Runes • Rifles • Reincarnation

210. Departure

Several days had passed since their trip into the newly blessed hidden realm. It was finally time for the group’s departure to the south—everyone except Jin Shu. His cultivation had reached a critical junction, leaving him locked in closed-door cultivation and unable even to come see them off.Yin’er glanced toward her dad’s room, then looked up at Sun Mei’er, in whose arms she sat.

“Will we be gone very long?” she asked softly.

Sun Mei’er smiled. “Not long. And your daddy will join us as soon as he can. He wouldn’t dare let his cute little daughter stay sad.”

“Um… okay.” Yin’er nodded with a small, brave smile—clearly upset, but trying her best not to show it.

“Would you like to go play with Ji Ji before we leave?”

Yin’er peeked at Ji Ji, who was happily chatting with Liu Hua and Liu Ying, then shook her head. “No… I’ll stay with you.”

She curled up and buried herself against Sun Mei’er’s chest. Sun Mei’er stroked her hair gently, soothing her.

“Such a cute child,” she murmured. “You’re too good for that stinky son of mine.”

“Daddy isn’t stinky.” Yin’er shook her head forcefully, her voice muffled. “Daddy is the best.”

Sun Mei’er chuckled and carried her ahead toward Chen Ai Yun, who was completing the teleportation formation. As the compass and focal point of the array, Sun Mei’er had to be in place before anything else could be finalized.

Quietly, Sun Mei’er was glad the formation was yin-focused and incapable of accommodating Jin Shu. Otherwise, even more of her painstaking plans for the boy’s future would have gone straight into the trash—just like that technique. Which she definitely wasn’t still bitter about. Not even a little.

***

From his window, Jin Shu caught a glimpse of his mother turning with Yin’er in her arms. He wished he could be out there—if only to wish them a safe trip. But he couldn’t move. Not without shattering the fragile hold he had on his qi.

Everything had been fine after Nano absorbed his rampaging qi in the hidden realm. Nano—and his blood—had strengthened by an entire fold, his cultivation settling comfortably at the ninth stage with room left for a few more runes.

But the moment they exited the realm, everything changed.

The strange dragon-shaped meridians embedded in his body suddenly began to move—rampaging wildly, tearing through his channels and leaving him spitting blood. Worse, they were greedily drawing in ambient qi, just like the life-giving rune—only in far greater quantities. No matter how much they devoured, it was never enough. And they refused to share even a drop with Nano.

Which left Jin Shu with two options:

One: Let the dragon keep absorbing qi until his body reached its limit… and exploded.

Two: Break through to the Spirit Realm to expand his qi threshold, and hope the dragon would be satisfied.

He chose option two.

Which meant he was trapped in closed-door cultivation until the breakthrough was complete.

No one else knew the actual danger. If he told them, they would worry—and worse, they might delay their trip for his sake. So he simply said he was at a critical junction.

If these really were his last moments… he wished he could at least say goodbye. But deep down, he was certain this wasn’t the end. He’d gotten pretty good at sensing those things—after dying or nearly dying more times than he cared to count.

“I can’t give up my spot right now,” he said to Shuang. “So tell me what I need to do.”

“With the dragon pulling in all the ambient qi, we won’t be able to draw anything else,” Shuang replied calmly. “So we’ll have to do this in reverse. Draw the dragon, then hide it using a formation.”

“Not a rune?”

“No. During a breakthrough, our technique requires a full formation rather than individual runes.”

“Not enough qi to break through with just a single rune?”

“Exactly.”

“What formation?”

“Let’s worry about that when we get there,” Shuang said. “First, you need to hold the dragon in place long enough for us to engrave it.”

Jin Shu glanced inward. The dragon-shaped meridian construct writhed through his channels like a worm throwing a cataclysmic tantrum. It was a miracle his body had held together… mostly.

“How do you propose I do that?” he asked.

“That… I do not know,” Shuang admitted.

“Okay… well, how about using Nano?” Jin Shu suggested. “It doesn’t seem interested in absorbing anything except ambient qi, and the dragon won’t share with it anyway.”

“How?” Nano asked.

“Isolate it. Flood the meridians around it with qi and have Nano push it in the direction we need.”

“That could work,” Shuang agreed.

“I’m not opposed,” Nano said.

“Then let’s do it. Otherwise this thing is going to tear me apart before I even reach the point where I explode from qi overload.”

Drawing on his newly expanded reserves, Jin Shu slowly flooded the surrounding meridians, careful not to alert the rampaging dragon to the trap forming around it. Despite being part of his body, it behaved like a living creature with its own will—violent, stubborn, and utterly unreasonable.

