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Chapter 30: Sun Yun and Drakes
🕑 Added 2024-12-30 01:02:17 +0000 UTCThe three of us spun in the direction of the voice. It took me a second to recognize who it was, despite how familiar her voice had seemed. She was dressed very differently from normal, wearing a beige and green tunic and pants combo, with a long overcoat on top. Her hair was tied up in a bun, and she had a smirk on her face.
But her almost unnaturally beautiful looks quickly helped me realize who this was.
Lin and Jianfeng, of course, were even faster at recognizing her.
“Sun Yun!”
“Hello,” Sun Yun said cheerfully and gave a small wave. She did it like it was completely normal for her to be here and not a massive surprise. How long had she been with us? Did she follow all the way from the city? “I was getting really bored cooped up in the compound, so I decided to see what the three of you were up to.”
Jianfeng was the first to find his voice. “Sun Yun, the Young Miss is going to kill you.”
“Big Sis will get over it,” Sun Yun said, sounding surprisingly casual about it given how cowed she looked whenever I’d seen her with Sun Xia over the last week. “One week was plenty enough for me to learn my lesson.”
“Apparently not,” Lin said drily, a frown on her lips. “Didn’t Sun Xia say that it was likely you were targeted specifically? And here you are, out here without any protection at all.”
Wait, what? I turned to look at Lin surprised. I hadn’t heard about this at all. Did they find more members of the Black Wind Marauders to interrogate or had Master Fan Hong kept some alive to question?
“It’s fine,” Sun Yun said, shaking her head. “I’m not alone, I have you three. And the only way they could have targeted me like that is if someone in the caravan I was with leaked our location. That’s obviously not a problem here. No one saw me leave with you three, and it isn’t like any of you were going to tell anyone else where you were going. Not with Li Lan’s interesting little ability, I’m guessing.“
I grimaced at that. Right, I’d been so shocked after recognizing her, that I’d almost forgotten that she’d seen my secret. She must have been following us this entire time—somehow without notice—and seen me harvest Skills. It wouldn’t have been obvious what I was doing before, but it was a whole lot clearer after I tried out Armored Shell.
Damn it! I would have to be way more circumspect in the future about trying out new Skills. No more trying them out right after harvesting in case someone was watching. Even if I thought I was only with those in the know.
“Oh, don’t look so glum,” Sun Yun chided as she bounced over to Jianfeng. She tried to pull him into a hug, but he easily dodged her and gave her a disapproving frown, earning him a pout from the girl. When he didn’t relent and let her grab him, she sighed before turning back to me. “I can keep a secret, don’t you worry. You helped save two of my friends from those horrible bandits. I won’t betray your secret so easily. Besides, while it's an impressive ability to mimic spirit beasts, my Sun family isn’t so impoverished that we would covet something like that.”
She sounded smug at that last part and raised her dainty nose into the air.
Ignoring the smugness radiating off of her, I relaxed just a bit. She was assuming that I could only harvest from spirit beasts. That was good. Not as big of a deal, hopefully. Still, while I trusted her words for the most part, I couldn’t help but worry she might tell at least one other person about this. One she would assume it would be fine to tell.
“So, you’ll keep this a secret even from your sister, then?” I asked cautiously.
Sun Yun just shrugged. “If that is what you want. Big Sis could probably help you make better use of your ability, but if you want to keep it a secret then it's not a problem. You’ll probably want to tell her if you join as a retainer though.”
I let out a small sigh of relief at that. Well, that was at least something. One more person in the know, even if partially, wasn’t great. But at least it stops here. As long as I was far more cautious in the future.
“Great, now that that’s settled,” Sun Yun said, clapping her hands. “Let’s go hunting. I'm guessing you're here for something in particular? Let me guess, you want to hunt down a—”
“Hold on,” Jianfeng said, holding up a hand to stop the excited girl. “Sun Yun, while I’m glad you’ll keep Lan’s secret, that doesn’t mean we can just ignore the danger you're in. The three of us are hardly enough to keep you safe. You’re the strongest out of all of us. That’s hardly enough.”
