Being laughed at: 10% damage.
Being the only light-element spirit master alive who could heal a teammate to death: 1,000,000% damage.
Ning Ruan: ...
"Elder Yu. IF such a situation truly occurred — what could cause it?"
Laughed at or not,
the dream of becoming the world's number one healer was on the line.
Ning Ruan could only fake composure and press on.
This time Yu Yuan genuinely stalled for a long moment.
Then her gaze settled on the black sword casket at Ning Ruan's back, and her brow creased faintly:
"You're a sword cultivator? Which peak?"
Ning Ruan shook her head firmly. "Invincible Peak. Light-element spirit master."
"Invincible..." Yu Yuan caught up a beat late.
So THIS was the castoff Li daughter who'd set the entire Crimson Heaven Sect buzzing with her mirrors today — Liu Yun's little disciple?
"So it's you..." Yu Yuan recovered her composure quickly.
Whatever else, as long as the girl wasn't a sword cultivator, this didn't count as picking a deliberate fight.
Yes, thanks to this girl, even Suiyun Peak had lost face by association. But she was the lecturing elder; targeting a student to her face —
that, she would not do.
"Your question, I cannot answer.
Whatever the cause: a healing art is a healing art. A healing art cannot harm.
If the fault lay in the cultivation method, then the harm would fall on the CASTER first."
"And if, while healing, the caster takes no harm — only the patient?" Ning Ruan pressed.
Yu Yuan: ...
She was now genuinely beginning to suspect the girl had come specifically to troll her.
"That situation cannot exist. No self-harm means the method is sound. If the method is sound, how could the healing art be flawed?"
Sensing that Ning Ruan meant to keep pressing —
Yu Yuan pivoted decisively to another disciple with a raised hand. "Your question?"
Ning Ruan: ...
The moment the lecture ended,
Ning Ruan slipped out first, before anyone could corner her.
She boarded the Scarlet Feather Kite and made for the main peak's Scripture Pavilion.
Today's lecture had yielded real gains.
But on the one problem she actually wanted solved — not a thread of progress.
If anything, her heart sat heavier than before.
...
The hearts of Suiyun Peak's elders and disciples sat heavier still.
With a thick layer of fury on top.
Four direct disciples had left the sect on one outing.
They'd come back two crippled, one wounded.
Li Yu, at least, was physically unharmed.
Mentally, she had collapsed outright — refusing to speak a word,
locking herself in her room the moment they returned, answering no one.
The greater crisis was the three injured direct disciples.
The one who was merely wounded had been stabilized by the Li Clan's light-element spirit masters; he would keep his life.
But the two with ruptured dantians — that was catastrophe.
Yu Yuan received Suiyun Peak's emergency summons the moment her lecture ended.
Several more light-element spirit masters arrived from the other peaks.
Every one of them above the seventh stage.
After a full round of treatment, Yu Yuan shook her head, face grim:
"It's no good. Their dantians are too badly ruptured. We can patch them — barely — but patching isn't enough. It will take heaven-grade treasures and Restoration Pills besides.
And even then, they're finished, for all practical purposes.
The best possible outcome: they recover their previous cultivation and remain nailed there for life.
If they ever attempt a breakthrough, the dantian tears open again."
"Elder Yu speaks truly. We have done all we can.
The sword qi that wounded them was simply too vicious. By my reading, it lingered inside the dantian even after rupturing it — it hadn't dissipated.
Caught early, they might have been saved.
It is far too late now."
"WHO did this to them?
A hand this ruthless — and they dared strike while the victims wore the Crimson Heaven Sect's direct-disciple robes?
Is this not an open provocation of our entire sect?"
Listening to the light-element healers' demands,
Elder Chen — the highest cultivation on Suiyun Peak after its absent Peak Lord — shook his head in fury:
"We don't yet know who struck the blow. But it is connected to Xueyang Peak — to Liu Yun's newest little disciple!"
"What?" Yu Yuan, who had seen Ning Ruan mere hours ago, was floored. "Surely not? She... she's only a light-element spirit master."
Yes, the girl asked absurd questions about impossible reverse healing.
But light-element was light-element.
She could hardly have drawn an actual sword from that casket and crippled Suiyun Peak's sword-cultivator direct disciples herself... could she?
"Naturally she didn't strike the blow herself. But she is inextricably tied to it."
Elder Chen's face was thunder.
He laid out the events in Shengjing from start to finish.
And just as Elder Chen had been stunned when he first heard it —
the elders hearing it NOW cycled through expressions worth painting.
Yu Yuan's mouth worked before sound came out:
"Elder Chen is saying — a Third Realm light-element girl, armed with nothing but those mysterious black spheres, bombarded the entire Li Clan into the dirt?
She blew apart their grand defensive ARRAY?"
Another visiting light-element elder sat stupefied for a long moment:
"Exactly how many image-recording mirrors does she OWN? She hung ten across our sect — and still had that many left for Shengjing?
Isn't she supposed to be the Li Clan's castoff daughter?"
Why does she look RICHER than the Li Clan???