It was only after killing him that Long Di noticed Shen Ling running over to him, but by then, darkness claimed his vision and everything went quiet.

****

Four figures lay unmoving in the cave. Xiannu Liang and Yaomu Shou seemed like they had it rough. They involuntarily shuddered every now and again when they recalled what had happened to them.

They got a rundown of what happened from Shen Ling as soon as they were out, but they weren’t sure if it was better to be out here or if it was better inside wherever they were.

Yaomu Shou and Xiannu Liang were still pale from the experience. Their irises were a light shade of grey and they seemed to stare into nothingness as if their minds were broken, but they seemed to be recovering fairly well.

“Ugh… w-what happened?”

“You’re awake!?” A surprised cry came from Shen Ling, who had Long Di lying in her arms on the ground.

She had moved Xiannu Liang and Yaomu Shou right beside her so she could keep a close eye on everyone.

“Y-Yeah, I am…” Long Di said with much difficulty. What Long Di was experiencing was not a deficit in energy or anything along those lines, but simply the consequences of a multitude of injuries suffered in his fight, culminating all at once.

He quietly circulated the spiritual qi in his body and he could feel the pain lessen by a considerable amount.

Long Di had learnt that spiritual cultivators’ bodies were a far cry from body cultivators as far as strength and defence were concerned. The bulk of their defence came from the erection of a thin, powerful shield of spiritual qi.

This would allow them to tank powerful attacks from their peers. Of course, it was not as versatile nor as convenient as body cultivators, but it was what it was. Long Di wasn’t used to fighting strictly hand-to-hand combat experts who were able to get to him as effectively as Uncle Metal and Auntie Metal.

This exposed a flaw in his experience, which resulted in a flustered mental state. It was because of this that their attacks resulted in so much damage, despite the slowed circulation of their somatic essence.

“What happened to them?” he asked as he noticed the strange state of Yaomu Shou and Xiannu Liang.

Shen Ling looked over at them before admitting, “It’s the effect of the second stage of the Ab… I meant the Scripture.”

Since she wasn’t sure if they were being watched, she didn’t want to say certain things that would make things difficult for them.

She had told Long Di that she could enter the abyss because of her cultivation of the Abyss Scripture. Even though she had told him it in passing and he wasn’t able to get more information from her, he was able to get a rough idea from the name alone.

“Oh, so that’s the consequences of using it. What is ‘it’ really? Why did it affect them like this?” probed Long Di, curious about the nature of the Abyss itself.

In truth, there were many things about Shen Ling that Long Di was curious about. Seeing as how they had a chance to sit and talk, getting a better understanding of what they were dealing with shouldn’t be too bad.

She appeared unsure with this question, finding it hard to answer, “I-I'm… not sure…”

Long Di turned his head back to look at her, not realising that because he was laying in her embrace, this action put his face mere millimetres away from her, an action that flushed red the cheeks of the young Abyss Ghost.

She turned her head away from his in a panic, unable to lock eyes with him as brazenly as he was able to do.

Of course, Long Di wasn’t thinking about any of this. He just turned his head to better ask her a question that’s been on his mind.

“I get that it’s in the name and everything, but… are you sure you want to keep using a power you’re unsure about? What if you’re tapping into something that’s far more dangerous than you expected?”

Hearing this, Shen Ling, with her head turned away, thought deeply about his question before asking one of her own, “I-If something came to swallow me up, would…?”

Her question trailed off into silence, leaving Long Di in the dark, but he said nothing and only waited.

Suddenly, she turned back around with a beautiful smile. ‘The first stage of the Abyss Scripture is Peer into the Abyss,’ her voice sounded in his mind, finding this method of communication to be much easier.

Not giving Long Di a chance to bring up the abrupt change in her train of conversation, she continued. ‘The second stage which I am currently at is known as ‘Enter the Abyss.’ However, the third stage is where I feel I will be able to get some answers. It’s called ‘Recognise the Abyss.’ It’ll take me a long time to get there though, and I think I’ll need to go into the Abyss to really understand what it is. Then I’ll be able to tell you.’

“I see,” was all Long Di said in return.

He wasn’t an idiot. He knew, based on how she switched up her words, that there was something she wished to ask. However, for some reason, she abandoned asking it halfway through and chose to give him an answer within the realm of what he asked, and nothing more. Considering that there was no knowledge on the subject, nothing really came of it, so he could only put this matter aside for now.

“Ugh…” a groan broke the outside silence, compelling Long Di and Shen Ling to look over to see Yaomu Shou and Xiannu Liang finally moving.

