Inside the turtle shell space, a chaotic dance of sword techniques and demonic arts clashed endlessly with Di Qi's Black Dragon Holy Shadow. Despite the desperate efforts of the Qingling Mountain trio and the little demons to intervene, terrifying surges of magic still struck the soft inner walls of the shell.
Turtle demons, with their naturally hard shells, possessed a racial talent that granted them defensive capabilities surpassing even the most sacred artifacts. But as all things in the world balance out, their interiors were fragile—utterly vulnerable to even the slightest blow.
The surface of the turtle shell had gradually darkened, a telltale sign of life slipping away.
The little turtle was doomed.
Outside the Holy Tower, Xu Jingshu and the old monk exchanged glances with the elderly turtle elder, hesitating to speak. The two old-timers wanted to offer comfort, but at this moment, any words seemed hollow.
How could they possibly say, "Please accept our condolences," when the elder's child was on the brink of death?
The turtle elder's wrinkled face remained expressionless. He put away the Mystic Heaven Mirror and suddenly declared, "You two, protect me. This old turtle is about to make his move."
Xu Jingshu & the old monk: "?"
During the grand competition, the Holy Tower was completely sealed—no one could enter or leave.
How exactly did the old turtle plan to intervene?
If they could act, would they have allowed Di Qi to wreak havoc inside the main tower?
Without explanation, the turtle elder crouched down and transformed into an ancient, gnarled tortoise, his shell covered in intricate gray-brown spiritual lines resembling the patterns of the Bagua.
As the Bagua formation activated, the elder used the direct bloodline connection of his race to synchronize his senses with his child inside the Holy Tower!
Instantly, a surge of gray-brown spiritual energy flickered within the turtle shell space, forming a protective barrier over the labyrinthine layers of the shell.
This was an ancient, immense power. Though it couldn’t directly strike Di Qi, it fiercely guarded the little turtle’s lifeline and even provided Xie Ziyin, Yin Xuan, Li Zhuohua, and the little demons a brief geographical advantage to catch their breath.
This was a secret technique passed down through generations of the turtle clan—never revealed to outsiders, a last resort to save lives.
The old turtle hadn’t even taught this to his own child, fearing the little turtle might share it with its mischievous demon friends.
Those rascals were already too carefree. If they knew they had an ultimate fallback, they’d grow even more reckless in battles, hiding inside turtle shells without a second thought.
---
While the disciples exhausted themselves restraining Di Qi inside the turtle shell space, Wen Shuangbai remained in the Holy Hall, fully focused on dissolving the first Demon Incineration Array with her spiritual senses and retrieving its spiritual formation line.
She carefully let the line float within the bronze-jade formation before withdrawing her consciousness.
As her awareness returned, the sound of Yu Xiaoli’s choked sobs reached her ears.
Wen Shuangbai’s heart clenched. She looked up to see a turtle lying beside her.
Apart from the weeping Yu Xiaoli and the severely wounded, unconscious Huaiming Buddha Son, everyone else—including Di Qi—had vanished.
In an instant, she understood.
They had entered the turtle shell space.
Wen Shuangbai knew what this meant—and how dangerous it was.
It was no different from locking oneself in a room with a murderous, unkillable criminal.
They were gambling with their lives to buy her time.
She closed her eyes, pushing aside unnecessary emotions, and grew even calmer.
She didn’t even pause to comfort the little fox. Instead, she immediately summoned Four Hundred and Ninety Million.
There were too many Demon Incineration Arrays—eighty in total across the tower.
Dissolving just one had already taken considerable time. She needed help.
Yu Xiaoli wasn’t a formation master and couldn’t assist, but Four Hundred could.
Four Hundred was, after all, a talisman-carving brush. Though it had been slacking off, working as Cao Xing’s secretary to earn some side income, engraving runes was its true expertise.
Runes and formation patterns were fundamentally the same—the only difference was that runes were inscribed on talismans or artifacts, while formation patterns were carved into walls and floors.
Wen Shuangbai took out paper and brush. Drawing from her experience dismantling the first array, she sketched the Demon Incineration Arrays and their approximate locations on each floor, then instructed Four Hundred on how to modify them into inert formations.
Once the arrays were disabled, she only needed to retrieve the spiritual formation lines, saving her the immense time required to dissolve them manually.
Four Hundred understood instantly. To it, this was even simpler than the classics—it was born for this.
The little brush patted its wooden chest confidently: Mhm, leave it to me!
