"What are you doing?"

Li Qingfeng retreated to his senior sister's side and jabbed her with an elbow. "What's this fit you're having now? Can't you act normally?"

"I—"

Lingxi swallowed, masking the terror in her eyes, and stood rooted where she was.

The others had noticed this senior's strangeness as well.

Zhu Jue frowned faintly.

Rather than say Perfected Master Lingxi seemed to know Junior Brother Shen — the way old acquaintances meet — it would be more apt to say she was afraid of him.

That complicated feeling of wanting to flee, yet being unwilling to.

Utterly bizarre!

"How goes your cultivation?"

Shen Yi seemed to ignore everyone else, and simply asked the question where he stood.

"Well enough."

Jiang Qiulan pressed her red lips together, gazing at the young man's face, a barely perceptible longing rising in her eyes. "Master says that in a while longer, I may consider taking in a second spiritual root. Wutong Mountain is wealthy — they've prepared an upper-grade root for me."

"Don't use their things."

Shen Yi shook his head and brought out three Spirit-Transformation Pills, handing them over. "Use these. If it isn't enough, come find me."

According to the pill recipes the Nanyang Sect had left behind—

an external-object root was the lowest grade; using a Spirit-Transformation Pill counted as middling; and only condensing a root oneself was of the highest order.

The last was beyond his reach for now, but there was no need to rely on external objects either. Taking the middle path was fine enough.

"Thank you."

Jiang Qiulan took the pills, yet still stared into Shen Yi's eyes.

More than the pills themselves, his gesture was telling her something else.

Namely that from this day on, the two of them were no longer minor cultivators dodging Xuanguang Cave's manhunt, no longer needing to conceal their identities. They could openly tell anyone at all that she and Shen Yi were colleagues out of Qingzhou.

With Shen Yi's cautious temperament—

that he could hand over these three pills before this many people was proof enough that he…