Chapter 107

Chapter 107: Who Wants Her Dead

A prickle of mortal danger crawled up his spine and he hissed: “Something’s wrong.” Just as the saber was about to punch into his back, an earthen wall surged up—the Earth attribute answered his will and blocked the blow. Relief had barely loosened his chest when, catching the edge of a shadow in his peripheral vision, his heart seized again. Where was Rong Shu?

A clear voice whispered at his back like a ghost: “Looking for me?”

The wall had shielded the man, but the shadow it cast upon the ground had become his death. Rong Shu stepped out of that darkness and drove the left-hand saber into his heart from behind. Wild-eyed, he gasped: “You… when did—” She pulled the bloody blade free, then cleanly took his head. He never finished his question; breath fled and life with it.

Rong Shu plucked her other saber from the earthen wall and swept her gaze over the three bodies. With a flick of telekinesis, she drew off each of their Storage Pouches. She snapped her fingers and flames bloomed, consuming the corpses until only ash remained. Then she sent a wave of water to wash the ground clean, and finally a gust of wind to dry it.

Only after all of this did she let herself exhale and sit down hard. Folding her legs beneath her, she immediately swallowed three Spirit Gathering Pills and settled into meditation to replenish her spent qi.

Outwardly it looked as if she had crushed three cultivators of the same realm. In truth, she knew she had held sizable advantages.

[First, I struck preemptively. Second, there was an information gap about my cultivation level and true strength. Third, I used Dark-attribute arts that ordinary outer sect disciples might never have seen.]

[But there were plenty of risks. If the three of them had not underestimated me and had swarmed at the outset… if this formation had been not just an imprisoning array but a killing array… if the ones sent to kill me had been Foundation Establishment Stage—or even Golden Core Stage—rather than Qi Refining tenth level…]

[Too slow. I could not kill three people at once, so I had to pick them off one by one; the last one even required psychological pressure. If the first two had not died so quickly, if my dark arts and saber work had not caught them off guard, if his mentality had been steadier and he had not rattled…]

[Conclusion: Luck +5. Hidden strength day-to-day +3. Tactics +2. In short, I am still not strong enough. Keep cultivating. Keep lying low.]

An hour later, right on cue, the formation ended on its own. Rong Shu had intended to retrieve the Formation Disc, only to discover it was a single-use consumable—spent and ruined. Confirming that it could no longer be used, she felt a pang of regret. A traveler’s essential, gone just like that. She sighed, tucked the broken Formation Disc into the Han Chuan Cosmos Pearl, and decided to ask Senior Brother Lin Dao what formation it had been the next time she saw him.

Stepping out of the formation, Rong Shu stood on a street thronged with people as if nothing had happened. Above her, the sun shone bright. Its warm light spread over her, comforting and dispelling a measure of the chill in her chest. She opened and closed her hands a few times, trying to still the tremor that lingered in her fingers. Senior Brother Lin Dao had once said that in the cultivation world, sooner or later everyone’s hands are stained with blood: if your hands do not stain others, then wait for others’ hands to stain you. Do not fear, do not shrink; if others come to kill you, you can kill in return. So long as you are without shame before your heart and the heavens.

She drew a few slow breaths; calm returned by degrees, and she turned toward the city gate. She did not go to look for Fu Yong Kang. Since she had been the target, and Fu Yong Kang was covered head to toe in precious treasure for saving his skin, he had likely only been deliberately shaken off and would not be in real danger. What concerned her was the possibility of further hands in the dark; she needed to leave the city at once.

Thus it was that four or five had set out, and but one person and one shadow returned.

On the road back, Rong Shu turned one question over and over: who wanted her dead?

Before joining the sect, she had stayed within her clan and rarely clashed with kin. It made no sense that they would sit on their hands for years and then, only after she entered the sect, hire blades to kill her. Which meant the enemy had likely been made during her first year in the sect.

Her routine in the sect ran between two or three fixed points, and she met few people. Even so, on reflection, several were suspect. Feng Lin, who threatened to kill her the first time they met, led the list. After she and Cheng Bu Fan staged their little performance and stole a bit of the spotlight, there might be disciples who took a dislike to her. As the personal disciple of Immortal Venerable Ze Yu, with all the privileges and treatment that entailed, she could also have drawn envy. And there was another possibility: a Demonic Cultivator who learned in advance that Immortal Venerable Ze Yu’s personal disciple seemed thoroughly ordinary and chose the softest persimmon to pinch—kill her to provoke Heaven’s Evolution Sect.

But still… she recalled the words of the three senior brothers. Someone had promised them resources up to the Golden Core Stage, and had even produced a single-use formation to trap her—both to restrain her and to avoid alarming the sect elders within the city. And then there was the chain of events: the encounter with Sky Piercing Sect; Demonic Cultivators appearing at Black Wind Town; the sect elders deciding to split forces, sending Golden Core Stage and Foundation Establishment Stage disciples to eradicate the Demonic Cultivators; arranging for the Qi Refining Stage disciples to lodge in Maple Leaf City; the three unfamiliar senior brothers seeking her out, using a reason she could not courteously refuse to draw her into the city, while luring Fu Yong Kang away; and finally, blades bared and intent revealed. Each link nested within the next. Whoever orchestrated this could even sway the elders’ stance in small ways, and could freely approach and dispatch in-sect Qi Refining tenth-level disciples to do the killing.

A single name rose, clear and cold, in Rong Shu’s heart. The one most likely to have arranged all of this and to want her dead was only one person: Feng Lin.