MPCW Ch. 84
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9m
For several days after the jade slip demonstration, Mengyao kept hovering around Alexei like she had something to say but couldn't quite make herself say it. She wasn't subtle about it. Whenever he crossed the courtyard or came back from the base, she would show up somewhere nearby, watch him for a few seconds, and then suddenly find something else to look at as soon as he noticed.
Alexei had figured it out by the second day, but he didn't push her. Mengyao was working herself up to something, and forcing the issue before she was ready would only make her shut down. He wasn't going to spend half the day coaxing it out of her when she hadn't decided whether she wanted to talk in the first place, especially when he still had a Wither farm to finish.
---
The machine had taken the better part of four days to get right, mostly because the containment side kept developing new problems every time Alexei thought he'd solved the last one. The idea itself wasn't complicated. Soul sand went in, Withers came out, iron golems killed them, and Nether Stars landed in a collection chest. The hard part was making that happen repeatedly without the Wither escaping, destroying the mechanism, or leaving him with another crater to repair.
The final design had four main sections, though they flowed into each other more like one long process than four separate machines. It started with a small placement and collection area where he could feed soul sand into the system and retrieve the output from a chest at the end of the line. From there, the soul sand moved into the Wither generation device, where pistons pushed each block forward and guided them into the proper T formation before the dispensers placed the skulls on top. Once the body was in place, three dispensers connected to dedicated skull storage units placed the wither skeleton skulls on top and completed the summon.
The containment chamber came right after that, and it was the part he was proud of. Instead of letting the Wither form upright and then trying to trap it afterward, the machine forced it to spawn sideways. An End Portal Frame sat above the spawn point, forcing the Wither into the chamber before it could finish manifesting. There wasn't any fight to force it in, and there wasn't any window where it could hit the walls before the trap closed. It appeared already contained, which felt like cheating in the best possible way.
The fourth section was what he thought of as the cleanup crew, since the whole thing was just a steady rotation of iron golems being delivered into the chamber by a transport line. They were there to handle the killing, which suited him perfectly, because he didn't want to make a habit of standing next to three-headed undead creatures every time he needed materials.
Drops from both the Withers and the golems fell through the gaps in the End Portal Frame floor, where hopper minecarts ran beneath the setup and collected everything before feeding it through a line of hoppers into the output chest beside him. That part, at least, was clean. The Wither died, the golems died, the items dropped, and the machine gathered everything without him needing to walk into the chamber afterward.
The only part he still couldn't fully automate was keeping the soul sand input stocked. After spending most of an afternoon trying to get around that, he had settled for something that worked even if it wasn't elegant.
He built a separate restocking unit beside the placement point, connected it to the soul sand supply from his bartering farm, and let the incoming blocks collect inside a dropper. A lever-activated pulse circuit ejected one piece at a time onto a pressure plate, locking the dropper as soon as the item landed so the machine couldn't flood the floor with soul sand. Whenever he picked it up and fed it into the input, the plate released, the dropper fired again, and the next piece was ready.
The Nether Stars still weren't fully automatic, but all he had to do now was pull a lever, feed the input, and let the machine handle the rest.
Alexei rested his hand on the lever.
"Let's see what this thing's worth."
He pulled it.
Click.
The dropper started cycling, sending blocks onto the pressure plate. He picked them up as they came and slotted each one into the open space ahead, letting the first bank of pistons shove it forward while the second bank folded it into position. Every few seconds, a Wither blinked into existence only to be pushed sideways into the chamber before it could finish forming, leaving the golems on the other side to deal with it while the output chest filled.
After a while, he stopped thinking about each movement. He kept feeding the line by habit, letting the machine run through the same sequence again and again until, nearly an hour later, it ground to a halt. A quick check showed that the three skull dispensers had run dry, which meant the comparator downstream had done its job and triggered the piston that sealed off the soul sand channel.
The shutdown had worked as designed. Nothing had broken, and nothing had jammed in a way that worried him, but he still needed to walk back to the wither skeleton farm, restock the skulls, and reset the line before it could run again. He'd expected that, and he'd planned for it, but a planned interruption was still an interruption.
