An Bing Qing didn't dare to look up this time, she perfectly knew what she had hit.
'Ugh... Why can't earth eat me?' she thought without moving; her forehead had yet to be taken back from his chest.
Wang Shu felt her reaction and decided to not care about a girl who clearly did things without thinking or so he wished as he couldn't help himself from having an eye on her.
As an erudite, her ignorance was annoying; as a young master, her naivety was amusing and reassuring; and as a man of high status, her innocence was perfect because that made her harmless unless she was faking it, making her a terrifying actress.
However, most of his attention was focused on what was going around them.
The pair's constant change of thoughts went very fast. Therefore, the exchange of words of the men clad in red robes still was at the beginning of its development.
The old man hadn't replied yet to the icy young man's long and aggressive argument, keeping himself quiet and in deep thought as his old eyes wandered all over the place without centring his sight on anything specific.
The other man wasn't good at being ignored as he was someone with a short temper; thus, he soon said, "Old man, you..."
"Brat, I will admit that you have some strength but you don't have a head so... keep quiet", the old man cut his sentence, emphasizing his last words; he won't waste his breath on a youngling who didn't have even a fifth of his age anymore. He had come to know the young man better in many ways in the little less than a day's time while their group of four were searching on the same area.
And as he had always thought, the young man came to be young, after all; he was just like a spoiled young master who to the old man's surprise had his own power to back him up despite his lack of tolerance and brains so the old man had more control over his emotions now.
But that was his case as the ever cold but impatient young man attitude was the complete opposite; his irritation increased instead of being appeased. It was by so much that he didn't argue more but just left, making the two middle-aged men who were under him being taken aback; those two had been motionless all this time as they weren't in a position to interject between the old man and their superior but the sudden action of the youngest of their team made them look at each other with a flabbergasted expression before following him.
"A brat indeed..." the old man was murmuring when his spread soul force noticed what the irreverent young man was doing, adding, "Heh... he seems to be aware of his weakness but... he is still a brat... with brute force, though".
Wang Shu was hearing to all the old man's complaints and he understood him. From what he had seen and heard since he took notice of these people, they used a strange eye-sized crystal-like pearl with nine colourful lines to break the formations and cross them freely; whenever that happened, one of the lines of the crystalline pearl would disappear. Such a thing had amazed him, he had no knowledge of a pearl like that; he had wanted to inspect it but if he had attempted that in his situation, he was sure his silent spying would have been discovered so to try to find out something about the pearls, he had focused on one of the holders of such pearls, learning quite of something about them.
First, the pearls didn't solve all the formations but specific ones. Therefore, they constantly changed from one pearl to another but all of them looked alike; he had seen that when he had changed to use the rays of light to survey the place around them. His soul sense in the other way had perceived that the pearls used to break the more difficult formations gave off a stronger aura, meaning that there should be a way to differentiate them from each other.
But neither the strange pearl and nor the fact that the Ancient Inn had them was what had made him more astonished but this Forbidden Bamboo Forest itself.
Earlier, when An Bing Qing and Wang Shu were sitting on the verdant grass, he saw how the last line of some of the crystal pearls of the old man's team disappeared, turning the pearl into water. Then, some time later, when the team was looking for a while on the area around where An Bing Qing's presence had been found and they were going to use another pearl to solve the formations where the pearls had become water, they couldn't use them; surprisingly, the formations had changed.
Wang Shu hadn't been the only one astounded but also the four men clad in red before that formation at that time.
It was an unknown situation that took them aback. Even so, they had quickly adjusted to it, allowing Wang Shu to see the knowledge of the old man in formations and to assess the strength of the cold young man.
And right now too, he was watching the latter's power again; the cold young man had gone to look for the two unknown people who the old man said where around this place and was breaking any formation that had changed with his raw force; it was just as the old man had murmured.
Wang Shu's thoughts were about many things, way different from An Bing Qing's who was still submerged in her earlier mishaps; she wasn't good at having her head here and there.
'… Sigh. Bing Qing, why can't you…'
'-... But my beloved, you don't need to think about the difficult things, here I am for y...' Memories of her past life intruded the constant berate to herself but it only served to make her more afflicted.
She shouldn't have left all to him, 'Why had I...'