“Shen Ling, do me a favour,” Yaomu Shou was eventually able to sit up with a hand to her head as if experiencing the world’s most cruel headache. “If in the future we need to choose between going to wherever you took us, and me receiving multiple bludgeoning hits to the head whilst also possessing the type of sore butt-hole one would only experience following a riveting bout of friction-filled chronic diarrhoea, then throw the toilet paper on my listless body and run for the hills.”

“Mighty comparison you made there. Was it that bad?” Long Di asked. He couldn’t help but feel impressed with Yaomu Shou’s comparison.

“It was horrible,” a flushed Xiannu Liang mostly recovered being able to hold a conversation. However, with her sitting in the fetal position rocking back and forth, it could be seen that trauma was the baseball bat that struck her in the side of her head with all the force of the sweet release of Yaomu Shou’s friction-filled diarrhoea.

“Though big sister Shen Ling held our hands, when we entered we couldn’t see a thing,” recalled Xiannu Liang with another shudder, her reddened cheeks deepening.

“So it was just dark?” asked Long Di. “That doesn’t seem so ba-”

“No,” Yaomu Shou shook her head. “It was much worse than that. We were stripped of all our senses and more. While we were in there, we couldn’t see, feel, hear, or smell.”

“Is it really that bad?” Long Di never experienced a situation similar to what she described, so his interest was piqued.

“You don’t know how terrible it is. Heck, I wouldn’t know how terrible it was if I never experienced it for myself,” Xiannu Liang sighed. The relief of being released from there was like being freed from hell.

They had a reason for why it was so terrible for them. Seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling were the senses that allowed a person to interact with the world around them, to interact with the surrounding existence.

Losing one or two would be difficult, but there would still be a link to the outside world. However, losing all of them, which was the result of them dwelling in the abyss, stripped them of all of this.

A person subjected to such a thing would neither be aware nor capable of correlating any form of existence, not even their own. It would be like living in a state where one does not exist. This violated reality and logic, and it was because of this that it could break most men.

Xiannu Liang and Yaomu Shou were only able to survive for as long as they did because Shen Ling was with them. She could defy the abyss’s nature and through it kept their minds from shattering.

Long Di then turned his attention back to Shen Ling, asking, “You’re not affected by it?”

She shook her head, “Not really. If anything, I feel more comfortable there.”

Both girls stared at Shen Ling as if she was some kind of monster. What sort of deranged, mentally ill, Long Di-like person would say such a thing!?

“You’re really… incredible,” Xiannu Liang commented with another shudder.

Long Di noticed this and asked, “Are you okay? You seem to be shaking a lot and you’re pretty… red?”

“I-I’m fine,” Xiannu Liang stated, her shaking now gone.

Long Di sighed regarding her lie. He waved his hand, creating a qi shield that encased the group.

Apparently, the fire-attribute-rich spiritual energy in the air had been causing her no small amount of trouble.

“Do me a favour, and when you’re gonna break up with being alive, just let me know in advance so I can be the ill-advised counsellor with growing intrigue in the divorce rate.”

After recounting their experiences, everyone prepared themselves for what was to come next: the Earth Flame.

Xiannu Liang helped Long Di to recover, and he used the time that she took to heal him, to comprehend his failings in the fight.

His lack of use of his spiritual qi to form a protective layer over himself whilst fighting as a spiritual cultivator. His relatively poor hand-to-hand combat skills. All of these and more, he reflected on deeply so that such shortcomings wouldn’t exist, or at the very least, be infinitesimally minimised.

“Ah, much better,” he stood up, wringing his shoulder, glad to be back at a hundred percent.

Shen Ling cast her gaze on the shield blocking the tunnel and asked, “Any ideas on getting through that?”

“Leave that to me.” Long Di walked past her, right up to the shield.

He stopped right before it and proceeded to rummage through his storage ring. “This reminds me. Shen Ling and Xiannu Liang, be a lamb and retrieve the storage rings from the corpses over yonder.”

Both girls’ countenances fell when they heard his request. They didn’t like going near corpses, and it was even worse when all that remained of one was a pancaked mess and the other died with his eyes open.

“You’ve become quite the proficient little grave robber, haven’t you?” Yaomu Shou quipped with a snarky smile.

“Au contraire,” countered Long Di. “To be a graverobber requires a grave, and those poor souls lack my courtesy to grant them such a thing.”

Yaomu Shou shrugged and didn’t comment on this anymore.

“Wha-”

She watched as Long Di retrieved the beast skin when, to their surprise, it flew out of his hand before pasting itself onto the shield.

Shing!

A red glow enveloped the entire group in an instant.