Chương 154: The Seventh Ancestor's Most Impressive Technique

"YOU DARE KILL MY GRANDSON?" A cave mouth that I hadn't noticed before was opening up in the side of the hill near the tree and darkness spilled out of it. The pressure on the area intensified as a figure emerged from it, tall and broad shouldered with a beard that would have made any mountain sage envious.

The Ancestor of the Three-Leaf Clover Sect didn't walk so much as glide and each step covered impossible distances, his eyes found me and they were burning with a fury that would have terrified most cultivators who encountered it. I felt Han Renyi's consciousness recoil slightly at the sight of him but I kept us steady because I had been expecting something like this, you don't kill a sect elder without anticipating that some family drama was going to follow.

"YOU DARE?" The Ancestor's voice boomed across the compound again and I had to admire the theatricality of it, the sound seemed to come from everywhere at once and to be able to make the air vibrate was a skill. If you were going to emerge from several centuries of seclusion to avenge your grandson you might as well commit to the entrance.

"Calm down," I told Han Renyi's panicking consciousness, "this is what we planned for."

"This was NOT in the plan!" he shot back, "you said we would intimidate the sect master, not fight a Tier 4 ancestor!"

"Details, details." Without any warning the Ancestor raised one hand and the attack came faster than I was expecting, a complex weave of branches spiraled through the air. The technique was beautiful in how the wood twisted and compressed while it was guided by rouqi, if I hadn't been the target I would have wanted to study it more carefully, but I was the target. The wooden drill shot toward me with enough force to level a small building.

Li Jie's eyes went wide, probably expecting to see me either dodge the thing or counter with something devastating but instead something more interesting happened. The moment the Ancestor's attack came within range of my qi, the wood construct ignored its original trajectory and curved around me in an enthusiastic spiral. I reached out and patted it. The wood vibrated with pleasure. The Ancestor launched himself into the air and covered the distance across the sect compound in less time than it took me to blink.

He landed in front of the tree with a thud that cracked the stone beneath his feet, the expression on his face when he looked up and realized his attack had not had the intended effect was one of the best things I had seen in a long time. I wished I had some method to preserve the image, unfortunately, cameras didn't exist in this world, and I had no idea on how to invent one.

"That's..." he frowned as his beard twitched with confusion, "that's not..." Before he could finish whatever he was about to say, I caught a flicker of movement. His arm was already rising again with rouqi gathering around his hand in an unfriendly way.

"Time for the next part," I told Han Renyi who had at least stopped panicking long enough to be curious about what was going to happen next. I stepped off the branch and rose up into the air to float above the Ancestor Tree. In this world, true sustained flight was a Tier 5 ability. By doing this, I was making a statement about my cultivation level. The Ancestor's attack fell apart as his jaw dropped open, "Tier…Tier 5?" he whispered and then shook his head hard, "no, impossible, this must be an illusion!"

"Seventh Ancestor, no…" the Sect Master started to say but the old man was already gathering more rouqi, and this time there was a fiery edge mixed into it. Right, Tier 4 cultivators could work with multiple elements, that could have been a problem if I hadn't come prepared. Before the Ancestor could launch his second attack, the tree beneath me came to life.

And when I say came to life I don't mean it swayed or shifted a little, I mean every single branch, every leaf, and every root in the tree woke up with the kind of energy you would expect from something that had been waiting a long time for this moment. The Ancestor barely had time to register what was happening before a branch thicker than his entire torso slapped him, he went flying through the air in a graceful arc that ended less gracefully through several walls in succession.

The Sect Master's face was doing remarkable things as he processed what he had witnessed. I could see the thoughts moving through his mind, not only was I apparently Tier 5, which should have been impossible in this age, but I was also a formation practitioner of high skill that disabled the barriers, and now the Ancestor's Tree itself, the single important symbol of the sect's history and power, had turned against them and sided with an outsider. Enjoying the story?

Show your support by reading it on the official site. The Ancestor emerged from the rubble with his beard slightly askew but otherwise looking intact for someone who had just been used as unplanned demolition equipment. I decided it was time to push a little further.

"A Tier 4 junior seeking death?" I let the right amount of dismissal into my voice to make the gap in our cultivation levels feel as wide as possible. And then I watched one of the most impressive transformations I had seen yet. The rage on his face vanished and was replaced by a grandfatherly smile that probably worked well on junior disciples, he even managed to make brushing rubble dust off his robes look dignified.

"This junior," he said as he dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead to the ground in a formal kowtow, "begs forgiveness from the honored senior for his grievous offense." When I didn't reduce him to ash, he lifted his head just slightly and seeing that he was still alive and intact, he seemed to gain a small amount of confidence.

"In fact," he continued and performed a second kowtow, "I must express my deepest shame at my grandson's unfilial behavior, Zhou Shentong was... problematic." Third kowtow, "always causing trouble for the sect..." Fourth kowtow, "embarrassing the family in front of others..." Fifth kowtow, "making unreasonable demands of other clans..." By the sixth kowtow he was really getting into it, his forehead was wearing a groove into the stone as he worked through every flaw his grandson had ever possessed.

