Chapter 1712: Pill Resonance

Li Yan wasn’t the only one to reach this conclusion. Everyone had their suspicions. The runes being unable to leave the thousand-fathom range suggested two possibilities: either the desk and the bottles possessed a powerful gravitational pull, or there was a cage-like formation within that range.

However, they had to try to snatch them. One couldn’t know the truth without a practical attempt. The twin sisters lashed out with pale green belts from their waists, trying to coil them around the runes. When their belts struck the barrier, they produced a dull, heavy sound that drowned out the efforts of the others.

The five others, Li Yan included, looked over.

“Earth-attribute treasures!” the black-clad man in the late-stage of Spirit Transformation whispered, his eyes gleaming with undisguised greed. He exchanged a glance with his companions, seeing the same avarice mirrored in their eyes. Those light, fluttering belts had produced a sound far heavier than their own attacks; this suggested the sisters were using high-grade artifacts that combined offense and defense into one.

The sisters noticed the change in the others’ expressions. They felt helpless; in this environment, they had to keep their guard up, but they couldn’t afford not to act. The examiner’s rules were malicious, designed to pit them against each other. Since this was an assessment for the Spirit Transformation realm, the sect wouldn’t make it easy. With only four hundred runes available, they had to secure their fifty as quickly as possible, regardless of whether they revealed their trump cards.

For now, greed was balanced by the urgency of the exam. Everyone turned their focus back to the golden runes. They adjusted their strategies and struck again.

Ten breaths later, Li Yan was startled to find that despite their various methods, not a single person had successfully captured a rune from within the barrier. Even when he concentrated fully, adjusting the trajectory of his Divine Sense and fine-tuning his spiritual power, he failed every time.

‘The power of this barrier is incredibly peculiar. My spiritual power can suppress it, but I cannot capture the target accurately!’

Li Yan had believed that without interference, he could easily secure a rune, yet he was met with repeated failure. Everyone stood outside the barrier, unwilling to step inside a place they didn’t understand. Each of them thought they had calculated the resistance after a few tries, yet each attempt ended in frustration.

At that moment, the twin sisters exchanged a quick voice transmission. One of them lashed out with her belt, coiling it around the other’s waist. The sister being held—the one in the mid-stage of Spirit Transformation—did not hesitate. Her body erupted in yellow light as she stepped into the invisible barrier.

The move drew the gazes of the other five. They had all considered entering, but their caution held them back; they wanted someone else to test the waters first. Li Yan was the same. Though his Divine Sense detected no immediate threat, he felt an instinctive unease. The four companions, despite their long history of cooperation, did not trust each other enough to replicate the sisters’ maneuver.

‘Decisive,’ Li Yan thought. He stopped his attempts to snare the runes and watched the sisters intently, making no move to enter yet.

The girl in the yellow dress moved forward. Her initial light steps slowed considerably, but she wasn’t as sluggish as a snail. She moved like a normal person walking through thick mud, the yellow light on her dress intensifying. Veins bulged on her forehead, suggesting that every movement required immense effort. She was moving as fast as she possibly could.

Aside from the heavy resistance, no other anomalies appeared. The girl approached a golden rune with a wary expression. Instead of using her belt, she reached out with her bare hand. She was inches away from the rune when her movements slowed even further. A strange expression flitted across her face, causing the onlookers to tense up.

The sister outside the barrier held the belt tightly. They couldn’t communicate via voice transmission once she entered, but as twins, they possessed a unique mental resonance. She sensed no call for help. Being experienced cultivators, they knew they had to persist as long as there was no crisis.

Every breath felt agonizingly long. The burly man’s group watched with flickering eyes, and Li Yan narrowed his own.

Two breaths later, the girl inside moved again. Her hand blurred as she lunged at a golden rune. The rune suddenly accelerated, swerving to avoid her, but her hand expanded with a burst of power, clamping down on the rune with a claw-like grip. Simultaneously, the green rune in her palm flashed, sucking the golden rune inside.

Outside the barrier, everyone—with the exception of the other sister—moved as one. The moment she secured the rune, they charged into the invisible barrier without a second’s delay.

Li Yan felt his body grow incredibly heavy. A massive, crushing pressure surged from all directions, pressing down on him.

‘The barrier’s power is immense… but this force is unique.’

