Chapter 98: Chapter 98: The Depths Of The World
"What did you do to that man?! D-did you..." She let her voice trail away, leaving empty silence to fill her question.
Shen Yuan tilted his head and said, "Don’t ask something you don’t want the answer to."
Candy’s face paled when she heard his response. Her hands around his collar loosened as she hoarsely said, "Do you think I care if you killed someone? Do you know who that man was?"
"He was the son of an elder from the outer sect. Elder Feng!" Beads of sweat covered his face as she revealed the horrifying information to Shen Yuan.
Shen Yuan’s expression didn’t change, but something behind his eyes sharpened, the lazy amusement from a moment ago folding away like a blade sliding back into its sheath.
"Elder Feng’s son," he repeated slowly.
This was not the first time he had heard that name, and Shen Yuan was not scared of the man, but he wanted to learn the implications of what it meant to kill someone like the man he had just chopped to pieces.
"Yes!" Candy’s voice cracked, hushed and frantic all at once, as she glanced over her shoulder toward the mouth of the alley as if the elder himself might somehow be listening.
"Elder Feng doted on him more than anyone in the outer sect knows."
"He kept it quiet because the boy was an embarrassment, wasting fortunes on women and drinking himself half to death, but he doted on him nonetheless! If he finds out his son died near my pavilion—" She swallowed hard. "They’ll burn the whole block to find the killer. And they will absolutely find you."
"They won’t," Shen Yuan said, though there was none of his earlier teasing in it now, only flat, considered calm. "Because I did not kill that man as far as anyone knows. He was not even here; he is probably several kilometers away from this place."
"You never talked to him today."
Candy paused and looked him in the eyes like he was crazy.
"You think that’s enough?" Candy laughed. A short, humorless, disbelieving sound that came out more like a breath.
She shook her head, hands finally releasing his collar, though she didn’t step back.
"You have no idea how deep this world goes, do you?"
"A man’s body doesn’t need eyewitnesses to be identified as murdered."
"There are talismans—tracking arrays that read the residual qi left hanging in a space like this. Techniques that can pull faint traces of qi from the air itself and reconstruct what happened here, sometimes down to the exact movements of a fight."
Shen Yuan’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
"Elder Feng is in the Core Formation Realm," Candy pressed on, quieter now and urgent. "Do you understand what that means? He has resources. Spirit stones by the mountain-load, access to array masters, and blood-tracing formations that mere servants like us cannot even dream of touching."
Candy was trying to make Shen Yuan see that he was being cocky and overconfident by doing something like this in broad daylight.
"If his favorite son is found dead in an alley, he won’t just file a report and move on. He will burn through every stone he owns to find whoever did this. And unlike some drunk fool swinging his fists in an alley, he will actually be capable of finding you."
Residual qi. Techniques that reconstruct a scene.
Shen Yuan looked down at his hands, thinking about what Candy had told him.
He had killed a lot, but Shen Yuan never thought something like this would exist in this world. He had been constrained by thinking time and time again.
The people he killed were mere servants before, but now he had set his hands on someone powerful.
’I cannot go back there, as it would increase the risk of being exposed.’ He had assumed silence and an empty alley were enough, that if no one saw him enter or leave, there was nothing left to find.
He had never once considered that his own qi might linger in the air, ready to paint the canvas of him killing the son of one of the powerful men in the Blood Moon Sect.
’I have been careless.’ Shen Yuan was mature enough to admit when he made a mistake, and now he was ready to learn from them.
"How long," Shen Yuan said finally, voice quiet and clinical, "before that kind of trace fades? Does the qi in the air just disappear on its own?"
Candy blinked, thrown by the shift from mocking bravado into calculating thinking. She acted like it was she who had committed the murder and not Shen Yuan.
"I don’t know exactly. It fades faster in open air and slower somewhere enclosed like this alley. A day, maybe two if the weather stays dry. Less if it rains, or if there’s wind funneling through."
Seeing her act this way, Shen Yuan paused before nodding. ’The way I left it, it will take time before someone recognizes who he was. They might even act lax since they don’t know his identity.’
’I should have used the Physique I got from the legacy. But then again it may have passively prevented any traces of my qi from leaking.’ Shen Yuan shook his head before looking up. "Come, let’s go inside. I have something to tell you."
"What could be more important than this?" Although Candy asked that, she was already leading him inside the pavilion.
While walking she looked up and down his body and sighed in relief when she saw no traces of blood on his body.
Shen Yuan noticed the look in her eyes but did not say a thing.
He felt no flicker of regret.
Only the quiet, sharpening awareness that the world he’d stepped into demanded more caution than he’d been giving it.
Shen Yuan only learned that he had to be more careful by killing from such a mistake.
’No more careless kills,’ he decided, following after Candy into the shadowed doorway. ’From now on, even my qi needs to know how to lie.’
...
"So what did you want to talk about?" Candy poured herself a huge glass of alcohol and drank it down in one gulp to calm her nerves without even offering one to Shen Yuan.
And from how calm he looked, she did not even need to offer him one.
She once again looked at his outfit and realized what she had missed before. Not only was he wearing the robes of the senior servant now, but even his cultivation was about to reach the same realm as her own.
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