He walked over to the output chest and lifted the lid.
[Nether Star x68]
[Iron Ingot x1,204]
[Poppy x289]
68 Nether Stars in under an hour was worth being satisfied with, but the rest of the output was expected clutter. The twelve hundred iron ingots took up nineteen slots on their own, which might have been impressive if his golem farm in the villager district hadn't already been producing more iron than the base could use. Adding another pile to the stockpile didn't change anything except the size of the problem.
The poppies were worse, mostly because there wasn't even a practical excuse for them. 289 bright red flowers had ended up in the same chest as the Nether Stars, taking space that could have gone to something useful, and he only had to look at them for a few seconds before deciding they weren't staying.
He routed the iron and poppies into the same disposal system he used for every other surplus item. The sorting line pulled them out of the main chest, fed them through a dropper chain, and dumped them straight into lava. The problem disappeared without noise, mess, or anything else for him to deal with.
The Nether Stars went through a separate line. They moved out of the collection chest, passed through a water channel, and rose through a bubble column into the dedicated storage chests on the level above. He watched the filters until he was sure they were only catching what they were supposed to catch, then sealed the machinery back into the wall and left the soul sand placement point exposed for the next run.
Running the cage every few days should cover his needs for now. He didn't have much use for Nether Stars yet, aside from acceleration torches and a few enhancement recipes, and he couldn't justify burning through wither skeleton skulls faster than his stockpile could recover.
He wasn't going to use Nether Stars on hostile mobs. He'd considered it, but only until he remembered that every mob farm he'd built depended on the monsters inside staying within the limits of the collection systems. Making them stronger would only turn his own infrastructure into a problem, and buffing the creatures that fed his economy sounded like the kind of clever idea that broke more than it fixed.
So he tested them on safer targets instead. Over the next two days, he fused a single Nether Star into a handful of villagers, another into the bees, and another into one of the snow golems he kept around for experiments. The changes showed up quickly. The villagers started making better trading decisions without him needing to guide them, the bees moved through the farm layout with less useless wandering, and the snow golem's health jumped from four hit points to twelve.
That last result was useful, but it also left him with another question. The increase could be a flat bonus, or it could be some kind of multiplier, and he hadn't run enough trials to know which. He put it on the list for later, then went to see whether Mengyao had worked up the nerve to ask whatever she'd been circling for most of the week.
---
Alexei found Mengyao near the courtyard gate, which wasn't surprising. She'd been showing up there with suspicious regularity lately, always positioned somewhere along his route while pretending she wasn't waiting for him.
She was doing it again today. She stood near the gate with her attention on him, but as soon as Alexei glanced over, she turned toward the wall.
He stopped walking and looked at her for a few seconds before saying, "If you have something to say, just say it. We aren't strangers. And I'm quite nice to kids. I even give them candy."
Mengyao's expression went blank for a second, and Alexei heard how that sounded.
"Forget that last part. I feel like a creep now."
That got a small laugh out of her, and some of the tension left her shoulders.
"It isn't urgent," she said, glancing away once before making herself continue. "I was wondering if you had a way to turn cultivation manuals and jade slips into something like the three you gave me before."
Alexei raised an eyebrow. "You mean the three technique slips? You want me to convert other slips the same way?"
"Mm." She nodded quickly.
"That part is straightforward," Alexei said after thinking it over. "Ordinary jade slips can be converted directly. Manuals are different because they're written on the wrong material. They'd need to be copied onto Bright Spirit Jade first, since that's what the technique slips use. Once the contents are on the jade, the conversion should work the same way."
Mengyao's eyes brightened as soon as she realized she knew something useful.
"I know where there's a Bright Spirit Jade vein!"
The words came out too quickly, and she understood the problem almost as soon as she said them. Her hands flew up to cover her mouth, but that didn't take the words back. A seven-year-old girl shouldn't know the location of an undiscovered jade vein.
