Chapter 399

Chapter 400: In the Rain Curtain

The local fox named Ling Long said one sentence that made everyone fall silent, even Immortal Yuan Hao, who had seen every kind of storm in his long life, looked stunned for a while. After who knows how long, Irene raised her hand without thinking and poked Foxy’s tail; a sharp crackle popped from the fur, finally breaking the strange quiet.

Foxy jerked her tail back and came to herself, muttering as she rubbed it: “Hey, stop zapping me,” then she turned and stared at Ling Long as she asked, “Did you just say that immortal was called Yun Qing Zi?!”

Ling Long nodded and answered in a small voice, “Yes. That was what the voice called itself. My great granduncle and I both heard it.” [Did I say something wrong?]

Irene lifted a hand to stop her and spoke while frowning in thought: “So you and your great granduncle saw some Illusion Arts and heard a voice that said it was Yun Qing Zi, told you there was a ‘chance’ here, and then you came. But did he give any proof? You just believed it like that?”

Immortal Yuan Hao also nodded and said in a steady voice: “This does bring doubt. Why did you believe what appeared inside those Illusion Arts? Also, under what exact conditions did you see them?”

Ling Long’s face went blank and dazed. As she tried to recall, doubt rose in her eyes, and her words grew unsure: “We… suddenly saw the Illusion Arts and heard the voice one day. It was a few days ago? No… I don’t really remember. I don’t know why I believed it. Now that I think about it, it is strange. Back then my great granduncle and I set off without hesitating. I…”

Her voice trailed off. She looked more and more foggy, shaken in mind. Immortal Yuan Hao reacted at once, lifted a finger, and said softly: “Clear Mind.”

He did not raise his voice, but the two words seemed to carry supreme power. Countless layered, mighty seals of scripture shot straight into Ling Long’s mind. With a hollow boom, the Jade Faced Golden Fox girl woke from that polluted haze, and the mist that had covered her heart for days scattered at once. Her expression shifted several times, and the after-fear finally showed.

Watching the changes on the Golden Fox girl’s face, Immortal Yuan Hao knew his judgment was right.

“You were both contaminated by Yun Qing Zi’s will,” he said in a low tone. “Good thing we caught it early, and your great granduncle sensed danger at the key moment. Otherwise the two of you would likely have become ‘death assassins’ like those Black Robed Cultivators.”

Irene’s eyes widened as she asked, “So those people in black serve Yun Qing Zi because their minds got polluted like this?”

“It is hard to say ‘all,’ but from the looks of it, at least some of them are,” Immortal Yuan Hao replied, then turned to the red-clad girl before him. “Did you see Yun Qing Zi’s Illusion Arts at the Grand Void Spiritual Axis?”

“No, at Nethermoon,” Ling Long answered quickly.

“Close enough. Nethermoon is very near the Grand Void Spiritual Axis,” said Immortal Yuan Hao. “And the exact time? You truly cannot remember?”

“I can’t. Thinking back, these few days feel blurry. I spoke and acted fine, but it was like it wasn’t me who lived it,” said Ling Long as she scratched under her ear and kept trying to remember. Then she pressed her lips: “Ah, I think I recall something. My great granduncle and I were watching the news. A headline popped up saying… Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain temporarily sealed its mountain ward because of a large-scale mechanism failure.”

Zheng Zhi, who had been listening quietly, reacted first and said, “Then that was when the Demon Suppression Tower went wrong, right?”

“Yes,” Immortal Yuan Hao nodded, his look saying many pieces now fit. “That makes things line up.”

Ling Long blinked, still a little lost.

So Immortal Yuan Hao explained what had happened these days in the Grand Void Spiritual Axis, Nethermoon, and nearby-only what could be public, of course, and nothing about the secrets inside the Demon Suppression Tower.

The more Ling Long heard, the more shocked she was. At last she realized something and looked up at Immortal Yuan Hao with a dazed face as she asked, “Wait, who… are you all?”

