Chapter 8: Refining the Talisman

  He took a deep breath, and Wang Guanlan let out a slight sigh of relief. His internal energy was still circulating, allowing him to relax slightly. However, he soon found himself unable to smile anymore. As he circulated his internal energy, the faint smell of blood in the forest also entered his body. Following that, his internal energy circulation began to become unsmooth.

  "It's poisonous, the air in this forest is poisonous!" Without thinking, Wang Guanlan stirred up his remaining internal energy and activated the Bodhi Town Quelling Knife. A strand of knife energy shot out from his fingertips, cutting off the spider silk that bound him.

  After cutting off the spider silk, Wang Guanlan felt a slight relaxation in his body and with a little effort, he broke free from the spider silk as hard as steel wire and ran out of the forest. The emerald green spider that was pulling Wang Guanlan forward suddenly sensed something unusual, turned around, saw Wang Guanlan stumbling towards the outside of the forest, and involuntarily let out a strange scream. Its eight short legs moved rapidly as it chased after him.

  Wang Guanlan saw the spider chasing him and didn't dare to slack off. He knew that this was already deep within the Fog Concealing Gorge, and this emerald-green giant spider was too strange, not something a small Qi Refining Second Layer cultivator like him could ignore.

  He drew his long sword and watched as the spider charged towards him, but instead of attacking, he took a defensive stance.

  Whoosh!!

  That blue spider suddenly accelerated as it approached Wang Guanlan, its four legs pouncing and shooting out a burst of blue light that shot straight at Wang Guanlan. About half a foot away from Wang Guanlan's face, it sprayed out a large amount of sticky liquid, which turned into transparent spider silk upon contact with the air, forming a web that enveloped Wang Guanlan's face.

  "As expected, it's eerie!" Wang Guanlan's mouth curled up with a cold smile, and the long knife in his hand swung out, unleashing the Arhat Breaking Precepts Blade Technique, which bypassed the transparent silk net that was heading towards his head and face, and struck directly at the emerald-green spider.

  Wow!!!

  Under Wang Guanlan's icy knife light, the emerald spider was cut in two with one slash, and the dark green blood splattered everywhere. Wang Guanlan hastily retreated, dodging the blood but not the spider silk, which wrapped around his head and face.

  "Bad luck!" Wang Guanlan cursed in a low voice, not even bothering to wipe the cobwebs from his face. He quickly left the dwarf forest and only managed to clear the cobwebs from his face after exerting great effort outside the forest.

  He took a deep breath and didn't dare to run wildly, finding a place with a gentle breeze, he swallowed another pill to recover his internal energy, and began to meditate quietly.

  He sat for three hours, until the sky began to darken, before Wang Guanlan finally opened his eyes. The three-hour period was enough to fully recover his internal energy and spirit with the help of the elixir.

  Taking a glance at the darkened sky, Wang Guanlan stood up. The humidity in this canyon was too heavy. Although three hours had passed, his clothes were still unusually damp. At this moment, Wang Guanlan couldn't care about these things anymore.

  The night fog in the valley is more dangerous than during the day, and he is not safe now. Although his physical strength and spirit have recovered, his injuries have not yet healed. Some of these wounds were left on him by Qin Da Ge, while others were inflicted by the piranhas. The wound on his calf from being bitten by the piranhas in the river alone will take a long time to heal. Now, the top priority is to find a safe place to recover from his injuries and then leave this place.

  Propping up his heavy body, Wang Guanlan drew out his long knife and carefully looked around before starting to move upstream in the direction of Tiger Leaping Gorge.

  He didn't have a map of this valley, but he knew that he had been washed down by the Tiger Leaping Gorge and that as long as he followed it upstream, he would be able to return to his original place. But was reality really as simple as he imagined?

  "Hiss, I don't even know what kind of spider that is, the silk it spits out is tougher than steel wire, definitely a good material for making magic tools. If I were to hand this silk over to a spiritual blacksmith, who knows, maybe they'd make a small fortune! Wang Guanlan walked while tidying up the transparent spider silk used by the mysterious blue-green spider to wrap around him earlier. This pearl-like silk was extremely sturdy, if not for his possession of the Bodhi Town Law Knife's divine abilities, he wouldn't have been able to cut through this spider silk and escape with his life."

  As he walked, he fiddled with the tangled spider silk in his hand, trying to separate it, but this wasn't something he was good at, so after messing with it for half a day and getting it even more tangled, he finally gave up and put the ball of spider silk away, thinking "Forget it, I'll let Yan Qing deal with it when I get back!"

  When the sky was completely dark, Wang Guanlan finally found a hiding place, a small stone cave.

  The surroundings of the Tiger Leaping Gorge are complex in terrain, with some sections being sandy beaches filled with sharp rocks, others being dense thickets infested with poisonous insects, and some areas being marshy wetlands shrouded in toxic fog. There are also steep cliffs and precipices. The small cave Wang Guanlan was searching for was located at the foot of one such cliff, roughly the height of a person, several meters deep, and its shape somewhat resembled the stone caves carved into the stone walls of famous Buddhist mountains that Wang Guanlan had seen in his past life.

  Wang Guanlan sat inside, just right, but such a stone cave could only block the rain and could not completely shelter from the wind.

