Chapter Ninety-Three: The World of Ice and Fire (Bonus Chapter)

"Little one, you're awake?" Gu Weiyu said gently. "I'm not entirely sure where we are right now."

"Don't call me little one!" Hua Ling grumbled, not sounding especially pleased. If she had a mouth, she probably would have been hanging a whole oil jar from it.

"Then may I call you Sprout?" Gu Weiyu asked softly, her gaze falling on the tender bud.

"Sprout? I like that name!" The little leaf on its head fluttered happily.

A smile tugged at Gu Weiyu's lips. Sprout really did like the name she had given her, and she seemed to be speaking much more fluently now.

"Sprout, you can call me Yu."

As she spoke, Gu Weiyu carefully moved across the ice.

Unlike the lush vitality of the wood spirit clan, this place felt oppressively bleak.

"Yu!" Sprout called to her cheerfully and emerged from her elixir field.

Outside lay a world of ice and snow. The moment her little head peeked out, the freezing air struck her face, and she shivered so violently that she quickly shrank back into the elixir field.

"Yu, it's so cold outside!" Sprout's tender bud curled up tight, and even the leaf on her head folded into a little ball.

As a wood spirit, Sprout was born to loathe the cold of ice and snow.

Gu Weiyu secretly snickered to herself. Sprout feared neither lightning nor cold—she really was an odd little creature.

"Yu, are you making fun of me?" Sprout could sense her mood and huffed in dissatisfaction.

"No, I was just thinking about how adorable you are, Sprout!" Caught red-handed, Gu Weiyu felt a little embarrassed. She lowered her voice and reminded her, "Sprout, since you dislike the cold, stay well inside your elixir field and don't come out."

"Okay~" Sprout instantly brightened. The leaf on her head spread open again and swayed with delight.

The little thing seemed to be an eternal optimist, able to amuse herself at a moment's notice.

Gu Weiyu was now a cultivator at the tenth level of Qi Refinement, and her body no longer feared heat or cold. The chill here was not enough to trouble her.

She glanced around and walked carefully across the ice.

Unfamiliar with this icy cavern, she was almost afraid of stepping through the frozen layer by accident, and so she trod as lightly as a cat.

The cave was utterly silent, broken only by the faint tapping of her footsteps echoing over the ice.

She walked for quite a distance, yet nothing around her changed. Ahead of her, the snow and ice still stretched on.

It was as though she were trapped in a bottomless pit with no end in sight, unable to walk her way out no matter how far she went.

Around her there was nothing but monotonous white, pervasive cold, and faint, indistinct currents.

She slowly came to a stop. "Little Book, I want to take a look beneath the ice."

At her words, the Little Book, which had been lying flat, propped itself up in a very human-like manner. It was curious too, and immediately carried Gu Weiyu's spiritual sense downward to probe into the ice.

Her spiritual sense spread deeper and deeper beneath the frozen layer, and only then did she realize that the ice was nowhere near as thin as it had looked.

On the contrary, the ice beneath her feet was mostly more than ten meters thick, far beyond anything she could break through simply by walking on it.

Her spiritual sense continued downward.

And downward.

A faint crimson color began to seep through the ice into view.

Could the water beneath the ice be red?

A thought flashed through Gu Weiyu's mind, and her spiritual sense kept probing deeper.

Through the ice, a vast crimson "river" surged into sight. Beneath the frozen layer was a thin stratum of red stone, and below that, astonishingly, lay a sprawling river of magma.

The magma roared and surged like a wild horse breaking free from its reins, striving to burst through the restraints above.

Many of the red stones overhead had cracked open. From those fissures, magma rose, only to be cooled by the ice above and transformed into new red stone.

Since these crimson rocks could separate the ice from the magma and exist between fire and frost, Gu Weiyu's intuition told her they had to be something precious.

She crouched down and shaped her spiritual sense into a blade, cutting at the red stone.

The rock looked like nothing more than a thin layer, but it was astonishingly hard.

Again and again, she drove her spiritual blade into it.

At last, after much effort, she managed to cut off a tiny piece and used her spiritual sense to draw it up.

"Yu, what is that in your hand?"

Just as Gu Weiyu was examining the small crimson stone in her palm, no bigger than a handspan yet heavy as iron, Sprout's childish voice rang in her mind.

Gu Weiyu and Sprout had formed the Great Virtue Pact, allowing not only spiritual communication between them, but also the sharing of emotions. They could even borrow one another's senses to inspect the world outside.

For instance, even though Sprout was inside her elixir field, she could see the stone in Gu Weiyu's palm through her sight.

Sprout was like a curious little child, interested in everything.

"I don't know either..." Gu Weiyu said honestly, looking at the stone in her palm.

"Yu, I'm hungry—" Sprout's pitiful voice sounded.

Hungry?

Only then did Gu Weiyu belatedly connect the word hungry with the stone in her hand. "Sprout, y-you want to eat this stone?"

She was stunned. Stones could be eaten too?

Sprout no longer had time to answer. She darted out of the elixir field and into Gu Weiyu's palm, where her tender bud eagerly stretched toward the crimson stone and began to eat.

That hard red rock had taken her so much effort to carve away even a tiny piece.

Yet Sprout's delicate-looking bud drove into the stone as easily as if it were tofu.

At that moment, there was only one thought in her mind: she was so, so hungry!

She seemed to have been hungry for ages, unable to feel full no matter how much she ate!

Gu Weiyu watched the crimson stone in her palm shrink at a visible rate, then stared open-mouthed as it turned into gray-black dregs.

Privately, she muttered to herself: Why did she feel like she was beginning to lose her grip on this little creature?

No—she had never really understood this little thing to begin with.

Though a member of the wood spirit clan, it could devour lightning, digest red stone, and had an enormous appetite besides. Its diet was simply far too eclectic!

Sprout: You're the one saying I'm not picky, and you're badmouthing me behind my back! Hmph, I'm ignoring you now!

"Yu, I want more!" Sprout's tender bud grew another inch longer, and the leaf also seemed to widen a little.

At the moment, the leaf was swaying contentedly; clearly, the red stone suited her tastes very well.

As for the original piece of red stone, it had entirely turned to ash and drifted away.

"This..." Gu Weiyu had a bit of a headache. Cutting the red stone was simply too troublesome. "Sprout, that stone is hard to deal with... hey—where are you going?"

Before she finished speaking, the little dot actually flew away from her and landed on the ice. "Heehee, after eating that stone, I don't seem to be afraid of the ice anymore!"

Gu Weiyu's eyes lit up at once. So the red stone had that effect too!

"I want more to eat!" Sprout murmured again. Her tender bud probed into the ice, and without the slightest resistance, it entered the frozen layer below.

Silver Quill Literature