Ultimate Villain's Return as a Doctor in the Cultivation World-Chapter 142- Burned Clothes

She raised her formation shield and kept moving with the composed precision of a woman who has decided that being on fire and naked is simply a new operational condition.

Chen Yun’s travel robes lasted approximately two additional seconds before the construct’s follow-up sweep found them—the dark fabric was slightly more resistant, but slightly was not enough, and the result was Chen Yun in the gorge air with her demon sword raised and the pendant at her throat—still converting, still working, its male register now serving no function whatsoever given available evidence—and everything the robes had been doing rendered academic.

The binding was gone too.

Chen Yun’s jaw set. Her dark eyes went to the construct.

The demon sword came up and its awakened field expanded outward—the distortion field pressing into the gorge, eating the ambient formation qi, finding the construct’s qi anchors with the accuracy of a weapon that had been designed specifically for this frequency.

She swung.

PAAH—not flesh, the sound of a demon sword’s awakened strike meeting a Nascent Soul formation construct’s qi architecture—the impact wave spreading from the contact point in visible ripples.

Cang’s outer robe lasted until the third fire breath, by which point he had stopped caring about the outer robe and was moving with the shadow sword raised, the darkness domain expanding from the blade in a spreading field of absolute black that consumed the construct’s left flank.

The crimson fire hit the darkness field and—stopped.

Not dissipated.

Stopped, the way things stop when they encounter something that has decided they are not relevant.

[Shadow Devourer: Darkness Domain Active — Qi Consumption: 847 units per second — Construct Qi Anchors Located: 7 — Darkness Domain Coverage: Anchors 1-2 — Status: Consuming]

"Now," he said to Wei Lingyue.

She was already moving.

She moved through the combat with the particular quality of a woman who could now read every formation layer simultaneously and was using this the way a master calligrapher uses a brush—decisive, exact, the precise minimum required.

The crown’s formation-sight gave her the construct’s architecture as clearly as text. Three remaining anchors—one at the base, one mid-section, one at the crown of the construct’s head—and the timing window was the simultaneous destruction of all three while Chen Yun held the right flank and Cang consumed the left.

She gathered her qi.

Her Nascent Soul Early cultivation, the crown amplifying it—the output of her formation array: a single triple-point strike, three formation characters released simultaneously, the geometry of the strike designed to land at three separate spatial coordinates at the same instant.

The construct turned toward her.

Another fire breath, wider, lower—

Chen Yun was already there. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

She stepped into the fire’s path—the demon sword’s field absorbing the formation qi with the appetite of a weapon that had been starved for eleven months and was currently operating with no dietary restriction—and the fire split around her with the specific parting of something encountering a priority target in its own qi frequency.

Wei Lingyue released the strike.

Three coordinates. One instant.

The construct’s remaining anchors shattered simultaneously—the sound not loud, not explosive, the clean, structural sound of load-bearing components failing all at once, the qi architecture of something that had been held together by seven interlocking anchor points losing all three of its remaining ones in the same moment the other four were already gone.

The construct came apart.

Not explosively. Deliberately—the formation energy releasing back into the gorge air with the specific controlled dissolution of a protection mechanism that has completed its function and has been successfully overcome by the conditions its own design required.

Stone material falling.

Crimson fire going out section by section.

The enormous mass of it reducing downward until the gorge held nothing but the waterfall’s sound and the mist and three cultivators standing in the wet cold air.

The spatial lock released.

Somewhere above them, the Trial’s exit portal activated.

They hit the ledge outside the gorge at speed and kept moving—the exit passage, the Trial’s outer formation, the violet-black surface of the entry portal giving way outward as all three of them pushed through—and then they were out.

The external air was cold.

Mountain cold—the genuine, unfiltered temperature of a high plateau in the cultivation world’s middle elevations, nothing between them and the wind, and all three of them arriving on the plateau rock with the particular condition of people who have been in a sealed formation environment for thirty-three hours and have just fought a Nascent Soul construct at close range.

Cang’s knees hit the rock first.

Not dramatically—simply, the body issuing its assessment of the previous thirty-three hours all at once now that the immediate priority had resolved. He sat on the cold stone and looked at the sky and the sky was the same sky it had been and the air tasted like mountain and cold water and the residual herb-density of thirty-three hours was fading from his system with the specific clarity of coming down from an altitude.

Wei Lingyue hit the rock beside him approximately two seconds later.

Sat. Then lay back. The crown still on her head.

The grey sky above her.

Her chest rising and falling at a rate that was considerably above her usual baseline.

Chen Yun sat on his other side, demon sword across her knees, eyes closed, breathing.

The plateau was quiet.

Then Wei Lingyue made a sound.

Not a combat sound. Not a cultivator sound.

The specific involuntary sound of someone whose body has just survived a Nascent Soul formation construct while naked and is processing the full sequence of events that led to this moment—a sound that started somewhere controlled and arrived somewhere entirely not, and became, before it finished, a laugh.

A real laugh. Unmanaged. The laugh of a hundred-and-seventeen-year-old princess who has just fought a formation construct in the nude and won.

Chen Yun opened one eye.

Looked at Wei Lingyue laughing at the sky.

Looked at Cang, who was looking at both of them.

Made the sound herself—the involuntary nasal exhalation that she had been suppressing since the Trial plateau, now not suppressed, now arrived at its full expression, which was also a laugh, which was also real, which was also the laugh of someone who has done something completely unreasonable and survived it.

Both women laughing on either side of him against the plateau rock.

Naked, injured, Nascent Soul Early, alive.

He looked at the sky.

His own chest moved—once, the contained version of the same thing.

"We won," Wei Lingyue said, to the sky.

"Yes," he said.

"We fought a Nascent Soul formation construct," she said. "’Naked.’"

"Yes," he said.

"Because a fire-breathing formation monster burned our clothes off."

"Yes."

"In the middle of a gorge."

"Yes."

She turned her head to look at him. The crown was slightly crooked. The grey eyes were still doing the thing they had started doing in the terminal chamber—not calculating, present. "You’re going to tell me you planned that too."

"I did not plan the clothes," he said.

"But everything else."

"I had a direction," he said.

She made the sound again—not quite the full laugh this time, the smaller version, the one that arrived when something was exactly as absurd as expected and you had already made peace with the absurdity.

"You are... strange."