“Go! Inescapable Drag-net!” Jin Shu shouted, purely for morale.

His blood surged. The qi sprang shut, dragging the dragon toward his back. It thrashed wildly, slamming against the restraints with enough force to rupture his channels. Several times, it nearly broke free—but each time the tight ring of qi held, giving it not even a breath of space to escape.

“No time to wait! Begin!” Shuang urged.

Jin Shu didn’t hesitate. He pulled up the spare qi he’d set aside and began shaping the rampaging dragon sigil across his back. Obviously, he couldn’t reach it physically—so he lifted a needle with external qi, its tip coated in an extra-dense layer of energy, and guided it across his skin.

The process was brutal. Every stroke cut deep, drawing blood—yet none of it dripped. Nano held each droplet suspended, preventing his body from losing a single drop he didn’t have to.

Then an unexpected effect appeared.

His blood infused with his qi again—but not like before. It bled directly into the dragon sigil and into the meridians that composed the dragon itself. Both turned a vivid, unmistakable crimson—the red of real blood.

It was clearly harming both Nano and his body, but stopping now was impossible.

Slowly, the blood-red dragon took form on Jin Shu’s back, frozen mid-rampage, curving neatly along his spine and ending just below his neck. When the final pinpoint stroke landed, the sigil locked into place—within his flesh and within his meridians. Even so, it continued devouring ambient qi with the endless greed of a glutton.

The needle moved again.

Next came the breakthrough formation.

Each stab of the needle was precise, carving the complex sigils of the Minor Deity Formation—a formation chosen for a very specific reason. Once activated, he would be able to briefly take on the form of the minor lightning deity itself. With his lightning affinity and mastery, he could theoretically fuel it endlessly.

In practice, the formation had a hard limit of two hours.

But Jin Shu was confident he could reach that limit… and push past it.

Once the formation was fully carved into his back—his skin now resembling a madman’s macabre canvas—the ambient qi drawn in by the frozen dragon surged through the engraved lines and runes. The formation drank deeply, reached full saturation, and pushed Jin Shu’s cultivation cleanly into the Spirit Realm.

“Sooo…? Was that it?” he asked, feeling deeply underwhelmed. “There isn’t any… I don’t know… fanfare?”

“According to the books from the library, you should have undergone an internal introspection to determine which spirit you awaken,” Shuang said, brows furrowed. “And… I don’t sense that you awakened one at all, despite clearly stepping into the Spirit Realm.”

“Maybe—”

A prickling sensation crawled up Jin Shu’s spine, cutting him off. Something moved beneath his skin. Summoning a water mirror, he angled it behind himself—while simultaneously realizing it would have been far easier to do this when he was carving the damn thing earlier.

The faintly bloody formation rippled like disturbed water.

Then a hidden, blood-red dragon burst out from within it.

It gave a silent roar, inhaled sharply—as if sucking in a great breath—and the rippling formation was pulled straight into its open jaws. The runes vanished from his back entirely. One of the dragon’s scale-like markings gleamed bright silver, as though forged from pure metal.

“…What just happened?”

“I believe we found your spirit,” Nano said.

“My meridians became my spirit?” Jin Shu asked, incredulous.

“No. The meridians were merely its vessel,” Nano corrected. “It seems Long Jinshu implanted a pre-existing spirit into your body upon his death.”

“Either that, or he awakened your spirit early but left it dormant,” Shuang added. “Also, it stopped.”

Jin Shu opened his mouth to ask What stopped?—but then realized. The dragon’s constant qi absorption had halted the instant it devoured the minor deity formation.

“Your qi reserves also grew,” Nano noted. “This may be how you’ll have to cultivate from now on.”

“I have to… feed it formations to grow my cultivation?”

“It would seem so,” Nano said. “However, do not think of doing it now.”

Jin Shu would have denied that—if he hadn’t been thinking exactly that. “Why not?”

“Our body is still recovering from nearly overloading,” Shuang said. “You also need time to stabilize your foundation.”

“Nine days,” Nano supplied. “Based on my calculations, that is the minimum time until full recovery and stabilization.”

“Then we can head out right after?” Jin Shu asked, eager to find the others before they departed.

“Yes.”

He reached for his discarded robes, excitement growing—only to freeze as a bright flash lit up the window. By the time he looked outside, the teleportation platform was empty except for drifting dust.

“Just missed them…” he sighed.

Fetching a map covered in cute doodles from his space earring, he studied it with renewed focus.

“No time to lose. We’ll see them again in a month, right?”

“Hopefully,” Gold and Shuang replied at once.