Chapter 65
Chapter 65: Jiang Yun Jiang’s Whereabouts
Shao Heng lowered her eyes and looked down at him.
When she’d put away the formation plate, she’d used the Face-Changing Art to disguise herself as an honest, burly man.
But that white-smoke phantom had seized her from a distance and dragged her back. In the process, it had shattered the spell. The disguise broke, and her true face was revealed.
Lu Tian Xiang’s face had been stomped crooked. Even so, the moment he caught sight of her real features, he looked as if he’d been struck blind. He snapped back to himself and begged in a rush.
“Lady Bodhisattva, spare me!”
“It was my fault. I shouldn’t have been so shameless and crashed into your formation.”
Shao Heng studied him and quickly saw the truth. Compared to the cultivators she’d fought before, Lu Tian Xiang did have over seven hundred furnaces of spiritual power—but his aura was unsteady and hollow, his inner flow sluggish and uneven. He’d never truly polished his cultivation through hard work.
A normal cultivator, when cornered, would fling out every spell they had to strike back.
This man had surrendered the moment his artifact was broken. After Shao Heng suppressed him, he didn’t even have the strength to struggle.
Just a rich wastrel.
Seeing no change in her expression, Lu Tian Xiang hurried to introduce himself, panic making his words tumble.
“Lady Bodhisattva, please spare my life. We’re both disciples of the One Yuan Sect! My name is Lu Tian Xiang. My master is True Lord Guan Jing, and my grandmother is True Lord Pu Xuan.”
Then he swallowed hard, eyes flicking up toward the lingering traces of white smoke.
“My grandmother’s divine-sense avatar already saw you.”
“T-this… if you really kill me, once we leave the secret realm my grandmother will definitely come after you. You won’t be able to explain yourself, right?”
Shao Heng’s brows tightened by a hair.
Lu Tian Xiang saw it and lunged for the opening, voice trembling with desperate hope.
“Let me go and I’ll swear a Dao oath. I’ll never take revenge. Believe me!”
A Dao oath required a special altar ritual and was sworn before the Heavenly Dao. It bound far more tightly than the contract curse Shao Heng had signed before.
Shao Heng spoke slowly, each word like a blade laid flat against his throat.
“Even if you don’t take revenge, your backers will. They’ll retaliate, target me, and make my life hard.”
The four arrows pinning Lu Tian Xiang’s limbs trembled under her control, then dissolved into colored motes. The motes gathered and twisted into chains that snapped tight around him.
The power was far beyond what her realm should have allowed. Lu Tian Xiang, with his shallow skill and floating spiritual power, had no chance of breaking free.
As the chains tightened, he cried out, writhing. “No—no!”
Tears poured down his face. “W-wah… I swear on my life, my master and grandmother won’t lay a hand on you!”
All he does is cry. Cry like that and you’ll cry your luck away, Ao Chuan muttered in her mind.
Shao Heng pressed her lips together. It really was troublesome.
If not for that eerie phantom, she wouldn’t have wasted a word. She would’ve killed Lu Tian Xiang outright. Killing in this secret realm couldn’t be divined or calculated anyway.
But the phantom existed. Her real face was exposed, and if she killed Lu Tian Xiang now, the moment she left the secret realm she’d be facing the retaliation of two Sixth Realm True Lords.
No matter how talented she was, a First Realm cultivator standing against a Sixth Realm was an ant trying to shake a great tree.
Shao Heng eased her foot away and said, “Swear the Dao oath exactly as I tell you, and I’ll let you go.”
“Y-yes! Yes!” Lu Tian Xiang nodded so hard his neck looked ready to snap.
When she told him the content of the oath, he hesitated—just for a heartbeat—then gritted his teeth. He fumbled a small altar out of his storage ring and activated it.
His voice shook as he spoke, but the words were clear.
“I, Lu Tian Xiang, swear by the Heavenly Dao and make this oath.
If Shao Heng spares me today, I will never harm her in this life, and I will restrain anyone connected to me from harming her openly or secretly in any form.
If I break this oath, may my life and Dao be extinguished, my soul collapse, may I suffer endless misery, and never enter reincarnation.”
