Han Xuhan took a deep breath and calmed his frenzied heartbeat.

"A bad evening indeed. What brought you here, master Fang Xie?" He said, taking a seat on a tool nearby.

"Is the poison supply I sent you intact?"

Han Xuhan nodded, asking, "Do you need them?"

Fang Xie laughed. "No, boy. YOU need them. You need them to be in your hands from tomorrow."

Han Xuhan closed his eyes. When he had heard Luo Yi's declaration that all sects were to actively engage in invasions in order to secure a high rank in the tournament, a dreadful thought had occurred to him.

Fang Xie's task for him was to go around poisoning some talented disciples of the sects attending this tournament. Since the new rules and Xuan Zi's training plan mandated that they had to go attack other sects, wouldn't that be the perfect time to execute that task?

He was not at all delighted to see that his foresight had made an accurate judgment.

"So...who do I poison, specifically?" Han Xuhan said after sorting out his thoughts.

Fang Xie pointed toward the table he was sitting beside. Han Xuhan turned his head and noticed an unfamiliar scroll there.

He unfurled it swiftly, running his eyes over its content, which turned out to be....nothing.

"The identities of the targets are recorded on the scroll." Fang Xie smiled excitedly, confounding him further.

"Once you arrive near one of the targets, you'll see the name and appearance of that disciple on the scroll. So I would suggest checking it every few minutes whenever you're on the move in the islands of the foreign sects."

So this scroll was imbued with inexplicable magical traits beyond his perception?

Han Xuhan felt a mixed range of emotions– excitement, apprehension, suspicion, and annoyance, to name a few.

Fang Xie seemed to have noticed his expression, because he said, "if you can perform this task well, you may keep that treasure."

Han Xuhan cast a steady gaze at him and asked a very rational question. "When does this explode?"

"...." Fang Xie's smile disappeared. With a sigh, he replied, "kid, just because I hate you doesn't mean our differences cannot be reconciled. You do this for me and..."

Seeing Xuhan's unchanged stare, Fang Xie trailed off.

"Alright, alright, you got me. It doesn't explode, really. It just catches on fire when given a certain mental command."

"Normal fire?" Han Xuhan asked, recalling all the extra spicy fire dao written by his favorite xianxia authors from his past life. Those authors had to have snorted some pretty nasty stuff to be able to come up with those abominable concepts.

".....No." Fang Xie relented after another ten-second-long staring contest. "But you shouldn't worry about that little trick. Since you've foreseen the little prank, I'd lose face by resorting to it anyway, hmph!"

Pranking kids and losing face were not a compatible pair in the same sentence. But Han Xuhan did not argue. He did not want to lose face either by getting into an argument with a madman.

Much to his relief, Fang Xie left without further ado. Taking a second look at the scroll, Han Xuhan put it inside a pocket of his robe.

Before Xiao Wu returned, there wasn't much he could do. Lying down, he took a dive down into his mental world, having decided to pay a visit to his dao tower.

There was another surprise awaiting him inside.

Tun Shi Tian and Zhanxian's avatars were nowhere to be found there. Han Xuhan was sure that he had canceled their summons. How could they be gone?

Did they somehow get ahold of Hai Yin Zhe's inexplicable power to bypass his will and freely travel between the worlds?

Han Xuhan could not sense his heart at the moment, but if it was conscious of his mental state, its beatings might have broken his ribcage.

And that's when he saw it.

The alphabets of laws that resided inside his domed ceiling were not moving like they usually did.

Han Xuhan's consciousness floated up close to the dome and realized that the alphabets were now divided into two groups, one tiny and one large.

The larger group consisted of hundreds of familiar alphabets buzzing and vibrating together chaotically, which wasn't an unfamiliar sight, but they appeared unwilling to break away from the jumbled, dense formation.

The smaller, second group was where the problem lay.

The alphabets in this group had been twisted beyond recognition and arranged in a tidy order.

At first, something felt off about the arrangement. Han Xuhan leaned in for a look and the realization struck him. Suddenly, he began to feel breathless.

The law alphabets had been deformed in order to create the letter structures of another language. The overall arrangement formed a line written in...English.

To a successful Fusion

Cheers

Han Xuhan's consciousness rocketed out of his dao tower, overwhelmed by panic.

His eyes snapped open and without wasting a single breath, he sped out of the hut, determined to seek Kong Ye's help as fast as possible.

But hardly had his foot crossed the yard of Xiao Wu's house when he felt his balance fall into disarray. As if his limbs had a mind of their own, both of his legs folded themselves and refused to move.

Han Xuhan tried to crawl forward using his hands, and they snapped backwards, gluing themselves to his back.

Han Xuhan attempted to scream as hard as he could as a fourth-layer cultivator. But not even empty air came out of his mouth.

He directed his qi flow towards the ground, trying to etch down a message on the soil. The qi froze inside his meridians before he could move them out.

Han Xuhan despaired. But that emotion did not last very long due to his familiarity with the feeling. Instead, he began to calm down.

As far as he could sense, there was nothing else he could do to contact another person. But if he simply stayed in this pose out here, that would give anyone enough of a clue to realize that something was wrong.

So he simply needed to wait for Xiao Wu or Mu Ran to return.

However, he was soon distracted by the sensation of air hitting his vocal chord.

"Grggrrhgh! Unghhrrh! AAAAAHHH!"

Voice his own, words not, the current body of Han Xuhan was mostly out of his control. As his voice seemed to find its groove and grew proficient in creating coherent sets of words, Han Xuhan could do nothing but listen attentively.

"Escaping heaven's eyes is sometimes an illusory possibility, but escaping your dao heart is invariably futility."

Silence fell.

"Oh right, you can't speak right now, can you? Let me see..."

The voice sounded a bit embarrassed.

"It's been a while since I've done this– wait, yes, try speaking now. Is there anything you want to say to me? Reckoned there is."

Han Xuhan cleared his throat, successfully.

"Senior, what do you want from me and what would it take for you to not harm me?" He said in a tearful tone.

"Me? Harm you? Hahaha! My boy, I have no such motive!" His voice was forcefully borrowed once more for the sake of communication.

"In fact, I'm very grateful to you! If you hadn't damaged your own dao tower by letting your minions cultivate, I'd have never seen the light of day again! Aahhh, it's been sooo long!"

The unwanted occupant of his body sniffed the air ravenously and emitted some inexplicable sounds while

Han Xuhan uttered some terrible profanities in his mind.

Letting his minions cultivate invited this guy to his dao tower? How the fuck did that even work?

"As for what I want from you...a healthy, powerful body would be excellent. You wouldn't happen to be in possession of one, would you?"

The tone of his opponent sounded pretty light-hearted. But every sentence he said made Han Xuhan shiver.

"How could I be in possession of dead bodies, senior? I'm not a demonic cultivator-"

"Oh, not dead bodies, NO! Living ones! I need a living, breathing, healthy body!"

"I'm afraid there is none of that sort here either, senior," Han Xuhan answered in a shaky voice.

The other party sighed. "Then I have no choice but to use yours, don't I?"

"Yeah, about that, senior...I must warn you. I have a very special physique."