Li Yan slowed down. His Divine Sense was suppressed here, though still usable. The crushing force was bizarre. Beyond the suppression of Divine Sense, Li Yan felt as if the familiar laws of heaven and earth had suddenly vanished. A cultivator’s strength came from their ability to manipulate worldly power; losing that connection created a profound sense of insecurity.

In that instant, Li Yan found he could not breathe.

Fortunately, even if a cultivator were buried deep underground, they could rely on their internal circulation to maintain life as long as they had spiritual power. But within this barrier, the familiar laws were replaced by a ‘vibrant’ and ‘rigid’ force. It was ‘rigid’ because, beyond the external pressure, Li Yan found that his internal spiritual power was being pinned down within his dantian by an overwhelming strength. He could only access the spiritual power already residing within his meridians.

To move, the examinees had to use the meager Qi in their meridians to carve out a space for activity. Even those who weren’t body cultivators possessed physical bodies at the Spirit Transformation realm that could shatter mountains; they could withstand the pressure through sheer physical resilience.

‘This is a specialized barrier formed by ancient Pill Resonance!’

Li Yan looked at the ancient desk. The ten green bottles were emitting golden light—likely a form of Pill Resonance light that contained its own laws. Li Yan had read in a Wangliang Sect archive that when one reached the pinnacle of the alchemy path, the pills refined would possess miraculous properties. Gaining sentience was common, but a pill could also contain its own laws of heaven and earth, becoming a ‘Pill Resonance’ space.

This was a technique most common in the primordial and ancient eras. Such spaces could trap, kill, or defend, and were functionally similar to top-tier formations or techniques. As the saying goes, ‘All paths lead to the same destination.’ Alchemy was one of the supreme paths of cultivation. However, Li Yan had read about Pill Resonance cutting off other laws to create a separate world, but he had never seen it in person.

This was different from a storage space like the Earthen Patch, which was made of spatial materials. Pill Resonance created a barrier within the existing world, as seen here, causing a thousand-fathom radius to lose its connection to common laws.

Li Yan stared at the bottles, realizing something else. The Pill Resonance here wasn’t exceptionally terrifying; if it were, it wouldn’t have required ten bottles to cover a mere thousand fathoms. Yet, for their level, it was more than enough to be shocking.

His Divine Sense swept toward the girl in the yellow dress. There were no spiritual power fluctuations on her body’s surface. Only when she grabbed a rune did a flicker of Qi appear in her hand to pull the drifting object in.

The girl felt the Divine Senses sweeping over her and frowned, but she ignored them and continued to the next rune. Li Yan and the others quickly retracted their Senses; the consumption rate here was staggering. Outside, Divine Sense might cover a certain distance, but here it required three times the effort. Divine Sense recovered far slower than spiritual power, even with pills. In a crisis, a cultivator without Divine Sense was ten times more vulnerable.

A golden rune drifted not far from Li Yan. He understood now why the girl stopped using her belt—she couldn’t afford the spiritual power. She could only use the Qi in her meridians. Therefore, they couldn’t just stand there and lash out; they had to rely on physical strength to walk up to the runes and snatch them.

Li Yan began to walk toward the nearest rune. His speed was roughly that of a normal person walking. When he reached the rune, he reached out. The golden rune seemed sentient, immediately trying to dart away, but a suction force erupted from Li Yan’s palm. The rune stalled for a moment, and Li Yan grabbed it. The moment his skin touched the rune, he felt a brief resistance; the golden rune seemed to want to turn into liquid and slip away.

Li Yan released another burst of Qi, pinning the rune firmly before storing it in his green rune.

‘At this rate, I might not even get fifty in half an hour!’

Li Yan frowned. He finally understood why the girl had paused when she grabbed the rune. They had to use physical strength to fight the pressure and walk, but capturing the runes required a further drain on their meridians’ Qi.

As Li Yan secured his first rune, the other Spirit Transformation cultivators began to have their own successes. They too realized the secret of the field and cast wary glances at the ancient desk.

Soon, Li Yan secured his second rune. On the other side, the girl in yellow had already captured four. She was remarkably fast. Yet, her face was pale, and beads of sweat rolled down her forehead. She suddenly tugged at the green belt around her waist.

Her sister, standing outside, had been watching closely. Although the others had entered, she had stayed behind. Despite the limited time, they had agreed to observe the situation before committing both of them. There were still many unknowns, and they stuck to their plan. Sensing the tug on the belt, the sister outside poured spiritual power into her hands and pulled with all her might.