Shufen's help

She cringed under his hold, anticipating what was to come next but he merely chuckled, shrugging his robe over her shoulders when he finally let her go. He noticed she hadn't realized she was also in her undergarments and had run out of the room in frenzy.

She grunted, almost burrowing into the ground from utter shame when she realized why he had taken off his robe in the first place.

"Why didn't you tell me?!"

Shufen shrugged, "I guess I was too stunned and focused on you to remember." Then he leaned back up, a sigh parting his lips when he adjusted the seams of his undergarment, "But now that we're here, we could spend the night doing something productive like helping you get your Qi back to flowing as usual.

I promise we'll be back in time to meet with the others before sunrise."

She exhaled, wondering why he had chosen this spot in the first place, and as if reading her mind, he spoke.

"Shan Town has an excess amount of Qi flow, This town was first used by the Tenggong Sect who first mastered Qi. The mount peaks and the forest still stores an abundance of it and it takes a cultivator of higher rank to know this."

He gloated and she scoffed, she was way behind on thousands of years of cultivation and Shufen was an immortal who had a stable flow of qi but chose to never use it and stuck to acting like a weak mortal instead.

Closing her eyes, she exhaled, drawing in deep breaths as she tried to feel the Qi surrounding them but got nothing instead.

He observed her for a moment, his raven, silky-smooth hair held in a high ponytail with the guardian headband, cascading down his shoulders in a flurry of waves.

"I can't feel anything." She retorted.

"You can't because your Qi is blocked, you need to cultivate and refine Qi through your body to help it flow once more. Your core is weak and your cultivation base is unstable."

She nodded, recalling that she had failed to cultivate and her Qi was slowly deviating.

"I'm fine, I just need to meditate and I'll be fine."

He scoffed, his lips curling in a snicker. He lingered closer to her, the glint in his eyes glimmering uncontrollably, he could easily see through her lies and knew for a fact that she  wasn't fine like she claimed to be.

Her Qi deviation had been the sole cause of her sudden outburst at the Inn and she could be overcome by her internal demons if it continued on.

"You're not fine and I know that, you cannot cultivate and I can help you keep it stable until we return to the Empire and Master sees to this.

I can only stabilize the imbalance temporarily, but i'm afraid that I can not fix it completely, It is unlike anything I have ever seen and totally out of my control." 

Another kind of emotion she found it difficult to comprehend flashed through his irises, a secret he wasn't telling her, something he felt he had to keep away from her, just in case it could have her worried, or worse, frighten her the more.

She had tried as much as she could to keep this hidden from the rest of the team, but in the end, she was only going to become a burden to them and she had to admit that she did indeed needed a fix, even if it was temporary.

"What do I need to do?"

His eyes widened mischievously again, "We could do Dual cultivation, it'll make it faster and more easier."

Liling gasped at the absurdity, appalled and shocked at his suggestion, Pair cultivation was frowned upon by the guardians and sects, not to mention the immoral and impure acts the cultivation entailed.

"Are you out of your mind?!"

He laughed at her pinched expression, his head tipping back with chest rising and falling to the sounds that rumbled through them.

She had taken his suggestion a little too seriously, although he'd made it out as a joke. This was never part of his plan but he could never miss a chance to elicit a series of emotions from her, most especially when she paled from shock.

"Come on! It's just a joke alright?" He added when she dashed out of the road as he neared, "Shall we begin?"

She nodded and he began to undo the knots of his undergarment again and she screamed out, making him jolt where he stood.

He wondered how many times she was going to act shocked and surprised in one day, but he reckoned their stay together at the Empire had been nothing more than a leader-team relationship and she had never witnessed him with his upper body bared to her view.

"Why are you taking that off again?! I told you that i'm not interested in dual cultivation!"

He stopped midway, in an attempt to clarify the situation "When I was still the disciple of the Empress of Heaven, she gave me a gift, for my chivalry and it's the 'All Formation Breaking Array."

"The All Formation Breaking Array?! Why would she give you such a rare spell?! We all know the Empress never shared her knowledge of spells with anyone."

Liling asked, watching him cower from her questions when he turned away from her. She arched a brow, when he tried to avoid her questions but grunted instead, flailing his arms. "Fine! I stole the array, I wanted to learn it all on my own so I imbued my blood with the spell."

When he finally managed to peel the robe off, she gasped this time from shock, and bewilderment as he did a series of hand gesture at a pace too fast for her eyes to keep track of, muttering the spell with a small whisper.

An ethereal glow surrounded him when he flattened his palm against his chest and white, blinding light surrounded him as an array of intricate patterns covered his body.