Qian Shanyi spent the days cultivating and trying to plan her escape. All the spirit wine she was drinking made planning slow. On the other hand, she had nothing but time.

Two days after she started tracking time, she gave in and learned Crushing Glance of the Neverworld Eyes out of sheer boredom. She knew that it was just the sort of technique her teacher would have wanted her to learn “to find a good husband”, and this fact annoyed her to no end.

The fact that it was incredibly easy to learn annoyed her even more.

As time passed, she noticed that the world fragment’s temperature and humidity had risen. It didn’t take her long to figure out why: it was all down to the chiclotron.

When she moved the water and fire nodes together, the temperatures of the two nodes balanced one another just like she planned, but she didn’t think about the trenches leading out of the nodes. These trenches were filled with water- and fire- spiritual energy, which of course affected the temperature of the air within them and the surrounding ground. Previously, all trenches had the same length, but as the result of the moved nodes, fire trenches ended up being about twice as long as the water trenches. The effect wasn’t anywhere near as strong as when the nodes were separated, but the temperature still steadily climbed.

The humidity problem was even easier to trace. Back when the trenches froze over, the fire nodes evaporated a large amount of water out of the ground. This water turned into ice, and later into water, but now it was slowly evaporating out of the previous water trenches. Over time, it would be absorbed back into the dried sandy earth left behind from the previous fire nodes, but for now, there was a lot of free water within the world fragment. On top of that, Blue Tear Stones constantly generated new water, which seeped through the wall between the new fire and water nodes and quickly evaporated.

By the time five days have passed, the world fragment started to resemble a sauna.

She thought about fixing the problem by correcting the trench lengths, but honestly… She couldn’t be bothered. On top of that, she wanted to save her calories, and so wasn’t about to pick up her shovel for such a minor reason. If the temperature got too high to be comfortable, she could simply pop the lids on the water nodes for a while and let the free water spiritual energy drop the temperature in the world fragment. Until then, she decided to just let it be. The only thing she did was to move the Blue Tear Stones halfway down the water trenches: the temperature was below freezing there, and so at least the net influx of water into the world fragment would be zero. She moved the books and scrolls into the same trench too, not wanting the humidity to ruin the paper.

Rich spiritual energy in the world fragment made the grass grow quicker, and after five days, the trenches no longer stood out as black lines of dug up dirt.

By the sixth day, her bruises had entirely faded. The bone in her shin was also starting to heal: it was still not strong enough to hold her weight without an infusion of spiritual energy, but at least she didn’t need her splint to keep the bone fragments in place anymore.

Her mood had brightened somewhat only to come crashing back down again.

In the middle of the sixth day, she heard a rustle of wind, and as she looked up she saw a colorful vortex form at the very top of the world fragment. She couldn’t see through it. As she watched it, she saw a large axe, a pair of swords and a whip fall through the vortex and onto the ground, followed by an enormous pillow. The vortex closed shortly thereafter.

That meant the exit from the world fragment was at the very top. Unfortunately for her, she could neither fly nor jump thirty meters into the air.

She threw an angry glare at the trench storing her “library” of cultivation techniques, where the scroll of the Scarlet Dragonfly technique was laying.

Damnable fire element…

Assuming that the exit could not move, this put a flying sword straight through the idea of sneaking out of the world fragment, on account of her being unable to soar through the air like a bird. That left trying to fight the person who put her here, or trying to negotiate. Neither of the options seemed good.

First of all, if her jailers were in the building foundation stage and she tried to fight them, she would just lose. But even if they were only as strong as Wang Yonghao, she would really struggle.

Ordinarily, if she was well-fed and with a solid leg, she was sure she could put up a good fight against someone like him. Last time, she only lost so easily because she didn’t expect him to actually start a fight. They were in the middle of one of the largest restaurants in the city, and she knew that the head chef was in the building foundation stage. On top of that, barracks of the imperial army were only a short distance away. Any cultivator trying to start a fight would get caught for sure, and so subconsciously, she felt safe, and did not bring up her spiritual energy shield in time. This time, she would know what she was getting herself into.