Jianfeng wasn’t wrong about that. Despite being only 17, Sun Yun was already well into the mid-stage of Qi-Gathering. Despite her rather delicate appearance—being the shortest out of the three of us and quite slender—in pure physical capabilities alone, she probably outclassed all of us. And that wasn’t including the no doubt more potent techniques she had at her disposal.
Sun Yun sighed and waved off his concern. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Like I said, there’s no one to leak where we are, so there is no need to be so cautious. And if it makes you feel better, Big Sis got me a few new toys.” She patted the small pouch at her waist. It was likely a spatial pouch. “If things get really bad then I can get us all to safety. So there’s no need to worry.”
“Sun Yun…” Jianfeng said, exasperated. But he didn’t seem to know what else he could say to try and dissuade her.
“Don’t be a bore, Jianfeng,” Sun Yun said, crossing her arms. “Besides, if I go back home, then you know you’ll feel obligated to escort me. That means your whole day will be wasted. Besides, me being here will only be a benefit.” She turned to look at me. “I can help a lot with making things easier for you. And not just as another strong pair of hands, either.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, only to notice Jianfeng mouthing ‘Don’t encourage her.’ Oops.
“I’m glad you asked,” Sun Yun said smugly.” She tapped her spatial pouch again. “I can just store all your kills away until you want to use them. My bag is pretty large and should be able to handle all your needs. It even has a preserving effect in case you need the kills to be fresh. That way, you can wait until you’re alone and don’t have to worry about anyone catching you by surprise again.”
Oh. I stared at the pouch at her hip a lot more intently. I wasn’t sure if the System had a time limit for harvesting. But even if it didn’t, being able to just grab the corpses would be really useful. It could give me more time to think about my Skill choices and compare everything I could get from a hunting trip at once. It would also make it even easier to obfuscate my harvesting, whether we get seen by more hidden observers or if we wanted to fight with more people in the future.
Sure, people wouldn’t be able to figure out what I was doing just by seeing me harvest Skills. But it could draw unwanted questions and speculation. It would be better to avoid leaving any hints as to what I could do in case I end up being forced to reveal too many of my Skills in the future. In that scenario, if I was also known to do strange things to corpses, people might put two and two together.
There was also a final benefit to the spatial pouch and just being able to grab spirit beast corpses. One that could matter today, making us a bit safer. The Crystal Cliffs—where we were at the outskirts of—were deep enough into the Great Southern Forest that even at the edges of it, there could be Mid Rank 1 spirit beasts. Not having to wait around near our battles any longer than necessary would be very useful here.
“I can see you understand,” Sun Yun said, grinning as she put her hands on her hips triumphantly. It seemed my interest was a bit too evident on my face. “So, come on. I’m already out here. Let’s just go do some hunting. Even if Big Sis gets mad, it will only be at me. It's not like any of you can force me to go back, anyway.”
Jianfeng slumped at those words, and Lin sighed and shook her head.
“Fine,” Lin said after a moment. “If you want to risk the Young Miss literally chaining you to the compound when we get back, then it's on you. Just keep whatever protective treasures you have on hand.”
“Great!” Sun Yun said happily and clapped. “Then let’s go.”
She started walking for a moment before she stopped and turned around. “What are we hunting again? Are we going after some Crystal Drakes?”
I shuddered at the thought of going anywhere near one of those things. I’d seen the entry on one of those when going through the bestiaries about this part of the forest. They were essentially wingless dragons with massive crystal spikes growing out of their backs. They could also fire beams of crystalizing energy that could turn an unfortunate cultivator into a statue in seconds.
The weakest of them were usually Mid Rank 1. The strongest… Well, it's said that Early Rank 2 was the level they reached at maturity. So I could only imagine it would be insanely powerful.
Was Sun Yun crazy or way stronger than I was already giving her credit for?
“No, that would be way too much,” I said, shaking my head rapidly. “All I’m after is a Gem Shelled Tortoise. Hopefully a small and weak one.”