Lu Tian Xiang had been ignorant and useless in the past. If he’d been the one composing the oath, he wouldn’t have thought up punishments this vicious even with extra brains.
When the altar’s light flared and an invisible force linked them, Shao Heng finally loosened the colored chains by a fraction.
“Answer two more questions,” she said. “First—why did you crash into my formation? Second—how did you end up carrying the altar ritual needed for a Dao oath?”
Lu Tian Xiang could finally move a little. He rubbed his wrists, wincing, and forced out a strained smile.
“Well… after I entered the secret realm, I finally managed to get two Shattered Moon. Then a fellow disciple named Jiang Yun Jiang swindled them away.” His cheeks twitched with humiliation. “I was in a foul mood, kept walking, and ended up slamming straight into your formation. So…”
He hurried on before her patience ran out. “As for the altar—my grandmother prepared it.”
“I offend people easily,” he added, almost sobbing again. “So she put together that whole speech for me. So I could save my life.”
Shao Heng’s eyes narrowed.
The old really were the sharpest.
The moment Lu Tian Xiang pulled out that prepared speech, if you didn’t want to offend two Nascent Soul Stage True Lords, the best choice was exactly this—force him into a Dao oath, then spare him.
She flicked her right hand. The chains dispersed completely, the motes flowing back to her wrist and condensing into a plain, round bracelet. No carvings, no filigree—yet it shimmered with shifting color.
The power was strange. After injuring an enemy, it could be recalled and saved for the next use. Shao Heng had no intention of wasting it.
Lu Tian Xiang crept backward, inch by careful inch. “Junior Sister Shao Heng… then… can I go now?”
Shao Heng spread her right hand and beckoned. “I was quite startled just now. Senior Brother Lu wouldn’t leave without showing some sincerity, would he?”
Lu Tian Xiang’s face twitched. He forced a smile, then hurriedly handed over his storage jade ring.
“Of course. Of course.”
Shao Heng took it without ceremony, then asked, “So Jiang Yun Jiang has two Shattered Moon on her?”
“Can you take me to find her? Can you track her down?”
Lu Tian Xiang’s eyes brightened at once. “Of course I can!”
He looked obedient, but his mind was racing.
He’d investigated every truly talented inner-sect disciple and never provoked them. Since when had an outer-sect mid First Realm named Shao Heng appeared with such brutal battle strength?
Even Grandmother’s divine-sense avatar had been suppressed to the First Realm in the secret realm. With the laws she controlled, she should have been able to slaughter any enemy—yet that colored light had ground it away. Unbelievable.
But Shao Heng wanted to find Jiang Yun Jiang. Fine. Let those two women collide. If they fought, maybe he could sit back and reap the benefits.
Lu Tian Xiang summoned a large green-porcelain bowl with blue patterns.
Once an artifact was refined, it could be stored in the qi sea and nurtured by spiritual power at all times. That was why the bowl hadn’t been inside his storage jade ring earlier.
He pointed with his right finger and chanted. A bowl of clear water gathered through spellwork. From the bottom, a wisp of purple qi rose, curling upward like smoke. Soon, an image formed on the water’s surface.
A plainly dressed yet striking young woman was cutting down yin ghosts with a longsword.
Jiang Yun Jiang.
Lu Tian Xiang lifted his chin, proud as if he’d done something remarkable. “This Truth-Peering Treasure Bowl was made by an elder of the Star-Inquiry Sect at my grandmother’s request. It contains a divination immortal art and counts as a secret treasure.”
“I tangled with Jiang Yun Jiang earlier and collected her aura. Now it’s finally useful.” He grinned. “Useful, right?”
Shao Heng raised her gaze to him, expression unreadable.
It was like the way a farmer who worked the fields would never understand, back when she’d been a marquis’s daughter, how much care could go into preparing a single dish—how one bite could eat up an entire year’s spending.
She’d been cultivating for less than a year. Most of what she knew came from haphazard browsing through the Wondrous Dharma Pavilion. Her foundation was still lacking. Naturally, she couldn’t imagine what strange artifacts and immortal arts someone like Lu Tian Xiang might carry.
But it didn’t matter.
Lu Tian Xiang lived under the shadow of his elders’ might.
She would become the one who built her own glory.