Altering formations consumed spiritual energy, so Wen Shuangbai slipped a storage ring filled with spirit stones onto its wooden wrist and assigned Ninety Million to carry Four Hundred around.
With its tiny limbs, Four Hundred could only hop about, moving far too slowly.
And being so short, it couldn’t reach higher spots on its own.
The little wooden puppet glanced at its tiny storage bracelet, standing valiantly atop the man-eating flower’s head, ready to say to Ninety Million: ["Let's go!"]
But before it could, the man-eating flower had already dashed down the steps, vanishing from Wen Shuangbai’s sight in an instant.
Ninety Million ran incredibly fast, and in no time, following Four Hundred’s directions, it located the Demon Incineration Array.
The array was drawn on the ceiling of a secluded spot.
Ninety Million shook its flowery head, stretching its stem like a spring, and—Duang!—its head bumped against the ceiling.
Four Hundred immediately got to work, diligently modifying the Demon Incineration Array.
Upstairs, Wen Shuangbai extended her spiritual senses back into the Bronze Jade Array, descending to the seventy-ninth floor—the location of the second Demon Incineration Array.
She didn’t have to wait long before Four Hundred rendered the second array useless.
Wen Shuangbai swiftly retracted the spiritual threads and moved toward the third array.
And so, Wen Shuangbai and the flower-pen duo worked in perfect coordination, dismantling one Demon Incineration Array after another and reclaiming the spiritual threads.
Everything went smoothly, except for a minor hiccup along the way.
For instance, on the sixty-second floor, Four Hundred and Ninety Million encountered the skinny monk, who was frantically searching for Lu Jiayao.
The man-eating flower moved silently, so the monk didn’t notice the duo approaching from behind—until Ninety Million slurped him up in one gulp.
After a moment, the flower spat him back out, and only then did the monk realize what had happened.
Wiping the flower’s saliva off his bald head, he recognized them as Wen Shuangbai’s personal artifacts and hurried after them, shouting, "You two! You two! Has something happened—?"
Of course, they didn’t respond—neither could talk.
The monk chased them through the maze-like array corridors for a while, but the flower and pen quickly finished their task and retreated the way they came.
As usual, Ninety Million slurped the monk up again and spat him out, while Four Hundred tossed a note at him.
The monk picked it up and saw the hastily scrawled words: ["Official business underway. Do not disturb. Go find my Uncle Lu!"]
……
Later, they found Lu Jiayao unconscious on the fortieth floor—even before the monk could.
This time, the man-eating flower recognized him as an ally, so it wrapped him up in its tendrils, slurped the blood off him, and swallowed him whole for safekeeping.
Though the flower’s stomach was sticky and gross, as long as it didn’t start digesting him, Uncle Lu would be fine—just a bit smelly when he came out.
Four Hundred didn’t object.
Of course, they also forgot to inform the skinny monk about this.
As a result, by the time the flower-pen duo completed their mission, dismantled all seventy-nine Demon Incineration Arrays, and triumphantly returned to the Holy Temple, the monk was still downstairs, diligently searching for Lu Jiayao—with no luck whatsoever.
After dismantling seventy-nine arrays, both Four Hundred and Ninety Million were exhausted. They divided the remaining spirit pills and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
……
Seeing that Wen Shuangbai had run out of spirit stones and pills, Yu Xiaoli—her eyes swollen from crying—hurriedly pulled out her own storage ring and shoved all her elixirs toward her. "Sister Wen, take these! Use them!"
"Thank you." Wen Shuangbai accepted them, looking sincerely at the half-fox, half-human girl with her fluffy ears. "Xiaoli, I don’t know what I’d do without you."
Wen Shuangbai truly needed these resources.
Her storage ring had been well-stocked, and Xie Ziyin had given her plenty as well.
But the Holy Tower’s arrays were far more intricate than she’d anticipated, consuming spirit stones at an alarming rate.
And the Bronze Jade Array was just a small part of the Holy Tower’s grand design. She couldn’t even imagine how much had been sacrificed to forge the tower itself.
No wonder.
No wonder five hundred years ago, Ye Qingrong had offered her body to forge the tower.
No wonder the Seven Saints had later sacrificed themselves to seal away tens of thousands of demonic cities within it.
Wen Shuangbai swallowed bottle after bottle of elixirs, not caring about the side effects of overdosing, and replenished her spiritual energy to its peak. She also clutched a dozen spirit stones in her hands, just in case.
Beside her, Yu Xiaoli blinked in surprise at Wen Shuangbai’s words.
