When Yue Qingqian recounted her tense encounter with Elder Zhao, Lin Fan did not react with anger or frustration. Instead, a deep, chilling silence fell over him. He listened to every word, his face impassive, but his eyes grew darker and colder with each detail.
The encounter confirmed his deepest fears. Their carefully constructed illusion, while effective against those who thought in terms of Dao and enlightenment, was dangerously fragile against a mind that thought in terms of logic and resources. Elder Zhao was a new type of variable, an accountant in a world of poets, and he was immune to their art.
"You handled it perfectly, Junior Sister," Lin Fan finally said, breaking the silence. His voice was devoid of its usual lazy drawl, replaced by a cold, hard clarity. "You used the core of your persona—incomprehensibility—as a shield. He couldn't prove anything. But he will not stop. A man like that doesn't forget a discrepancy in his ledgers."
He walked over to the stone table and looked at the long, ambitious "shopping list" they had created. With a single, decisive gesture, he rolled up the parchment.
"The 'Wool-Harvesting Plan', as we know it, is over," he announced. "It has become too predictable, too risky. Every request you make from now on will be scrutinized by Elder Zhao. We can no longer afford to operate on that front."
Yue Qingqian's heart sank. "Then... what about our plan to relocate? We still need so many materials..."
"The strategy has changed," Lin Fan replied, his gaze turning towards the hundreds of jade slips they had acquired from the library, now neatly stacked inside his hut. "We have completed the most crucial phase: information gathering. Now, we move from acquisition to production. We will work with what we have and what we can create ourselves. It is time to process our gains."
For the next ten days, Lin Fan sealed himself inside his hut. He forbade Yue Qingqian from disturbing him for any reason, posting a sign on his door that simply read: "Calculating."
Through the small window, Yue Qingqian could see him working, a sight she had never witnessed before. He was surrounded by the glowing jade slips, his eyes alight with an intense, focused fire. He wasn't just reading; he was cross-referencing, calculating, and drawing. Complex array diagrams, far more intricate than anything she had ever seen, covered every available surface. He was like a master craftsman, taking the raw, disparate parts of ancient knowledge and forging them into something new, something that served his singular purpose: ultimate safety.
On the eleventh morning, the door to the hut creaked open. Lin Fan emerged, looking pale and utterly exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. But those eyes burned with an triumphant, almost fanatical light.
He held up a new, smaller piece of parchment. It was not a shopping list; it was a blueprint.
"I've done it," he said, his voice raspy. "The theoretical model for a rudimentary, single-use, long-range teleportation array. It's incredibly unstable and requires an astronomical amount of energy, but it's our ticket out."
He unrolled the blueprint for Yue Qingqian to see. It was a dizzying spiral of runes and energy channels that made her head swim.
"We have the most crucial component, the one that makes it all possible," he said, pointing to a central rune. "The spatial law principle contained within the Kongming Hua (Void Spirit Flower). And with the knowledge from the library, I can craft most of the secondary components myself over time."
He then tapped two empty circles on the blueprint, marked with large, red question marks.
"But we are missing two key catalysts. Without them, the array is just a drawing."
He looked at her, his expression grim. "The first is a Void Crystal, a material that can stabilize a spatial channel. It is exceedingly rare. The second," he paused, his gaze hardening, "is something called Star-Navigating Iron. It's a unique metallic ore that doesn't just conduct spiritual energy; it resonates with the very fabric of space, allowing an array to lock onto a distant coordinate across domains."
Yue Qingqian's hope faltered. "Where... where can we find such things? They sound even rarer than the Kongming Flower."
"The Void Crystal, I have no idea. It is a matter of pure luck," Lin Fan admitted. "But the Star-Navigating Iron... our luck, it seems, is both terrible and strangely convenient."
He brought out another document—a fragmented map he had painstakingly pieced together from three different ancient texts found in the Bai Cao Peak library. It depicted a cross-section of the Tianxuan Sect's mountain range.
He pointed to a specific, deep location marked with an ancient, faded symbol.
"According to this map, a small, deep-earth deposit of Star-Navigating Iron was discovered centuries ago by a geology-obsessed elder. He deemed it too difficult to mine and too unstable for conventional forging, so the deposit was recorded and then forgotten."
He looked up at Yue Qingqian, a look of profound, cosmic irony on his face.
"The location of that deposit," he said, his voice a low, fateful whisper, "is at the very bottom of the mountain's core, directly beneath a certain cold, dark pool of water."
"It's in the Dragon-Locking Pool (Suolong Tan)."
The lair of the Blackwater Serpent Demon. The one place in the entire sect they had sworn never to go near again was now the location of the key to their salvation. The Heavenly Dao had played its hand once more, tying their only hope of escape to their greatest known threat.