Two sharp whistles cut through the air. Arrows came flying from outside the treehouse. Qingxue quickly reacted. A translucent longsword materialized in her hand, and she swung it. Icy sword energy exploded outward in a sharp wave.
Swish.
The incoming arrows passed straight through her sword qi like it didn't exist. Their speed didn't even slow. They kept coming, aimed directly at the shield Alexei had raised. He'd been bracing for impact. But it never came.
"What the—"
He looked up in confusion just in time to see Qingxue snatch both arrows out of the air with her bare hand, catching them like they were moving in slow motion. His mouth fell open slightly. Before he could process what he'd just seen, her other hand was on his shoulder, pulling him behind her.
Clang!
She swung her sword at the log wall blocking their exit. The blade bounced off harmlessly. The log didn't budge. An awkward silence stretched for half a second. Alexei could see her ears twitch slightly, the fluffy fox tail behind her going rigid. She'd just pulled off an incredibly cool arrow-catch, and now she couldn't even cut through a wooden wall. The contrast was almost painful.
More whistling sounds... this time aimed directly at her.
She swung her sword qi again in a defensive arc. Still useless. They collided with the sword qi, intersecting it, and then just passed through. Like cutting fog. Only when the arrows were right in front of her did she raise her sword and strike twice in rapid succession.
Clang! Clang!
The arrows were deflected with such force that they ricocheted back even faster than they'd come, vanishing into the forest. When she finally got a clear look at their attackers through the opening, she froze.
"Skeletons?"
That didn't make sense. This wasn't the style of the Ghost Sect she'd been expecting. Their techniques revolved around ghosts and spirits, not animated corpses.
A different name flashed through her mind, the Three Souls Sect. That vile organization that allied with Ghost Sect and specialized in crafting corpse puppets. If they were involved, things were more complicated than a simple revenge attack.
Alexei, meanwhile, was having a minor revelation about how cool Qingxue looked when she wasn't being awkward. Before he could fully appreciate it, she'd already launched herself through the one-meter-square opening, her body somehow fitting through the space. The sight left him, who had religiously been digging two-block-high exits everywhere, momentarily speechless.
He suddenly realized a very real problem.
Did people in this world not need two blocks of vertical clearance to move through doorways?
Had he been making himself look like an idiot this whole time, digging oversized exits when everyone else just squeezed through normal ones?
To avoid looking any stupider, he decided to follow her example. As it turned out, a one-meter-square opening was perfectly manageable for someone his size. You just had to duck and angle your shoulders right. The only downside was that climbing through felt awkward as hell. Not exactly a dignified exit.
By the time he dropped to the ground outside, Qingxue was long gone. The area around the treehouse looked like someone had gone berserk with a giant sword. Deep gouges crisscrossed the ground and tree trunks. Some cuts went half a meter deep into the wood. If it hadn't taken him only about fifteen seconds to climb through and land, he would've thought he'd emerged onto an active battlefield.
Bones, rotting flesh, gunpowder, and glowing experience orbs littered the ground, floating slightly above the surface. But not a single piece of equipment, the one thing he actually wanted, was anywhere to be seen.
"Damn it," he muttered, already jogging toward the sound of fighting.
That's when he saw it.
A flash of gold among the trees, bright enough to hurt his eyes in the filtered sunlight.
A zombie. A completely innocent, minding-its-own-undead-business zombie wearing a golden helmet and golden chestplate. And it was about three seconds away from being cut in half by Qingxue's merciless sword.
"Wait! Don't kill it yet!"
The blade screeched to a halt, stopping just millimeters from the zombie's skull. Qingxue sidestepped its retaliatory lunge. The zombie swung at where she'd been standing, hitting nothing but air. In a flicker of movement, she was back at Alexei's side.
"What's wrong?" she asked.
"That armor it's wearing," Alexei said, gesturing frantically at the golden-armored zombie. "I need it intact. Killing it directly has a terrible drop rate."
Qingxue blinked. "Drop… what?"
Alexei waved his hands, realizing the term wouldn't make sense. "Uh… it means… if we kill it the normal way, the armor probably won't fall off. I need it whole."
"Ok..." Qingxue stared at him. "But we still have to kill it eventually, don't we?"
"Technically, yes. But there's a method..." He paused, trying to figure out how to explain Minecraft drowning mechanics. "Haven't you noticed that all the mobs... uh, monsters, you killed earlier didn't leave corpses behind?"
"No corpses?" Qingxue hadn't paid attention to that detail.
She swept her gaze over the areas she'd cut through, and sure enough, exactly as he'd said: aside from sword scars, there were only weird floating items and those yellow-green glowing orbs slowly drifting toward Alexei. The bodies themselves had simply vanished.
