Chapter 96: Fragment of the Innate Eight Trigrams Formation

"I'm fine."

"Xiao Lei, go check whether Lu Yuhui and the others have rested enough."

"If we want to leave this instance, we have to kill enough monsters of rank five or higher. Monsters of rank five and above are not easy to kill, especially in an S-rank instance. If they've recovered, have Lu Yuhui come with me. You all stay here and wait for us to return."

Yu Lei opened his mouth, wanting to ask why it had to be Lu Yuhui going with his elder sister instead of him.

But seeing that Yu Yan was in a bad mood, he swallowed the question back down and only nodded. "All right."

The green mountains were hazy in the distance; the waters shimmered with emerald light and rosy clouds.

On this side, Yu Yan was busy leading Lu Yuhui in search of suitable fifth-rank monsters to strike.

Far away, inside another B-rank instance, amid the ruins of a building in a place of beautiful scenery, Lin Zhe held the smart bracelet Yu Yan had left behind. His index finger gently traced the fish-shaped mark on the back of the band, his gaze tender as water.

Then, as if remembering something, that tenderness gradually faded into gloom.

"Boss, I've searched every inch of this place. There won't be any more treasures left behind. Should we...?" Should we pull out? The last three words died on his lips. One look at Boss's expression, and Guo Wei knew he must be thinking of his wife.

He had no idea what sort of woman the wife was, to be able to make a man like Boss think of her so relentlessly.

Li Miaozhu was already the finest woman he had ever seen.

Gentle, capable, an excellent cook, beautiful, and built well too.

Her feelings for Boss were plain for anyone with eyes to see, let alone Mother Lin. Ever since Boss saved her in the instance, she had hovered around him every day like a busy little bee, almost ready to leap straight at him and shout that she wanted to bear him a litter of children.

And yet Boss showed not even the slightest hint of being moved.

He let Li Miaozhu and Mother Lin throw themselves at a cold wall all on their own.

Guo Wei even had a feeling that if Li Miaozhu's water ability had not advanced and she were not already a rank-one ability enhancer, if she could not strengthen the effect of the array Boss had researched, giving him more confidence to cross B-rank instances—or, to put it more plainly, if her presence did not make Boss more certain he could find his wife as soon as possible—then after Li Miaozhu had repeatedly ignored his refusals and kept showering him with attentions, Boss would already have cut her down with a single ruthless hand and thrown her out of the team.

Guo Wei had not missed the look Boss gave Li Miaozhu: impatient, disgusted, as though he were looking at a fly.

If Li Miaozhu were the one pestering him, Guo Wei felt he would be smiling in his sleep.

Boss had a temper as foul and hard as a stone in a latrine pit. The instance world had already descended, and Mother Lin had said it so well: who knew whether he would even live to see that woman again? If there was a good woman right beside him, why not treasure the present?

At worst, if he truly met his wife again in the future, he could always kick aside the woman he no longer liked.

But if he never saw her again, Li Miaozhu really was a decent choice for a new wife.

Why risk their lives, going in and out of instances again and again, for the slightest possibility of reuniting with that wife? If it were him, he would never do such a terribly uneconomical fool's errand.

It was only a woman, after all. It was not as though she had grown three heads and six arms.

Not to mention that ever since the instance world had descended, for ability users like them, finding women was as easy as picking up trash. Even before the descent, a woman in her thirties with a child—Guo Wei truly could not understand what there was to miss.

He could only conclude that Boss had lost his mind.

And not just a little.

Of course, Guo Wei only dared to grumble these thoughts inwardly.

Even complaints from Mother Lin about the wife got thrown back in her face by Boss. If Guo Wei dared bad-mouth that woman, Boss would probably not give him a pleasant look. If pushed too far, he might even kick him out of the team. Boss had clearly gone hopelessly mad over that woman.

For her, there was nothing he would not do.

"Let's go."

Kill two more rank-three monsters, and their team would be able to leave this B-rank instance. Then they would be one step closer to the woman he loved.

Lin Zhe, interrupted from his thoughts by Guo Wei, quickly gathered every trace of emotion back inside himself.

He carefully tucked the smart bracelet into the hidden pocket of his clothes. In order to keep from losing his wife's bracelet while entering and leaving instances or fighting, he had specially torn off a piece of cloth and stitched it on. The stitches were sparse, crooked as centipedes, utterly ugly.

Fortunately, he had sewn it on several times over, enough to ensure the smart bracelet would not be lost.

In his heart, Yan Yan had long since become the wife he had chosen.

No one could ever take her place.

That Li Miaozhu... if she still refused to be sensible, he would have no choice but to expel her from the team.

Without Li Miaozhu's water mist interference, however, the crude array he had painstakingly derived from a fragment of the Primordial Eight Trigrams Array would suffer a great drop in power for lack of a water-element source. Then he would no longer be able to enter B-rank instances, and would have to detour around them as he had in the past.

The time before he could see his wife again would no doubt become much longer.

But when two evils must be weighed, one must choose the lesser.

If one day he really met his wife again, and there happened to be such a woman by his side... Lin Zhe did not know what came to mind, but he shivered all at once. Yan Yan was usually not one to get angry, but once she truly did, she was very difficult to coax.

Lin Zhe's hand brushed the spot at his waist where the fragment of the Primordial Eight Trigrams Array was kept.

This remnant of an array scroll, obtained from the C-rank instance "Eight Trigrams Forest," contained fewer than a thousand words, with some passages burned away beyond recognition. And yet it was his greatest reliance in meeting his wife. It seemed it was time to make preparations on two fronts.

He needed to research, as quickly as possible, an array that would still have decent power even without water-element support.

Morning glow soaked half the clear blue sky.

Against the backdrop of mountains and water, the man's silhouette stood firm and self-assured.

He believed that one day, he would see that lovely and beloved woman again, the one who had once given him countless moments of warmth and precious memories.

Under Lu Yuhui's reverent gaze, the lovely and beloved Yu Yan released a storm of wind blades.

Where the blades swept through, devastation followed.

The iron-scorpion beast horde that had driven them yesterday to the brink of the heavens and the earth, almost wiping them all out, was now dead or wounded in heaps.

In the blink of an eye, more than a hundred iron-scorpion beasts had fallen by seventy or eighty percent.

The few remaining stragglers stood among the fallen beasts, trembling all over, no longer daring even to flee.

Yet Yu Yan seemed only to have done something as natural as eating or drinking. She lifted Lu Yuhui and leaped onto a tree.

"Don't look at me with that worshipful expression. Among these iron-scorpion beasts, only a few are rank one or two. You could do the same."

How could that be?

Lu Yuhui felt Yu Yan must be joking.

If he had that kind of ability, how could he have been hunted so miserably yesterday?

"Don't be in such a hurry to disbelieve me. The piece of meat I fed you was meat from a ninth-rank Qu Ru beast. It's two ranks higher than what Yu Wei and the others ate, already a peak earth-tier existence. If we only look at the wind-element ability rank, you're actually one level higher than me now."

"My wind ability is only at the peak of rank four, while you've already become a rank-five wind ability user."

Lu Yuhui: "..."

Impossible. Unthinkable. He didn't believe it.

Although last night, after absorbing and refining the Qu Ru flesh, he had indeed gone through indescribable torment and suffering, afterwards he felt refreshed and ready to take on a whole pack of iron-scorpion beasts. But he had always thought that was only the blind confidence brought on by a sudden surge in strength...