She watched Alexei's face, already trying to think of an explanation that wouldn't sound absurd if he asked how she knew. Thankfully, he didn't seem to find it strange. He only looked at her as if he were waiting for the rest, and after several seconds of uncomfortable silence, she lowered her hands and let herself breathe again.
The vein she was thinking of hadn't been discovered in her previous life until more than thirty years later, and she only remembered it so clearly because of how much trouble it had caused. Several large families in the region had fought over the mining rights, and the dispute had escalated so far that the Immortal Alliance had to step in before it turned into a full clan war. Under Alliance mediation, the families were forced to develop the vein together and divide the output between them through some complicated agreement outsiders never fully understood.
That should have been the end of it, but once mining began, everyone found out that the famous Bright Spirit Jade vein wasn't much of a vein at all. It was only a thin layer near the surface, with almost nothing underneath, and after a few days of mining the deposit was already exhausted. Every family involved had spent more fighting for a share than they ever recovered from the mine itself.
She had always remembered the story because it said more about cultivator families than any lecture could. Before fighting over a treasure, it was better to check whether the treasure was worth the cost.
---
Verdantree City, hall of the Verdantree Alchemy Alliance.
A group of elderly alchemists stood around a stone platform, each with an alchemist's badge pinned to his robe and very little patience left on his face. At the center of the platform sat a golden fruit.
Since the Immortal Alliance had brought it back from the ancient realm, the fruit had been cut, scraped, soaked, burned, frozen, and struck with a workshop's worth of tools. Someone had even tried a drill, which had snapped clean in half and sent three assistants diving for cover. Array inscriptions flickered across the platform at irregular intervals, still recording data, though none of it had helped anyone understand what the fruit was.
After five days, the only conclusion anyone had reached was that the fruit didn't care what they did to it.
"Elder Fang." A young man in embroidered robes cleared his throat. "Perhaps someone could try... biting it?"
Every head in the room turned toward him.
They had already tried knives, axes, alchemical solvents, refining flames, and a top-grade Earth-tier spirit sword that could supposedly part stone like silk. None of them had left so much as a scratch. If the fruit hadn't been giving off that faint, maddening sweetness, half the alchemists present would have insisted it wasn't a spirit fruit at all, but a very convincing golden rock.
"You go bite it, then." Elder Fang didn't bother hiding his exasperation.
"What? Me?" The young man froze as his confidence abandoned him. Now that the job had landed on him, he understood that putting his teeth on a mysterious golden fruit wasn't nearly as clever as it had sounded in his head.
What if it was poisonous? Then again, poison might not even be the worst problem. The fruit had been sitting there for days without rotting, softening, or reacting to anything they did to it, so the real question was whether his teeth would survive.
"Do I really have to bite it?" he asked, though he already knew the answer and was only trying to steal a few more seconds.
"Bite the thing already," another elder snapped. "Stop dragging your feet."
With every elder in the room staring at him, the young man bent down and pressed his teeth against the golden fruit with as much courage as he could gather, which wasn't much. He expected the hard resistance of stone, but his teeth sank in with the soft give of a ripe peach, and sweet juice flooded his mouth before he could stop himself from tasting it.
Warmth spread through him before he even swallowed. The exhaustion from sleepless days of staring at the fruit faded so quickly that he almost couldn't remember how heavy his body had felt, and thin spirals of golden mist began rising from his skin.
Several elders straightened at once. "What in the..."
The young man barely heard them. His fear had vanished along with his exhaustion, and with the taste still lingering on his tongue, he leaned forward for another bite before anyone could tell him not to.
The nearest elder moved first. Despite wearing robes far too fine for someone who had apparently decided that kicking was the correct response, he planted his foot in the young man's side and sent him sprawling across the floor.
The elder ignored the young man and bent over the fruit himself, inspecting the bite mark. A faint sheen of saliva clung to the exposed flesh, but beneath it, the fruit was still as bright and golden as before.
