his dozen-odd Fireball Talismans—annihilating the young man in a single concentrated blast.
A dozen Fireball Talismans detonating at once was the equivalent of a dozen cultivators at Andy's level all casting the Fireball Technique simultaneously. Against that young man's eighth-layer cultivation, if he had devoted his full power to his barrier, he could likely have weathered the onslaught. But he had been pouring most of his spiritual power into controlling the crimson sword, leaving his barrier barely reinforced—and Andy's surprise attack had found its mark.
Andy himself was shaken in the aftermath. Setting everything else aside, he hadn't been able to withstand a single blow from that crimson sword. If not for the Heaven and Earth Bowl in his beast-hide pouch happening to block the strike, he would already be dead. He silently resolved that from this point forward, he would never again play the hero without absolute certainty of success. His own life had to come first.
The young woman had no inkling of these thoughts. After catching her breath briefly, she forced herself to her feet, gave the young man's corpse a few inspecting glances, then walked over and pulled the pouch from his waist. She tossed it to Andy. Then, with a casual Fireball Technique, she reduced the body to ash.
"What's this?" Andy turned the pouch over in his hands. It was bulging with contents and somewhat similar in shape to his own beast-hide pouch, yet he couldn't find the opening.
The young woman gave him a look of genuine surprise. "Don't tell me you've never even seen a storage pouch before?"
"A storage pouch? So that's what a storage pouch looks like." Andy was overjoyed. He had certainly heard of storage pouches—they were spatial-type artifacts, practically indispensable to any cultivator. Even a cultivator with the barest minimum of spiritual power could use one, and a typical storage pouch could hold objects ten or even a hundred times its own volume. The space inside was a world unto itself; no other cultivator could use their spiritual sense from outside to determine what was stored within. Andy had long wished for one of his own, but storage pouches were expensive. In the Jian clan, only higher-stage Qi Refinement cultivators who regularly went on missions had them.
"Just channel your spiritual power into the pouch and you can access it. See what's inside." The young woman walked him through the process step by step.
"I know how to use a storage pouch—I just didn't recognize this one on sight," Andy said, a bit embarrassed by the tutorial. The texts he had studied had laid out the key points of storage pouch usage quite clearly, and he remembered them all.
First, a storage pouch could not hold living things. Any living creature placed inside would be cut off from air and would die.
Second, the capacity of a storage pouch was finite. Depending on size, they came in common varieties: ten-times capacity, hundred-times capacity, and even thousand-times capacity. Naturally, the larger the capacity, the higher the price.
Third—and this was the most important point, emphasized repeatedly in the texts—a storage pouch was a low-grade artifact and had no owner-recognition function. In other words, any other cultivator who got their hands on your storage pouch could open it and take out whatever was inside with ease. For this reason, cultivators took special care to keep their storage pouches secure and out of sight, lest they invite a fatal disaster upon themselves.
"Since you don't have a storage pouch yet, this one's yours. As for this red sword—that goes to me." The young woman picked up the fallen sword, examined it several times with obvious satisfaction, and tucked it away without bothering to ask whether Andy had any objections.
She had recognized the sword as a decent mid-grade artifact—worth considerably more than the storage pouch—and claimed it for herself without a moment's hesitation.