Yet it was not Wei Zhao who reacted first to her shout, but the Brain-Eating Bug.

Beaten into a sorry excuse for a loach and seemingly on the verge of collapse, the Brain-Eating Bug had nonetheless lost none of its vicious, cunning nature. The instant it heard Duanmu Yu's voice, it shot out of the mud and came racing over. Against Wei Zhao in his flood-dragon form it truly had no recourse, but seizing Duanmu Yu would be child's play.

So long as it had a hostage in hand, it would not be utterly routed; it would still have something to bargain with.

Duanmu Yu was alarmed. She hurriedly brought out One Leaf Falls, Autumn Knows to hide herself in formlessness, but before she could flee the spot, that inexplicable field of pressure that had appeared before descended once more, fiercer and more savage than any time prior. Trio!

Duanmu Yu was forced back into visibility in an instant, and by now the Brain-Eating Bug was a single step away from her. She was about to be coiled up in its body, and there was no time left to flee—when a dragon claw striped with the Eight Trigrams came down out of the sky.

Splat! The Brain-Eating Bug's head was seized in one claw and rammed savagely down into the mud. However desperately it thrashed, it could not break free.

"You all right?" Wei Zhao glanced at Duanmu Yu—or to be precise, the Five Elements Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon glanced at Duanmu Yu.

"F-fine... I'm fine..." Though she knew perfectly well that this was Wei Zhao, being looked at so closely by a flood dragon still made Duanmu Yu's heart flutter with instinctive alarm—and, strangely, a certain thrill. She had never experienced anything like it. After all, this was a flood dragon—a creature of legend!

"Good, so long as you're fine." Before Wei Zhao had even finished speaking, the Brain-Eating Bug below—though its head was gripped in his claw—lashed its serpentine body up in a mad coil, hysterical and tremendously strong. After a couple of those whipping blows, even Wei Zhao in his flood-dragon form could hardly bear it. The Eight Trigrams stripes across his body suddenly dimmed and began to waver and dissolve.

Bad! Wei Zhao's heart lurched; he knew his time was up and he could no longer hold the flood-dragon form. He hastily gathered every last scrap of spiritual energy into that one claw and struck with all his force. The Brain-Eating Bug's hard skull burst on the spot like a watermelon, dissolving into a foul pool of reeking sludge in the mud. The stench hit the nose like a wall.

At the same moment the Five Elements Eight Trigrams Flood Dragon flickered out of being, and Wei Zhao reverted to his primordial-spirit body, his face ashen and plainly weakened.

"How are you?" Duanmu Yu hurried to steady him. She did not know the specifics, but she could more or less guess that it had to do with the essence of Withered Leaf Brings Spring that she had disclosed to Wei Zhao earlier. His sudden transformation into a flood dragon must surely have drawn on that principle. Even if it was not the same art, similar means would inevitably carry similar aftereffects—once used, one was bound to be weak for a time.

"I'll live. I have the Sacred Water Pearl; it won't come to anything fatal." Wei Zhao forced a smile.

The aftereffect of Withered Leaf Brings Spring was a very long period of weakness—three months at the shortest, half a year to a year at the longest. That Duanmu Yu had recovered so quickly was due not only to her own exceptional talent but, more importantly, to the fact that what she had used was not the full version of Withered Leaf Brings Spring. What Wei Zhao had just used was a mutated variant, whose aftereffects were not so severe—but by no means to be taken lightly. The drain, after all, had been enormous.

Strictly speaking, because the fight against the Brain-Eating Bug had been an almost one-sided crushing, Wei Zhao had not truly been wounded—it was purely a matter of excessive expenditure. But the trouble was that this expenditure was no ordinary expenditure: it was the expenditure that came after forcing open the last self-preserving safety valve of his primordial spirit. And that was serious.

To drain the primordial spirit to such a degree left Wei Zhao scarcely better off than if he had been injured. Fortunately, the Sacred Water Pearl could be put to use. Though it could not replenish the vital consciousness energy he lacked most, it could at least stabilize his primordial spirit. Otherwise Wei Zhao would not even have been able to keep his consciousness now; he would long since have collapsed into self-imposed dormancy.

Steadying his primordial spirit with the Sacred Water Pearl while drawing in the last remnants of consciousness energy from the Star-Ink Charcoal, Wei Zhao knew full well that he had to recover his strength as quickly as possible. Otherwise, any further mishap—however slight—would spell disaster.

Seeing this, Duanmu Yu wasted no words. She turned her back to him and said, "Get on!"

"You're carrying me?" Wei Zhao grimaced, and added instinctively, "I'm a man, you know."

"Obviously I know you're a man. In an emergency you make allowances—what's wrong with carrying you a bit? You've held me before, so we're even now!" Duanmu Yu urged. She took the matter of propriety between men and women far less seriously than most girls; otherwise, having been carried by Wei Zhao in her undergarments, she would have been too ashamed to show her face long ago, let alone travel alongside him as openly as she did now.

"Fine." Since Duanmu Yu herself did not mind, Wei Zhao certainly minded even less. Besides, the tide was already rising again, and for the moment he had no strength to move on his own. It was a choice with no alternative.

Wei Zhao climbed onto Duanmu Yu's back at once. Plain-spoken tomboy though she was, a fresh, subtle fragrance still reached him from the nape of her neck. Perhaps because she had spent years dealing with leaves at the Leaf Spirit Sect, this scent was quite unlike that of ordinary women—less a bodily fragrance than a kind of agarwood-like resin, reminiscent of ancient trees. It actually lifted his spirits slightly, with a distinctly refreshing, clarifying effect.

"Behave yourself. Stop breathing into my neck!" Duanmu Yu spat, frowning.

"I'm not doing it on purpose..." Wei Zhao smiled wryly. He was drained to the dregs; panting heavily was only natural. Was he supposed to hold his breath on purpose at a time like this?

"Well, don't breathe into it anyway. And how are you so light?" Duanmu Yu muttered. She had assumed a grown man like Wei Zhao would weigh at least a hundred and forty jin, but he was feather-light on her back. If he had not had his arms looped around her neck, she would have feared a gust of wind might blow him away.

"I'm a primordial-spirit body, of course I'm much lighter than you." Wei Zhao smiled wryly again. Ordinarily he would not have been this light, but his expenditure had been so great that merely maintaining the form of a primordial-spirit body was a struggle—how could he spare the effort to make it solid or not?

Duanmu Yu said "Oh," but she did not head straight back toward the shore. Instead she ran toward the Consciousness Grass. The two of them had fought for their lives precisely for this stuff; now that Wei Zhao had struck down the Brain-Eating Bug, there was no way she was leaving the treasure behind. (To be continued.)