He turned his glare on the young man, who was still picking himself up from the floor and trying to brush the dust from his robes. A treasure this rare had been placed in front of them, and this idiot had taken such a large bite out of it that he might as well have been eating an ordinary fruit from a market stall. At this rate, he could finish the entire thing before any of them had time to properly study it.
"Huh? It doesn't hurt?" the young man asked as he straightened his robes and looked down at himself. "I don't feel anything."
The elder's eyes narrowed as the mist continued rising from the young man's body.
"Are you saying I should've kicked harder?"
"No, no," the young man said quickly, rubbing the back of his head. "You misunderstood. I mean it literally. I don't feel anything strange, and I can't feel the pain from the kick either."
Elder Fang had no interest in discussing whether the kick had been too light, so he flipped a jade box upside down over the fruit and sealed it from view before looking back at him. "How do you feel right now? Be specific."
The other elders came back to themselves and turned toward the young man as he flexed his hand, curled his fingers into a fist, and checked his own condition.
"I feel really comfortable," he said after thinking it through.
The room went quiet, but only for a few seconds. Then one of the elders narrowed his eyes and stepped closer, and that seemed to be all the permission the others needed.
The elders crowded around him at once, hands reaching for his arms, chest, shoulders, and face as they searched for anything that might explain what they had just seen. The young man could only stand there and let it happen. By the time the third elder had grabbed his wrist and the fourth had pressed a palm against his chest, he had already accepted that whatever dignity he had brought into the room wasn't leaving with him. Being poked and squeezed by a pack of old alchemists wasn't an experience he had ever expected to have, and he couldn't imagine it doing anything good for his reputation in the Alliance.
"His body doesn't look any different," one elder muttered as he felt along the young man's arm. His hand slowed, then stopped. "Hold on."
The other elders crowded closer as his expression changed. "Something is healing him. There's old damage inside his body, but it's closing up while we're standing here."
"Someone bring a knife," Elder Fang said.
The young man's body went stiff at once, which unfortunately did nothing to stop the elders from continuing their examination. Before he could decide whether Elder Fang had meant that literally, steel slid out of a scabbard behind him, and through the gap between two elders, he saw a girl step forward and place a longsword into Elder Fang's waiting hand.
The old alchemist took the weapon out of reflex, only to pause when he felt the weight of it in his hand. He looked at the longsword, then at the girl who had offered it to him.
He had wanted a knife for a shallow cut, not a weapon better suited to taking off the whole hand. Still, everyone was watching, and handing it back now would make the situation more awkward than simply using it.
So he turned to the young man and held out his free hand.
"Hand."
The young man stared at him.
"What?"
"Give me your hand."
The other elders stepped back, and the young man noticed their sudden concern for personal safety. His hand was already shaking by the time he held it out.
The young man's hand trembled as Elder Fang held the sword two inches from his palm. Elder Fang's sour expression made it worse, but it was the blade that kept his body stiff and his breath shallow. He glanced past the old man toward the girl standing behind him, and the resentment in his eyes had already turned into something closer to betrayal.
Since dodging wasn't an option, he closed his eyes and forced himself to stay still as everyone in the room watched Elder Fang lower the sword. The blade touched the center of his palm and slid lightly across his skin.
But nothing happened.
Elder Fang looked down at the unbroken skin with a frown. That couldn't be right. The young man was only at peak Foundation Establishment, and the sword in his hand was a Profound-tier blade. Even if the edge wasn't perfect, it should've been more than sharp enough to cut flesh.
His expression darkened, and he pressed harder before drawing the blade across the same spot again. The result didn't change. There wasn't even a thin red mark on the young man's palm.
The young man kept his eyes shut the whole time. He hadn't felt either cut, but that only made the waiting worse. At least pain would've told him what was happening. Without it, he was left standing there while Elder Fang tested him again and again, until one clean slash started to seem better than the slow torture of not knowing what the old man would try next.
"Hold the edge yourself. I refuse to believe this."
Someone guided his hand toward something cold and thin. The second his fingers closed around the blade, every hair on the back of his hand stood up.
