My Junior Brother is a Hidden Boss

Chapter 17: Thousand-Net Tower

Everything on the battlefield fell under the absolute domain of Lu Changsheng’s Divine Sense.

He locked his focus onto the shadowy figure. It was definitely not someone from the Cangyun Sect, and its target was dead obvious—Zhou Qingyu.

By now, the bulk of the disciples had retreated to the safety of the rear lines.

Only a handful of Elders and Zhou Qingyu remained in the vanguard, locked in brutal combat to stem the tide of Demon Beasts.

In the next heartbeat, the shadow moved. A violent surge of Magic Power erupted from its body as a miniature tower materialized in its palm.

The seven-story pagoda stood mere inches tall. Without a second of hesitation, the figure hurled it into the blood-stained sky.

Instantly, a suffocating, colossal shadow eclipsed the raging sea of fire.

Directly above Zhou Qingyu, the small tower caught the wind and explosively expanded. It swelled into a monolithic structure tens of zhang high, crashing down from the heavens with the sheer intent to obliterate everything beneath it.

“Senior Brother, look out!”

Ye Tianyi spotted the sudden anomaly. Screaming a warning, he threw himself toward the epicenter of the crush.

Zhou Qingyu couldn’t tear himself away; he was pinned down holding the frontline.

As the shadow relentlessly pumped Magic Power into the artifact, the tower’s oppressive might compounded. The gravity around it warped, pressing down with the weight of a mountain to grind them into dust.

“A Spirit Grade Magical Artifact!”

Lu Changsheng raised an eyebrow in genuine surprise. Magical Artifacts in this world were strictly tiered.

The absolute garbage tier was Mortal Grade, scaling up through Profound, Spirit, King, and finally, Divine Grade.

More importantly, these assets were notoriously difficult to forge, making their market value horrifyingly inflated. Each grade was split into three sub-ranks, and even the cheapest, bargain-bin Profound Grade Low Grade artifact demanded tens of thousands of Spirit Stones.

Spirit Grade required massive capital. A Top Grade piece could easily drain hundreds of thousands of Spirit Stones. As for King Grade? That was a luxury item a Nascent Soul artisan might spend decades slaving over, with no guarantee of success.

Even an average Nascent Soul heavyweight couldn’t afford a Spirit Grade High Grade artifact, let alone a King Grade one.

The entire, sprawling Cangyun Sect only possessed two such treasures: one Spirit Grade Low Grade and one Spirit Grade High Grade Magical Artifact.

Throughout the entirety of Cangzhou Prefecture, Spirit Grade items were rarer than phoenix feathers.

Watching the scene unfold, Lu Changsheng was momentarily stunned.

As the monolithic tower plummeted, the sheer pressure of a Core Formation cultivator utilizing a Spirit Grade Magical Artifact forced even the indomitable Zhou Qingyu to pale.

Ye Tianyi, merely at the Essence Condensation realm, desperately raised his sword to block. The blade shattered into shrapnel upon impact. The apocalyptic force continued its descent, threatening to pulp his body into a bloody smear.

“Tianyi!”

The Qingyun Peak Elder’s expression turned utterly ghastly.

Zhou Qingyu violently repelled the Azure Bird with a single strike. Pure sword intent erupted from his pores, forming a tornado of Sword Qi as he desperately tried to sever the suppressive lock and dodge.

But the Azure Bird screeched, diving right back in, and the tower was already crashing down.

It was an ambush executed with flawless precision. Everyone knew an assassin was lurking in the shadows, but there simply wasn’t a fraction of a second to pinpoint them.

Yet, what happened next shattered everyone’s expectations. Just as the tower’s base was about to crush Ye Tianyi into paste, a brilliant light erupted from the scorched earth.

A blinding wave of golden spiritual energy swept upward, acting as an absolute aegis. It caught the falling monolith dead in its tracks.

Immediately after, that suffocating Magic Power coiled around the tower like a golden serpent, forcibly sealing its runes. The artifact’s apocalyptic aura was snuffed out like a candle.

The tens-of-zhang tall tower violently trembled, struggling against the bindings. But under the absolute suppression of that Magic Power, it rapidly shrank, reverting to its original, palm-sized form before plummeting harmlessly toward the ground.

“This…”

Ye Tianyi’s heart hammered against his ribs. He had already accepted his gruesome death, yet the suffocating killing intent had vanished without a trace.

The surrounding Elders were equally bewildered, exchanging blank, horrified stares.

They scanned the battlefield below. There was only the roaring sea of fire; the savior was nowhere to be seen.

And deep within that inferno, obscured from the world, stood Lu Changsheng. He casually weighed the small tower in his hand. Its exquisite surface was etched with dense, complex runes, emanating a faint, ancient pedigree.

He traced his thumb over a prominent hairline fracture on the artifact’s surface, his eyes narrowing. “The Thousand-Net Tower!”

Lu Changsheng instantly recognized the merchandise. This was the signature, sect-guarding Magical Artifact of the Thousand-Net Sect.

The Thousand-Net Sect—alongside the Cangyun Sect and the Xuantian Sect—formed the ruling triad of the Cangzhou Prefecture. The tower brazenly sported their corporate logo, complete with an internal authentication watermark.

Historically, this bad boy was a Spirit Grade High Grade asset. Sadly, it caught some serious battle damage in the past, depreciating its current market value to a mere Spirit Grade Low Grade.

