Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 122 - Sword Disciple’s Real Aim

He looked at her chest again.

"I don’t think that’s accurate," he said.

"It is," she said. "Completely flat. Flat as this log. There is no measurement. Don’t look."

"The binding line suggests—"

"’Flat,’" she said. "’As a stone.’"

He said nothing for a moment.

"I genuinely don’t believe that," he said.

She turned to look at him fully. Her eyes had the specific quality of a sword cultivator who has been pushed past the event horizon of patience. "Then don’t believe it," she said. "I don’t need to prove anything to you. Don’t believe it. It doesn’t matter. They’re flat. You can carry that doubt to your grave."

"The binding uses three layers," he said. "Single-layer bindings are sufficient for—"

"’Three layers because I run cold,’" she said.

"Running cold doesn’t require chest binding," he said.

Her hand had gone to the hilt of the demon sword with the automatic motion of a person whose first response to stress had been the same for a very long time.

"Chen Yun," he said.

"What."

"I think they’re bigger than my head."

The sword cleared two inches of sheath before she controlled herself.

She sat very still.

Then she shoved it back.

"They are," she said, through her teeth, "significantly bigger than your head."

"I knew it," he said.

"I didn’t—" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "That was—you were baiting me."

"Yes," he said, with the equanimity of a man who had been baiting people since before she was born.

She stared at him. The expression of someone who has just supplied their own punchline and is reviewing the sequence of events that led here.

"Significantly bigger," she said, very quietly, "than your head. Since you now apparently need this information."

"I believe you," he said.

"Go rot," she said.

"Noted," he said.

The chamber was quiet for a moment.

Then she made a sound. Not a laugh. A short, involuntary exhalation through the nose—the kind that arrives when something is funny before the rest of the person has caught up—immediately suppressed, immediately denied, immediately replaced with the expression of someone who had not just done that.

He said nothing about this.

The sound arrived before the people.

Running feet—the ragged, uneven percussion of a group that had started at a full sprint and had been running long enough to become uneven—and above that, voices.

"’MOVE—it’s still following—’"

"’DON’T STOP DON’T—’"

"’We need help—ANYONE—’"

They came out of the east corridor at speed: a group of eight, mixed composition, the varied robes of people who had entered separately and aggregated around a crisis. Half-blooded from different sects. Three wearing the grey-white edge trim of Jade Meridian attendants. The rest in blues and browns that suggested smaller affiliated factions.

They were not being chased. Not yet. But the quality of their terror suggested that something had been chasing them until recently and might resume the practice.

The woman at the front—Jade Meridian trim, hair undone, one sleeve torn to the elbow—saw Cang and Chen Yun and redirected toward them with the immediate pragmatism of someone who has stopped caring about faction protocol.

"Cultivators," she gasped, "are you—can you—" She was breathing too hard for full sentences. "Princess Wei Lingyue. She’s trapped. The labyrinth—the second layer—it collapsed the entry passage and she’s—she went in with Young Master Liang’s group and something happened, there was a formation activation and—"

"Which labyrinth," Chen Yun said. Her voice had dropped the male register slightly before the pendant corrected it—a half-second artifact that the running disciples were too panicked to register.

"The east branch. Third sub-chamber. We barely got out before the second gate closed." The woman pressed her hands together. "She’s—the Princess is in there and we don’t know if—"

"How many others are with her," Cang said.

"Young Master Liang’s group. Six of them. And—" The woman’s face performed something complicated. "It was—when we entered, Young Master Liang had separated from the main formation. There was a—there was a disagreement. About the passage route. The Princess went ahead, and Young Master Liang—he said he had information on the formation structure, that she should follow him, and—"

The three Jade Meridian disciples behind her had gathered enough breath to produce expressions that completed the sentence. Not just fear. Anger. The specific anger of people who have watched something happen and cannot prove it happened fast enough to stop it.

"He had information from an immortal advisor about the third chamber," one of them said, flatly. "And he wanted to ’escort’ the Princess through it. Personally."

Cang filed this.

’The young master wanted the princess separated from her formation inside the Trial. Where his immortal advisor’s intelligence about the formation structure was the only navigation available.’ He looked at Chen Yun.

She was already standing.

Her expression had changed.

The calculated, managed neutrality of a woman maintaining a cover was still present in the architecture of her face, but underneath it, something had activated—sharp and cold and directed—the expression of a person who has received a piece of information that connects to something they already knew.

"The patriarch sent word," she said. Not to Cang. To herself, or to the information she was already carrying. Then, to the Jade Meridian disciples: "Sect Elder Bao Wei. Did he know you were entering the Trial today?"

The lead disciple stared at her. "Who—how do you know—"

"Did he know," Chen Yun said.

"He—yes. He arranged the vessel clearance. He specifically requested that—" The disciple stopped. Her eyes moved over Chen Yun’s travel robes, looking for the identifying mark she expected to find and wasn’t finding because it wasn’t there. "Who are you."

"Someone the Patriarch sent," Chen Yun said. It was not a complete lie. It was not a complete truth. It had been assembled from components of both with considerable skill. "The Princess is my responsibility."

The disciples looked at each other. The information registered the way information registers when it has the shape of something someone wants to be true—fast, without adequate examination.

"The east branch," Chen Yun said. "Lead."

She was already moving.

Cang stood. He looked at the group of disciples, who were collectively deciding whether to follow a person who had appeared from nowhere and claimed responsibility for their Princess.

"She’s telling the truth," he said. "In the ways that matter."

He followed Chen Yun.

The disciples followed him.

The labyrinth section announced itself as a different quality of architecture.

The corridor formations here were older—the inscriptions running in the older dialect of spirit script that predated the standardized cultivation world system by several centuries.

The walls had the damp, close feeling of compressed space, the stone pressing inward with the implication of much more stone behind it.

The traps were visible to Cang’s Eye of Truth as colored qi lines running between emitter stones on opposite walls—horizontal, vertical, diagonal, the overlapping geometry of a formation that had been designed to kill specifically and efficiently.

Chen Yun saw them too.

She moved through them with the trained precision of a sword cultivator who had clearly done labyrinth training at some point in her formal education—reading each line before she reached it, selecting her path through the intersections with the calculated jump-dodge-roll sequence of someone navigating a physical puzzle.

Her travel robes swept.

Her boot placement was exact.

She cleared a horizontal barrage of qi bolts with a step-and-drop that put her flat for half a second before she was upright again, demon sword drawn for the next segment.

She turned to check on Cang.

He was walking.

Just walking.

Through the qi lines.