According to his revised opinion, Zhou Shentong had been personally responsible for everything from failed harvests to bad weather and difficult seasons. The seventh and final kowtow was his most elaborate production yet with his long beard sweeping across the ground as he pressed himself lower than I would have thought physically possible for someone of his age.

"This junior humbly requests the honored senior's guidance," he finished and stayed prostrate on the ground. Seven kowtows felt appropriate coming from the Seventh Ancestor. Beside him, the Sect Master's expression showed profound relief that the old man wasn't going to get all of them killed tonight.

As the Ancestor maintained his position on the ground and continued his impressive ongoing revision of his grandson's character, I thought back on how we had gotten to this point, because despite what Han Renyi believed, this hadn't been as reckless as it had looked from the outside. The plan had been quite straightforward in its core logic.

Use the Shroud rune to keep my identity hidden while letting enough of the red sun energy seep through, not enough to reveal its true nature, but enough to make anyone watching think I'm not someone they would want to have as an enemy. Demonic cultivators had a certain reputation that was consistent across most worlds, and most sects would rather avoid offending one if possible because their approach to revenge tended to be creative and thorough and showed little concern for who else got caught in it.

But intimidation alone wouldn't have been enough, and I knew that going in, especially because I wasn't certain what would happen if I died here. Was there a reset? Would Han Renyi stay dead? Those were not questions I wanted the answers to through direct experience. What had made the plan work was the sect's specialization because if they had focused on any other element, I would have advised the Han family to relocate while I bought them as much time as I could.

A Tier 3 cultivator was roughly equivalent to someone in the early Elemental Realm. I knew how that fight ended, let's just say it didn't end well for me. But wood style was different and something I could work with. The first thing I had done when arriving was disable their barrier formations, they weren't complex, most decent formation practitioners could have managed it, though perhaps not as quietly as I had. And then I had sensed the tree and even without pushing qi outward, I could feel it responding to me.

Azure had suggested it might recognize the World Tree Sutra's influence, and I wasn't going to question that assessment. During the silent staredown with the Sect Master I hadn't been going for the mysterious intimidating visitor effect, I had been carefully and quietly feeding qi into the tree and establishing a connection while staying below the sect master's spiritual sense detection.

The moment I felt the slumbering power inside it respond and reach back toward me, I knew that the outcome of the night was already decided, which was why the Ancestor's appearance had been surprising but not alarming.

"But what if the tree hadn't responded?" Han Renyi asked after I walked him through the plan.

"Then we would have had an exciting night involving multiple backup plans, some creative use of explosives, and possibly a brief career as traveling merchants in a distant province." I could feel his exasperation but at least the panicking had stopped. My attention came back to the present as I noticed the Ancestor was still talking and had moved on to a detailed and thorough criticism of his grandson's personal choices in his romantic life. The tree's branches shifted and twitched in a questioning way.

Both the Sect Master and the Ancestor tensed because they recognized what that gesture meant, an offer to remove these annoying people from the situation. I reached out and patted the nearest branch, "now now," I said in my most unbothered tone, "I'm sure these juniors were about to invite me inside to examine their techniques," I let my eyes brighten as I looked at the two of them, "isn't that right?" The two sect leaders exchanged a fast glance before nodding with enthusiasm.

"Of course!" the Ancestor said and his smile had entered please-don't-kill-us territory, "we juniors would be honored to receive any guidance the esteemed senior wished to share!"

"Master," Azure said and there was amusement in his voice, "I believe you are enjoying this performance more than is necessary."

"Can you blame me," I replied internally, "it's not often I get to watch a higher tier cultivator try to convince me that he wasn't just attempting to kill me moments ago and would I perhaps be interested in some tea."

"Well don't get too distracted," Azure said, "because we appear to have found something very interesting about this world's history." He was right about that. The Ancestor's Tree wasn't behaving like a sacred artifact should behave, the speed and completeness of its response to my qi and the way it had instantly recognized the World Tree Sutra's influence suggested something much older than the Three-Leaf Clover Sect, something that had been here longer than any of the people currently standing on these grounds.

Which raised some interesting questions about the Celestial Sovereign and this world's structure and possibly why everything in it was falling apart. The Ancestor was already leading the way toward the sect's main hall and kept looking back every few steps as if afraid I might vanish, or worse change my mind about not killing him. The Sect Master followed at a respectful distance while almost certainly trying to reconstruct in his head how his night had managed to go this sideways.

I floated along behind them and maintained the air of casual superiority while thinking about what the next steps needed to be. The crisis was handled well enough, between the tree's support and their belief in my cultivation level, the sect wasn't going to move against the Han family now or in the near future.

But fear alone wasn't going to create lasting stability and these people needed to believe they were getting something worth having out of this arrangement, something valuable enough to outweigh the lost face, the dead elder, and the humiliation of tonight. Time to be the mysterious senior who might be willing to share some profound insights with deserving juniors.