"Wait, I..."
His eyes snapped open just as Elder Fang pulled the sword free. The metal hissed across his skin, and his mind braced for pain before he could stop himself, but when he looked down, his palm hadn't even been scratched.
The elders pushed in around his hand at once, clicking their tongues and muttering as they checked it from several angles. Until now, they had assumed Elder Fang's first two attempts failed because he hadn't found the right way to cut him, but there was only so much they could blame on technique after watching the sword slide over his skin without leaving a mark.
If the fruit was responsible, then it wasn't just healing him. It had strengthened his body to the point that an ordinary blade couldn't cut him at all, which made the thing far more valuable than a simple recovery treasure, even if moving it required an absurd amount of effort.
That thought made several of the elders look back toward the fruit.
It needed four early-stage Nascent Soul cultivators working together just to lift it off the ground, so anything that had been eating it before couldn't have been normal.
A few of the elders exchanged glances, and their expressions turned uneasy.
Rumors had been circulating through Verdantree for the past several weeks, usually passed around in lowered voices over tea by cultivators who didn't want to sound paranoid but couldn't quite bring themselves to ignore what they'd heard. The details changed from person to person, but the warning at the center of every version stayed the same. If one of the boar-faced demons wasn't carrying a weapon, then whatever else a cultivator did, they shouldn't let it land a punch.
The story that spread the farthest involved a Nascent Soul body cultivator who'd taken a single unarmed hit and been launched nearly a hundred meters before crashing down with only a thread of life left in him. He'd only survived because his luck had been absurd. He'd landed within reach of a passing healer, he'd been wearing a protective charm, and he'd still managed to bring up his bound treasure in time to blunt part of the force. Without all three, no one thought he would've lived.
That alone would've made the warning worth taking seriously, but the reports only got worse from there. The punch was said to have hit harder than the strongest technique of a Tribulation Transcendence cultivator, and even the shockwave had swept thirty to fifty meters out from the point of impact. No one in Verdantree had been eager to test whether those numbers were exaggerated, partly because the city didn't have a Tribulation Transcendence cultivator to waste on an experiment, and partly because asking anyone below that level to stand in front of the demon sounded less like research and more like arranging their funeral.
A Dharma Aspect cultivator might have survived through sheer overkill, but Verdantree didn't have one of those either, and the nearby sects probably wouldn't lend theirs out for something as stupid as testing a demon's punch. With no one willing to provide a high-level cultivator as a target, the rumor remained untested. In the meantime, everyone with sense treated it as fact.
These days, cultivators who ran into boar-demons in the wild didn't approach them with the same confidence they used to have. Most kept their distance as soon as they spotted one, because the stories had already spread far and wide. No one wanted to be the unlucky fool who assumed an unarmed boar-demon was harmless, only for it to come charging out of nowhere and land two punches before anyone could react. By then, having enough of the body left to bury would already be considered good fortune.
Because of that, a strange theory had begun spreading through the region. The longswords those creatures carried might not have been proper weapons at all, but restraints or binding tools used to keep them under control. It sounded ridiculous at first, yet the more people talked about it, the harder it became to dismiss. After all, no one could come up with a better explanation for why the same creature seemed more dangerous with empty hands than with a sword.
Now that a golden fruit had been found inside the ruins of that very creature's broken city, the theory started to feel less like wild speculation and more like something none of them wanted to be true.
A short round of follow-up testing confirmed what the alchemists had already started to suspect. No matter what method they used, cutting the young man open was somewhere between difficult and impossible.
Blunt force produced slightly better results, though not in the way they wanted. A solid hit could send him stumbling, and a heavier one could still knock him flat, but the impact never left any damage beneath the skin.
"Hit harder," the young man said, quickly taking another bite from the golden fruit. "What, did you skip breakfast?"
The girl standing nearby heard that, closed her hand into a fist, and stepped forward as spiritual energy gathered around her knuckles. Sparks of fire flickered through the glow, mixed with the tight pressure of compressed wind, and before anyone could tell her to stop, she drove her fist straight into his stomach.
