Chapter 16: A Small Trial of Skill! Journey to the Ancient Phoenix Secret Realm
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After resting in the thatched cottage for the time it took an incense stick to burn, you felt refreshed. Once you rose, you gave the room a careful inspection and searched it from corner to corner, only to discover that it was nothing more than an ordinary thatched cottage. You had simply been mistaken earlier.
After leaving the cottage, you hurried back to the sect without stopping, handed over the Recording Stone, and reported everything truthfully. Upon learning that you had slain a Foundation Establishment demon beast while fighting above your level, the sect began to take you seriously and accepted you as a nominal disciple of the Inner Sect.
Using the resources provided by the sect, you entered closed-door cultivation for a month. At last, you broke through the Qi Refining Realm and reached the Foundation Establishment Realm!
As fate would have it, the Ancient Phoenix Secret Realm, which opened only once every thousand years, happened to appear. Those who obtained the Phoenix’s True Blood could awaken the Phoenix bloodline and cultivate a hundred times faster. Since the minimum requirement for entering the secret realm was the Foundation Establishment Realm, you were suddenly tempted to take part in this battle for supremacy.
[Main quest triggered!]
[Quest Two: A Trial Run! Enter the Ancient Phoenix Secret Realm and search for the Phoenix’s True Blood.]
[Quest Reward: Obtain an Inherited Bloodline.]
“...”
Di Qiu listened to the system’s narration without expression. As expected, the quest announcement had arrived.
She stared blankly upward into the darkness. A quest panel appeared before her eyes, and she sighed inwardly. It had only been two days—no, more precisely, only one day.
In that single day, the system had issued no fewer than five quests. Was it planning to unleash all the quests accumulated over the past ten years at once?
Still, the narration describing events that did not belong to her world was rather interesting.
Recalling what had happened when the previous quest was triggered, she wondered whether quests were activated by unlocking specific locations.
Could this tunnel be the location of her next quest?
Di Qiu turned her head toward the window. Outside was pitch-black, and she could see nothing at all. That was highly inconvenient for scouting the area.
She thought back to what Deng Jingxiang had said earlier. It seemed she had never expressly forbidden them from turning on their lights. Di Qiu therefore took out the phone issued by the school, switched on the flashlight, and shone it out the window.
“Hm? Who turned on the light?”
Everyone aboard the bus was startled.
The sudden brightness drew every questioning gaze toward its source. Before anyone could wonder who had been so bold, they caught sight of the eerie face pressed against the window.
The face reflected in the glass was covered in countless densely packed eyes, each one rolling round and round. Even the tongue protruding from its mouth was covered in rolling eyeballs. At that moment, it was baring its teeth and sticking out its tongue against the window.
Sensing the focused beam of light, the eerie creatures crawling around the bus began gathering there. Each one displayed its own strange ability, fiercely attempting to break through the windows.
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The entire bus seemed to take a collective deep breath.
Good heavens. One glance had nearly made them scream!
Even though they were seasoned veterans who dealt with eerie creatures every day at school, none of them could withstand such a sudden face-to-face scare.
After all, not every ability user possessed nerves of steel when it came to the eerie.
Some ability users, despite having studied for a full year, still reacted with terror when confronted by grotesque entities. There was no deeper reason for it—they were simply timid.
That was why the academy spent most of its time helping all its students become desensitized to the eerie.
When they saw that the person who had turned on the flashlight was Di Qiu, they were surprised, yet not surprised. To be honest, she had done what everyone else had wanted to do.
The eerie creatures swarming outside, the narrow tunnel—everyone was curious. Why had the Central Anomaly Bureau left these creatures alive instead of eliminating them?
As for Di Qiu, the culprit, the moment she switched on the flashlight she wanted nothing more than to stab her own eyes blind. She had been mentally prepared, but apparently not prepared enough.
Zhu Yufang, seated beside her, turned to look at the young woman, who had silently closed her eyes and appeared perfectly calm. Smiling warmly, she patted Di Qiu on the back, signaling for her to open her eyes, then gave her a thumbs-up.