Furthermore, she could stack her odds. She had new protective robes, and there was even more specialized armor among the treasures. Besides the armor, she could use talismans, if she could guess which ones were defensive in nature. She could pop the covers on the chiclotron and fill the world fragment with metal spiritual energy, bending the environment to her side and allowing herself to recover energy faster in the middle of the fight.

Still, she wouldn’t bet on herself winning. Her realm was quite low, and her cultivation law was mediocre: small improvements and little tricks could only get her so far.

That left negotiation, which seemed iffy at best. Her father was a merchant, and before she broke through and stepped on the path of cultivation, he taught her a bit about his business, which included negotiating. If she looked at her situation from the perspective of what he taught her, she would describe her situation as “thoroughly fucked”.

To negotiate, you needed leverage, and as a starving prisoner, she had almost none.

Worst of all, she was missing crucial information. For example, how did she get here? When she lost consciousness, they were on the street in front of the restaurant. How did she end up in a world fragment?

Did Wang Yonghao bring her here? Why? For what purpose? How did he escape from the part of the city positively swarming with cultivators that dwarfed him in realm while carrying a body? Was he intending to use her as ransom? But her sect was one of the smallest in the city, and wasn’t known for any particularly unique techniques or artifacts: any ransom they could offer would be dwarfed by the treasury in this world fragment.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

On top of that, if that was his intention, surely he should have at least given her food and medicine - a dead ransom is worth nothing. He couldn’t have possibly expected her to pick her way through the treasure piles to find the single bottle of pills she could use - if she wasn’t as stubborn as a donkey, she would have given up long before finishing.

Did someone else bring her here? Again, why? Why did they leave her to her own devices for an entire week, without giving her food or water? Why leave her here - alone in a treasury? Why was this world fragment so undeveloped?

When nobody appeared after several days of her confinement, she figured that whomever the owner was, perhaps they temporarily couldn’t access the world fragment. Maybe their group had put her inside due to not having any other place to store her, and then avoided opening the entrance in order to avoid attracting attention to its location. Swords falling from the sky dispelled this strange theory, and only brought more questions along with them. Surely they had to have noticed what she had done with the place? Why did they not come down to talk to her?

There were dozens of questions roiling in her head about her situation, and that meant her negotiation position was fundamentally unstable. She had no idea who was on the other side of that swirling portal, what they wanted, what force or group they belonged to, what constraints or timelines they were operating under, and on the other hand, they likely knew everything about her. They could come and talk to her at any time, while she was imprisoned here, slowly starving to death.

In any negotiation, the other side would be holding all the cards, while she had none.

She waited for six hours, prepared to spring into action with her sword on her knees and decked in defensive talismans, but the entrance did not open again. Whatever this strange situation was, it seemed slated to continue.

While she was waiting, she decided that she might as well make a plan B for the next time the entrance opened. She took a long spear out of her storage of weapons, cut off a fifty-meter long strip of Silvered Demon Moth Silk, and tied it to the middle of the spear. If her jailers were not going to descend to her level, she would ascend to theirs: the next time the entrance to the world fragment opened, she would chuck the spear through it, and try to climb up as fast as she could. The spear was longer than the entrance was wide: if luck was on her side, it should lodge itself against the opening when she pulled it back, and all she would have to do is climb up the strip of silk to reach the entrance. Of course, wherever it actually lodged itself or not was down to chance.

If her luck was truly godlike, she would happen to spear whomever opened the world fragment, and pull them inside. Even if they were at the peak of the refinement stage, a fall from thirty meters with a spear through their guts should disorient them for long enough for her to slice their head off.

If they were in a building foundation stage or stronger, she was just dead.

The problem was that she had never trained herself to quickly climb up ropes. She was sure she was strong enough to manage it, but the question was how quickly. She would need to climb thirty meters up: how long would it take? Ten seconds? Twenty? She had no idea. What she did know was that unless the person who opened the world fragment was blind, they would see the spear, and ten seconds was an eternity when it came to cultivation. One chop, and she would come tumbling down.

