Chapter 918: Chapter 912: A Rolling Pin
The young waiter was sweeping the floor with a broom, kicking up clouds of dust.
A guest casually tossed sunflower seed shells onto the ground.
The waiter, evidently accustomed to being overbearing, placed his hands on his hips and glared.
“I was wondering why I have to sweep seven or eight times a day! It’s people like you who make me live a life where my wages don’t match my labor!”
The waiter hurled abuse at the guest, and while cursing, he casually snatched up a rolling pin and marched forward.
Huan Gui frowned. She rarely visited the mortal realm and found it all simply too noisy.
But right at that moment, Huan Gui turned her head slightly, staring past the inn toward a towering mountain visible several miles away in the distance.
She narrowed her eyes and snorted coldly.
“You managed to track me down even like this? A mere Peak Divinity Transformation cultivator dares to come here seeking death? The audacity!”
Within her perception, on a high mountain a dozen miles outside the town, a woman with a ponytail dressed in martial attire bent her Pink bow, nocked an arrow, and fired!
Suddenly.
Huan Gui’s expression shifted once more. She looked toward the counter, where the aura of the red-robed old man surged violently, actually releasing a burst of Demon Qi.
“Void-Breaking Root!”
Sharp spikes thrust out from the very air, striking toward Huan Gui.
“You have some nerve, too…”
Huan Gui was beside herself with rage. This Tree Demon was also at the Divinity Transformation Realm. As the saying goes, “a starved camel is still bigger than a horse.”
Forget that she was merely heavily injured—even if she were down to her last breath, she was not someone a mere Divinity Transformation cultivator could…
“Nascent Soul?!!”
Amidst her thoughts, Huan Gui blinked blankly, her vision gradually spinning as the heavens turned and the earth rotated.
In that instant, the entire world plunged into a pallid whiteness. She seemed to behold a pair of pure white eyes—eyes of incomparable nobility, wielding the authority to control the Spiritual power of heaven and earth, to grant life, inflict death, and strip away all power.
As those eyes fixed upon her, the Spiritual power within her body returned to the heavens and the earth, and her physical flesh reverted to its origin!
It all happened too fast, leaving Huan Gui to murmur in disbelief, “Impossible.”
That young waiter had actually used the two distractions to slowly close in on her. An aura of the Nascent Soul realm erupted in an instant.
Huan Gui didn’t even have time to turn her head; in a split second, she felt herself stripped of all Spiritual power and consciousness, her mind growing heavy and dim.
Bang!
Dust and smoke billowed up. Li Changsheng, clad in the attire of a waiter, held a rolling pin in his right hand. With a beaming smile, he stared down at Huan Gui, who lay unconscious face-down on the ground, and at Taotie, whose aura was chaotic and unstable.
Before long, Li Changyao and Old Tree arrived as well.
The two of them glanced at the cultivator at the very limit of the Void Refining Realm lying on the ground, then looked at Li Changsheng, who was tapping the rolling pin against his palm. They couldn’t help but swallow hard.
“A cultivator at the limit of the Void Refining Realm—perhaps even at the Half-Step Integration Realm—knocked unconscious by a Nascent Soul cultivator with a rolling pin… If word of this got out, who would dare believe it?”
The corners of Old Tree’s mouth twitched. Although this wasn’t the first time he had witnessed the power of Li Changsheng’s eyes, it still made his heart tremble with fear.
And this was merely the result of Changsheng devouring the Human Emperor’s Blood and mastering its complete power. Yet, he already possessed such transcendent abilities.
Old Tree could not even imagine just how powerful that old, undying Human Emperor in the Imperial Capital must have been at his peak.
“Brother, what do we do now?”
Li Changyao stared blankly at the two powerhouses on the ground.
But Li Changsheng did not reply. When Li Changyao looked at her older brother, she saw that his face was already pale and covered in cold sweat; the sweat had soaked through his uniform.
“…”
Her brother was trembling uncontrollably. He looked like he was trying to feign composure but couldn’t hide his panic, and finally, he collapsed onto the ground on his backside.
“What do you mean, ‘what do we do’?”
Li Changsheng gritted his teeth.
“Hurry up and get a rope! Tie me together with the two of them. Take out the Spirit Tool used for sealing demon beasts and trap the three of us inside.
Grandpa Old Tree, swallow us into your belly in a moment. Whatever you do, don’t let me be separated from them.”
“The elders really are too much. How could they just let these two go?”
