Chapter 19: A Night for Secrets

That night, Xiao Yifeng gave strict instructions to Yue’er: he needed deep rest and was not to be disturbed under any circumstances. He climbed the stairs to his room, blew out the candles, and waited.

When the night deepened, a bright moon hung in the sky, surrounded by sparse stars. Silence blanketed the peak.

A shadow slipped out of the Huixing Small Courtyard like a wisp of smoke, disturbing no one.

Once he reached the cover of the back mountain, the moonlight illuminated a delicate, handsome face—Xiao Yifeng. He should have been in bed, nursing his mending bones, but his eyes were sharp and clear.

Now at the fifth layer of Qi Condensation, he estimated his strength was finally sufficient. He had the bare minimum capability to explore the forbidden zones of the mountain. He couldn’t wait any longer. There was something here he needed to retrieve.

He moved along the familiar path he used for chopping wood, stopping frequently to check his six. Only when he was absolutely certain no one was following did he unleash his speed.

Whoosh.

He burst forward. Reaching the dense treeline, he abandoned the path entirely. He leaped into the canopy, moving like a spirit ape, swinging from branch to branch with agile grace.

At first, his movements were slightly stiff, a body getting used to new power. But within minutes, muscle memory from a past life began to merge with his current form. He swung left and right, weaving through the forest with increasing fluidity, a ghost haunting the trees.

He traveled far beyond the perimeter where he and Su Miaoqing had encountered the snake. The aura of Demon Beasts grew stronger here, their guttural growls echoing in the dark. Xiao Yifeng kept his breathing shallow and his aura tightly suppressed, slipping past them unnoticed.

Ahead, an endless sea of green bamboo blocked his vision. He pushed through, layer after layer, sweat slicking his back, his throat parched from the exertion.

Suddenly, the ground vanished.

Xiao Yifeng skidded to a halt, his toes dislodging pebbles that clattered into the abyss. A massive cliff dropped away before him, appearing so abruptly he had nearly plunged to his death.

He steadied his breath and looked down.

Below lay a deep valley, its floor swallowed by a churning ocean of thick white mist. The cliff walls were studded with gnarled pines and cypresses clinging to the rock. This was the forbidden zone of Wuya Hall, a place of perpetual fog and hidden danger.

Xiao Yifeng grinned. He had found it.

Without hesitation, he identified his direction and jumped.

As he plummeted, he reached out, snagging a protruding pine branch. His body swung in a wide arc, bleeding off the momentum of the fall, before he released and dove straight into the mist toward an unseen target.

The fog was blindingly thick. Xiao Yifeng swung from tree to tree in the gray void for what felt like an hour, frustration beginning to mount. He stopped, calibrated his position, and searched again.

Then he saw it.

Halfway down the sheer cliff face, a massive, ancient pine tree grew horizontally out of the rock, extending far into the void. It was an anomaly—trees didn’t grow this large on a vertical wall.

Xiao Yifeng’s eyes lit up. He swung hard, his body tracing a perilous arc over the drop, and barely managed to grab the tip of the pine’s branch.

He shimmied along the limb towards the trunk. Hidden deep within the cluster of branches, right where the tree met the cliff, was a dense thicket of twigs. He pulled out a knife and hacked them away, revealing a small, dark hole in the heart of the trunk.

It was tight—barely wide enough for a child—but it was there. The tree was hollow, a living tunnel. Over the centuries, the bark had tried to heal over the entrance, shrinking it, but it remained passable.

Xiao Yifeng sheathed his knife and squeezed inside.

The interior of the massive pine had been hollowed out by human hands, forming a passage that bored straight into the mountain stone. If one didn’t inspect the trunk up close, it would be impossible to detect.

He crawled through the wooden tunnel until his hands touched cold rock. The cave beyond was pitch black. He crawled on his stomach for a while until the ceiling rose, allowing him to stand.

He struck a fire starter. The flame flickered, casting long shadows as he groped his way forward. Suddenly, a soft light bloomed ahead.

