Chapter 3287: Dog Zhuang

Ye Chen was not a stingy person, but he truly felt the pain of losing spiritual energy.

Moreover, this time the amount of spiritual energy he was tricked out of reached an unprecedented new height—all the spiritual energy in his body, plus that generated by the hand seals, and even the five Peiyuan Pills were completely drained; this loss hurt more than losing a hundred billion US dollars.

Lin Wan'er also did not expect that feeding Ye Chen five pills would cause all his spiritual energy to vanish without a trace; she couldn't help but exclaim, "Young Master, this… this spiritual energy couldn't just disappear for no reason, could it? Could it have been sucked away by the ring again?"

Ye Chen shook his head and said wearily, "This time it really isn't the ring. I was trying to guide all the spiritual energy into the ring, but the spiritual energy generated by the hand seals was not only beyond my control, but seemed to have its own consciousness; it wrapped around my original spiritual energy and rushed straight into my sea of consciousness, so much so that I even lost control over my own spiritual energy. Then you kept feeding me pills, and it seemed to sense the new spiritual energy in my dantian, turned around, and launched a counterattack—five pills, it made me go through six rounds of loss. I suspect it has been setting a trap for me from beginning to end, first giving me a little petty gain, then constantly feeding me hope, making me think my spiritual energy had doubled with its help, when in fact it was coveting my principal..."

After saying that, he thought of the five pills, covered his face, and lamented, "This is like being forced to blow up my position after being lured into five-times leverage… Damn it! Isn't this exactly the kind of market manipulator who lures bulls to slaughter retail investors in the stock market?!"

Lin Wan'er murmured, "But… no matter how you say it, it's just the spiritual energy you cultivated with your hand seals, Young Master; spiritual energy couldn't possibly have self-awareness, how could it be so cunning..."

Ye Chen shook his head and said, "I also can't figure it out—it makes no logical sense at all."

Lin Wan'er asked, "Since you're sure the spiritual energy wasn't taken by the ring, could it have been absorbed by something else?"

"Something else?" Ye Chen shook his head. "Besides the ring you gave me and the medicine cauldron I tricked from the headmaster of Tai Zhen Dao, I basically haven't obtained any other ready-made magical artifacts from other sources. This time it wasn't the ring, and it couldn't have been the cauldron."

Lin Wan'er wondered, "But… such a vast amount of spiritual energy—even if your body couldn't bear it, why did it vanish without a trace once it reached the sea of consciousness? I've been by your side all along and felt nothing abnormal; logically, your spiritual energy shouldn't have seized the chance to escape your body, yet it just vanished for no reason, which is truly too strange."

"Indeed..." Ye Chen struggled to sit up, fuming, "It's like a person eating several times their body weight in one meal—sounds utterly absurd, but those spiritual energies really did vanish without a trace once they reached the sea of consciousness."

Lin Wan'er added, "Have you ever considered why, when you and I stood beneath the aurora in Northern Europe, the aurora manifested that set of hand seals? Could it be that the other party had already set a trap for you back then?"

Ye Chen asked, "You mean someone deliberately made the aurora teach me those hand seals to lure me into a trap, just to steal all my spiritual energy?"

Lin Wan'er nodded and said, "Let's reason together, Young Master and I—if this whole thing is a setup from start to finish, then the orchestrator must be either a person or an object;"

As she spoke, Lin Wan'er added, "The possibility of it being a person, I think, is negligible—even if there were experts hiding near the aurora that day, it's highly unlikely they could have tailed us across the ocean, followed us to Jin Ling, and tracked us down to this villa's basement without being noticed, unless it were some supernatural entity like a ghost—but that's unverified, so the probability is low;"

Ye Chen agreed, saying, "Indeed, it's unlikely to be a person or a ghost. If it were a person, they'd at least need to master the invisibility technique from fantasy novels to follow us unseen; as for ghosts, that's even less plausible—there's no evidence ghosts exist, and even if they did, they couldn't possibly absorb spiritual energy."