At last, Zhu Yufang took out her reading glasses and put them on. She pulled out her phone, handed it to Di Qiu, and pointed toward the flashlight on its back, indicating that she wanted Di Qiu to turn it on for her.
Di Qiu did as she asked, making Zhu Yufang the second person to produce a flashlight.
Everyone waited for quite some time. Once they confirmed that the two women’s actions had caused no problems, and seeing that Deng Jingxiang remained quietly seated without objecting, they all took out their phones and switched on their flashlights.
In an instant, the bus was as bright as day.
Just as they had imagined, countless eerie creatures were crawling over the vehicle.
Even the windshield at the front had an entity clinging to it, its entire mouth filled with eyeballs. The driver drew in a sharp breath, and the hand turning the wheel nearly jerked it off course.
If he had been allowed to speak, he certainly would have turned around and cursed, “Who was the idiot who started turning on the lights?”
He closed his eyes, floored the accelerator, and drove at full speed. Thirty seconds later, they finally saw daylight again.
The moment the bus emerged from the tunnel, all the eerie creatures scattered from its body like vampires exposed to sunlight.
Once the entire bus had cleared the tunnel, one of the students let out a long breath.
Others eagerly began asking about what had just happened:
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“Sister Xiang, what was that all about? Why doesn’t the Central Anomaly Bureau deal with those eerie creatures?”
“Exactly! Why didn’t you tell us about something like that sooner and give us time to prepare ourselves? My heart nearly leaped out of my chest.”
Deng Jingxiang had waited until they were almost at the tunnel before mentioning it. There was clearly an element of deliberate mischief involved.
Could the assessment still be ongoing? That made no sense.
Di Qiu quietly waited for Deng Jingxiang to respond. To be honest, if she had not known in advance that the Central Anomaly Bureau was an official organization, she might even have suspected that the entire bus was taking them to some kind of death camp.
Deng Jingxiang said nothing. The driver, however, spoke first.
“Hmph. You little brats. I’ve transported countless ability users who passed their assessments, and not one of them was as unruly as you. If I weren’t a veteran driver with decades behind the wheel, that bus would have nearly overturned just now.”
“Heh-heh, you can’t blame us for that. Sister Xiang was the one being unreasonable, waiting until the last moment to tell us. Besides, she never said we couldn’t use lights.”
“Old Deng, that was quite a trick,” the driver said with a hearty laugh, turning to glance at Deng Jingxiang. Then he laughed again. “Still, this is the first time I’ve seen everyone on an entire bus turn on their lights. You’d better be careful the next time you come through here.”
“What? Careful of what?”
“Sister Xiang, say something! Don’t scare us!”
The students began bombarding her with questions.
“Hahahaha, I suppose I’d better tell you. There’s an unwritten rule in that tunnel: no human voice may be made while passing through it. The reason is that the moment sound is produced, the eerie creatures can break through the bus’s defenses and launch an attack. Once the bus’s barrier is damaged, we’ll be in for a fierce battle.
“Of course, even if a fight broke out, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. All those creatures are only Class A, and we could handle them. The real difficulty comes after every Class A entity has been destroyed. What we would face next would be creatures of the Destruction level.”
The driver, who had been quietly concentrating on the road, had opened the floodgates once he began speaking and was now enthusiastically explaining everything.
“Wait, the Central Anomaly Bureau can’t even deal with an S3-level entity? That’s pathetic. It’s not even as good as our little Di Qiu.” Zhu Yufang’s kindly yet booming voice rang through the bus.
Di Qiu’s mouth twitched.
“...”
She had finally figured out that Granny Fang might be old, but her spirit certainly was not. It was hard to imagine that someone of her age could still possess such vigorous energy and vitality. Supernatural abilities truly had changed humanity.
She turned to gaze out the window, listening to the driver’s words while silently calculating how she should complete the quest.
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