It wasn’t long before Qingyi found himself in a flying boat with Zhu Rongyan. The space was small, certainly too cramped for the two of them.
"Why do you need a disciple? Wouldn’t it be easier to just fly straight there?" Qingyi asked.
That journey in a flying boat would take about two weeks, but Rongyan herself at her top speed would probably make the journey in less than a week, counting all the necessary rest stops.
In the end, the flying ship’s strongest point was that it could fly for months without stopping to rest, unlike cultivators.
"Bureaucracy," Rongyan replied.
"Basically a bunch of treaties on participation in studies between the city guard and the sect. From time to time we need to include a disciple in some missions to honor these treaties."
"I see." Qingyi said.
The earth was also full of such things too. As a former office worker, he knew this all too well.
Most of the time, it just ended up delaying already slow processes even more.
Looking out of the window, he saw the forest passing below them.
He observed the landscape for a brief moment before noticing something.
A shadow, imperceptible to anyone else, but unable to escape his draconic eyes.
It seemed to be moving, following them from afar.
Rongyan noticed the purple glow that took over Qingyi’s eyes, needing only a moment to understand that this was an ocular technique.
"Did you notice something?" she asked, looking out of the window and following Qingyi’s gaze.
Even though she didn’t have an ocular technique, her vision as a Nascent Soul Realm expert was still powerful enough for her to see kilometers in detail.
Still, she didn’t notice anything.
The forest below them seemed calm and peaceful.
But that didn’t last long.
"It’s coming towards us," Qingyi spoke as the shadow left the cover of the trees, its Qi exploding towards them.
That was shadow Qi, one of the rarest and most valued by assassins and spies.
"I know." Rongyan gritted her teeth, strapping the box tightly to her hips as her fiery Qi spread out, covering the entire flying ship.
Even so, it wasn’t enough.
Her Qi barrier was shattered with a bang, the explosion causing the ship to shatter in the air.
"Shit!" She moved her hand, trying to grab Qingyi to stop him from falling, but had to change her plan the next moment, defending herself against that expert’s attack.
"Hang in there!" she shouted at Qingyi while focusing on her own battle.
That was a fall of thousands of meters, but it was nothing a cultivator of the Burning Blood Realm couldn’t withstand if he used his Qi correctly.
Qingyi just nodded as his body plunged.
With his body’s current power, he didn’t feel threatened in the slightest.
In fact, he even changed his position to descend as quickly as possible, noticing many auras of the crystalline core realm waiting for him below.
Qingyi’s broke through the treetops.
A shockwave swept through everything in a radius of tens of meters and raised a cloud of dust as he fell to the ground.
A powerful man of the first stage of the Nascent Soul Realm stepped forward, but was stopped by an angry voice.
"This one is mine, don’t you dare touch it!"
That voice belonged to Zhao Yulie, who had almost completely recovered but was still using an armchair-shaped flying artifact to move around.
"Relax, young master Zhao, I was just going to capture him for you. Our only interest is in the box carried by that woman," the man smiled, an impure, disgusting Qi leaking from his body and making the young man shudder.
That was demonic Qi.
"Besides, he seems to have died in the crash. I can’t even feel his Qi." Looking to the side, the man waved for one of his minions to advance towards the cloud of dust that was already slowly descending.
But before the poor man could even get close, a powerful hand broke through the dust cloud, grabbing his head and squeezing.
All it took was a little force for the demon cultivator’s skull to collapse in an explosion of blood and brain matter.
There was silence and shock as Qingyi deactivated the concealment arrays of the three-bladed monarch set.
The handsome young man stretched gently.
A calm smile played on his lips as he looked at the battle above him.
That expert with shadow Qi was at the peak of the Nascent Soul Realm, but his Qi simply wasn’t suited to fighting in full sunlight and without any shadows to hide behind.
Because of this, his combat ability had been severely limited.
Even though Rongyan was only at the third stage of the Nascent Soul Realm, she could still hold her own against him.
Qingyi lowered his head again, focusing his gaze on Yulei, who shuddered.
"The demon cult... have you really fallen that far?" Qingyi moved his gaze down to Yulei’s crotch.
"Don’t tell me that turning you into a woman caused that much mental damage."
Those words drew a loud laugh from the man next to Yulei.
"A woman? Really? So that’s why you came to us as soon as you found out that this brat was accompanying that bitch, he destroyed your golden little eggs! Hahahaha!"
The uncontrolled laughter soon spread to the other demon cultivators, Yulei’s face turning redder and redder as he lowered his head.
As someone who worked a lot with bandits, he naturally had a certain level of contact with the demon cult and a powerful intelligence network.
On discovering their interest in this item and hearing his shadow report that Qingyi had taken on the mission of escorting him, he rushed for a chance to get rid of the damned thing.
Unfortunately, those demonic cultivators didn’t have a shred of respect for him.
"Ah..." The leader of the demonic cultivators sighed heavily.
"Nothing personal, kid, just business," he said as his Qi exploded, but in a totally different way to anything Qingyi had ever seen in his life.
That was a soul attack, a type of attack that only cultivators of the Nascent Soul Realm and above could make and which, even among them, was extremely rare.