Chương 153: The Cloaked Figure With The Blood Red Eyes

Li Jie stood with his eyes locked onto the cloaked figure on top of the Ancestor's Tree and didn't move a single muscle. Six centuries of cultivation had taught him a great many things but perhaps the most useful lesson was this one, when you are faced with something that appears to be impossible, the first thing you need to do is accept that it is in fact possible and is happening in front of you. And what was standing on top of that tree was impossible by every measure he had.

The figure wasn't making any threatening moves or dramatic gestures and wasn't doing anything at all except existing, and somehow that alone was enough to make it difficult to breathe. Li Jie extended his spiritual sense and probed the space around the figure, and he already knew what he was going to find, or rather what he wasn't going to find, but old habits didn't die. As expected, there was nothing there, not even the faintest whisper of rouqi detectable anywhere.

Only cultivators of higher cultivation than you could mask their energy from your senses, the same way Li Jie himself could become undetectable to Tier 1 cultivators when he wanted to, but to be invisible to someone at his own level, half a step into Tier 3, that was a different matter. And that wasn't even the part that concerned him. There was also the flying.

Li Jie's eyes had narrowed when he watched the figure descend from the heavens because flight wasn't a matter of having enough raw power behind you, it required a fundamental understanding of how to manipulate the world's energy fields and how to work with the forces that kept everything on the ground. That wasn't something you could develop in the lower tiers no matter how talented you were.

Even Tier 4 cultivators couldn't achieve true sustained flight, they could cover distances in a single leap and glide for short periods but staying in the air, flying, that required Tier 5 cultivation at the minimum. Nobody had reached Tier 5 since...

"Impossible," he whispered and the word came out before he could stop it. The last confirmed Tier 5 cultivator had died over four hundred years ago. Li Jie remembered it because he had been a young elder at the time, barely two centuries old, when news spread that Master Yuan of the White Horn Sect had failed to maintain his cultivation level and had chosen to end his own life rather than suffer the indignity of falling back to a lower tier. Since that day it had become almost impossible to break through to Tier 3.

The idea that someone could not only reach Tier 5, but maintain it in these energy starved times was something his mind kept struggling to process as a real thing.

"What did you do Zhou Shentong," Li Jie whispered, "what could you have done to draw out something like this." Drawing the attention of any higher tier Rouqin was bad enough on its own because they were territorial and fast to anger, but the red eyes suggested something worse than that, demonic Rouqin. If Li Jie didn't know better, he would think that Zhou brat had tried to get their sect destroyed before he died.

His thoughts were cut off by footsteps approaching from behind, the elder who had tried to speak with him earlier had gathered courage to try again.

"Sect Master," the elder began, "about Elder Zhou Shentong's death." Li Jie kept his eyes fixed on the cloaked figure and didn't dare look away for a moment. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"He was killed by the young master of the Han family," the elder continued, "our scouts confirmed it, the boy managed to..." Han Renyi, that Tier 1 cultivator, had killed Zhou Shentong? But then what was the connection to the figure in front of him right now? Why was this being here at all?

"The Han boy destroyed Elder Zhou Shentong's private chamber," the elder was saying, "used some kind of unknown technique to..." Li Jie made a gesture with his left hand, three fingers spread and then closed into a fist, a signal every elder in the sect knew the meaning of. The elder's words died in his throat as he noticed what Li Jie had been staring at this time and the blood drained out of the old man's face. To his credit, Elder Chen didn't make a sound and backed away slowly.

The cloaked figure showed no reaction to his departure, which Li Jie chose to take as an encouraging sign, at least they weren't here to slaughter everyone, at least not yet. Li Jie couldn't shake the feeling of his own mortality, and it was a sensation he hadn't experienced in centuries.

Strangely, a part of him almost welcomed the feeling because he had forgotten what this was like, the edge of uncertainty that made every moment feel more real and present, compared to the endless routine of sect life and cultivation attempts that never went anywhere. Still, he wasn't ready to die tonight if he could avoid it, and the being hadn't killed him upon arriving which suggested there might be room for some kind of conversation, so Li Jie took a breath and gathered what courage he had.

"May this one ask what brings such an honored guest to our humble sect?" The figure stayed silent for long enough that Li Jie began wondering if they were going to respond at all, and when they did speak, their voice was difficult to describe. It was neither male nor female, neither young nor old, but managed to be all of those things at the same time.

"I see that news of the junior's death has reached you." Li Jie held back a sigh. So, this was about Zhou Shentong after all, but why did someone of this cultivation level have any interest in a Tier 2 cultivator?

"Yes, honored one."

"Then you know it was my disciple who killed him." Li Jie kept his expression neutral while his mind processed that. Han Renyi was this being's disciple, that Tier 1 merchant's son was the disciple of something that could fly and was invisible to his spiritual sense.

"What happens between juniors," the figure continued in that same casual tone, "should stay between juniors, the involvement of seniors would be unfortunate." The words were spoken without any particular emphasis, but Li Jie knew it was a warning. Stay out of it or face consequences that he did not want to think about.

If he was reading this correctly, the being wasn't here to destroy the sect, they were here to prevent escalation and to make sure the death of one elder didn't pull everything into a larger conflict that nobody in their right mind would want. It made sense when he thought about it. The death of a disciple or elder almost always led to retaliation, which led to counter retaliation, until entire sects found themselves locked into centuries long blood feuds.

Li Jie had watched that happen more times than he cared to count. The world's history was full of those cycles. But if both sides agreed to treat it as a matter between juniors that had reached its natural conclusion, then maybe everyone could walk away from this.

"Zhou Shentong was," Li Jie chose each word with care, "prone to creating problems, his death while regrettable, was not unexpected and one might even say he invited his own fate through the choices he made." Was that a slight nod from the figure? Li Jie pressed forward, taking it as encouragement.

"Our sect has no wish to escalate matters that have already reached their natural conclusion." The figure shifted to suggest something like approval and Li Jie allowed himself the smallest amount of hope that perhaps everyone was going to survive the night. The sect could manage the loss of one elder, especially one as troublesome as Zhou Shentong had been, and yes there would be political consequences, but those could be handled. The important thing was… The world exploded.

There was no other way to describe what happened because one moment everything was calm and the next, an overwhelming pressure came down on the entire compound like something enormous and furious had decided to land on top of all of them at once. Li Jie's knees buckled under the weight of it, and he heard screams somewhere in the distance as weaker cultivators simply collapsed where they stood. A voice like thunder shook the foundations of the sect from somewhere deep below them.

"YOU DARE KILL MY GRANDSON?" Li Jie's blood went cold because he recognized that voice despite not having heard it in over four centuries. The Seventh Ancestor. The single most powerful member of their entire sect, who had not emerged from seclusion in over four hundred years, who had given standing orders that his bloodline was to be protected at all costs under all circumstances, and who had just discovered that his grandson had been killed.