The First Legendary Demonic Scholar

Chapter 116: Chapter 116: The Trap [3]. [Bonus Chapter For The Massage Chair.]

Lin Xia remained crouched before the empty chest for several long seconds, staring at her own trembling fingers as though they belonged to someone else.

The tracking seal had never failed her before—not once, not in the years she’d used it to keep watch over documents far more dangerous than a single embezzlement ledger.

All this time when she had framed all those servants that came to this residence, gunning for Bang Fo’s favor.

She had use the same trick to get rid of them. Be it a man or a woman, she left no threats alive. The only ones who lived were the ones who knew their places and did not get in her way.

And this technique—this act, it never failed her before.

Yet here she knelt, hand outstretched toward nothing, the confident architect of the night’s careful trap reduced to visible confusion.

Shen Yuan watched her with the same unreadable calm, though his mind was already several steps ahead, working through the mechanics of what had actually happened.

He knew about Lin Xin hours before he came to this place.

Candy had warned him about someone from Bang Fo’s inner circle who was doing the cleaning for him.

While the people thought that Bang Fo was responsible for killing them. Some smart people knew he was not dumb enough to kill the servants himself.

He would use another servant to get rid of people he did not like.

Lin Xin was that someone.

So when she killed someone who got in her way, he would act like he did not know about it. After all, he could give his patsy such a leeway.

It was his way of giving her a sense of satisfaction. A feeling that he cared about her.

Shen Yuan did not know about her in such detail but he knew that there was someone killing the servants who was not Bang Fo.

But after living here for almost half a month, he now know who it was.

So when he unfolded the scroll hours earlier and sensed a faint, near-invisible shimmer clinging to the parchment’s fibers, he knew something was up.

The aura clinging to the scroll was subtle enough that most cultivators would have dismissed it as nothing more than residual qi from handling.

But Shen Yuan’s silver eyes, could see it like the wisps of qi floating in the air.

’I didn’t know exactly what it was,’ he thought, recalling the moment he’d tucked the scroll away into his inventory rather than simply hiding it in the chest as expected. ’But anything deliberately marked like that was worth treating as a threat rather than an inconvenience.’

His inventory, that strange pocket dimension gifted to him by the system, existed entirely outside the normal boundaries of this world’s laws—outside qi detection, outside spatial tracking, outside whatever principles governed a marking technique keyed to sense presence within physical space.

He hadn’t been certain it would work.

But logic had suggested that anything requiring a connection to track its target needed that target to remain within the same reality the tracker occupied.

Once removed from that reality entirely, there was nothing left to find.

As an additional precaution, he’d spent the better part of an hour afterward slowly drawing in every trace of lingering qi the scroll had left behind in his small shed with his newfound physique.

He’d absorbed it the same way he had absorbed Lin Xin’s qi signature from that knife. But it did not change his shape because the aura did not belong to a living person.

Which was, he now confirmed silently, watching Lin Xia’s growing bewilderment, precisely why her seal had returned nothing at all.

"It seems," Shen Yuan said finally, breaking the silence with practiced, unbothered calm, "there’s nothing more for you to find here. You should leave."

Lin Xia’s head turned toward him slowly, disbelief still etched across her features, some part of her clearly still cycling through explanations that made sense within the framework of everything she thought she understood about cultivation techniques.

She said nothing, simply rising to her feet and making her way toward the door, movements uncharacteristically hesitant, her usual sharp confidence replaced by the lost, unmoored expression of someone whose careful plan had unraveled in a way she couldn’t begin to rationalize.

Shen Yuan watched as she walked by him, already calculating his next several moves.

She stopped.

Just before crossing the threshold, her back still turned toward him, something shifted in her posture. The lost, confused set of her shoulders sharpened, resolve settling back into place with unnerving speed.

"There’s no scroll," she said quietly, not turning around. "But I can still sense traces of it in the air."

Shen Yuan’s expression didn’t change, though something in his stomach went cold and alert.

’She has given up on proof. Now, all she wants to do is kill me even if it means she has to make up something that is clearly not true.’

"Residual qi doesn’t lie the way seals can be tricked," Lin Xia continued, voice low and steady now, all trace of her earlier bewilderment gone. "Whatever you did to hide that scroll, you couldn’t have removed every trace perfectly. I can still feel it, faint as it is. Which means it’s still here. Somewhere close. And I will find it—"

Her sleeve shifted.

Shen Yuan caught the motion instantly, the faint glint of metal sliding free from the fabric, a slim, wickedly thin blade appearing in her hand with the practiced ease of someone who’d drawn it a hundred times before.

But before him, it was the work of an amateur.

"—even if I have to—"

She never finished the sentence.

Shen Yuan was already moving, the Flowing Mist Step carrying him forward without a whisper of sound, closing the distance before she’d even completed her turn.

His hand rose with the folded cloth he’d prepared hours earlier, soaked in a compound he’d quietly assembled from his alchemical notes that he had learned from the reward of the system, specifically to slip past a cultivator’s resistance and settle deep into the meridians rather than simply overwhelming the lungs.

It was a chloroform, made for knocking out cultivators.