Alex didn't move a step forward when he heard Shen Jing's voice in his head. A moment later, he felt a gust of wind.
Alex turned around, simply out of instinct, to see if Shen Jing had come. However, no one was there.
"That's not the direction you want to go towards," Shen Jing said from right next to him, but Alex couldn't see him at all.
He strained his senses as far as he could to find him, however, the next set of words came from so near him that he felt the breath on his ears.
"I'm right here."
Alex jumped a little, looking in the direction where the sound came from but saw no human standing there. It wasn't until Shen Jing got rid of some sort of technique that Alex finally saw him.
'What was that?' he wondered.
Alex checked his connection with Pearl and felt him someplace far away. "Where's Pearl?" he asked.
"Cultivating someplace else," Shen Jing said.
"Is he safe?" Alex asked as a sense of panic ran through him.
"With me around, there's nothing on this continent that can threaten him. You need not worry about his survival at the moment. You should worry about yours," Shen Jing said.
Alex sent his senses to the slopes of the mountain, wondering if there was some sort of beast down there.
"It's poison," Shen Jing replied, letting Alex know.
"Poison?" Alex asked with surprise, but he couldn't sense it yet. Even after his spiritual sense had grown to about 150 meters in radius, he couldn't see any signs of poison.
"Can you not smell it?" Shen Jing asked.
Alex took a deep breath and a familiar smell of sour and pungent air filled his senses.
"Ah, this was the poison's smell drifting to me, huh?" Alex asked.
"Poisons, Venoms, and Toxins of every kind," Shen Jing let him know.
"So many?" Alex couldn't help but let out a surprise in his voice. Then, a thought came to him.
"Am I… close to the Poison Swamps of the Dreaded Mountain range?" he asked.
"Oh, you know about this place huh?" Shen Jing asked. "Yes, you are correct. It is exactly the site you are thinking of. Down this mountain, there is nothing but plants and animals that will kill you with a single touch."
"Although your physical body might be able to protect you a bit, without antidotes, I suggest you do not go back there," Shen Jing said.
Alex thought to himself. 'Will the poison really hurt me?' he thought. His body was after all evolved from the version that could already destroy most poison.
He had also seen poisons being destroyed by his body during the fights in the last year or so.
Still, there had also been a time when his body hadn't been able to protect himself from the poison.
'That saint realm poison still nearly killed my previous body,' he thought. He couldn't be sure if his current body could save him or not, but his master surely couldn't protect herself.
And she had a body at the same level as his right now.
Alex didn't know what to do.
"You seem to be lost in some thoughts," Shen Jing said, looking at his lost look.
Alex was startled back to reality and bowed a little. "My apologies. I was just thinking about something."
"About what?" Shen Jing asked. "Ask me, and maybe I can help you."
Alex frowned and thought for a moment. 'Should I tell him?' he wondered. He wanted to keep it a secret, but he couldn't be sure if that was the right path to take here.
Shen Jing was an incredible human, with knowledge and experience that far surpassed him. Keeping information to oneself when he could be using it to advance himself really did feel like the wrong approach here.
So, he took a deep breath and told him… some of the information. "Brother Shen Jing," he called him, feeling a little weird calling a Saint realm human his brother.
"It's like this. My body can destroy most poison I come across, but I'm still unsure of the limit of my body. So, I thought it might be a good idea for me to go into that swamp and test it out myself," Alex said.
Shen Jing looked at him with a curious look. "I knew you could gather Qi through beast cores, but I never knew you could survive poison too. Do you have some sort of a rare, heaven-defying bloodline or what?" Shen Jing asked.
Alex flinched. He did have one, but he wasn't born with it, and neither could he use it at all. The only time he did use it was to improve his Metal spiritual root, so… that likely didn't count.
"I'm joking, I'm joking," Shen Jing said. "I don't care if you were the son of God himself. Actually yes, I would care but I wouldn't be jealous or envy you. Actually no, I would be jealous and envy you, but I would never hurt you for it."
Alex didn't know how to respond to that.
"Anyway, are you sure your body can handle poisons?" Shen Jing asked.
"Yes," Alex nodded.
"Have you never been poisoned with something that your body couldn't handle?" Shen Jing asked as if he knew things he shouldn't have.
"I have," Alex said. "But it was a Saint rank poison."
Shen JIng's eyes turned suspicious. "Are you sure?"
"Yes," Alex said. "It came down in the meteor shower some thousand years ago."
Shen Jing's face narrowed with a confused look. "What meteor shower?" he asked.
Alex didn't know what to say. This should have been well known even throughout the Luminance empire. Even the Crimson Empire had some documented events of it happening, but since it was back when the empire didn't exist and everything was the Shattered Kingdoms, most information was lost.
So, Alex went ahead and swiftly explained everything he had learned about the shower until now.
Shen Jing nodded his head in surprise as if this was the first time he was hearing all of this. 'Was he not supposed to have been lived his entire life here?' Alex thought.
"How old are you?" Alex blurted out, before even thinking about it.
"Very old," Shen Jing said, not giving an accurate answer as he thought about the meteor shower.
"How did you not know about this until now then?" Alex asked.
"I only just recently returned back to the continent, so it's obvious I missed it right?" Shen Jing said.
"But you said you've lived here your whole life," Alex said, finding the contradiction in his words.
"Ah, but you see, someone like me can live for a long time. So for me, a thousand years is nothing much," he said.
Alex's face frowned. "Are you an immortal then?" he asked, knowing that was impossible since immortals needed to remain hidden lest the Heavenly Judgment tears them apart.
"What makes you say that?" Shen Jing asked with a curious face.
"Because a Saint realm can only live up to 2000 years at best," Alex said.
"Those saint realm artists are weak. Most saint realms I know can live 10,000 years. I've even met some folks who've been alive for 20,000 years, but those people mostly depend on elixirs and spirit foods, not to mention tons and tons of pills," Shen Jing said.
"Oh," Alex said, fully surprised. He hadn't known that. Was the information in those books incomplete? Maybe the lack of Saint Qi in the air had made the saint realms of this continent weak.
"I have a question of my own actually," Shen Jing said and asked, "how do you know the poison that nearly killed you was saint rank?"
"Because… " Alex searched his brain for a proper answer, but aside from 'my master told me,' and 'what else could it be?', he found no other answer.
His eyes widened. 'Was I wrong about the poison then?' he thought. 'Was the poison I was struck with not saint rank?'.
"You see the problem right? How can you mere mortals judge something that fell from the heavens if it did not have a label to it?" Shen Jing asked.
Alex was about to say something, but Shen Jing put up his hands to stop it.
"Actually, there is a better method to find out," he said. Shen Jing became a blur in Alex's senses and he moved out of the range of his vision in a fraction of a second and reappeared back in it a second later.
This time, he wasn't alone. Next to him was a confused-looking snake with 3 heads instead of one, each a different shade of purple.
It hissed and tried to attack Alex, but a golden barrier blocked it. Only then did the beast calm down and started looking around in caution.
"Are you going to act properly? Or should I kill you?" Shen Jing said with a smiling face, but the pressure he created made the poor snake nearly frighten to death.
The snake kept hissing and quickly nodded.
"Do you have an antidote for your poison?" Shen Jing asked the snake.
The snake looked confused, but it nodded.
Shen Jing's face widened into a glorious smile. "Good!" he said. "I want you to go poison that young man."
The snake still looked confused, but it nodded. It looked like it understood words, but couldn't speak properly.
'He's worse than Pea—'
As Alex was thinking, the golden barrier blocking off the snake was removed, and suddenly, in came a terrifying aura that nearly got Alex down to his knees.
This snake was a Saint beast.
