Chương 152: Sect Master, Zhou Shentong...is Dead!

.. is Dead!

In private mediation chamber surrounded by array of spirit stones that had been arranged in concentric circles, Li Jie sat cross-legged. The complex formation was designed to gather and purify what little rouqi still remained in the world, so if he was going to break through to Tier 3, it was going to have to happen here, if it was even still possible at all. He adjusted his breathing and followed the rhythmic patterns laid out in the Three Leaf Clover method.

Inhale for seven heartbeats, hold for three, exhale for seven. Each cycle drew in more rouqi and refined it through his meridians before circulating it through his dantian. The process was maddeningly slow. There had been a time where this chamber could fill a Rouqin's reserves in minutes, now it took hours to gather even a modest amount.

"Focus," he muttered to himself, pushing the familiar bitterness back down because self-pity was not going to help him break through anything. The challenge was always what came next. Breaking through to Tier 3 required more than gathering energy, it demanded a fundamental transformation of one's essence, the accumulated rouqi had to be compressed until it reached a critical density that forced a phase change, which would alter the spiritual foundation.

The margin for error in that process was vanishingly small, too fast and the energy dispersed, too slow and it stagnated. Li Jie began the compression and the rouqi in his dantian grew more concentrated. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he fought to maintain control. Through his spiritual sense, he could feel the energy moving toward the critical threshold. A little more was all it needed, a little more.

Then it happened, the air in the chamber grew thick with pressure as centuries of accumulated power condensed down toward a single point within his dantian. For a second, he felt it transform. The energy sharpened and crystalised, taking on that distinctive quality that marked the difference between Tier 2 and Tier 3 cultivation. And then like it had every time before, it slipped away. The gathered rouqi dispersed like it had never been there at all.

It left behind nothing but exhaustion and that bitter familiar taste of failure. Li Jie slumped forward and stopped bothering to maintain his posture because what was the point?

"Too thin," he muttered and ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair, "the energy is too thin." It wasn't his personal failure and he knew that, it was a fundamental problem with the world itself. The ambient rouqi had grown so sparse that achieving the density needed for higher tier breakthroughs might simply be impossible now regardless of how skilled or prepared the cultivator attempting it was.

The last successful breakthrough to Tier 3 had been over a century ago, and even that cultivator had fallen back to Tier 2 within decades because they couldn't maintain the realm in the face of the declining energy. Li Jie stood up and walked to the chamber's window to gaze over the sect's grounds. How many times had he attempted this breakthrough now? Hundreds of times? Thousands?

Each failure brought him closer to accepting what he had suspected, that he was never going to reach Tier 3, and that he would end his days as a half-step cultivator, forever stranded on the threshold of power. The thought should have filled him with despair but instead he felt only a tired kind of resignation that had settled into his bones over the years. Perhaps it was time to do what he had been thinking about for a time now, step down as sect master and find somewhere quiet to live out his remaining centuries.

Let someone younger with more fire left in them take on the burden of leading a dying sect in a dying world. A knock at the chamber door interrupted that thought. Li Jie frowned because everyone in the sect knew better than to disturb him during cultivation sessions. For someone to dare interrupt meant that something had happened.

"Enter," he called without turning from the window. The door creaked open and he heard someone immediately drop to a full kowtow which was not a good sign.

"Speak," he ordered when the silence went on long.

"Sect Master..." the servant's voice was trembling, "Elder Zhou Shentong, he..." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Li Jie turned then and noted how the servant was shaking, afraid to say whatever it was they had come here to say.

"What about Elder Zhou Shentong?"

"He…he's dead, Sect Master." There was silence for a long moment before Li Jie spoke.

"How long have you been waiting to tell me this?" he asked quietly.

"Five hours, Sect Master, we didn't dare interrupt your cultivation but..."

"But this couldn't wait," Li Jie closed his eyes briefly, "you did right to tell me." Without another word, he vanished and left the servant still prostrated on the floor. Space blurred around him as he employed the Three Leaf Clover method's movement technique and reappeared in a different chamber deep within the sect's heart. The Soul Lantern Hall was ancient, and its walls were lined from floor to ceiling with thousands of delicate crystal containers.

Each one housed a small flame inside it, and these were the soul lanterns. A tradition that went back to the sect's founding. Every member who achieved Tier 2 or higher had their essence bound to one of these lanterns at their initiation, the flames served as both a symbol of their connection to the sect and a way to monitor whether they were still alive. Li Jie moved through the rows and the flames flickered as he passed them, responding to his presence.

