Floating above the River of Fate, Moxian and Qingshui both look like they have been through a rough time. Their once-beautiful clothes are in tatters, there are small cuts and bruises all over their bodies, and they are both panting heavily as they glare daggers at one another from several miles apart.

At this point, both of them are running on their last dregs of energy, but neither dares to retreat first as they know the other would frame them as a coward for running away. From the look in their eyes, it is clear that this is not the first time that they’ve been stuck in a situation like this.

Moxian lowers her gaze and sneers at Qingshui before scoffing.

“Qingshui, it’s a shame that boy already left. If he were still here you could let him see what kind of woman you really are.”

Beneath her veil, Qingshui fumes. Moxian had nearly destroyed the bodice of her dress leaving very little left unseen. Were it not for her undergarment, she would not have the face to continue fighting.

Gritting her teeth, she curses silently before responding.

“Even with my dress in tatters, I can still retain my dignity and comport myself properly. But for you, all you are is a wanton creature with the mask of a woman… Oh! I suppose your mask is ruined now, isn’t it?”

“You bitch!”

Moxian hisses at Qingshui and unconsciously places her hand over a large bruise around her right eye. Earlier, in order to ruin Qingshui’s dress she had made a slight miscalculation which allowed Qingshui to strike her face.

Qingshui smirks at Moxian’s expression, but her smirk quickly disappears when Moxian says, “I wonder if you can still say that after I show that boy the jade I secretly recorded of your bare body!”

Qingshui blinks rapidly, confused as to when Moxian could have recorded her body. Part of her doesn’t believe it, but another part of her knows that, if she had ever allowed herself to be unguarded while taking a bath, Moxian would certainly take advantage of the opportunity to do just that. Consequently, she cannot help but think through every time she had ever bathed while wondering if she had been particularly carefree with regard to her surroundings at those times. Inevitably, she recollects multiple instances when she could have been more cognizant.

She glares at Moxian, her eyes full of wrath as she decides, no matter what, she is not going to let her off until she gets her hands on that jade. So even though she has very little energy left, she takes a single step forward and crosses the entire distance separating her from Moxian before striking out with a small white palm.

Moxian sneers at Qingshui as she expected this result, but as she goes to shift her stance to casually avoid the palm, she finds that something is wrong in both her heart and her spiritual sea. All of a sudden, piercing pain shoots through her and, distracted, she is directly struck by Qingshui above her heart before letting out a pained scream. Then Moxian loses control over her body and begins falling in an arc toward the water below.

Qingshui is stunned by the sudden turn of events. She knew she had been fooled the moment she saw the look in Moxian’s eyes, but the end result ended up being entirely different from what she expected. She even felt a sudden onset of fear and nervousness as she realized she had applied too much force to her palm in anger and the subsequent result was that Moxian may have been greatly wounded by her one palm.

She grimaces as she quickly considers her next step, but seeing that Moxian has no control over her descent, she forcefully exerts her cultivation and flies directly toward Moxian at a speed that feels all too dangerous for her this close to the water.

When she manages to catch Moxian, she is hovering unsteadily a mere ten feet above the surface of the water and the oppressive force she feels from below makes her heart jump in her chest and her Qi churn uncomfortably through her body.

Not wanting to spend any more time so close to the river, she quickly retreats to the shoreline where she places Moxian on the ground and examines her condition carefully.

She can immediately tell that something is very wrong with her. In addition to the injuries caused by her palm strike, Moxian’s Qi is running rampant through her body, her heart seems to be disturbed, and her spiritual sea is chaotic. Qingshui doesn’t know what caused so many things to occur at once, but she realizes she will be the one held accountable if she doesn’t get the situation under control.

“How could such a situation even happen?” She wonders while clenching her hands tightly.

If it were any one thing, she could easily control it and mitigate the consequences. But now, Moxian’s current state was in an unusual and precarious balance and if Qingshui had not been present to witness the escalation of Moxian’s condition, she’d even believe she was being affected by some external force. So if she were to do anything, it would have to be to calm Moxian’s Qi, disturbed heart, and chaotic spiritual sea all at the same time, or the balance would be broken and the consequences would be dire.

Unfortunately, with her current state, even if she were to take medicinal pills to forcefully recover her energy, she isn’t confident in being able to save Moxian.

Feeling overwhelmed, she begins wondering if she should contact her master as she is certain she’d know what to do. But the problem lies in the fact that the Bright Moon Immortal Palace and the Dark Moon Immortal Palace hate one another and have for millions of years and her master and Moxian’s master were the origin of that hatred. But because they are both under the rule of the Twin Moon Divine Palace, they are forbidden from direct confrontation with one another.

At most, the two Immortal Palaces squabble behind the scenes and engage in petty fights, but with Moxian’s current condition, it is certain that Moxian’s master would lash out in fury and possibly even disturb the Twin Moon Divine Palace.

Even worse, when she had told Moxian earlier that she had already informed her master of the situation, she had been lying because she knew Moxian wouldn’t hand her the information without first feeling apprehensive about the consequences of not doing so. She would never report unconfirmed or potentially false information to her master, so with the absence of the young man and no one else capable of proving he was ever here, she is the only person who knows exactly why she was here.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

So, because of Moxian’s current condition, Qingshui would definitely be the one held accountable for their fight as she clearly used too much force and it was debatable as to whether Moxian ever invaded the Bright Moon Immortal Palace’s territory. Without further information, she would also likely be held accountable for losing track of the boy who was seen in the water as she had taken it upon herself to verify this information when she had heard it from an elder of a tributary sect.

Her thoughts run at a million miles per minute as she tries desperately to find a solution, but ultimately, she has no choice but to bring out a jade talisman to contact her master. Just as she prepares to activate it, Moxian’s condition rapidly settles and she finds herself confused as the emergency seems to end abruptly.