Li Changyao knitted her moth-like brows.
“But Big Brother, we can’t kill them—they took great care of Great-Uncle Tianyi. Yet we can’t keep them either; their killing karma is too heavy. I fear that if we’re not careful, an Integration Realm expert will come knocking. And even if we kept them in our Azure Cloud Prefecture, it would give others a handle to use against us.”
“It’s simply that Great-Uncle Tianyi and the elders didn’t have a chance to reason with them. Once they’ve cooled down, I will have a little chat with them!”
Old Tree and Li Changyao exchanged a glance. Immediately, they used the rope to bind the three of them together and applied the seal.
Old Tree transformed into his true form and swallowed the three of them whole.
At this moment.
In the clouds, a dozen spirit boats were advancing slowly, heading from the Imperial Capital toward the direction of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems.
Zhao Guang sat on the spirit boat, his brow furrowed in worry.
Suddenly, a dark shadow approached from the clouds above and descended onto the deck of the spirit boat.
“Caw!”
As the crow—pitch-black as ink—cawed and fixed its jet-black eyes upon him, Zhao Guang’s expression turned displeased. “Do you take me for a subordinate of your Li Clan?”
Over ten days ago, Li Yuanshang had sought him out and demanded the locations of every single member of the Grand Tower known to the Immortal Suppression Department.
He had even assigned Zhao Guang specific locations to lead the Department to arrest people from the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems and the Grand Tower, going so far as to dictate the sequence of the raids.
“Does he want me to help the Li Clan attack the Grand Tower just so they can swoop in and reap the benefits from the shadows?”
Zhao Guang sneered.
“Despicable to the extreme. Relying solely on the strength of your Azure Cloud Li Clan, even if you obtained benefits, how could you possibly hold onto them? These are the antics of a buffoon, serving only to make people laugh.”
He simply didn’t spare another glance at the Dark Crow.
Although he was desperate to extend his lifespan, he, Zhao Guang, was not someone the mere Li Clan could order around.
The Azure Cloud Li Clan had a loud reputation, but they were actually nothing special.
If they truly wanted to secure a foothold in the Imperial Capital, even if the Li clansmen were exceptionally gifted, they were still several thousand years too early!
“Commander.”
A subordinate of the Immortal Suppression Department entered the cabin of the spirit boat and spoke respectfully. “We have arrived at the location of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems.”
“Mn.”
Zhao Guang gave a slight nod and stepped out of the spirit boat.
The moment he arrived, his brows knit together tightly.
The aura in the clouds was terrifyingly violent—containing both Buddhist Dharma and a grim energy of death.
This was the lingering might left behind by a great battle between Integration Realm cultivators, rendering the air around the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems stiflingly oppressive.
“Reporting to the Commander: Holy Monk Yidian battled the True God of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems for seven days. Both sides eventually withdrew. Holy Monk Yidian merely remarked, ‘Impressive skill,’ before returning to the Imperial Capital.”
Upon hearing the subordinate’s report, Zhao Guang let out a scoff.
He had known Holy Monk Yidian for a long time. That old bald donkey had always been willful and acted on impulses, never taking anyone else seriously.
“With a temperament like that, sooner or later, he will reap what he sows.”
Saying no more, Zhao Guang headed toward the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems. As he approached, his face darkened.
The battle at the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems was far more brutal than his intelligence reports had indicated.
The underground Inverted Mountain had completely sunk; the rock formations of the vast subterranean world had collapsed, causing the center of the grasslands to cave in and form a basin.
Blood and gore from the “Mountain of Corpses and Sea of Blood” within the mountain seeped through the soil and rock, filling the sky with a pungent, foul stench.
The lingering shockwaves from the cultivators’ battle rendered the spiritual pressure over the entire ruin extremely oppressive.
This state of devastation would likely persist for the next thousand, or even ten thousand, years.
“Have you started the excavation?” Zhao Guang asked his subordinate.
The subordinate looked hesitant, pondering for a moment before replying,
“Reporting to the Commander, we… we excavated. I arrived three days ago and used evasion techniques to tunnel into the ruins of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems, but… but there wasn’t a single corpse inside!”
“What?” Zhao Guang’s expression shifted. “Did all the people of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems flee?”
The members of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems were skilled in stitching corpses; only they would take the bodies away!
“No.” The cultivator from the Immortal Suppression Department looked bewildered.