He picked up his pace. The narrow tunnel abruptly opened up into a massive, natural cavern.

The light came from a fist-sized Night Pearl embedded in the ceiling, bathing the cave in a ghostly luminescence. In the center of the cavern, atop a flat stone dais, sat a skeleton in a lotus meditation position.

The skeleton was draped in tattered black robes. Stabbed into the stone floor beside it was a pitch-black sword, its blade etched with crimson runes that seemed to pulse in the dim light.

Zhan Xian. The Immortal-Slaying Sword.

On the skeleton’s finger bone sat a simple, ancient Storage Ring. A cultivation manual peeked out from the ribcage beneath the rotting robes.

Xiao Yifeng approached slowly, stopping a few meters away.

Despite the decay of the robes, there wasn’t a speck of dust on them. The bones themselves glowed with a faint, jade-like blue luster—the undeniable mark of a Tribulation Transcendence expert. Even in death, the pressure was suffocating.

This was Mo Tianqing. The Bloodthirsty Sword Demon.

Centuries ago, after the Great War between the Righteous and Demonic paths, Mo Tianqing’s sect, the Absolute Sword Sect, was annihilated. He had escaped, a lone survivor consumed by hatred. He spent years in hiding, cultivating with demonic obsession until he broke through to the Tribulation Transcendence stage.

Then, he came for revenge.

He attacked the Wentian Sect single-handedly. He breached the mountain defenses, devastated Wuya Hall, and fought his way to the main peak, the Tongtian Hall. He had nearly pierced through the entire sect alone.

It took the sacrifice of the previous Headmaster, Wuyazi, to stop him. Both sustained fatal injuries. Mo Tianqing managed to escape the encirclement and vanished from the world. Everyone assumed he had died in some ditch.

They were right. He had died here, hiding right under their noses in the back mountain of the very sect he tried to destroy.

Xiao Yifeng stared at the skeleton. He knew that on the floor in front of the dais, written in blood but obscured by dust, were two lines of text:

Whoever obtains my inheritance must destroy the Wentian Sect, or else meet a terrible end!

Xiao Yifeng smirked. He didn’t take another step.

Instead, he reached into his robes and pulled out five small black flags.

Swish! Swish!

With a wave of his hand, the flags flew out, embedding themselves into the rock floor in a perfect pentagon around the skeleton.

He pulled out a small knife, sliced his fingertip, and flicked a single drop of blood through the air.

Splat.

The blood hit the blade of the Zhan Xian sword. The crimson runes on the black steel flared up, drinking the blood greedily.

Xiao Yifeng stepped back, his hands rapidly forming hand seals.

“You’re as cautious as ever, Old Demon,” he laughed, his voice echoing in the cave. “Or are you just too weak to project your spirit body more than a few meters?”

Silence. The skeleton remained motionless.

“Still pretending?”

Xiao Yifeng muttered an incantation. The five black flags erupted with billowing black smoke, sealing the space around the dais. He then produced a jade bottle filled with a multicolored, viscous liquid and smashed it hard against the Zhan Xian sword.

Crash!

The liquid splashed over the blade and was instantly absorbed.

The reaction was immediate.

The skeleton began to tremble. Specks of black light leaked from the bones, coalescing in the air above the dais. The light twisted and formed into the translucent figure of a young man with a gloomy, sinister face.

“Young friend,” the spirit rumbled, his voice heavy with suppressed power. “I hold no malice. Why do you trap this Seat with my own Holy Sect’s Soul-Trapping Array?”

Xiao Yifeng sneered. “Don’t play dumb. You stuck that sword there, wrote those blood characters, and exposed the ring and manual for one reason: bait. You wanted someone to walk up and touch your corpse so you could seize their body.”

The spirit’s expression darkened, the facade of benevolence cracking. “What a cunning little fox… Did the snake send you?”

Xiao Yifeng paused, genuinely surprised. “That snake… you released it?”