Then something in the water draws her attention and she looks up to see the head of a young man sticking out of the river while looking in their direction.

At first, she is stunned to see someone in the water as it should be impossible. Even having been alerted to the general situation previously, her knowledge prohibits her from believing that his presence in the water is anything but impossible.

She thinks to herself, "No, this is impossible. Not even impossible. Impossible isn't a strong enough word to describe the abnormality of the situation. Not even a True Immortal could touch the River of Fate without stirring up a tremendous storm and then dying horribly as they were swept beneath the Bridge of Dreams far in the distance.

But he is swimming so calmly?"

Her mind stops working for a moment as she meets the gaze of the young man and the two of them stare at one another from a short distance apart. She has a thousand questions to ask him about his presence here, his strange ability to swim peacefully in the water, and the relationship Moxian claimed he had with the Dark Moon Immortal Palace.

Then she remembers her current state of undress and her face turns a deeper shade of red than Moxian’s eyes and all of her questions disappear.

***

Wading water slowly, the young man stares at Moxian on the shoreline while feeling slightly guilty for throwing the purple fire into the blood bubble without first knowing the potential consequences of it.

At first, he couldn’t care less what happened as a result of his actions because, despite not knowing her very well, he felt a little betrayed by Moxian and how she acted. But, after throwing the fire into the blood bubble within the Omega Browser’s Space, he couldn’t help but grow concerned.

There were a few reasons for this with the least important of those being that he lost whatever meager control he had over the purple fire the second it entered the blood bubble. Originally, that was fine considering that the projection coming from the jade only lasted about twenty seconds anyways. But it became an issue when, after the rest of the fires faded away, the purple one remained inside the blood bubble instead of disappearing.

He was actually shocked that his impulsive decision seemed to do something, so he continued watching the fire for a short while only to realize that other than not disappearing, nothing was really happening. So he played the jade again and found another purple fire to throw into the blood bubble as well.

Two turned to three and three quickly turned into four, five, six, and eventually, several dozen little purple fires with red and gold streaks running through them were floating around inside the blood bubble without a care in the world. Even still, nothing seemed to be happening.

So for a couple of hours, he optimized his time and began going a little overboard. Instead of throwing one little purple fire into the blood bubble every twenty seconds, he would start the jade, throw a purple fire into the blood bubble, and then stop the jade before repeating the process once again. This entire process only took four seconds once he memorized where the purple fire would end up in the projection.

This multiplied the number of times he could throw a little purple fire into the blood bubble by nearly five times and so, by the time he finished, there were close to two thousand little purple fires with red and gold streaks floating around inside the blood bubble. But, unfortunately, the last little fire he threw in seemed to be the piece of straw that broke the camel’s back as the blood bubble started churning rapidly and he even heard an anguished scream that sounded like Moxian’s voice.

When he heard the voice, he was nearly scared half to death because he thought Moxian was actually nearby. But then he realized that her scream came from the blood bubble and he started feeling a bit off. At first, he acknowledged that he may have unintentionally done something to her, but he didn’t really care because it was pretty much her fault for putting a blood bubble in him in the first place.

But then he realized that the last time he had seen her was when she was floating above the River of Fate and, for whatever reason, people couldn’t normally swim inside the water. So he started feeling uncertain as to whether he had caused her some kind of significant harm. He rationalized that she shouldn’t be above the water anymore and thus would probably be fine, and also that she would deserve it for trying to make him her pet, but a wiggling sense of guilt inside his chest compelled him to activate the image of the naked woman and listen to the Three Realms Fate-Guiding Verse once again.

If nothing else, on the off chance that she did fall into the water because of his actions and couldn’t swim, he wouldn’t want her to die because of it.

When he appeared in the River of Fate once again, he had, indeed, seen Moxian floating above the water. The problem was that she was only floating because another woman with torn-up clothes was visibly struggling to carry her.

He watched them slowly fly to the shoreline and noticed that Moxian was in a terrible condition, but he was pretty sure that most of it wasn’t his fault. After all, he didn’t remember giving her a panda eye or beating her until she had bruises all over her body. But even still, there was definitely something other than just being abused that was wrong with her based on the way she was constantly writhing in pain.

As for the other girl, she definitely won the fight the two of them clearly had. Her dress was a bit torn and it was a good thing that she seemed to be wearing some kind of satiny undershirt as she’d be flashing him with a whole lot of chest otherwise, but she seemed to only have a few bruises on her arms where her sleeves were missing as opposed to Moxian’s polka-dot body.

Part of him is happy to see how miserable Moxian is, but that changes after noticing how bad her condition is. So he opens the Omega Browser’s Space again and tries to forcefully remove the purple fires from the blood bubble only to find that rather than there being many purple fires in the blood bubble, they had all somehow merged together as the blood bubble churned and formed a, admittedly still small, single purple fire with red and gold streaks. He’s surprised by the situation, but he doesn’t think too deeply about it as he uses his thoughts to prod the bubble and slowly extract the purple fire.

It’s nowhere near as easy as it was to fling them into it in the first place, but he feels like the blood bubble is helping to slowly push the fire out of it. That thought disturbs him because he feels like the blood bubble is inside of him and he has no control over it, but he decides to ignore it temporarily as he finally pulls the fire away from the bubble.

Not knowing what else to do, he rapidly switches his focus between Moxian lying on the shoreline to the fire and then the bubble again, but it seems as though Moxian has calmed down and she no longer looks like she is in pain so he gets ready to stop the music and return to his body before she can awake.

But, as he prepares to do that, he feels strange and looks up only to see the other woman. He thinks she is staring right at him, but with her long veil covering her face, he can’t tell for sure.