The little tower buzzed aggressively in his palm. Someone was furiously spamming the recall command. The black-clothed assassin in the distance was practically short-circuiting trying to retrieve it, but the connection was dead.

Reinforcements from the other peaks were rapidly closing in on the sector.

Realizing the Cangyun Sect cavalry had arrived, the shadow cut its losses. Abandoning the tower, it melted seamlessly into the dense mountain forest.

Lu Changsheng ghosted through the burning treeline, quietly trailing his new friend.

A hundred li away, the hunt ended. He casually waved a hand, unleashing a tidal wave of Magic Power to cut off the shadow’s escape route.

The immense pressure slammed into the figure. The assassin was blasted backward like a cannonball, violently shattering the spine of a nearby mountain peak.

The target crawled from the rubble, desperate to run. Too late. Lu Changsheng materialized directly in front of him. With a nonchalant press of his palm, the atmosphere turned to lead.

The execution was ruthlessly efficient. The opponent had absolutely zero margin to counterattack; he was instantly pinned to the crater floor by an ocean of Magic Power, paralyzed.

Lu Changsheng had only followed to extract some intel, but his eyes widened in surprise. The thing writhing in the dirt wasn’t breathing. It was a humanoid puppet.

Beneath the shredded black robes lay a painfully generic face, yet its artificial core pumped out the genuine, oppressive Magic Power of the Core Formation Third Layer.

“A Core Formation combat drone. Who the hell has this kind of venture capital?”

Lu Changsheng was genuinely impressed. In this market, puppets fell into two main categories. The first was built using biological corpses—cheap, easy to mass-produce, but inherently flawed, as the process permanently degraded the donor’s original cultivation base.

The R&D costs for maintaining one were staggering, practically equivalent to funding a brand-new elite cultivator from scratch.

Still, the ROI was obvious. Drones didn’t talk, didn’t feel pain, and made perfect suicide bombers. Equipping one with a high-tier artifact to assassinate Zhou Qingyu meant zero liability if the operation went south.

The second category was the premium tier: forged entirely from rare treasures and exotic materials. These were obscenely expensive, but if the base materials were high-end enough, the puppet possessed an infinitely scalable growth curve.

“To wipe out Senior Brother, the Xuantian Sect really didn’t mind bleeding their treasury dry.”

Lu Changsheng rapidly calculated the angles. Everyone knew the Thousand-Net Tower was proprietary Thousand-Net Sect tech. If they were planning a hit, they wouldn’t leave their own business card at the crime scene.

By process of elimination, that left the Xuantian Sect.

A textbook false-flag operation. If the assassination failed, they could claim plausible deniability and watch the Cangyun Sect declare war on the Thousand-Net Sect.

But nobody in upper management was that stupid. A frame-job this obvious was a double-edged sword. Even if the Cangyun executives saw through it, they’d still have to raise their guard against the Thousand-Net Sect. In corporate warfare, trust was a liability.

Then there was the worst-case scenario: What if the Thousand-Net Sect hadn’t even realized their asset was stolen? If they pinged the artifact’s location and found it here, how the hell was Cangyun Sect supposed to spin that PR disaster?

Tell them some phantom third party bypassed their world-class security, stole their signature weapon, and used it to try and gank Zhou Qingyu?

It sounded like a dog-ate-my-homework excuse. There was a zero percent chance the Thousand-Net Sect would buy it.

Even if it didn’t trigger an immediate turf war, diplomatic relations would freeze over instantly.

And if some malicious actor actively fanned the flames in the media? Total systemic collapse.

Lu Changsheng stroked his chin. No matter how the dice rolled, the Xuantian Sect monopolized the profit margins on this setup.

Best case: Zhou Qingyu dies, neutralizing a major competitor. Worst case: he survives, but the resulting paranoia and diplomatic friction bleed both rival sects dry.

“Are the Xuantian Sect executives really this utterly toxic?”

Lu Changsheng clicked his tongue. He was holding a radioactive hot potato.

The Thousand-Net Sect had spent millennia encrypting and refining this tower. The spiritual DRM was baked deep into the hardware; it couldn’t be formatted overnight. The original owners would definitely track the GPS ping to this exact sector.

Even if he just tossed the evidence into a ditch, if it was recovered on Cangyun soil, the optics would be disastrous.

Staring at the stolen hardware in his hand and the broken drone at his feet, Lu Changsheng let out a long, weary sigh. He cast a glance back toward the smoking ruins of the battlefield.

“What kind of blood feud justifies this level of targeted harassment against Cangyun? I heard the CEO of the Xuantian Sect is a woman. Did our Sect Leader run out on some unpaid child support or something?”

For a moment, his imagination sprinted down a very scandalous, highly inappropriate rabbit hole. It took him a solid minute to reboot his brain and turn back toward camp.

He absolutely had to run a background check on this gossip when he got back. If they had to deal with targeted assassinations every other business day, his stress levels were going to spike.

But this specific hit was aimed squarely at Zhou Qingyu. Was it just standard corporate sabotage—clipping a high-potential asset before he matured to protect their market share?

Or did Senior Brother do something incredibly stupid off the clock during the last Cangzhou Ascension Ceremony?

Suddenly, a memory clicked into place. During that very summit, rumors circulated that the Xuantian Sect Leader had heavily praised Zhou Qingyu’s performance. And that very same night, his Senior Brother had mysteriously gone off the grid.

“Don’t tell me Senior Brother actually…”

…