  Sitting in the stone cave, Wang Guanlan finally felt a little safer and took out the life token he had obtained from Yue Haifeng's corpse.

  This talisman was rectangular in shape, with a dark cyan color throughout. When held in one's hand, it felt like hemp but wasn't hemp, like cloth but not cloth, like paper but not paper. On the dark cyan talisman, a complex symbol was drawn. The lines of this symbol were intricate and mysterious, and to Wang Guanlan's eyes, they seemed like a black whirlpool that had inadvertently pulled him in deeply. Wang Guanlan stared at the symbol for an entire half-hour, his body completely still, until a black shadow flashed by outside the stone cave, yet he still didn't have even a hint of reaction.

  That black shadow lingered at the entrance of the stone cave for a while, seemingly discovering that Wang Guanlan was in a strange state and hadn't noticed his presence, before finally putting its mind at ease and pouncing towards Wang Guanlan fiercely.

  "Whoosh!!"

  The black shadow was a skilled predator, and after a swift movement, it pounced on Wang Guanlan's neck, its sharp teeth gleaming with cold light, as if in the next moment, it could cut off Wang Guanlan's neck.

  A cold light flashed by, and blood splattered out.

  Wang Guanlan's body suddenly jerked backward, one hand covering his neck and the other drawing out a long knife.

  The life symbol in his hand fell to the ground, stained with fresh blood. However, the blood on the symbol did not last long and was soon absorbed by it. The faint golden lines that outlined the text on the symbol flashed once, and the entire symbol transformed into a stream of light that suddenly shot into Wang Guanlan's brow.

  At this time, Wang Guanlan had already swung his sword and was fighting with the black shadow, and he also saw clearly what the black shadow looked like - a black leopard.

  "Damn it, almost got my major artery bitten!" Wang Guanlan secretly took a cold breath in his heart, the blood flowing from his neck was still hot, but he didn't have any passionate or excited feeling, only a chill coming from the bottom of his heart.

  It was just a little bit, his soul would have been swallowed up by the mysterious text on the fate symbol. If it wasn't for this black leopard appearing in time, he would have already gotten lost in the labyrinth of his own soul. In that case, he should still be grateful to this black leopard, but under current circumstances, words of gratitude were hard to express.

  The black leopard was extremely fast, its movements incredibly agile. Wang Guanlan covered the wound with one hand and held a long knife in the other, guarding his entire body without counterattacking.

  This was also an unavoidable thing, not that he had been injured just now, but when he was about to launch a fierce attack, the fate symbol that fell on the ground happened to be inspired by his fresh blood, and it became a complete process of blood sacrifice, pouring into his divine soul.

  At the moment when the mysterious symbol was cast into his brow, he felt his spirit begin to expand infinitely. In an instant, his spiritual awareness had expanded to a range of three miles around him.

  Within a radius of three miles, every blade of grass and every tree, every movement and every stillness, are all present in his spiritual awareness with utmost clarity. The world, at this moment, seems to have come to a standstill.

  But this mysterious feeling came quickly and went quickly, in less than a breath of time, the expanding spiritual awareness began to shrink violently, all returning to his body. The world once again returned to normal, but the situation had changed.

  The black leopard seized the moment of his expanded consciousness, grabbing exactly on his right shoulder, tearing a large piece of flesh and blood, leaving three deep claw marks on his bones.

  "Ahhh!!" The intense pain caused Wang Guanlan to drop the long knife in his hand, and he retreated violently. However, the black leopard showed no mercy, following closely like a shadow, and pounced again. Without the long knife, Wang Guanlan seemed to have lost all ability to resist.

  "Get out of my sight!!!" Wang Guanlan, who had just stormed off, glared with anger, his nearly crippled right hand suddenly lifted, and dozens of cyan blades burst forth, directly meeting the black leopard that was pouncing over. In the black leopard's eyes, which were shocked to the extreme, it was cut into dozens of pieces of shredded meat.

  "Ah——roar——!!!" Suddenly, Wang Guanlan, who had just burst out in a frenzy after dealing with the black leopard, didn't let out a sigh of relief. Instead, he used his still movable left hand to clutch his head and rolled around on the ground in agony.

  Pain, endless pain!!

  After the spiritual energy shot into his brow, he enjoyed a brief moment of immense pleasure, and then his entire head was about to burst open from the sudden surge in spiritual power. For an ordinary person, such pain would have caused them to faint, but Wang Guanlan was different. His pain came from deep within his spirit, and his sensitive spirit kept him in a state of clarity, feeling every cell as if it were being torn apart, on the verge of bursting open. The earlier burst of blue light was just a manifestation of his semi-unconscious state, but now he had no way to wield the Bodhi Suppressing Blade again - his spiritual power was sufficient, but his internal energy had been completely depleted in the previous outburst.

  All he could do was hold his head and roll on the ground, stubbornly resisting with his own willpower.

  This situation lasted for a whole hour, and Wang Guanlan also rolled on the ground for an hour. Fortunately, his luck was good, and no other monsters came to make trouble during this time.

  After a while, Wang Guanlan gradually stopped struggling and lay on the ground, panting heavily, and only got up from the ground after a good while.