Some of them burning bright and strong, others wavering, and a few had gone out, which meant those cultivators had either died or severed their connection to the sect. He found Zhou Shentong's lantern where it should have been in the section reserved for elders. The crystal container was intact but the flame inside it had been extinguished.

Li Jie reached out with his spiritual sense, hoping to find some trace of the elder's essence, some small clue about what had happened, but there was nothing there, just the cold emptiness of someone who was gone.

"This is going to be a problem," he muttered and pressed his fingers to his temples. Zhou Shentong had been more than an elder, he had been a direct descendant of the sect's Seventh Ancestor, and his bloodline carried a fragment of the Ancestor's power which made him theoretically irreplaceable. The Seventh Ancestor had been clear on occasions about how important it was to maintain his bloodline within the sect.

The political consequences alone were going to be a nightmare because other sects would see this as weakness and would start testing borders, trying to expand their influence. Younger disciples might start questioning whether the sect could protect them and might begin looking into other sects to move to. And the Seventh Ancestor himself? Li Jie felt a shudder go through him, the Ancestor rarely emerged from seclusion these days but the death of his own descendant would rouse him.

The questions that would follow were going to be uncomfortable, how had this happened, why hadn't the sect protected young Shentong, and most importantly who was responsible. That last question needed an answer, but he didn't have one.

"Truth be told," he murmured to Zhou Shentong's dark empty lantern, "I'm not surprised someone killed you, you made more enemies in a single decade then most cultivators manage in a lifetime." It was almost funny in a dark way because he had spent years trying to rein in Zhou Shentong's various excesses and trying to minimize the damage the man kept doing to the sect's reputation. And now that someone had dealt with the problem, he was going to have to avenge him.

"I hope you at least had the decency to get yourself killed by someone expendable," he said to the empty lantern, "some nobody I can execute without creating even more problems." But knowing Zhou Shentong, he had almost certainly managed to offend someone with powerful backing behind them, which meant this situation was probably going to get messier before it got better. Li Jie turned to leave.

He was already mentally composing the messages he needed to send, the resources he would need to mobilize, and the response the sect needed to present to the world, something strong and unified that showed the Three-Leaf Clover Sect was still… He froze. His spiritual sense had picked up something wrong, something that made the hair on the back of his neck rise.

The formations, the ancient arrays of protective formations that surrounded the sect and had been accumulated over centuries of paranoid sect masters adding layer upon layer of defense onto what was already there, they were silent. If they had been destroyed, they would have triggered countless alarms throughout the sect. If they had been bypassed, they would have left detectable traces. Instead, they were inactive, extinguished like a candle.

Li Jie felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber. He knew these formations more intimately than anyone alive, he had spent centuries studying them and maintaining them, and even added his own contributions to their complexity. They were supposedly unbreakable and impossible to disable without the secret methods passed down through generations of sect masters. Someone had proven every one of those assumptions wrong.

He left the Soul Lantern Hall, and his steps took him through the sect's main corridors, training grounds, and meditation gardens. On the surface, everything looked normal because disciples were practicing their forms and servants were moving about their tasks. The ordinary machinery of sect life was just grinding along like nothing had happened. A group of outer disciples bowed as he passed, "Greetings Sect Master!"

He ignored them and kept his attention on extending his spiritual sense to its limit to search for any trace of whoever had done this. Whoever had disabled the formations had to be somewhere nearby because this level of interference required physical presence. And if they were powerful enough to do it remotely? Well, that was too frightening to think about.

"Sect Master!" a voice called out. One of the sect elders was approaching, probably wanting to talk about Zhou Shentong's death. Li Jie waved them off without looking because something else had caught his attention. The Ancestor's Tree. It stood at the center of the sect's grounds; it was an oak that had been old when the sect was first founded.

According to tradition, the First Ancestor had used it as a conduit to establish the sect's original formations, binding his own power into its roots, and every Ancestor since then had added their own power to it over the centuries, which made it as much a part of the sect as any of the buildings. But it wasn't the tree itself that made Li Jie's blood go cold. There was a figure floating above it, suspended in midair, their face hidden in the shadow of a dark cloak. The only thing visible were the eyes.

They burned like fresh blood as they fixed directly on Li Jie, making his centuries of cultivation feel like child's play. He had a fairly strong feeling he knew who had disabled their formations. And he had an equally strong feeling he knew who had killed Zhou Shentong. The only question that mattered right now was what they were planning to do next.