"That wouldn't even scratch an itch, holy..."
His voice cut off as pain tore through his abdomen and sour bile surged up the back of his throat. Before he could make sense of what had happened, the impact lifted him off his feet and sent him flying four or five meters across the room.
WHUMP.
He hit the ground face-first, folded at an awkward angle, with drool already spreading beneath his cheek.
One of the elders leaned over him. "Either the defensive effect failed, or there is a threshold of force it can't stop."
Nobody rushed over out of concern. The alchemists only crowded closer, treating his pain as another useful result while they checked his stomach and felt along his pulse points.
Somewhere in the middle of the examination, one of the alchemists sliced a small fresh cut into his finger. Under normal circumstances, the young man might have complained, but the pain in his gut had him close to convulsing by then, so the sting was almost lost beneath it.
The examination went on for nearly half an hour before they were satisfied. By the end of it, they had confirmed that every bit of old internal damage in the young man's body had been healed by the fruit. That matched what they had already seen in the earlier tests, where the recovery effect lasted for roughly thirty breaths before fading, while the faint golden mist remained a little longer before burning away. Aside from whatever improvement had been left in his flesh, every other effect from the fruit seemed temporary.
Once they finished with the young man, the elders returned their attention to the fruit itself. The bite mark on its surface was impossible to ignore, and seeing it again made their headache return in full. They had already spent a good portion of the past hour testing the exposed wound, hoping the missing chunk would make the fruit easier to work with, but nothing they tried made any difference. Knives slid off, fire did nothing, and even a focused blast of spiritual energy only warmed the surface a little.
As far as they could tell, the fruit could only be damaged by a human bite, which was such an weird property that none of them had any idea what to do with it. Even with decades of alchemical research between them, none of the elders had ever encountered anything remotely similar.
---
High above the Demonbeast Forest, Mengyao sat behind Alexei on the flying sword with one hand gripping the back of his robe for balance, watching the forest pass beneath them as they followed the pull of the spiritual energy.
The trip hadn't seemed dangerous, so they hadn't treated it like anything serious. They had told Yan and Qingxue where they were going, received a simple nod in return, and left without anyone stopping them. That should have been the end of it, but Mengyao couldn't quite shake the feeling that the two of them were somewhere nearby, keeping watch from a distance. It would fit their masters' usual caution whenever the Demonbeast Forest was involved, and Qingxue didn't seem like someone who would let Alexei wander into monster territory without at least making sure he had a way out.
She could have been overthinking it. The strange part was that a Bright Spirit Jade vein inside monster territory should have gotten some kind of reaction from them, but neither senior cultivator had looked surprised. They hadn't asked how she knew where to look or why she was so sure it was there. They had let her and Alexei leave the mountain, which made the whole thing feel less like permission and more like they already knew something she didn't.
As the spiritual energy in the air grew thicker, Mengyao narrowed her eyes and scanned the forest below until she found the direction where the sensation felt strongest.
"The spiritual energy is getting denser around here," she said, leaning to one side so she could point past him. "We should be close. Head that way."
Her memory of the place wasn't clear anymore, mostly because too many years had passed since she'd last had a reason to think about it. Those years technically hadn't happened yet in this life, but that didn't make the memory any fresher. If the dispute between those cultivation families hadn't turned into such a disaster back then, dragging on for years and ending in a way no one expected, she probably couldn't have remembered the location at all.
Bright Spirit Jade hadn't been part of her plans this time around, since she had no use for it. Only the top cultivation clans cared about the material, using it for inheritance slips and technique slips as casually as ordinary cultivators used paper. For everyone else, storing knowledge in jade was too expensive, no matter how stable or convenient it was.
The only reason this deposit was special was because of where it had formed. It sat at the center of a natural spirit-gathering formation, more than ten meters underground and sealed inside solid rock, so almost none of its spiritual energy reached the surface. The trace that did leak out was so faint that most cultivators would walk straight over it without noticing anything, unless they had the senses of a Nascent Soul expert or were specifically searching for something hidden below.
