Following Lin Fan's instructions, Yue Qingqian took a day to fully recover her strength and composure before heading back to Bai Cao Peak. Her performance for Elder Liu Changqing was brief but effective. She appeared pale, her aura subtly depleted, and described her experience at the Dragon-Locking Pool and Sky-Piercer Peak not in terms of danger, but purely through the lens of profound, exhausting enlightenment.
"The songs were... overwhelming, Master," she explained, her voice carrying a convincing weariness. "The deep song of the mountain... the high song of the moon... My harmony absorbed them, but it needs time to... settle. To find its new silence." She requested a month of secluded meditation on Xiao Xiao Peak to "consolidate these profound gains" and "prevent Daoist instability."
Elder Liu, already convinced he was witnessing the birth of a new philosophical path, readily agreed. He saw her exhaustion not as weakness, but as proof of the immense spiritual effort involved in her unique cultivation. He praised her dedication, urged her to rest well, and promised not to disturb her "sacred silence," effectively granting them a precious month of uninterrupted privacy. He even offered more resources for her "meditation," which Yue Qingqian politely declined, stating she needed "emptiness, not fullness" for this phase – a response that only further convinced Liu Changqing of her profound understanding.
Back on Xiao Xiao Peak, Lin Fan had also spent a day in deep recuperative meditation, aided by his own potent recovery pills. The expedition had pushed him closer to his limits than he liked, a stark reminder of the dangers lurking outside his meticulously crafted defenses.
With Yue Qingqian securing their 'quiet month,' Lin Fan turned his full attention to the prize they had risked so much for. He retrieved the Ice Jade vials containing the Lunar Essence Dew. In the secure confines of his hut, he carefully unsealed one vial.
A wave of incredibly pure, potent yin-aligned celestial energy washed over him. It was cold, not like mundane ice, but like the deep, silent cold of the void between stars. The silvery liquid glowed softly, seeming alive. He carefully channeled a minuscule thread of his spiritual sense into the Dew. It felt like touching liquid moonlight, imbued with a subtle, inherent resonance that vibrated in harmony with the concept of space itself.
"Incredible," he breathed. "The texts were right. Pure, potent, and stable."
He spent the next few days in intense calculation and experimentation, using tiny samples of the Dew. He confirmed its ability to conduct immense amounts of energy with minimal resistance, and more importantly, its natural compatibility with spatial energies. It wasn't as perfect as Starlight Sand, requiring slightly more complex channeling runes to manage its extreme yin nature, but it would work.
With renewed vigor, Lin Fan threw himself back into the construction of the teleportation array. The Lunar Essence Dew, carefully integrated into the design, allowed him to finally begin crafting the main energy conduits. He worked with painstaking precision, forging delicate channels of purified metals and embedding them with runes designed to handle the Dew's unique properties.
The month passed in a blur of focused labor. Yue Qingqian acted as the perfect lookout and assistant, managing the peak's outer arrays, tending to their sleeping master, and providing Lin Fan with whatever mundane support he needed. The peak remained quiet, undisturbed. Elder Liu kept his promise, and Elder Zhao, lacking any new ammunition, seemed to have temporarily paused his overt scrutiny, though Lin Fan knew the accountant's watchful eye was never truly closed.
Slowly, agonizingly, the impossible array began to take shape within Lin Fan's heavily shielded workshop hut. The core navigational module sat ready. The stabilization matrix, incorporating the Deep Ocean Black Iron, was painstakingly assembled, its dark metal seeming to absorb the very light around it. The intricate network of energy conduits, designed to channel the Lunar Essence Dew, snaked across the array base like silvery veins.
By the end of the month, the physical structure of the rudimentary, single-use, long-range teleportation array was nearly complete. It was a marvel of unorthodox engineering, a fusion of ancient knowledge and Lin Fan's unique brand of paranoid genius. It hummed with barely contained power, the spatial runes seeming to warp the air around it even in its dormant state.
But one crucial circle on the blueprint remained empty.
Lin Fan stood before the nearly finished array, his face etched with exhaustion but also a grim understanding. They had overcome impossible odds, gathered materials thought mythical, but the final piece remained elusive.
"The Void Crystal," he said quietly, his gaze fixed on the empty slot in the array's central power core. "Everything else is ready. The conduits can handle the energy flow. The matrix can contain the spatial stress. The navigational module can lock onto the theoretical coordinates of the Lawless Land. But without the Void Crystal to initiate and stabilize the initial spatial rupture..."
He gestured helplessly at the magnificent, yet incomplete, machine. "It's just a pile of useless, dangerous junk."
Yue Qingqian looked at the array, then back at her Senior Brother. "Where... where do we even begin to look for something like that, Senior Brother? The library records mentioned it only as a theoretical possibility, formed in the heart of collapsing spatial storms."
Lin Fan ran a hand over his face, the fatigue suddenly hitting him with full force. "I don't know," he admitted, the words tasting like ash. "It's not something you can mine or trade for. It's an anomaly. A cosmic accident. Finding one relies entirely on... luck."
And luck, Lin Fan knew, was the one variable the Heavenly Dao controlled absolutely. Relying on luck was relying on the enemy.
He stared at the incomplete array, the culmination of all their efforts, the key to their ultimate escape, rendered inert by one missing, impossible piece. A profound sense of despair, heavier than any physical exhaustion, began to settle over him. Had they come all this way, only to be stopped at the final hurdle by sheer, random chance?