Chapter 141 | I Was Just Gathering Herbs, So Why Did I Find a Sword Fairy?

Everspring City, Huamanlou.

The room was deathly quiet, without a single sound. It was so suffocatingly quiet that it made it hard to breathe, yet everyone in the room was still very much alive.

The crowd that had packed into the room earlier had long since dispersed. The warmth of human presence vanished in an instant, leaving only Lu Yan and Jiang Ci, who was lying on the bed.

Lu Yan sat properly on the wooden stool by the bed, keeping watch in absolute silence. His back was held perfectly straight and his face was devoid of expression, but his entire being looked exceptionally exhausted. He also looked incredibly downcast...

Beside him, Jiang Ci lay tucked beneath the covers, perfectly still, without moving a muscle.

Neither spoke. An invisible, suffocating weight pressed down on both of their hearts, making the silence in the room almost agonizing.

Just how quiet was it?

It was so quiet that their breathing could be heard with absolute clarity—one light, one heavy, echoing alternately in this confined space.

The wind and the chirping of insects outside could not penetrate the room, or perhaps they did but simply went unheard. A deathly silence festered and spread through the room, making one's heart race with unease.

With nothing to do and no idea what to say, Lu Yan instinctively closed his eyes to meditate and cultivate. He pulled out a Focus-Stabilizing Pill, tilted his head back, and swallowed it dry.

The pill tasted bitter, leaving his mouth full of gritty residue. With no water to wash it down, he could only chew it dry, swallowing it down his throat with a bit of saliva. It was as bitter as his own life.

Truth be told, the path of cultivation was nothing but bitter from start to finish.

Meditating, popping pills, and carving lines in meditation day after day—there were absolutely no shortcuts to becoming an immortal.

Having cultivated for so many years, Lu Yan could be considered law-abiding and honest compared to most cultivators in the cultivation world. He almost never actively harmed anyone.

So how did he end up in a situation where he had to endlessly suffer and swallow bitterness?

Sometimes, he really wanted to ask, why? He had never committed any heinous evils in this life. At most, he had schemed a little to survive in times of chaos, but he had never gone against his conscience.

Yet Heaven just had to make things difficult for him, specifically targeting him to torment. To hell with cultivation being bitter, and becoming an immortal being bitter. Even after completing his compulsory education in his past life, he failed to see what was so "cool" about any of this.

Sighing, Lu Yan began performing "porcelain repair" inside his spiritual sea. Guided by his spiritual energy, the fragments slowly returned to their original positions, restoring his cultivation.

Soon, his Foundation Establishment foundation was completely stabilized, and his cultivation rose by a steady margin. His divine sense throbbed with a bloated sensation, but the amount of spiritual energy he could employ continued to increase. He was now one step closer to the Golden Core realm.

Normally, he would have breathed a sigh of relief at such progress. After all, a higher cultivation meant a better life and better eyesight. Right now, his vision had already upgraded from blurry blocks of color to 144p resolution.

But today, he could not feel even a shred of joy. Even though his realm had risen and he was no longer blind, his chest still felt incredibly tight and stifled.

Because his becoming stronger was useless. No matter how strong, how capable in battle, or how talented in cultivation he was, he could not solve the greatest problem right in front of him.

Ever since he turned sixteen, Heaven had refused to treat him like a human being.

He had finally fallen for someone after all this time, only to be dealt such a crushing defeat. It wasn't even a matter of being rejected—even being rejected would have been a hundred times better than this.

Fate had played the cruelest joke on him.

The girls other people liked were, at worst, physically weak, cursed with bad fates, or prone to illness. In some people's eyes, a sickly beauty might even be some kind of bonus point. But Lu Yan only wanted Jiang Ci to be perfectly fine and healthy, free from sickness.

Yet Jiang Ci wasn't sick at all. She simply had no heart. It wasn't a heart disease—how was he supposed to treat it? How could he mend it? How could he save her?

There was simply no way to even begin. Lu Yan raised his eyes and looked at the white-haired girl on the bed.

Jiang Ci kept her clear, glass-like, light gray eyes open, quietly staring up at the worn, mottled ceiling beams above. She blinked and stared, as if looking at something highly intriguing, looking for all the world as if she wasn't the one who had just fainted.

The room remained dead silent. Neither of them knew what to say, so Lu Yan simply went back to cultivating, though the sharp, rhythmic throbbing in his spiritual sea felt like a mockery, reminding him that one must take things one step at a time.

Fine, if he couldn't cultivate, then he wouldn't. Lu Yan simply sat on the stool in a daze, staring at the battered, dilapidated door of the room.

Indeed, this was Lu Yan's room.

As for how things had ended up in this wretched state, it was a rather complicated story that had to be told starting from three hours ago.

Three hours ago, everyone had been squeezed into this small room, the atmosphere suffocatingly tense. It was then that Jiang Ci had raised her hand and gently wiped the tears from his face.

That single, small gesture had instantly silenced everyone in the room. Even Lu Yan himself had been utterly dazed.

Watching this unfold, the few people standing nearby had all tacitly taken half a step back. No one dared to chime in, and no one dared to break the tension.

It wasn't that they lacked loyalty; they were truly at their wits' end.

Yao Wu had already made it abundantly clear—

“This thing isn't some spare part that can just be replaced with a new one. If it were shattered or damaged, it could still be treated.

“But if it's gone entirely, there's absolutely nothing that can be done.”

Everyone had discussed it for nearly an hour, finally arriving at the sole path to survival: if they wanted to save Jiang Ci, they had to find her original, missing heart.

Only if her original, rightful heart was returned to its proper place would she have a chance of surviving. Yet this sole path to survival was even harder to traverse than a dead end.

First, no one knew when her heart had been lost, how it had been lost, who had extracted it, or where it currently resided. Even if they did find it, how would they put it back, and who would do it? That was another major hurdle...

Second, what they lacked most was time.

Yao Wu had done some rough calculations. Jiang Ci was currently keeping herself alive entirely through a fake heart condensed from a clump of spiritual energy inside her body. This spiritual energy heart originally consumed itself at an extremely slow rate, and would have had absolutely no problem sustaining her for eight to ten years.

But the catch was that Jiang Ci wanted to become strong far too badly.

She didn't want to be a burden, she didn't want to be constantly protected, and she didn't want to remain weak and powerless forever. Thus, she had insisted on drawing qi into her body to embark on the path of cultivation.

Once cultivation began, the spiritual energy throughout her body fell into complete disarray, directly disrupting the original balance within her. The rate at which that life-sustaining spiritual energy heart dissipated instantly surged.

Now, at the shortest, she had one year; at the longest, three years.

Once that spiritual energy heart dissipated completely, it would be the end for Jiang Ci.

Because of this, Lu Yan's mental state had completely shattered. A heart transplant was out of the question, and if they wanted to find her original heart, they had to do so within a year. Wasn't this just driving someone to a dead end?

The others felt terrible watching this but were utterly powerless, so they quietly excused themselves, leaving the space to the two of them. Lu Yan hung his head, his heart aching with guilt and pain, filled to the brim with a chaotic mess of emotions. If only he hadn't lent her a hand back then, buying her those body-tempering pills...