Chapter 268: Earth Yuan Fruit Blooms
Chapter 268:
Yu Caiqing didn't ask questions.
One look at the wild, glassy sheen in Jiang Chen's eyes told her everything the words hadn't — this wasn't desire born of clarity, but of something closer to sickness. As an alchemist who had spent years around volatile pills, unstable Qi deviations, and the occasional patient stumbling in half out of their mind from a botched cultivation technique, she recognized the signs immediately.
Still, she didn't push him away.
The heavy stone door sealed shut behind them, muffling the noise of the tower outside to a distant hum. Whatever happened next, it happened behind walls thick enough to keep prying eyes and prying ears exactly where they belonged — outside.
Hours later, the frantic edge in Jiang Chen's breathing finally began to ease.
He sat slumped against the cool stone wall of the alchemy chamber, drenched in sweat, staring blankly at the ceiling as clarity slowly seeped back into his mind like water returning to a drained field. The runaway heat that had consumed him for three days had finally, mercifully, burned itself out.
Yu Caiqing sat across from him, wrapped in a spare alchemist's robe, fanning herself with a folded talisman and shooting him a look that was equal parts exasperated and curious.
"Care to explain," she said dryly, "what exactly possessed you to kick down my door like the Earth Fire Zone was collapsing?"
Jiang Chen groaned, rubbing his face with both hands. "A fruit."
"...A fruit."
"A very specific fruit. From a very specific tree. That I should not have eaten three of."
She stared at him for a long moment, then began to laugh — not politely, but the full, unrestrained cackle of someone who dealt with cultivator misadventures for a living and had, apparently, just heard a new personal favorite.
"You," she wheezed, "grew yourself into a walking aphrodisiac disaster. With farming."
"When you say it like that—"
"There's no other way to say it, Junior Brother Jiang." She wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, still grinning. "Gods. Wait until Wang Ze hears this."
"He will hear nothing."
"Mm-hm." She clearly didn't intend to honor that request even slightly.
Jiang Chen let his head fall back against the wall, too drained to argue further. In truth, some part of him — the part that had spent three sleepless days convinced his own cultivation base might combust from the inside out — was simply grateful the ordeal was over. Dignity could wait. Survival came first.
"For what it's worth," Yu Caiqing added, her tone softening slightly, "you're lucky it burned out on its own. Some Qi-deviation states like that don't stop until they're forcibly suppressed, usually by a Nascent Soul elder with a very large needle. You got off easy."
"Comforting."
"I try." She stood, stretching, then tossed him a spare set of alchemist's robes from a nearby cabinet — his own had been reduced, over three sleepless days of frantic farm work and an even more frantic flight across the sect, to something closer to a rag. "Now get dressed. If Chu Xiu sees you leave my chamber looking like you fought a swarm of fire bees, the rumors will write themselves."
Jiang Chen accepted the robes with a tired nod, already dreading exactly that conversation.