Ou Li's spirit-summoning ritual was still ongoing.
Her footwork seemed chaotic but actually followed a subtle rhythm, and her whispered incantations were slurred yet drawn out. She held a few shattered fragments of the amethyst pendulum in her hand, using them as a makeshift spiritual medium. Faint, sparkling spiritual light flickered in the evening breeze.
Everyone's eyes were fixed on her, their hearts in their throats as they waited for the results.
Only Bai Ci, who was floating nearby, felt a dense, growing sense of unease.
Summoning a spirit at random, inviting whichever immortal was closest.
In this area, the existence closest to the ritual, with the strongest aura and deepest karmic connection, wasn't it the Ghost Immortal Ming Yi who coexisted with her?
If you have questions, just ask directly. Why go through all this trouble?
Suddenly, the light of the array flashed. The tiny amethyst shards trembled in unison, and faint spiritual threads pulled and intertwined out of thin air, turning into an invisible force of attraction.
In the next instant, an undeniable pulling sensation gripped Bai Ci's soul.
Wait, no!
Don't summon me!
It's useless to summon me, I won't be able to see anything!
Bai Ci's heart tightened. She wanted to speak up and tell her to choose another target, but even though the words were at the tip of her tongue, she was ultimately a step too late.
This wasn't the gentle shift of control she usually felt when Ming Yi softly took over her body. It was a violent, rough yanking, as if trying to tear or peel something apart.
Bai Ci was completely stunned.
Ever since she entered this instance, she had been traveling as a spiritual entity. Weightless and formless, she had lost the physical sensations and sense of gravity that a normal human body possessed.
But at this moment, a powerful wave of weightlessness suddenly hit her, and the world began to spin.
She felt like a hooked fish.
An angler yanked the fishing rod, and with a swing of the line, she was pulled from the depths and dragged onto the shore.
The moment it broke the surface, the fish clearly felt the water's boundary—a gentle, accommodating threshold that softly let the fish go, releasing it from its embrace.
With a thud.
Due to the sudden loss of balance, Bai Ci actually tumbled onto the cold, hard concrete floor of the courtyard.
The cool, rough texture of the ground against her palms, the tangible touch of the evening breeze on her skin, and even the scent of grass and dust in the air with every breath she took were all vividly clear.
This was a physical perception that a pure soul could absolutely never possess.
She had been yanked out.
From the body she coexisted with Ming Yi in, she had been forcibly separated and dragged out by Ou Li's chaotic spirit-summoning technique.
Not only Bai Ci, but everyone else—including Ou Li herself—was completely dumbfounded.
Weren't they summoning a deity? What just fell out?
A woman in red with her hair hanging loose.
Everyone present fell into a brief daze, their minds blank.
The first to realize what had happened was Ming Yi, closely followed by a burst of pure rage.
A bone-chilling cold suddenly exploded outward. The pressure belonging to a Ghost Immortal poured down without reservation, heavily enveloping the surroundings and freezing the evening breeze in its tracks.
In the once-empty air, a red-robed phantom faintly materialized, bringing with it a sharp, aggressive wave of hostility.
Ming Yi was utterly enraged.
In his mind, he and Bai Ci were originally one.
Bai Ci was his benevolent soul, his inseparable other half.
To have her forcibly ripped from his divine soul at this moment filled him with a horror and fury no different from a living person watching their own heart being torn out of their chest.
How absurd, how audacious!
“Did you do this?” a deep male voice echoed from the red phantom, completely devoid of warmth.
In the next second, several red silk ribbons materialized out of the void, instantly wrapping around Ou Li's limbs while she was still in a daze.
The flexible yet overbearing red silk tightened hard, binding her wrists and ankles. It lifted her into the air, hanging her upside down right in the center of the ritual array, unable to move.
This sudden restraint finally snapped the completely bewildered Ou Li out of her daze.
She hung in the air, her hands and feet tightly bound. As she struggled, her body swayed like a pendulum. Her face was a mask of innocence, confusion, and panic.
“Ah? Ah? What is going on?!”
“What did I even do?!”
She was truly at a complete loss, having no idea what she had done wrong.
She had only activated her spirit-summoning class skill!
Screaming internally, Ou Li frantically reviewed her class skills.
Perhaps her performance in the instance where she obtained her class had been too pathetic, resulting in her hatching such a bizarre class.
Its skill mechanics were strange, the success rate was a coin flip, and it was highly unstable.
Especially that spirit-summoning skill—it was essentially a mystery box with unknown odds.
With good luck, she could invite a passing deity, obtain crucial clues, skip countless steps of investigation and reasoning, and directly begin solving the main quest.
With bad luck, most of the time she would summon absolutely nothing. On rare occasions, she might summon malevolent gods or evil spirits. Not only would she fail to get clues, but she would also lose a lot of her own things.
To put it bluntly, this class was a ticking time bomb.
She just never expected that the bomb would go off with a completely new effect this time. It was truly an eye-opening experience.
Sitting on the ground, Bai Ci slowly pushed herself up. Looking at Ou Li hanging in midair with a genuinely innocent and bewildered expression, Bai Ci immediately came to a conclusion.
It wasn't her fault.
It really wasn't her fault.
This was an accident caused by multiple overlapping coincidences.
First of all, Ou Li's class was inherently flawed and unstable, and her spirit-summoning was completely random and disorganized.
Secondly, Ou Li's reaction—her expression of clearly having no idea what was happening—was enough to prove her innocence.
Of course, Bai Ci had doubted for a brief second whether Ou Li was acting. Was her acting good enough to fool everyone?
But if she really was acting, what would she gain from this?
Even a member of the Malicious Outlaws would hesitate or show some wariness when facing a situation that could anger a powerful NPC.
Thirdly, Bai Ci figured that the problem was highly likely on her end.
It was very likely because she was a player herself that the medium's skill had undergone an aberration.
With these three possible factors combined, it had triggered this unpredictable soul-separation anomaly.
Ou Li was truly unaware. It was an honest mistake from start to finish, definitely not an intentional offense.
Both in terms of reason and empathy, Bai Ci couldn't stand by and watch someone suffer collateral damage because of her.
Bai Ci looked up at the hostile red phantom in the void. She spoke softly, her gentle voice reaching Ming Yi's ears with perfect clarity.
“Ming Yi, let her down.”
“She doesn't seem to understand what happened either. Besides, my existence is already very unusual. Perhaps that's why this aberration occurred.”
This was the first time Bai Ci could truly see what Ming Yi looked like.
Rate on N.U.
