Li Yuan’s vision cut out. He wasn’t too shocked. With the elites of the Lotus Cult and imperial army weaving through this region, even the most inconspicuous of scouts could be found.
Still, after many days of observation, he was starting to piece the puzzle together—
First, his martial cultivation technique didn’t contain its own ancestral seal.
Second, hungry to break through, his disciples had improvised their own ancestral seal shards—abnormal shards they were never meant to wield. The shards provided immense power, but the price was madness.
Third, when Li Yuan absorbed these shards, they slotted home and functioned properly. And because these shards shared the same origin, they could fuse without limit, not merely in threes.
In effect, every disciple contributed to completing the technique. Li Yuan supplied the framework, but lacking full insight he had no ancestral seal. The disciples, driven by their own visions, sketched their own ancestral seals in his stead.
Fourth, the Lotus Cult was exploiting the quirks of his martial cultivation technique to build an army of super soldiers. The stripped away memories and desires of the disciples were transformed into exotic beasts while the vegetative bodies were refitted by the Green Lotus Cult into fearless troops.
Li Yuan had bought and used fearless troops before, but he had never seen them being made.
White Lotus beguiles.
“By using some secret art to instill killing intent, the Green Lotus Cult turns vegetative humans into fearless troops...?” Li Yuan muttered, his gaze dimming. He had learned everything he needed without a single clash and simply by watching.
And now the road forked beneath his feet—
Rescue the disciples? Or walk away?
Walking away would certainly profit him...
After all, the Lotus Cult was dead-set on increasing their military power. They promoted his martial cultivation technique everywhere, poured in resources, and rolled out new batches of sixth rank disciples like an assembly line.
Every one of those sixth rank disciples was like a fresh leek waiting to be harvested.
The mind would be turned into an exotic beast, the body into a fearless soldier, and the ancestral seal to Li Yuan.
Everyone got what they wanted. Li Yuan needed only to sit back and harvest.
Rescuing the disciples was the right thing to do, but it posed its own risks...
If Li Yuan chose to save Cheng Mao, he could fight tooth and claw, but getting the boy out alive would be nearly impossible.
Smuggling him away would tip off the Lotus Cult and the Son of Heaven, forcing a head-on war with their elites.
After miles of bloodshed, a loyal Cheng Mao might insist on Li Yuan fleeing first, vowing heroically that he’d make it back alive before being left behind.
Then Li Yuan would shuttle back to Cloudpeak Province, duel the Lotus Cult through his thousand-mile thread, attract ever fiercer enemies, and beat a reluctant retreat while passionately declaring, “Thirty years east of the river, thirty years west!”—only to grind away in seclusion for a future revenge.[1]
The whole scenario felt absurd.
For the first time in his life, Li Yuan found himself playing the greedy mastermind, and he felt markedly uncomfortable.
He returned to Cloudpeak Province to think.
Li Yuan knew himself. His heart held room only for him and those he cared about. Had the people being held captive been Sheng’er, Yan Yu, Xue Ning, Tang Nian, and Ping’an—or even Cui Huayin, Yao Jue, Jing Shuixiang, the deceased Senior Li or Zhu Ban—he would have struck immediately.
If he could truly rescue strangers without being dragged into a cataclysm, he would do so in a heartbeat. Then, he’d rebuild the Bladeseekers and welcome new talent. Those newcomers would still go mad when they broke through, but once he drew out their ancestral seals they could live on, as Zhao Chunxin and the others had.
Could that ever happen, though?
Li Yuan lacked the resources and the appetite for flashy theatrics.
He was no selfless hero; he wouldn’t sacrifice everything for strangers.
He was no heartless demon; he couldn’t watch people butchered and feel nothing.
He was no carefree hermit; he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t happening.
Li Yuan fit none of his idealized visualizations—Thousand-Mile Hero, Southern Mountains’ Ghostly Rain, or Young Master Riding the Deer.
He was simply human—a little base, a little bold, part desire, part conscience, and more than a little self-delusional.
A new fifth rank exotic beast appeared in the valley.
Under a bleak, chilly sky, Li Yuan crouched nearby like a great cat—talons hidden, patience limitless, greed in his eyes—watching.
Not righteous, perhaps, but terrifying all the same; no one would choose him as an enemy.
At last the fourth rank Peng Guang left the post. The guards were down to three sixth ranks and one fifth rank.
Li Yuan still held his hand.
The valley’s exotic beasts appeared to have received an order.
They swarmed out—black shadows flooding the hills in a roaring tide—and pushed north of the Bladeseekers compound into a mountainous region within Little Ink Mountain. The Lotus Cult was either searching or training.
The beasts scattered through the ridges.
Li Yuan tailed one of the lone fifth rank beasts into a hidden vale.
No words. One thought. His spherical ancestral seal slammed into his heart; he blurred forward several hundred meters.
White Serpent flashed from his sleeve. Thunder cracked from the short blade, and his strength spiked into early fourth rank.
The fifth rank beast with a peak power of a 1,200 was like a child in a strong man’s grip.
Li Yuan pinned it face-first in the dirt with one hand. A blood-red, blade-shaped ancestral seal floated from the beast’s heart. He plucked it and absorbed it into his own ancestral seal, turning the three-blade rune into a four-blade one. Then, he let go and vanished.
The beast raised its muddy head. Its power hadn’t changed, but the rabid glare had softened into the glint of reason. Snakelike trunk lashing, tiger head swiveling, it bounded off again.
Li Yuan repeated the trick through the night, using the beasts’ wide dispersal and the cover of darkness to collect six more ancestral seal shards.
By dawn, his ancestral seal blazed as a 10-blade rune.
Li Yuan gave himself a quick once-over. His combat power had jumped from 2,600~31,638 to 2,600~33,536.
That’s a gain you can see with the naked eye. A few more ancestral seal shards and I’ll be stronger than Qing Hancheng, he mused, a flicker of awe in his eyes.
But the 10-blade rune also carried far more chaos than its three-blade predecessor; keeping it suppressed took real concentration.
Li Yuan drew the spherical ancestral seal back into dormancy, melted into a pocket of darkness. He linked to some nearby birds and resumed his watch.
1. A Chinese idiom. It literally refers to the Yellow River and how it’s frequently changed course over history, so people living on one side might eventually find themselves on the other side after some time. In modern times, the phrase is used similarly to the English idiom, ‘The shoe is on the other foot’—a situation now being the opposite of what it was. ☜