It was a plan that could only work if everything went exactly right, but she wasn’t about to sit on her ass until whomever was up there deigned to come down.

She was also running out of food. She was drinking four wine bottles per day, but that was clearly not enough. Cultivators needed more calories than normal people, and on top of that, she was injured, and spent the first two days of her confinement doing heavy labor: she could feel her muscles growing weaker by the day. At this point, she had five bottles of wine left.

That left two options: either deliberately cutting down her consumption, knowing that that will make her weaker still when she would need to break out…or eating the monster egg.

She decided to risk it. The egg was large: if it could be eaten, and she stored the leftovers, she should have enough food for a long time, and it would make her stronger for the breakout attempt.

The key problem was that she didn’t know any immortal chef techniques. She did learn the basics of cooking, after extensive nagging from Elder Striding Phoenix, but only that. Furthermore, the tools she had to work with were extremely primitive.

It would have to do.

She quickly cleaned up the world fragment, putting away the weapons and treasuries into the trenches of the chiclotron: if it was going to come down to a fight, she didn’t want to give the other side more tools to use. Then, she took out half a dozen Igneocopper bricks from the fire nodes, built a circle with them, and put her trusty shield pan on top.

While she waited for the pan to heat up, she brought several empty wine bottles over, and carefully sawed their necks off with her sword. She would need to store most of the egg on ice, and she figured she might as well re-use the containers she had.

For a moment she wondered if perhaps this was all some kind of convoluted plot to make her eat the egg by starving her, but quickly dismissed the possibility. If someone wanted to do so, they could have simply tied her up and force fed her the egg.

With the pan nice and hot, she brought the egg over, carefully drilled two small holes into it, and started pouring it onto the shield, stirring the egg with a short dagger.

The egg albumen was bright blue. She doubted this was an auspicious sign for its taste.

It took her three pours to completely fry the egg omelet. She packed most of it into wine bottles that she’d sawn in half for this purpose, and put the bottles on ice into the water trenches of the chiclotron. This left only a small amount for her meal - less than a quarter of what she would have eaten, were the omelet made from regular eggs, but she would have to make do. The egg could still be poisonous, or disagree with her empty stomach that had only seen spirit wine for the last while.

Before she ate the egg, she did her best to be careful. She took a small bit of the omelet, put it on her hand, and waited. After ten minutes, her skin did not react. After that, she licked the omelet, and once again waited. Surprisingly, it tasted like a regular egg, though unsalted, and with a bit more earthy flavor. She did not feel the effect of any poison: feeling encouraged, she swallowed a small amount of the omelet, and once again waited.

Another ten minutes later, and she still felt fine. She could feel the rich spiritual energy within the omelet diffusing through her stomach and into her sacral dantian, but surprisingly, it wasn’t gushing nearly as fast as she feared. Perhaps this egg was safe to eat, after all?

She finished off her omelet and started cultivating, circulating spiritual energy through her body to reduce the load on her stomach and digest the omelet faster.

Ten minutes into the cultivation, Qian Shanyi staggered. Her vision was swimming, filled with strange shapes and blotches of color.

“Not safe,” she breathed out, falling on her knees. “Not safe at all…”

She lost consciousness. Her dreams were nonsensical, full of color, shapes, scenes flowing into one another, and a droning sound like the buzz of a thousand bee hives.

She didn’t know how long she slept. When she awoke, her clock was completely empty, so it must have been at least twenty hours.

Surprisingly, she wasn’t feeling that bad, and as she checked her body over with spiritual energy, she didn’t find anything out of place. She guessed that the egg must have had some subtle drug within it - like alcohol, something that was fine in small doses, but would knock you out if you took too much.

She took another healing pill, washed it down with some spirit wine, and was about to try testing her theory by eating a much smaller amount of the omelet, when she heard rustling of the wind, and her head snapped upwards.

The entrance to the world fragment was opening again.