Wreath of Lilies, Cauldron of Poison

Collaboration Chapter

The Golden Sword and Sheath -- PART 2

"What have you done?" Zheng Jin asked the girl, his eyes widened at the sight of the drastically changed sky up above—now roaring as it started to seemingly crumble, followed by the slight tremors from the ground under them.

“Hahaha! So the real thing’s getting angry!!” Connie yelled out with a wide grin. She leapt back as the ground beneath her started to break apart, landing lightly on a rock nearby. “And it seems that it’s trying to exert more pressure on this place!”

"Thing?" Zheng Jin asked once again, gritting his teeth as he followed the girl and jumped back, confused by what she was talking about. Looking at the golden sword that was unknowingly taken from him when they separated—now at the girl's possession—he then snapped, "What did you just do?!"

“The question is not what I did,” Connie’s face grimaced as she looked at the sheath in her hand. “But what this thing’s doing.” The engravings on it began to glow a sinister black, like rot eating through the gold. She felt as if something was leaking from it, but she could not stop it, as her own power was not enough. “Not Yin or Yang Energy. This is something foreign.”

She then lightly threw the sheathed sword to Zheng Jin. “Can you read what’s engraved? I don’t recognize the writings.”

The sheathed sword then flew to Zheng Jin's grasp, which he caught carefully with two hands. After doing so, he then directed a confused, yet angry look towards the girl. "Who do you think you are—"

His words, however, we're interrupted as his eyes caught sight of the strange, engraved words that was glowing eerily on the sheath that was thrown to him. "These markings...The First Language? No…" He paused, then looked at the girl that was watching him from not too far away. "These are for sealing."

Zheng Jin's mind then wandered back to when he had first read the strange book that he had come across just a year ago. In the book, he had seen symbols close to the ones he was currently seeing on the golden swords' sheath, and although incomplete, he had read that such symbols are used for sealing living beings—abominations that are too powerful to kill or contain in the past.

With the information clicking in place as to what situation he was currently in, he then turned to the girl. With a dead-serious look on his face, he then activated the [Accuser's Eye] and asked, "Who the hell are you and how did this sheath come into your possession?"

Connie gazed into the artificial sky and sat on a rock after the earthquake stilled. Apparently in no hurry to answer. She crossed one leg over the other and rested her right arm on the top of her right knee while leaning forward. The very image of a vulgar upstart. “It is only polite for a junior to answer first, but...haha, I did tease you too much. Very well, I will answer. The sheath is something I found being sold by a charlatan. Absolute garbage, I think. Too garish and flashy for my taste. Subdued and elegant, that’s the ticket. Observe,” she said, raising an eyebrow while presenting herself with a quick movement of the hand.

“As for name, hmm,” Connie twirled the red hair jutting over her bangs. “It’s Cornelia Asterium Steelheart. You can just call me Connie. Because I like your moxie,” she said with a laissez-faire attitude. “And you?”

Zheng Jin, for a while, did not answer as he simply stared at the girl. Not once did his attribute pick up a lie in her words, and this, along with her sudden change in demeanor, puzzled him.

"Steelheart...where have I heard of that family name?" he wondered as he noticed the semblance of the use of a family name, though eventually coming up with anything. There were a lot of noble families in Estellia, yet he had never heard of any family "Steelheart".

Putting the matter aside for now, he decided to introduce himself. With a sigh, he then eased up for a bit and crossed his hands as he finally replied, "Zheng Jin, a disciple of the Golden Dragon Sect." He smirked, then continued, "It's also polite to ask someone's name before you try to beat them up...Connie."

“Hahah! Well, if there is one thing I’ve learned from years of experience, it’s that killing your enemies first before they even have a chance of killing you is always the best option. I don’t need names when they’re corpses,” she laughed heartily. “I was also planning to do the same to you, after all you were the only one here when I arrived.”

Connie shrugged. “But then as we fight I realized that you don’t have the knowledge to do something like this. By then I just want to have a bit of fun,” the girl noticed the sour look on the man’s face. “Oh, no. I’m not belittling you. You have a gift, I can see that. But doing something like this is out of your league. Especially...seeing that your moves are from an Orthodox Sect. They don’t do this playing with this…” she vaguely gestured towards the golden sword. “Dark powers kind of thing.”

“Anyway, Golden Dragon Sect, eh? Never heard of them before. Is that a member of the Hundred Island Congregation?”

"Hundred Island Congregation?" Zheng Jin tilted his head, visibly confused by the foreign term. "Have you come from the Primordial Dragon Continent too? Or are you perhaps from Estellia Kingdom?"

With a curious look on his face, he then stared fixedly at Connie. He wondered how the girl knew of denominations such as sects when she clearly did not look like a native, and her looks and even her name made her much more like a girl from a noble family back in his old world—and so he asked.

