Chapter 413

Chapter 413: Golden Core Realm

Yu Zhi Yi didn’t expect to wake up. She had thought she was as good as dead: [I’m done for.] When the seventh bolt of Tribulation Lightning fell, she clearly saw the lightning in the sky hadn’t dispersed, which meant there would be an eighth and a ninth. [What day is it even?]

Lying on charred earth was not comfortable. Yu Zhi Yi pushed herself up and, first thing, felt for the power inside her. While she was unconscious, her Golden Core had formed. It now hovered in her dantian-round and flawless, shining with a clean light. She turned her wrist, and a surge of spiritual energy gathered in her palm, hundreds or even thousands of times greater than what she could summon before.

“Golden Core Realm-I can do swordflight now,” she murmured with a sigh. Sadly, she hadn’t inherited a sect’s teachings and didn’t know how to swordflight. She also had no life-bonded sword. The storage ring left by Immortal Qing Feng held plenty of manuals, but none on swordflight. Maybe swordflight wasn’t treated as a secret for those with a proper master, so no one bothered to write it down?

She drew a Purification Talisman and cleansed herself, scrubbing away the char left by the lightning. As the black crust flaked off, her skin showed, pale as jade. After stepping into the Golden Core Realm, her skin looked even better than before. But a Purification Talisman couldn’t repair clothes, so Yu Zhi Yi took a fresh set from the ring and was about to change when she suddenly remembered something.

A chill pricked her heart-she had forgotten about Gao Wen Feng in the middle of the Tribulation Lightning. She hurried to look and soon found a cooled, charred corpse.

Yu Zhi Yi fell silent. Her easy mood vanished, replaced by urgency: [This place isn’t safe.] When exactly did he die, and did his final image show her? She set her jaw. It didn’t matter. Either way, she couldn’t stay here.

She quickly judged Gao Wen Feng’s time of death. Though he’d been charred, there was still some intact muscle and bone under the crust. After working in the Ministry of Justice for so long and taking part in cases herself, she’d learned quite a bit. She decided he had been dead for less than two hours.

This mountain range on the edge of the Hidden Realm looked endless. Before today, even if she rushed at full speed, she couldn’t cross it in a single day. But the Gao Clan had Golden Core Realm experts. Golden Core cultivators could fly by swordflight. Between wiping the scene and running right away, she chose the first.

She wasn’t sure exactly when Gao Wen Feng had died, but she was certain her back had been to him the whole time. Even if the Gao Clan had seen her, at most they would have caught a back view and wouldn’t know her true identity. To catch her, they would first have to find the crime scene and then search around it. Whether they looked for clues or swept the area, step one was locating where it happened. In reverse, if they couldn’t find the scene, it would slow them down.

Having decided, Yu Zhi Yi didn’t waste a second. She tossed a Fire Command Talisman onto Gao Wen Feng’s body; in short order, his remains turned to ash. Calmly, she drew dozens of Purification Talismans and used them on every inch within a hundred meters, scrubbing the lightning-blackened ground back to its natural color. She then transplanted nearby brambles and weeds. She didn’t go so far as to cover every patch of soil-in fact, less than a third of the area got plants-but it was enough. With spiritual energy this rich, given a little time the growth would go wild.

She didn’t have that time. An hour had already passed; if she didn’t leave now, she might be found. From high in the sky, it was hard to pick out a patch of ground that had been altered after a lightning strike. But finding a moving person was much easier.

Before setting off, she cast another divination. She expected to have to try twenty times again before getting a clear answer, but this time it worked at once. Northeast? That meant going back the way she came. She didn’t doubt her result. Though puzzled, she turned around.

Her instincts plus the hexagram proved dead on. After going some distance in the indicated direction, she found a cave hidden by a low-grade mirage array. From the air, the formation wasn’t obvious; it could even fool someone who didn’t understand arrays. But while Yu Zhi Yi wasn’t a master of formations, she could modify them herself. A trick like this couldn’t fool her.

She wasn’t very nosy, and on a normal day she wouldn’t trespass into a place that clearly had an owner. But her divination had pointed this way, and this mirage array blocked her path, which made it hard not to wonder. So, without breaking the array, she stepped through and found the cave behind it.

The entrance wasn’t big-just enough for one person to pass. A faint foul smell drifted out. Yu Zhi Yi had worked in the Ministry of Justice and helped solve cases; she knew what that smell was. Sure enough, once she squeezed through the narrow initial passage, the tunnel opened up wide. What caught her eye first wasn’t the brighter light, the roomy cavern, or even the odd pool half a meter across. It was the old man sitting cross-legged beside the pool.