She had been wallowing in guilt, distressed that she couldn’t help her friends and could only sit on the sidelines like an outsider.
But it turned out… she was useful after all.
The little fox nodded firmly and pushed the remaining spirit stones toward Wen Shuangbai. "Sister Wen, focus on repairing the array. If you run out of stones, I’ll replenish them for you."
"Alright." Wen Shuangbai smiled faintly, took a deep breath, and focused her mind, channeling all her spiritual awareness into the bronze jade array.
The next step would be the most critical one.
Perhaps the loss of both parents in her childhood had forged an unshakable resilience in Wen Shuangbai's heart.
At the most pivotal moments of her life—whether during national exams, final interviews at top corporations, or now—she always remained calmer and more composed than usual.
So much so that she often exceeded expectations.
At this moment, her face was serene, devoid of any emotional fluctuations, like a machine.
Using her spiritual awareness as hands, she meticulously untangled the eighty spiritual threads recovered within the bronze jade array. Gently grasping them, she guided them downward toward the moonstone below, weaving through each layer of the barrier formations until she reached the Mystic Heaven Mirror’s spherical array at the fortieth level.
All communication across the Xuantian Continent relied on this.
In modern terms, this was the continent’s largest database.
In her past life, Wen Shuangbai had chosen computer science for its lucrative prospects.
The underlying principles governing the spherical array before her bore an uncanny resemblance to computer programming.
Though their outward expressions differed, their logic was fundamentally the same.
Coincidentally, Wen Shuangbai understood. She had never forgotten the knowledge from her previous life.
Coupled with the sacred tower blueprint within her spiritual sea, it didn’t take her long to figure out how to integrate the eighty spiritual threads from the bronze jade array into the spherical formation.
The real challenge lay in execution.
The spherical array’s computations were immensely complex, draining a cultivator’s energy at an alarming rate.
Each connected thread consumed an overwhelming amount of Wen Shuangbai’s spiritual power.
Soon, her reserves ran dry, and even the spirit stones in her palm turned to worthless rubble.
Yu Xiaoli, who had been watching intently, noticed immediately and swiftly replenished them with fresh spirit stones.
But within moments, those too were exhausted, and Xiaoli replaced them again.
In less than half the time it took to drink tea, Yu Xiaoli had depleted her entire stock of spirit stones—enough to sustain a small sect for three years.
"They’re being used up so fast," the little fox muttered to herself, scratching her head before flicking her tail and conjuring a bundle of spiritual tails as substitutes.
Back in Tian Village, when they first met, Yu Xiaoli had introduced herself: "Sister, I’m a demon cultivator. You can call me Xiaoli. I can grow infinite tails..."
But that had been a lie.
She had exaggerated her abilities. While she could produce many spiritual tails, there was a limit.
After supplying thirty thousand tails, Yu Xiaoli couldn’t summon a single one more.
Now fully transformed into her fox form, she looked at Wen Shuangbai.
Without spiritual energy, sweat beaded on Wen Shuangbai’s forehead. Her lips paled, and the color drained from her face.
Sister Wen… was visibly wasting away.
Yu Xiaoli knew of the Five Hundred Years’ Sacrifice, where seven saints had offered their bodies to the tower due to insufficient energy.
Though small and timid, demons honored their promises.
A vow was worth a thousand pieces of gold.
She glanced at the three fluffy tails behind her—her true tails, cultivated over centuries.
With a swipe of her paw, Yu Xiaoli severed them and placed the bloodied tails solemnly into Wen Shuangbai’s palm before collapsing weakly.
Inside the fortieth-level spherical array, Wen Shuangbai had connected seventy threads.
But the remaining nine were the most intricate and demanding.
When the energy supply vanished, she didn’t hesitate to begin burning her own body.
A cultivator’s physique, nourished by spiritual energy for years, was itself a potent fuel.
From the moment she decided to repair the array, Wen Shuangbai had accepted only two outcomes: death or success.
She would never quit halfway.
Yet suddenly, her spiritual awareness trembled.
Though her soul wasn’t in the sacred hall, she sensed what Xiaoli had placed in her hand.
One, two, three.
Yu Xiaoli had given her every tail she had.
Warm, soft, and faintly stained with blood.
In that instant, Wen Shuangbai finally understood the emotion behind Ye Qingrong’s words: "I didn’t refuse. I forged the tower from the divine tree and set the moonstone into its array."
Because she, too, did not refuse.