Confusion was written clearly across her face.
She reached out, grabbed Alexei by the shoulder and in one motion, she'd moved them both thirty meters from the zombie. The zombie, undeterred by missing its attack, immediately turned and started shambling toward them again.
"So what do we do?" she asked curiously now. "You seem to know exactly how to handle these corpse puppets."
She'd checked earlier with her spiritual sense. These things had zero spiritual energy. In her perception, they registered as literally just ordinary dead bodies. Close her eyes and she couldn't even detect them. But ordinary corpses didn't chase people around trying to bite them.
Alexei nodded. "I have a way to get the armor off without destroying it. But I need it held in place."
In Bedrock Edition, directly killing an equipped zombie only gave an 8.5% chance for it to drop its armor. But if you turned the zombie into a drowned first, the armor would fall off completely when the conversion happened, then the new drowned would pick it back up, and anything a mob picks up has a 100% drop rate when killed. Players could even snipe the full-durability gear the drowned throws out after conversion. The same applied to weapons held by zombies.
The only tricky part right now was how to convert it into a drowned.
He could always use the classic boat-sealing method by himself, but there was a powerful cultivator right here. Might as well make use of her, right?
"Can you immobilize it? With some kind of binding technique?"
"I..." Qingxue suddenly found herself at a complete loss for words.
She was a pure offensive cultivator. Sword techniques, sword qi, sword intent... she knew dozens of ways to cut things. But binding? Restraint? Control?
She had basically zero techniques for that.
The main reason was that the Aureate Summit Sect, her home sect, was small and poor. Auxiliary tools, life-saving treasures, crowd-control artifacts, any of the things that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of low-grade spirit stones were completely out of their reach. Even when they could afford the stones, they couldn't compete with the major sects in the Eastern Territories. They'd get outbid before they even saw the auction house floor.
Her personal sword, the Frost Jade Blade, had been painstakingly forged for her by her Fourth Senior Brother over the course of six months. And even that had only been mid-grade Profound tier when first completed. It had taken her a hundred years of constant spiritual nurturing to elevate it to early Earth tier.
Seeing her stay silent, ears twitching, her fluffy tail swishing erratically behind her, Alexei couldn't quite believe it.
No way. She really can't do it?
Qingxue's cheeks flushed slightly. She turned her head to the side, pretending not to notice his stare, and her tail swished harder.
Okay. He understood.
She was obviously a hardcore sword cultivator walking the path of pure offense. The novels always talked about it: Press forward without retreat, advance without hesitation, forge an unbreakable sword intent through overwhelming power.
She clearly disdained to use "underhanded" tricks like binding techniques. It would compromise her sword dao or whatever.
"Right," he said. "No problem. I can handle it."
He pulled out his iron sword and, with a thought, swapped it for the boat in his hotbar. The wooden boat materialized in his hand, looking out of place in the middle of a forest.
"Here we go."
He tossed the boat directly in the zombie's path.
The instant the zombie stepped close enough, maybe half a meter away, reality seemed to hiccup. The zombie just appeared sitting in the boat, as if it had teleported. Or as if the boat had somehow swallowed it mid-step. The transition happened so fast that even Qingxue, who'd been watching intently, didn't catch the moment of transfer.
Her fox ears twitched.
"What the fuck?" she spoke, then paused. "Oh. Did I use it correctly?"
Alexei froze for half a second, then let out a long breath. "Yes. Yes, that was perfect."
She nodded, seemingly satisfied, and turned her attention back to the immobilized zombie. When Alexei started walking toward the trapped creature, she hurried to follow. At this distance, she could easily protect him if something went wrong.
Alexei reached the boat and pulled out his stone shovel. He started digging straight down beneath the seated zombie.
One meter. Two meters. Three meters deep.
Then he mined the boat, breaking it with a few quick strikes. The zombie dropped into the hole, landing hard. Before it could climb out, he sealed the top with dirt blocks, leaving a single hole. He pulled out a water bucket and poured it into the hole until the water level rose past the zombie's head. The zombie started thrashing immediately, the water muffling its groans.
Alexei placed a fence gate one block in front of where the zombie stood, locking the water column in place while leaving a small opening he could attack through later.
"Now we just wait," he said, wiping dirt off his hands. "It'll convert soon."
Qingxue stared at the trapped, drowning zombie, then at Alexei, then back at the zombie.
"Convert into what?"
"A drowned. When it transforms, the armor will fall off, then it'll pick it back up."
"I..." Qingxue paused. "That seems unnecessarily complicated."