Connie rubbed her hair as she thought to herself. “...those were not names I recognized,” she then had a thought. “At what stage of cultivation are you currently?”

"I'm an Awakened Mortal," Zheng Jin answered abruptly, not specifying at what level he was currently in. As he then looked at the slight narrowing of Connie's eyes after hearing his words, he finally came close to a conclusion of his own...

Connie’s lips trembled, then she began to slowly recite the First Verse of the Soul Reversing Sutra while watching his reaction. When she saw no trace of understanding in Zheng Jin’s eyes, she continued to the Second and the Third. Zheng Jin narrowed his eyes, looking at her as if she was a madman.

“Aha…” Connie lowered her head, trembling slightly, before exploding into a laughter. “HAHAHAHAHAH!! HAHAHAHA!!! I see! I see!! You did not understand what I said, did you?! Oh, yes! What would those old bastards think if they knew I recited three verses to a stranger I met on another plane!! The secrets that thousands of cultivators spent most of their lives seeking, given freely to a stranger! Now I know how Cloud Watcher feels. Heheheh!!”

"Three verses of what, exactly?" Zheng Jin asked utterly confused, yet a bit intrigued by the strange incantations that left Connie's mouth. Engraving the incantations in his mind by the suggestions of his opportunistic self, he then decided to find out what they meant later since they sounded fairly important from what the girl had just shouted out…

If he ever got out of his place, that is.

“Aah, that was fun. Well, they would only do you good if you understand Dharmic Language. If you do, then you might advance your Dao faster,” Connie stood up with a dramatic flip. “That is, if you’d believe a Heretic Cultivator, mr. Orthodox Cultivator.”

"Dharmic Language…" Zheng Jin trailed. He had learned a variety of languages, but never heard of such a thing. With a sigh, however, he finally relented and just let it slip by. After all, he eventually came to a conclusion that the girl, Connie, was actually an other-worlder, much like him, and questioning her any further would only waste precious time.

He then turned his attention to the sword and sheath, pulled them, and held them in each hand. He noticed that both were now starting to degrade and decay at a considerable pace, even if he did already pull them apart and separated them.

"Each of our worlds' matters aside," Zheng Jin said gravely as he touched the slowly-fading engravings on both of the sheath and the sword. "I had read a book that contained incomplete versions of these symbols once, and if I'm right about what I suspect that they're for...I think we're in quite a bit of a predicament."

He looked at the broken skies up above, then back to the sword as he channeled his spirit energy and tried to sense where the origin of the strange energy inside the sword and the sheath was, but to no avail. His spirit energy was not enough to cover a significant distance, not to mention that he did not have the spirit sense yet.

“Are you trying to look for the direction of the foreign energy?” Connie asked, gesturing for Zheng Jin to throw over the sword. As he did so, Connie glanced at it with a smirk. “I don’t know how to read this energy. But when it comes to the aura of despair and malice, it is a piece of cake to trace them - Haha, cake. I’ve gone bloody native - Come, boy. Follow me.”

Connie leapt to the direction of the East, not waiting for him to answer.

Zheng Jin watched as Connie zoomed past him, to which he responded with an irritated grumble—caused being called "boy" yet again. After a few seconds, however, he eventually followed her hastily. He had to give credit when it was due after all, and the girl was apparently better than him when it came to sensing the foreign energy. He had no choice but to follow for now.

Finally catching up to Connie, Zheng Jin could now see that the effects of the seal weakening were now starting to manifest itself, and the unstable dimension he and the girl were in was now on its way to its collapse.

Bits and pieces of rock and debris were now shaking along with the ground below them, and the ground itself was now slowly tearing apart as deep crevices started to run along the earth—dividing them to pieces much like the slowly-darkening sky up above. He half-expected for there to be rain, but along with the lightning and thunder, it never came. Only the subtle, yet eerie crack of the sky and earth breaking rang out, in place of the thunder he had mistakenly anticipated.

“Can you feel it?” Connie asked, glancing at Zheng Jin who just landed by her side. “This is ancient hate. This is an old grudge that had festered for many centuries until it became pus. Corrupting and decaying the thing that trapped us here from inside out. Unfortunately for us, to have lived so long means it’s not going to be a run-of-the-mill monster.”

Connie took out a handful of pills and shoved it into Zheng Jin’s hand, like a grandfather giving his grandchild some candies on a New Year’s Eve. “Here. Middle-Grade Rejuvenation Pills. We spent a lot of power during our fight before this. This should return us to at least 70 percent power. Just to make sure, I’m giving you triple dose of what’s recommended. That thing suppressed my power and my pills.”

Acknowledging the Connie's words as the truth, Zheng Jin could not help but be a bit surprised that she had already known that there was indeed an extremely powerful being contained right in this very dimension. It was then that a sense of foreboding passed by him—one that tells him of another battle yet to come.

One that he only hoped that he was ready for.