"What's that down there?" Alexei tilted his head.
Something flashed far below. Mengyao opened her eyes when she noticed his focus shift, then followed his gaze toward the ground.
"Looks like somebody's trying to murder somebody else over loot," Alexei said, already grinning. "Or maybe not. Wanna get a closer look?"
"Why would we want to watch that?"
Alexei had already begun lowering the sword before she finished speaking, and by the time she got the whole question out, they were only seventy or eighty meters above the conflict. The people below didn't seem to notice them, too focused on each other to spare any attention for the sky.
There were five people on one side and three on the other. The five wore matching robes. Across from them, a road-worn, middle-aged cultivator stood with a man and a woman who looked to be in their early twenties. Both were bleeding, and from the way they held themselves, the wounds had cost them more than a little blood.
Their robes didn't match the attackers', so they probably belonged to another sect.
"Can't hear a damn thing from up here," Alexei muttered, lowering the sword another twenty meters.
"Members of the Treasurefall Sect," the middle-aged man called out once his voice could finally reach them. He tried to sound steady, but the chase had drained him too badly to hide the strain. "Think carefully before you make a mistake you can't undo. The Skyborne Sect ranks above most second-tier sects. If we retaliate, the consequences won't end just because you got what you wanted today."
The warning would've sounded more convincing if he hadn't been struggling to stand. His spiritual energy was nearly spent, and the two disciples behind him were in even worse condition, breathing hard with torn robes and pale faces after being forced to run and fight at the same time.
One of the Treasurefall cultivators laughed as the formation tightened around them. "This place is nowhere. If we kill the three of you here, who's going to come asking questions?"
The Skyborne cultivator's face tightened as he understood what the man was saying.
Something about this ambush had been wrong from the start, and the longer it went on, the more certain he became that the problem came from inside Skyborne.
A late-stage Nascent Soul escort shouldn't have run into this much trouble while protecting two promising disciples. The Demonbeast Forest was dangerous, but this ambush was far too precise to be a coincidence. They'd been inside the forest for less than an hour when Treasurefall cultivators appeared with two mid-stage Nascent Soul fighters and three peak Core Formation backups. Worse, they knew what treasures the disciples carried and how the two preferred to fight.
Luck couldn't explain preparation this thorough. Someone had leaked the route, the target, the disciples' treasures, and how they fought. Without help from the inside, Treasurefall couldn't have prepared counters this precise. If Skyborne didn't have a traitor somewhere in its own ranks, he would eat his boots.
Unfortunately, he already had a suspect. If both disciples died out here, there was one person who stood to gain the most.
The Ji family's brat had every reason to do it. He wanted the Young Sect Master position, hated that he was losing ground, and had the clan's money behind him. Hiring this many people wouldn't drain their treasury, but the more he thought about it, the worse his expression became.
The Ji family called themselves second-tier nobility, but everyone knew they were stuck near the bottom of that bracket. Even so, they still had the nerve to stretch their hands this far into Skyborne's business.
Did they really think arranging murders would push their family up a rung? Once he made it home, this was going straight to the Sect Master. If the accusation held up under scrutiny, the Ji boy's entire branch wouldn't survive the fallout.
"You bastards," the male Skyborne disciple snapped. "Just because you outnumber us doesn't mean you can do whatever you want!"
The two mid-stage Nascent Soul cultivators from Treasurefall looked at each other before they burst out laughing.
"Sorry, kid," one of them said, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye. "Strength means we can do whatever we want."
The rest of the Treasurefall disciples joined in right after him, laughing and looking at each other.
Alexei nearly choked.
It wasn't even that the line was clever. The delivery, the timing, and the smug confidence behind it all belonged in a cliche isekai scene, with back-alley thugs cornering the protagonist and saying something predictable before getting wiped out. Hearing these cultivators say it with completely serious faces only made it harder to take seriously.
He tried to keep a straight face, but the laugh slipped out as a snort.