I was hoping to hunt that to make my Earth Skill more powerful. Crystals were generally a lot harder than rock, and I was hoping consolidating some Crystal Skills with what I already had would be a major buff. The Gem Shell Tortoise also had the ability to store Qi in its shell, and that could potentially solve my boost problem. Even if it wasn’t enough, it would at least be a great way to boost just how much Qi I had to play with.
“Aw, that’s so boring,” Sun Yun said, pouting at me.
In any other situation, I might have caved from such a look from such a pretty girl. But her infatuation with Jianfeng was pretty clear, and Crystal Drakes were way too strong right now.
“We could always just head back if it's too boring,” I said, earning myself a nod of approval from Jianfeng.
“That would be for the best—” Jianfeng tried to say, but Sun Yun cut him off.
“Fine, fine,” she said, crossing her arms before turning around and walking off. “Boring battles with turtles it is.”
The rest of us moved to follow her, and we continued our journey into the wastelands ahead. We left the massive trees behind and instead walked across very rough and rocky terrain. Cracks ran through the ground, and the further we went from the trees, the larger these cracks got. At first, they were small enough that we didn’t even have to worry about stepping over them. But not long after, they were large enough that a person could fall inside them.
The only other things that marked this barren land were random boulders and other large rock formations. It reminded me of a story about people fighting in a similar environment who needed bridges constantly set up to cross from rocky plateau to plateau, separated by canyon-like cracks. Though, this was a lot less of a problem for us, as even if the gaps grew that large, we could be able to leap over them quite easily.
It would have been almost boring if it wasn’t for all the spirit beasts.
We ran into another pangolin first. Sun Yun decided to show off and took care of it rather easily. She just rushed it, easily getting on top of its armored form, and slammed her palm down hard on its shell. There was a flash of blue-white light, and then the poor creature's shell was shattered.
She then leaped off the creature and landed daintily, holding her head high.
I moved to quickly finish off the pangolin, noticing how its spine was likely destroyed too, which is why it didn’t put up a fight. Scary. Part of me couldn’t help but hope I was right about Sun Yun being especially strong for her cultivation. Otherwise, mid-stage Qi-gatherers were a lot more dangerous than I thought.
Sun Yun stored away the corpse after I was done, though not before I checked what Skills it had available. To my disappointment, while different Skills were offered up from the other three I’d seen earlier, none of them were all that interesting. I hadn’t expected different, but it would have been nice to be surprised.
After that, we ran into more and more spirit beasts. There was a group of lizards that tried to ambush us from a particularly large crack. A poisonous burrowing serpent. Several vicious but small dessert cats. And even one particularly pissed-off three-humped camel.
All of them were taken out with relative ease. With Sun Yun around, it wasn’t really much of a fight. Though out of all of these kills, I only considered harvesting two of them later. The serpent and the camel. The serpent for a venom Skill it had and the camel for its Skill to survive extreme conditions without food or water.
I wasn’t sure if I would actually want to waste a Skill slot for any of those, especially the survival Skill from the camel, but I was considering them. Those two beasts were also the only ones I’d bothered asking the others to let me finish off if we encountered more of their kind. Just in case they had better Skills than what I’d seen so far.
The rest I wouldn’t bother with, as it seemed unlikely they had any Skills I would need right now. They would be better off as additions to our growing collection of spirit beast cores—we almost reached my minor goal of 25 cores, but I thought it would be better to get more just in case.
In between these fights, we stopped a couple of times for me to check if the corpses were still considered valid targets by the System. Each time they popped out of Sun Yun's bag and remained glowing blue, I found myself more and more eager to get a similar bag one day.
It would have to be in the future, though, as the price Sun Yun gave me for hers was staggering, to say the least.
Eventually, maybe two hours into our journey through the wasteland, we finally found our main target in this region. The first sign that we were close was when the cracks—which were major fissures now—started showing signs of purple crystals growing within. They weren’t spirit stones apparently, but those gems had something to do with how this place became the wasteland it was.
Though no one amongst us knew just why that was the case.
Not long after we started seeing the crystals, we saw something similar in the ground above. Except this one was moving and was quite large. About the size of a van, the lumbering beast moved slowly on a plateau completely isolated by the massive cracks surrounding it.
It was all alone and just waiting to be harvested.
