Spying from the Air

Furthermore, keeping Lin Dayou's earnest teachings in mind, he carefully remembered to leave a portion of the Ice Stone Grass with their roots still wrapped in mud.

Who knows, maybe they could be planted in the future?

Actually, many people had thought of this, but they found that using ordinary jade boxes meant for storing spiritual plants was completely useless for Ice Stone Grass. Once this grass left the Ice Plains Realm, it would wither within half an hour. Although it could still be used for medicine with the exact same effect, replanting it became impossible.

Moreover, Ice Stone Grass was extremely particular about its growing environment and couldn't tolerate even the slightest bit of heat.

Furthermore, this grass originally only grew in regions of extreme cold. While it was quite rare for the people of the Southern Spirit Domain, where the climate was pleasant, it wasn't exceedingly scarce overall.

Not to mention that after the appearance of the Ice Plains Realm over the past century, it suddenly became much less of a rarity.

Therefore, no one went out of their way to try and cultivate this relatively low-value Ice Stone Grass—except, of course, for Lin Xiao.

Because the private storage provided by the system preserved items perfectly.

He didn't need to worry about storage costs at all.

By the time Lin Xiao finished harvesting this patch of Ice Stone Grass, only a few minutes had passed.

He couldn't help it; assuming the cultivation world would be brimming with spiritual plants and treasures, he had made preparations before coming out, learning a few harvesting spells exactly for moments of reaping like this.

Looking at the over five thousand stalks of Ice Stone Grass stored in his private vault, Lin Xiao felt extremely satisfied.

He put away his tools, took out his peach wood sword, and began to fly on his sword.

Originally, he wanted to fly as high as possible. However, the moment he ascended to an altitude of two hundred meters in one breath, he stopped immediately and even descended a hundred meters.

Because when he reached the two-hundred-meter mark, he felt the biting astral winds and the tyrannical spiritual energy. Moreover, in the endless sky above, it seemed as though many pairs of eyes were looking down, their faint, imperceptible gazes vaguely locking onto him.

This sudden feeling of being spied upon made Lin Xiao shiver to his very bones.

Despite usually being quite curious, he didn't even dare to look up at the time and immediately lowered his altitude.

Only when he dropped to around one hundred meters did he feel those eerie gazes completely vanish.

Still, he felt entirely uncomfortable, so he simply put away his peach wood sword, landed on the ground, and started walking on his own two feet.

Lin Xiao asked Liao Pantu, but Liao Pantu, whose soul body was currently only at the Qi Condensation realm, didn't know what was going on either. In all the various large and small secret realms he had visited in the past, he had never encountered such a thing.

Without an answer, Lin Xiao didn't dwell on it. After all, he was just an ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivator. As long as he gathered resources normally like everyone else and obediently left when the realm closed after fifteen days, everything would be fine.

This secret realm had been stable for hundreds of years, so there shouldn't be any problems.

Along the way, aside from that eerie feeling in the sky earlier, he didn't encounter anything else out of the ordinary.

He did run into a few cultivators, but Lin Xiao avoided them from a distance.

Some of them seemed to have noticed him as well, while others didn't.

The cultivators who noticed him seemed to share his mindset and quickly distanced themselves too.

Thus, throughout his journey, Lin Xiao remained quite at ease.

He was also rather relaxed.

Because from his extensive inquiries and eavesdropping, he knew that the first three days in the Ice Plains Realm were arguably the safest.

This was because the demonic beasts and spirits in this realm almost never appeared during the first three days.

Furthermore, the newly entered cultivators were all busy harvesting resources everywhere and had no time to fight or compete. After all, the Ice Plains Realm was massive, and the items inside weren't particularly precious. If someone beat you to a spot, the optimal choice during the first three days was to quickly find the next location rather than waste time fighting.

But after three days, things would be different.

By then, the majority of the resources in the realm would have been harvested by people. At that point, the various demonic beasts and spirits would gradually emerge, and their numbers would surge from the seventh day onward, continuing until the realm closed.

At the same time, large-scale conflicts between cultivators would erupt.

Robbery, killing, and looting would begin to occur in every corner of the entire realm.

It was only the first day now, so Lin Xiao, walking alone, merely maintained an appropriate level of vigilance while touring what was the second secret realm of his life.

However, he didn't have the same good luck as before to encounter large patches of spiritual plants. He only occasionally stumbled upon a few scattered plants of various kinds, none of which fetched a high price.

What he didn't know was that although many of the cultivators he encountered were traveling on the ground like him, or flying just a few meters in the air using flying artifacts or swords, he assumed they were doing so for the same reason he was.

But that wasn't the case at all.

Other cultivators simply couldn't fly at high altitudes in this Ice Plains Realm. At most, they could only fly low, below ten meters.

This was entirely because their cultivation systems were different.

Above ten meters, the Ice Plains Realm fiercely rejected five-element spiritual energy. The violent spiritual energy up there was entirely composed of impure energies outside the five elements, making it impossible for those cultivators to fly high.

As a result, for over a hundred years in this realm, no one had ever experienced what Lin Xiao did at that high altitude.

However, neither the current Lin Xiao nor Liao Pantu knew any of this.

On the second day, Lin Xiao suddenly noticed that the previously murky ice beneath his feet was becoming increasingly transparent and clear.

He thought about it and guessed that since his starting position was at the edge of the realm and he was now approaching the central region, perhaps the ice simply became clearer the further in one went.

Although he had gathered a lot of information in the city beforehand, he was still a newcomer. Having only been there a few days, it was impossible for him to have figured out every single detail perfectly.

After walking a bit further, Lin Xiao's path was blocked by a massive iceberg.

After confirming with Liao Pantu that the direction was correct, he began his journey to climb over the snow mountain.

Just then, heavy snow like goose feathers suddenly began to fall from the sky.

Meanwhile, far away in a gray area on the map of the Ice Plains Realm—a place that even Wan Wantong had not explored—Yuan Zhiyun had been wandering for over a day.

After entering the Ice Plains Realm early yesterday morning, she had assumed she would land normally in one of the countless explored areas, just like every other time she had entered in previous years, and then smoothly rendezvous with the teammates she had found a few days prior at their agreed-upon location.

Unexpectedly, she found herself completely alone in a location with absolutely no intelligence available.

After repeatedly checking her surroundings, Yuan Zhiyun knew with absolute certainty that she had landed in a gray zone from which no one had brought back exploration data in a hundred years.

For a moment, she didn't know whether to consider herself lucky or unfortunate.