“You finally thought to ask,” Immortal Yuan Hao said with a faint smile as he pointed to himself: “Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain, Yuan Hao.”

Ling Long blinked hard, trying to recall who “Yuan Hao” was.

After half a minute, she finally remembered that Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain probably had a sect leader…

“Oh,” the local fox clapped, her face cleared, and she neatly rolled her eyes up and fainted.

Irene sprang up and cried, “Hey! This fox just passed out!”

The scene turned messy at once. Foxy hurried to catch the falling Ling Long. Immortal Yuan Hao took a spirit pill from his sleeve, but Irene waved her hands and grumbled, “Why bother,” then hopped onto Ling Long and raised a crackling hand to shock her. A moment that should have brought her back only drove the poor Jade Faced Golden Fox into a deeper coma.

The place got lively like a construction site, full of the Hotel’s daily chaos.

Yet in all this flurry, Luna stood quietly in a corner, like an elegant doll carved from steel, watching the long curtain of rain outside the old factory. No one knew what moved inside her cold metal shell. After a good while, she seemed to sense something and lifted her head to look into a point in the sky.

…

Yu Sheng rose from muddy darkness and opened his eyes as he was about to return to the living world. On the border of life and death, he saw the edge of the Soul Wilderness under a pounding rain.

A golden-haired girl in bright armor stood in the rain with her twelve knights, waiting for him.

“You came to meet me again?” Yu Sheng smiled as his figure formed in an instant, landed on the open ground, and walked toward Luna and her Knight Order.

Luna spoke fast the moment they met: “The shorty is too noisy and full of trouble. Without you, no one can keep her in line. I figured it was better to wait here with the knights. I am on standby ‘outside.’ Irene zapped the local fox unconscious, then she panicked and started yelling. No one dared to touch her. Foxy brushed against Irene and howled.”

“Whoa, slow down,” Yu Sheng said with both hands up. He was used to Luna’s usual ten-seconds-three-words pace, so he needed a second to adjust each time he met her in this wilderness. “What do you mean she zapped the local fox? Why is she discharging all over? What’s the situation outside? Also, what’s with this rain? You know I died a bit suddenly this time.”

Luna paused, then chose not to say what she first thought-that most of your deaths are sudden-because she remembered this master had died twice by her hand and felt awkward. She cleared her throat and said, “The fight outside is over. That Hermitage Order priest is dead.”

Yu Sheng, calm a second ago, jolted and asked, “What? Dead? That guy was so hard to deal with. Did Immortal Yuan Hao make a move?”

“Irene killed him,” Luna said with a small helpless shrug.

Yu Sheng went blank. He stared and muttered, “Huh?”

“It was complicated. I didn’t catch it all. Right after you dropped, she was hit by lightning. It lasted about half a minute. Then she was charged up,” Luna said flatly, the kind of calm that comes from understanding the Hotel’s pace. “Then she fired a Light Cannon about two meters wide at the priest. It all happened too fast. She had no time to hold back. No one reacted in time. After that, the scene was very clean. We did not find a corpse.”

Yu Sheng thought for a moment and said, “Is there a chance that…”

Before he finished, Luna shook her head and said, “No.”

Yu Sheng froze, then sighed long: “So there is no live capture. Well, we cannot force it. A win is still good. He was a tough enemy.”

Luna nodded and then lifted her eyes to the rain that kept falling on the open land.

“The rain began when you ‘died,’” she said. “I thought you would know why.”

“Is that so?” Yu Sheng murmured. He held out his hand to touch the drops, his face thoughtful.

The rain cooled his skin for a moment but left no water. The grass bent in the fall of it and was soaked and then dry again in the blink of an eye. The soil under the blades stayed gray-black and never turned muddy.

This rain felt like Illusion Arts falling from another layer of reality, but not fully that. It interacted with the wilderness, yet only a little and only for a moment.

Yu Sheng frowned. From the rain, he suddenly sensed a kind of message.

“This is part of ‘Sentinel Silence’?” he whispered. [So this rain is tied to Sentinel Silence’s world?]