“Finally,” Sun Yun said when she spotted it. “This was getting boring. We should have run here.”
“Maybe if we were all at your level, we would have,” Lin said, rolling her eyes. “But running around recklessly for the rest of us would be a death sentence.”
“I know, I know,” Sun Yun said, pouting. “You three really need to work harder on your cultivation. I want to be able to do something exciting with friends instead of only when I have my Big Sis or Weiwei watching me like mother hens.”
“Oh, of course,” Lin said, sarcasm thick in her voice. “We’ll just stop being so lazy and leap to mid Qi-gathering right away. We could have done it at any time but were just holding back because we were being lazy.”
Sun Yun turned to glare at Lin, but she just returned a flat stare. Then Sun Yun stuck her tongue out at Lin and turned back towards the turtle.
“What happens to this thing next is your fault,” She said petulantly before rushing off.
The rest of us rushed to follow, and we all leaped over the crack separating us from the Gem Shell Tortoise. However, after we landed, Sun Yun stopped in her tracks.
“Oh, it's stronger than I thought,” Sun Yun said, straightening up as the tortoise slowly turned toward us. There seemed to be something wrong with it, however. I’d assumed it was moving slowly because it was a tortoise, but its movements were kind of jerky. “Mid Rank 1.”
“Is that going to be a problem?” I asked hesitantly as I felt like something was wrong. But I couldn’t figure out what it was. We were alone on this little island of rock. The land was quite flat so there wasn’t anything around that we couldn't see. Maybe in the now cavernous cracks surrounding us? We’ve dealt with ambushes from those before, so maybe that was it?
Sun Yun scoffed. “Hardly. Maybe just a little more interesting. But there would have to be a lot more of these guys before we’d have an issue.”
Sun Yun moved to engage the tortoise, but she stopped when Jianfeng grabbed her by the shoulder.
“Hold on,” he said before pointing at the tortoise. “Does anyone else see that?”
“The jerky movements?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at the beast.
“Yes, but look at its limbs,” Jianfeng said, his hand moving toward his sword. “Only its shell is supposed to be crystal. But it looks like its limbs are coated in crystal as well. It’s making it hard for it to move.”
Oh, shoot, he was right. It looked like its limbs were partially crystalized… Oh fuck! I gripped my sword and looked around. The canyon-like cracks surrounding this plateau were a whole lot more sinister now. Please let this just be a strange disease and not what I was thinking.
“Huh, so it’s injured,” Sun Yun said, tilting her head. “What’s the problem, then? A more boring fight, but isn’t that what you want anyway?”
“Yes,” Jianfeng said as he started to unsheathe his sword and looked around. I did the same and Lin unslung her warclub. “But why exactly is this badly injured tortoise just wandering around out here? Why hasn’t something come and finished it off? How did it get away from whatever did that to it.”
I turned to look where we’d come from. Instead of just talking, shouldn’t we be running? I moved to take a step in that direction, but Lin stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. She shook her head when I looked at her.
Oh shit, did she think whatever had set this up was already waiting for us to try and run away?
“Oh,” Sun Yun said, her eyes spinning around to look at Jianfeng with bright eyes. “This is a trap!”
As if reacting to Sun Yun’s words, something leaped out of the surrounding cracks where I was just planning on running. It was aimed right at us, but we all rushed to the side and avoided the large creature slamming down where we’d just been.
It landed with a loud thump that shook the ground. It was a lizard-like thing that was larger than the Gem Shell Tortoise. Spikes of the same purple crystal as the tortoise’s shell grew out of its back. Its tail ended in a spike crystal club. Unlike the tortoise's shell, however, these crystals glowed with a malevolent light.
The spirit beast let out a loud roar as it regained its balance.
“Yes, a Crystal Drake!” Sun Yun cheered while the rest of us were tense.
Then two more forms leapt out of the cracks surrounding the isolated piece of land we were on. Each was just as large as the first. Each landed on our plateau and turned to look at us.
Sun Yun seemed even more excited about this. I, on the other hand, just hoped she was as strong as she seemed to think she was. Otherwise, we were fucked.
