Chapter 414

Chapter 414: Mount Ming, Annihilation

Rather than an old man, it was a corpse.

He sat cross-legged with his back straight, looking like a normal cultivator meditating. But his chest no longer rose and fell, and a faint rotten smell drifted from him.

The Hidden Realm was full of danger, and Yu Zhi Yi had just completely offended the Gao Clan, so she didn’t dare relax at all. This should be the cave dwelling where the old man chose to die.

High-level mystic arts practitioners often called themselves cultivators. Her master had said that cultivators killing for treasure was common; if you died in the wild, most likely someone would search your body. So many cultivators, once they felt death coming, would find a hidden cave and die quietly.

Yu Zhi Yi wasn’t self-righteous, but she wasn’t born in the Hidden Realm and wasn’t a grave robber either. After a brief struggle, she gave up the idea of searching the corpse.

However, the puddle nearby drew her attention.

Even though the Hidden Realm already had thick Spiritual Energy, the Spiritual Energy above this puddle was many times stronger than elsewhere, almost solid to the eye.

She released her Divine Sense to check the old man again, making sure he was truly dead and that nothing strange haunted his body. Only then did she walk to the puddle’s edge.

The instant she stepped to the rim, the scene in front of her changed.

Yu Zhi Yi frowned: “An illusion array?”

With a snap of her wrist, she drew Immortal Qing Feng’s sword and slashed a beam of sword-qi at the ground not far away: boom.

Rocks burst, dust billowed.

Soon the dust settled, leaving a deep gully.

Yu Zhi Yi knit her brows.

No matter the array, it ran on the same logic. It was like a sturdy house: it sat there looking unbreakable, but if you destroyed its load-bearing wall, the whole thing would collapse. If you couldn’t find the wall, you could still break the house by hitting one point again and again with force greater than it could handle.

That was how she had destroyed Ji Guang Dai’s array before. The Formation Core was like the load-bearing wall; people unfamiliar with arrays rarely found the core. But the principle stayed the same: if she violently destroyed the other Formation Flags that formed the array, it would still fail.

Unwilling to accept it, she sent her sword flying high, poured half her Spiritual Energy into it, and brought it down hard: boom!

The ground split into a long, deep trench that snaked for hundreds of meters and sank more than ten meters down.

Yet the surroundings did not change.

Yu Zhi Yi murmured, her eyes narrowing: “Strange, could it be…”

She suddenly remembered the manual resting on the old man’s knees. Even though she had tried to keep to a moral line, curiosity made her look once, and the cover read-Teleportation Formation.

So the puddle was just bait, and a Teleportation Formation lay in front of it? Did the old man use this trick to protect his body?

Thinking it through, it made sense. The higher one’s cultivation base, the more sensitive one was to Spiritual Energy. Anyone entering this cave would feel how unusual the energy above the puddle was. After confirming the corpse was harmless and sensing that thick energy, many would wonder if the old man had hidden all his treasures in the puddle before he died. Who would guess that a Teleportation Formation was hidden by the pit’s lip?

Not guessing it, they would take a step forward-then vanish without noticing.

Yu Zhi Yi could only smile bitterly. She didn’t even know where she had been sent.

Left with no choice, she took out her Five Emperor Coins. With her current ability, casting thirty divinations a day was no problem, and as her strength grew, so did her skill at divination.

Sure enough, after only sixteen casts she got an answer.

She lifted her foot and sped through the air in the direction shown by the divination.

The farther she went, the more familiar the scenery became.

Yu Zhi Yi frowned, glancing around: “This… is the road to the Martial Alliance?”

She didn’t understand why her divination would point her back to the Martial Alliance. Immortal Qing Feng’s death must have been reported to the Grand Void Sect by now, and the people they sent had likely already reached the Great Sheng Empire. [Wait…]

[Could they have already learned about my ties to the Martial Alliance and gone there to kill everyone?]

As soon as the thought hit, she stopped hesitating. She slapped an Invisibility Talisman onto herself and raced toward the Martial Alliance.

The speed of the Golden Core Realm was nothing like the Foundation Establishment Realm. In less than half a day she crossed a thousand li.

At the foot of Mount Ming, before she even climbed, a gust carried a heavy stink of blood.

Yu Zhi Yi’s body trembled: [No… impossible…]

When she set the plan to kill Immortal Qing Feng, she had already thought about the trouble that would follow. Whether it was her mother and brother in the Capital City, or her father, brother, and her eldest uncle’s family in the Martial Alliance, they would all be dragged into this. So even though guilt gnawed at her, when she sent the mystic Xiao Qing away she begged her to persuade her uncle’s family to leave the Martial Alliance. It didn’t matter where they hid, as long as they lived. She also promised she would find her sect as fast as possible and solve this problem at the root.

After sending her mother off, she had even waited a few more days before acting, just to give her mother time.

But why…

Gold and black light intertwined in Yu Zhi Yi’s eyes. Even though her heart resisted, her feet moved fast. In a single breath, she was atop the mountain.

Then she saw corpses everywhere.

She staggered, almost falling: “Mother! Father! Brother!”

Everyone’s death was gruesome, and her closest kin suffered the worst. Her father and mother were nailed to the wall, their bodies pierced by eighty-one thin weapons. Her brother’s hands and legs had been chopped off, and his eyes gouged out. By comparison, her eldest uncle’s family had each been killed with a single strike-they died the easiest.

Yu Zhi Yi finally couldn’t hold herself up and crashed to her knees.

She wanted to say “I’m sorry,” but the words stuck in her throat and wouldn’t come out. She thought she would cry, yet her eyes felt dry and hot. She hated herself for it.

In that instant, a wish to destroy everything flooded her like seawater, squeezing all the air from her chest and pressing until she might burst. Thoughts flickered past like a slideshow; every time she reached for one, it vanished.

Only one clear image remained.

It was her master’s gaze before leaving, full of pity: “In this life, your family ties are thin; do not force them.”