Not together. The specific staggered timing again—Lianhua first, Zhen Ying approximately one second later, both of them arriving at the same word through different internal routes and meeting at it the way people meet at the only available bridge.
The fire crackled.
The herbs were starting.
Song Mei was finally crying, quietly, with Xiao Hua's arm around her, because Song Mei cried about things and this qualified, and at least she had waited until he was through the portal.
The broken mountain range received him the way it always had—with the patient, geological indifference of a place that had been broken by something enormous and had been sitting with the breakage for ten thousand years and did not particularly register the difference between then and now.
He stood on the high plateau.
Opened the System.
[First Demon Trial Rewards — Full Inventory:]
