Three quarters into the Zi hour.
At the top of the bell tower, Su Ming’s pupils suddenly contracted.
The heavy nanmu rear door of the Yongchang Marquis Manor silently opened a slit just wide enough for one person to slip through.
A figure that blended completely into the darkness slid out of the gap like a phantom. It was a person in a black robe, carrying no light source, not even making a single footstep sound.
The black-robed man left the alley and, extremely cautious, glanced around. After confirming no one was nearby, he pressed to the wall like a night bird and dashed toward the outskirts of the city.
“He’s come.”
Su Ming inhaled deeply, his body drifting down from the bell tower like a fallen leaf caught by the wind.
He did not immediately follow. Instead, relying on the faint, icy current of killing qi his divine sense had detected, he hung far behind the black-robed figure. The distance between them remained just beyond the limit of a single street.
The black-robed man’s counter-surveillance skill was excellent. He made several large loops through the city and even deliberately stopped in several dead-end alleys, trying to flush out any potential tail.
But Su Ming did not rely on visual tracking. He pushed the Aura Concealment Art to its extremes and, using only the faint trail that the blood-killing qi left in the air, tenaciously locked onto the other person.
After passing through the city gate, the black-robed man suddenly accelerated, becoming a blur, disappearing into the stretch of black mountains to the northeast outside the capital.
Su Ming stopped at the foot of the mountain and did not rashly enter. He lifted his head and stared at the eerie peaks, which gaped like open maws in the night, a sliver of sharp light flashing through his eyes.
The next morning.
Inside the secret room of Qingya Zhai.
“Old Chen, what do they call the mountain range thirty li northeast of the capital?” Su Ming asked directly while watching Chen Mingyuan pour tea for him.
Chen Mingyuan’s hand paused mid-pour. A heavy gravity crossed his murky old eyes.
“Your servant answers, that place is called Black Wind Mountain.” Chen Mingyuan set down the teapot and lowered his voice. “The terrain there is treacherous, with perennial miasma. In recent years that place has grown even more sinister. Woodcutters and hunters who go in deep never come back alive. The authorities have sent people to investigate several times, but all returned without success. Over time it became a forbidden area.”
Chen Mingyuan paused and spoke in an extremely solemn tone, “A while ago, this old man sensed something amiss, so I sent a few of my most capable men at noon, when yang energy is strongest, to scout the outskirts.”
“What did they find?” Su Ming’s gaze hardened.
“They did not dare go deep, but they reported strange carvings on the ground halfway up the mountain, and the surrounding trees were dead in an unnatural way. Master…” Chen Mingyuan looked at Su Ming and spoke each word slowly, “those are traces of an array that has been run to draw life energy from the earth veins. There are cultivators hidden in Black Wind Mountain!”
Su Ming stood and paced twice in the cramped room.
Arrays, cultivators, the Yongchang Marquis Manor’s black-robed man, the corpse-puppet iron cavalry from the Northern Barbarian battlefield…
All the clues converged at the node that was Black Wind Mountain.
That night, Black Wind Mountain.
Autumn wind cut through the black-range ridges, howling like a ghost in torment. A lingering faint miasma hung thick in the forest, blotting out the light of stars and moon.
Su Ming moved silently, climbing between sheer rock faces and dead ancient trees. The higher he went, the more nauseating the blood-killing qi in the air became.
When he reached a relatively level hollow halfway up the mountain, Su Ming’s steps abruptly stopped.
The scene ahead stood out starkly in the sea of withered yellow desolation. Within roughly a hundred-zhang radius, the trees were not dead; instead they showed an unsettling ink-green. There was not a single fallen leaf on the ground, and even the soil’s texture was unnaturally smooth, as if a layer had been carefully scraped away.
“A concealment array, and a killing array with strong recoil.”
Su Ming crouched, picked up a handful of soil from the edge of the array, and brought it to his nose to sniff. Cold, liquid-like spiritual energy instantly converged in his eyes. In a “microscopic” view, he clearly saw that the seemingly normal space ahead was densely woven with layer upon layer of dark-red spiritual threads.
This was absolutely not an orthodox formation from the Cloud Hidden Sect heritage. It was filled with violence, chaos, and plunder. Any external force that forcibly touched it would not only immediately alert the array’s operator but would trigger a frenzied internal recoil of the array’s blood-killing qi.
Su Ming sat cross-legged, a fine sweat beading at his brow. This exceeded the normal combination scope of the two hundred basic runes he currently mastered.
He placed his hands lightly on the void at the array’s edge, not injecting spiritual energy, but using the logic from The True Meaning of Basic Rune Deconstruction to frantically dismantle the spiritual energy circuits before him inside his mind.
“To sustain such massive consumption, it must draw power from the earth veins. Then its ‘Solidify’ rune must be mutated and linked to the ‘Lead’ rune…”
Countless array models formed, collapsed, and reformed in Su Ming’s consciousness.
“Slide in like water…”
Su Ming took a deep breath and immediately abandoned the original idea of forcing a break. He closed his eyes and stirred the steady, deep-pool spiritual energy within, drawing upon the Like Water Art.
He used no offensive means. Instead he turned that thread of liquid spiritual energy into a faint azure waterline ten times finer than a hair.
Following the third node on the left, the waterline silently crept along.
There was no collision, no repulsion. The extremely pure water-attribute spiritual energy behaved like a drop of warm water dissolving into a bath of scalding oil. Su Ming carefully tuned the frequency of his energy so it vibrated in an extremely subtle synchronization with the dark-red blood-killing threads.
“Hum—”
A vibration so slight that only Su Ming’s divine sense could detect it.
Under the wrapping and assimilation of the azure waterline, the previously impregnable dark-red energy web quietly dissolved like melting ice and snow, opening a narrow gap just wide enough for one person to pass.
Su Ming did not hesitate. He moved like lightning and slipped through the gap. The instant he entered, he withdrew the waterline and the gap sealed seamlessly as if nothing had occurred.