As he spoke, he suddenly thought of something and said, "By the way, Young Lady Lin, you mentioned earlier about cultivators who failed their tribulation and became scattered immortals through body liberation—could scattered immortals be like ghosts, invisible and intangible to ordinary people or cultivators with insufficient power? If so, then I couldn't possibly have been targeted by some scattered immortal, could I?"

Lin Wan'er replied, "Scattered immortals are merely a legend I found in some obscure wild histories; I have no evidence they truly exist. Moreover, passing tribulation succeeds only one in a hundred times, and the remaining ninety-nine basically end in body and spirit destruction. Those who manage to achieve body liberation and become scattered immortals upon tribulation failure are probably even rarer than those who succeed—so it's unlikely we'd be so unlucky as to encounter one. Furthermore, according to the records, although scattered immortals are forced to liberate their bodies, their strength is still second only to those who passed tribulation; they're called scattered immortals precisely because they are immortal beings trapped in the mortal realm."

As she said this, Lin Wan'er looked at Ye Chen and said softly, "Young Master, I mean no disrespect—but even if we truly encountered a scattered immortal in Northern Europe, such a being would surely look down on the spiritual energy in your body..."

Ye Chen nodded in agreement: "Meng Changsheng cultivated for a thousand years and still couldn't reach the threshold of tribulation—just see how powerful tribulation-stage cultivators are, let alone scattered immortals; it's likely even Meng Changsheng wouldn't catch the eye of a scattered immortal, much less someone like me."

Lin Wan'er continued, "In that case, we can basically rule out a person or a ghost causing trouble, leaving only an 'object.' And if it's an object, it certainly couldn't be mundane—your father's ring couldn't even do this, so the 'object' behind this is likely far stronger than that ring. Young Master, you should really think: have you come into contact with any magical artifact? Could it be that the artifact remained in your body or even hid in your sea of consciousness?"

Ye Chen racked his brains for a long time and murmured, "To be honest, in all my cultivation, I've hardly seen any good things—I really don't have anything that could be related to this."

As he spoke, he also thought of the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda and instinctively said, "If we're talking about good things I've seen, the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda definitely counts—it's a national treasure forged by Master Xuanzang and countless cultivators. But I've already returned the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda intact to Zhao."

Because although the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda is a magical artifact, it was forged for the nation's fate as a feng shui treasure, and Ye Chen had already quietly returned it to the state; during his contact with it, he never detected any abnormality, so naturally he doesn't believe this incident is related to the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda.

Lin Wan'er refused to give up and pressed Ye Chen: "Young Master, during your contact with the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda, did you notice anything abnormal about it that you couldn't understand?"

"No." Ye Chen shook his head. "Besides showing me a segment of footage from that time, the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda had nothing else special about it; moreover, when I entered it with spiritual energy, I merely activated a hidden image-forming array— theoretically equivalent to the pagoda playing a recorded documentary stored within it. Aside from that, I had no other interaction with it, nor did I notice anything else unusual."

Lin Wan'er asked, "Since then, have you noticed any abnormality in yourself?"

"No." Ye Chen said firmly, "After finishing viewing that footage, my divine sense withdrew from the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda—I detected no abnormality whatsoever."

Lin Wan'er said, "The Four Directions Treasure Pagoda was forged by Master Xuanzang and top cultivators of the Tang Dynasty; to some extent, it counts as a Buddhist magical artifact, and what we saw in the skies over Northern Europe was also a Buddhist hand seal—perhaps there really is some connection between the two."

Although Ye Chen felt nothing related to the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda, Lin Wan'er's point did make him suspicious, so he said, "If that's the case, then the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda does seem suspicious—after all, Europe supposedly has no Buddhist countries, and even if the Arctic Circle near Northern Europe shows heavenly anomalies, the aurora should turn into a Christian cross, not a Buddhist swastika. Yet I truly feel nothing connected to the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda—I really can't make heads or tails of it."

Lin Wan'er asked him, "Young Master, why don't I contact Old Sun and see if we can arrange for you to visit the Four Directions Treasure Pagoda again, to check whether any details were missed the first time?"