“I have questioned the survivors. When the members of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems fled, they had absolutely no time to look after others. Thirty percent of their cultivators lie buried forever underground.
Many powerful experts perished within—Ling Xu, Zhen Wu, He Hao, Li Dalong… none of them survived, nor could they have escaped from the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems.”
“Wait!”
Zhao Guang opened his mouth, hesitating as if to speak, but stopped.
He filtered the question he was about to blurt out before finally asking, “Who killed them? Is there absolute certainty that they all lost their lives?”
“The great battle within the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems was complex. We know very little about the specific details of the combat. Who killed whom cannot be determined.”
The cultivator from the Immortal Suppression Department spoke gravely.
“However, the one thing we can be certain of is that both Zhen Wu and He Hao were members of the Grand Tower. Our men had already withdrawn from the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems, yet those two died.”
“Our spies are certain of what they perceived: He Hao had managed to shuttle out of the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems, but it seemed as though something was hunting him down.
He was struck out of the Void Refining Dimension and crashed to the ground. At that moment, his life force was already completely severed. Yet, when our men went to search for his corpse, it had vanished.
We have already sent a transmission to inquire with the Eternal Ancient Immortal Sect. Their reply was that every single member of the Eternal Ancient Immortal Sect sent on this mission has perished in battle!”
“At the time of He Hao’s death, a great battle was still raging within the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems. It was the fluctuation of Zhen Wu’s Spiritual power. Yet, once those fluctuations dissipated, Zhen Wu’s corpse was nowhere to be found; we only found the final wisp of Void Refining Qi he left behind in his dying moments.
The corpses of other cultivators vanished at the same time. Therefore, we can infer that the two of them died at the hands of different people.”
“….”
As the cultivator spoke, he noticed Zhao Guang’s stunned expression and couldn’t help but call out to him a few times.
Only then did Zhao Guang come back to his senses. “It’s nothing. You may withdraw.”
“Absolutely impossible!”
Zhao Guang’s expression darkened slightly.
Those Dark Crows from the Azure Cloud Li Clan had visited him earlier, specifically to delay his arrival at the scene.
Zhao Guang had formed some half-baked conjectures, but after thinking them through, he actually let out a self-deprecating laugh.
“Li Dalong and Li Yaozu of the Azure Cloud Li Clan… even if you add the Li Family Old Ancestor and the other three Void Refining cultivators of Azure Cloud Prefecture—given their abilities, how could they possibly have killed He Hao and Zhen Wu?”
Immediately, the spirit boat departed once more.
On the ground below, one could still discern the faint semblance of what were once mountain ridges. However, having undergone an earth-shattering cataclysm, traces of Spiritual power still lingered.
It was unclear what manner of great battle had taken place, but it had caused the earth to crack open, turning the mountains into a landscape riddled with rift valleys!
“From the nearest city, the Region Prince has reported back that a great battle took place here five days ago!”
“Based on intelligence brought back by the local Nascent Soul cultivators, we surmise that over three hundred people were present here—they were members of the Grand Tower.
They intercepted an expert, but we do not know exactly what transpired.
Thirty percent of those three hundred cultivators fled in panic from the Void Refining Dimension, only to be hunted down.”
“Unfortunately, all traces of their battle have been wiped clean by designing minds.
Even Diviners cannot calculate anything definitive; a high-level expert has shielded the Heavenly Secrets.”
“The only thing we can perceive from the Spiritual Qi of heaven and earth is that perhaps close to ten Void Refining cultivators engaged in a great battle here…”
The subordinate from the Immortal Suppression Department wore a grave expression.
“An unknown, powerful faction is hunting down the Grand Tower just as we are, and they are one step ahead of us at every turn.”
“A spy has appeared in our ranks. I beg you, Commander, grant me a few days’ grace. Once I drag this bastard out into the light, I will make his nine generations weep in grief!”
“….”
Zhao Guang couldn’t be bothered to care about exterminating nine generations right now.
His face was as dark as charcoal ash.
He turned around, returned to his room, and picked up the Dark Crow. If the Mountain of Esoteric Stratagems could be called a coincidence, then what about this?
“What the f…”
Sure enough, the Dark Crow was telling him not to bother going to the locations of the other Grand Tower members anymore, but instead to meet at the Grand Tower’s headquarters!
But…
The Immortal Suppression Department had been investigating for over a hundred years, yet they had never managed to find the location of the Grand Tower’s headquarters!
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