Chapter 4716 — Not Believing It Gets You Struck by Lightning

By her reckoning, she had expected the journey here to take at least half a month. To her surprise, ten days had sufficed. The whole way had been smooth sailing, and all of it was thanks to Wei Zhao, this formidable teammate of hers. It seemed she truly had picked the right man!

Wei Zhao nodded and looked around for a while, finding that there was no one else in this place. That much was within expectations. After all, even for a cultivator at the peak of the Nascent Soul stage, crossing the Ten-Thousand-Year Grand Canyon was no easy feat, much less doing so in a mere five days. Such a thing was little short of a pipe dream.

"So what now? Do we just go straight through?" Wei Zhao turned his head and asked.

"Of course not. There's a formation here. Let me look for it—it should be somewhere nearby!" Huo Yudie said as she consulted the map and began searching back and forth.

A formation? Wei Zhao's brows knitted slightly at the words. He had assumed this place was nothing but a stretch of pure, crumbling ruins. He had not expected a formation to be here as well. Could these boulders before him be part of it?

Be that as it may, since it was a formation, he could not go blundering about. Wei Zhao could only fold his arms and stand to one side, watching Huo Yudie search back and forth. Yet half a day passed, and Huo Yudie was visibly wilting, while still not having yielded the slightest result.

Watching from the side, Wei Zhao was struck utterly speechless. True, Huo Yudie had indeed been searching carefully, seeming to take each step with great caution. But after half a day of back and forth, the route she had actually walked was essentially all repetition. Pacing the same spot over and over like this—even if she walked for ten thousand years and wore the ground beneath her feet into a flower, what good would it do? How was she supposed to find any hidden formation this way?

Seeing that after thirty-seven repetitions, Huo Yudie was about to gasp her way into a thirty-eighth expedition, Wei Zhao could stand it no longer. He had no choice but to step forward and stop her. "Aren't you tired?"

"Huh? I... I'm not tired..." Huo Yudie panted, great gulps of air heaving through her chest.

"You're not tired from walking, but I'm tired from watching." Wei Zhao shook his head in exasperation and said at once, "Say, can't you just let me have a look at that map? Do you really have to circle around here all by yourself? Keeping secrets from me, are you?"

"Huh? No! Absolutely not!" Huo Yudie's pretty face flushed at once. At the beginning she had indeed been on her guard against Wei Zhao—that was only human nature. But ever since Wei Zhao had risked his life to heal her poison and save her, that little bit of wariness had long since been flung to the back of beyond. She said huffily, "It's not that I'm keeping secrets. This place really can't be wandered through carelessly!"

"Oh?" Wei Zhao raised an eyebrow, noncommittal.

"Didn't I tell you? There's an exceedingly profound formation in this place. If you go wandering about, even a single misstep will trigger heavenly lightning. That would be absolutely fatal!" Huo Yudie said with a grave expression.

"A heavenly lightning formation? Was it set up here specially by some grandmaster of formations?" Wei Zhao could not help starting.

"Not exactly. It's said that wherever a Thunder Mystic Vine grows, a naturally formed formation will guard it. To get through this heavenly lightning formation, forcing your way is absolutely out of the question. You have to find its formation eye, and only after striking the eye in a very particular way can the formation be broken." Having explained, Huo Yudie added in a quiet, plaintive tone, "So all of this is for your own good—keeping you from getting struck by lightning."

"Fine. But even so, you don't have to keep circling the same spot, do you? How long is this dawdling going to take?" Wei Zhao could not help laughing. Then he paused and asked, "Since you've gone to such pains to gather all this intelligence, don't you know the way through this heavenly lightning formation?"

"The formation is naturally formed. Every so often, as the environment changes, the entire formation changes with it. No one could possibly compile a route map. And even if someone had one, no one would dare follow it, because there's a very good chance it's useless. So to pass safely through this heavenly lightning formation, everything depends on probing it out bit by bit yourself. Naturally, you can only start from the edges." Huo Yudie said helplessly.

"Good grief! How long is this probing going to take? Just give it to me!" Wei Zhao said, pressing a hand to his forehead. His time was already extremely limited. If he wasted several days on something like this, he would not even know what to say.

"Oh..." Huo Yudie answered weakly and handed him the map. Though she did not believe for a moment that Wei Zhao could have any better method, she really was rather tired after all that probing and groping about, and a rest while Wei Zhao took over the shift would not be bad at all.

Taking Huo Yudie's map, Wei Zhao examined it carefully. He found that apart from lacking a clear route for breaking the formation, everything else on it was marked with perfect clarity. Once he had roughly understood it, he said not a word more and strode straight in.

Huo Yudie was just about to sit down for a rest when she saw this, and she leapt up in alarm. Rushing over, she grabbed Wei Zhao's arm and cried, "Hey! Do you have a death wish?"

In her panic, Huo Yudie had practically thrown her whole body against Wei Zhao. He felt his entire arm sink into some tender, soft place, a sensation sufficient to intoxicate any man. Though Wei Zhao was not quite so base as that, he still instinctively tensed his muscles.

Seeing the strange look in Wei Zhao's eyes, Huo Yudie finally realized how ambiguous their posture was at that moment. With a startled cry she hurriedly retreated several steps, her cheeks flushing red to the tips of her ears, and she did not dare look at Wei Zhao again.

Wei Zhao smiled silently, then resumed his previous pace, heading straight for the boulder formation, veering left and right from time to time in no discernible pattern. It gave the impression that he was simply wandering about as he pleased—yet the result was that, from first to last, his way of walking never triggered the heavenly lightning!

Once Huo Yudie had recovered from her embarrassment, she stared wide-eyed and blankly at the scene before her, her face full of disbelief. Could her deduction have been wrong? Had this place not yet reached the Thunder Mystic Vine's location, and there was no heavenly lightning formation at all?

That seemed unlikely. This intelligence had come to her master personally from Ning Shanghe, the Island Master of West Island. Given the deep friendship between them, she surely would not have falsified something like this. Or was there an error in the map?

Unconvinced, Huo Yudie immediately tried to imitate Wei Zhao and take a few casual steps. But the instant she moved her foot, before it had even fully touched the ground, she heard a deafening crack out of thin air, and a sharp bolt of deep-blue lightning came crashing down on her head! (The school beauty web drama launches today on iQiyi—has everyone gone to watch it? Mermaid's official WeChat: yuren22) (To be continued...) I752