"Strange. Where did he go?" As their injuries slowly mended, the four searched the area but could find no trace of Li Fan.
"Could it be that he exhausted himself with that strike and, knowing he was outmatched, withdrew first?"
Confusion flickered across the faces of the black-robed Five Elders Council cultivators.
"Judging by the power of that palm strike, it's entirely possible. A single blow nearly shattered our grotto-heaven domains. No matter how strong he is, unleashing a divine ability like that must incur significant backlash."
"Not necessarily. Ancient cultivators excel in battle. Li Fan was clearly holding back before."
"Regardless, caution first. Let's break this array!"
Exchanging a glance, the four joined forces and turned their attacks on the Light-Splitting Dragon-Trapping Array Li Fan had laid down.
Without a cultivator controlling it, the array's once-impregnable defenses had grown brittle and frail.
The massive golden bowl trembled violently.
Heartened, the four pressed harder, striking with greater frequency.
When the Dragon-Trapping Array finally shattered under their onslaught, golden light drifted down from above like rain, refracting around them in dazzling rays.
Bathed in the glare, they instinctively narrowed their eyes.
"Careful!"
The lead cultivator's warning rang out sharply.
Before his voice had faded, portions of the drifting golden light detonated. Thunderous booms rang out in rapid succession, and terrifying energy erupted from each blast center, sweeping outward in all directions.
There were sixteen, seventeen sources of explosion in all, each disguised as a mote of golden light. Positioned on every side, they had the Five Elders Council cultivators completely surrounded.
"Sky-Rending Gilded Thunder?!"
Cries of fury and shock tore from their throats as the gilded specks transformed into rings of radiance and swallowed them whole.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Deafening explosions rolled ceaselessly across that stretch of sea.
When the smoke and dust finally cleared, four mangled, barely-intact grotto-heaven domains held the remnants of what had been human bodies. Slowly, agonizingly, flesh and bone began to knit themselves back together.
"How despicable..."
"I knew he hadn't gone far!"
Pale and shaken, they swept their surroundings with urgent gazes, yet found no sign of where Li Fan was hiding.
"Do not engage him further. Retreat!" the leader ground out through clenched teeth.
They withdrew their grotto-heaven manifestations and gave no thought to anything else, streaking toward the distant coast of Yongliang Province at the far edge of the Congyun Sea.
After a long stretch of flight, the coastline came into view, and still Li Fan did not reappear. He seemed to have abandoned the pursuit entirely.
The four of them finally breathed out in relief.
Yet as that relief settled, the memory of how close they had come to death left a nagging sense that something was wrong.
"C6... don't you think Li Fan was toying with us?"
The black-robed cultivator codenamed C6 was quiet for a moment before answering gravely. "As much as I hate to admit it, judging by what actually happened, it does seem peculiar.
"He could have finished us with the Gilded Thunder right after that palm strike. Instead, he waited until we had recovered our vital essence before acting again.
"It was as though he deliberately gave us a chance to catch our breath."
Another cultivator added, "We were gravely wounded. A simple follow-up would have ended us. Yet he didn't. He let us go.
"What does he want?"
The four exchanged glances, thoroughly baffled.
"Li Fan is an ancient cultivator who slumbered for millennia and only recently awakened," C6 said, after a moment's consideration. "Someone like him would have little reason to feel any allegiance to the Myriad Immortals Alliance."
"You mean..." The other three stirred with sudden interest.
"He guessed we are from the Five Elders Council and deliberately spared us to establish goodwill?"
"Highly likely."
"So that's it!"
"Does that mean we could recruit him? Bring him into the Five Elders Council?" C6's voice sharpened with a new idea.
"By the intelligence we've gathered, he was the first to deduce the prophecy of Tianxuan Soul-Locking, Xuanhuang unified. If we win him over, we wouldn't just offset the punishment for this mission's failure, we'd be making a major contribution."
Ambition stirred in all of them at those words.
But reason prevailed.
"Let's return and report first," the lead cultivator said.
"Agreed. This man is strange through and through. We cannot afford to be careless," another cultivator nodded.
C6 could not quite suppress a pang of regret. "His movements are erratic, and he appears and vanishes like a ghost. Tracking him will be no simple matter."
"True. If we hadn't been out on this mission and stumbled across him by chance, we'd likely have had no way to find him at all.
"He is a cultivator of the Heavenly Mechanisms Sect, proficient in divination. It's only natural that he can counteract and shield himself from divination arcane arts."
They spoke back and forth like this as Yongliang Province seemed to draw closer and closer.
Then, gradually, something about their surroundings began to feel wrong.
The coastline looked close enough to touch, yet no matter how long they flew, they remained suspended over the azure expanse of the Congyun Sea. Yongliang Province never came any nearer.
What chilled them further was that the distant shoreline, when they looked more carefully, appeared faintly blurred, less like a real place and more like... an illusion.
One by one, they slowed to a halt, their expressions darkening.
Then the lead cultivator's face drained of color. "This is bad. It's an illusion!"
"What?" The others froze, then cast frantic gazes around them.
The clouds, the wind, the sea—all of it had gone perfectly still. Then, like cracks spiderwebbing across a mirror, the world shattered with a roar.
And in their ears, they could still faintly hear the echoes of explosions. Their grotto-heavens were in a pitiful state. Their bodies were a bloody, mangled ruin, never having recovered at all!
Time had never moved. They were still locked in the instant Li Fan had struck them with the Sky-Rending Gilded Thunder.
"He took advantage of the moment our grotto-heaven domains were hit, when our spirits were dazed, and pulled us into the illusion!"
C6 finally understood, his voice dropping in stunned realization.
"Mastery of divinations, arrays, illusions...
"Truly worthy of an ancient cultivator."
The leader coughed roughly, jaw tight.
He tried to activate his grotto-heaven and draw in the surrounding spiritual qi. Despair hit him immediately. Their opponent had already laid down an array that reduced the entire area to a vacuum, stripped clean of spiritual qi. Every chance the Nascent Soul cultivators had to restore their bodies by drawing on their grotto-heavens had been cut off entirely.
"Impressive technique," he growled, glaring upward.
There, Li Fan was slowly taking shape in the air above them.
Truly a coincidence? Li Fan's brow furrowed faintly as he considered it.
With his abilities, he could have killed these four from the Five Elders Council long ago. The entire elaborate sequence had served one purpose: to use the Cloudwater Dream Illusion Art to extract the reason they had found him from their minds.
And the answer he had received was this seemingly absurd one.
He hesitated no longer. The Five Elements Annihilation Swords swept out in rapid succession. Grievously wounded as they were, the four Five Elders Council cultivators held on for only a moment before falling, one after another, dying beneath Li Fan's blades.
Above, the phenomena marking the deaths of cultivators manifested briefly, but Li Fan paid them no attention.
In the short time he had been occupied with the Five Elders Council cultivators, a powerful suction force had erupted without warning from the massive whirlpool on the seafloor. It had drawn Han Yi, still immobilized by the Insect Binding technique, down into the deep hole within the ruins below.
Providence...
Li Fan stood before the whirlpool, his gaze thoughtful.