Chương 183: Chapter 182: The Search

He sat up sharply.

"Stop. Senior Brother, did you see that?" They came to an immediate stop, surrounding the carpet, and Senior Brother Qing An reached out to halt it as well since Yang had gotten too distracted by what he had seen to manage it himself. Senior Brother Fan Xiao was almost in his face with how quickly he had closed the distance.

"Chen Yang. What did you see?"

"A white light. It blinked once, directly above us." Senior Brother Fan Xiao and the others looked up at once. The sky was the same blue-orange it had always been. The blinking light was gone. Yang looked as well and could not locate it.

"There was a light. I saw it," he said, but his voice had lost some of its certainty since even he could not find it now.

"We trust you, Junior Brother," Senior Brother Qing An said with a small smile. Senior Brother Song Weilong looked around at the others.

"What do you think it could be?"

"A creature," Senior Brother Yuan Shen offered lazily.

"Or a place of some kind," Senior Brother Zhen Hao added, before turning to Senior Brother Fan Xiao.

"Senior Brother, what do you think?"

"It could be anything," Senior Brother Fan Xiao said, still looking upward.

"It could be anything. The exploration teams have not gone this far and they were not specifically looking at what was above them."

"Not surprising," Senior Brother Song Weilong agreed.

"Most hidden things are found on the ground or underground. Places concealed in the sky are rather rarer."

"Do we look into it?" Senior Brother Qing An said. Senior Brother Fan Xiao nodded and turned to Yang.

"Lead us in the direction you saw it. As close as you can manage." Yang nodded, feeling a bit uncomfortable. He was the only one who had seen it, and now he would be leading his Senior Brothers to what might turn out to be nothing at all. They flew upward. Yang tried to hold his bearing but the sky here offered nothing to navigate by. No sun. No moon. No stars. It was the sky so there were no landmarks of any kind. Everything above looked exactly the same. Hours passed. Then more hours but no light appeared.

"Senior Brother," Yang said finally, glancing at Senior Brother Fan Xiao.

"Perhaps I made a mistake." Senior Brother Fan Xiao looked at him and brought the group to a stop, drawing Yang's carpet in alongside him.

"Junior Brother, it has only been a few hours since we began searching. It is not a good habit to surrender to doubt this quickly."

"Indeed," Senior Brother Qing An said, with a reproachful look.

"Hardly anything in the cultivation world would ever be discovered if cultivators began abandoning searches after a little effort. You have given us the first indication of anything since we arrived here. We would be ignorant fools to not look into where it may lead us." Senior Brother Yuan Shen added his own two cents.

"Of course, we cannot yet determine whether it will lead us to an exit or to our deaths." He smiled pleasantly.

"Either way it is better than flying in circles," Senior Brother Zhen Hao muttered. Senior Brother Fan Xiao gave Yang's carpet a light push and they were off again. Days passed. In hindsight, Yang came to be reminded again over the following days that his understanding of time as a meaningful unit of measurement was not shared by cultivators of higher realms. Because they had been searching for days, going higher and higher.

The sky remained the same, and surprisingly the air remained breathable despite the altitude. On Earth, they would have left the atmosphere long before now. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. Senior Brother Song Weilong took out a crystal pendant at some point and flew at the front with it suspended in the air before him. Apparently it was a treasure capable of registering hidden spaces.

Yang, whose cultivation was too low to sustain the effort his Senior Brothers maintained without rest, took to sleeping and eating in the air. This was made possible partly by Senior Brother Yan Zheng's gift, which Yang was quietly beginning to regard as the most practically useful thing he owned. You could only stand on a flying sword. On this carpet, he could sit, sleep, eat, and practice, all while continuing to move.

Senior Brothers Yuan Shen and Zhen Hao, who needed at least some rest even at their cultivation levels, would occasionally join him on the carpet, Senior Brother Fan Xiao keeping it tethered to his own self so it continued moving even when no one was actively steering. Relieving himself was handled by some pills Senior Brother Fan Xiao produced, which stripped toxins from the body entirely and removed the inconvenience from the situation with clinical efficiency.

Senior Brother Fan Xiao in these days had taken on the persona of a military commander, keeping them in tight formation at all times. Yang was of limited practical use, so he divided his time between rest and practicing the Myriad Silk-Splitting Needle Art. His control of the single needle had improved considerably over the past few days of practice.

The primary inconvenience was that every time he lost concentration and dropped the needle, it was Senior Brother Zhen Hao or Senior Brother Yuan Shen, whoever happened to be closest to him at the time, whose duty it fell to catch it before it disappeared into the clouds below.

Yang was lying on his back practicing, the single needle making smooth loops in the air above him, while Senior Brothers Zhen Hao and Yuan Shen sat beside him playing some card game, where they both were trying to cheat, when Senior Brother Song Weilong's voice cut across everything.

"I found something." Senior Brother Fan Xiao shot toward him immediately. The tether pulled the carpet along behind, and Yang grabbed the edge to stabilise as the carpet swung in the direction of the movement. The needle dropped straight onto his face as he lost concentration. Senior Brother Song Weilong and Senior Brother Qing An were both looking at the crystal pendant.

It hung in the air slightly tilted, the crystalline stone in the middle now glowing"Still distant," Senior Brother Qing An said, looking up from the pendant. He turned to Yang.

"It was fortunate that you noticed it at all."

"Have you identified what it is?" Senior Brother Zhen Hao asked.

"Not yet," Senior Brother Qing An said.

"But we will." He turned to Senior Brother Fan Xiao.

"How do you want to approach this?" Senior Brother Fan Xiao was quiet for a moment, his expression working through something internal. Then he looked determined.

"Put the swords away. Everyone on the carpet." Before Yang could begin to guess the reason, Senior Brother Qing An said, "You think it might take us somewhere else?"

"Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I would rather take the precaution." Senior Brother Fan Xiao looked up at the direction the pendant indicated.

"Whatever it is, it is clearly not a beast. Some beast would have either moved away or attacked by now. We approach together." One by one his Senior Brothers stored their swords and stepped onto the carpet and within moments they were moving up, Senior Brother Fan Xiao at the front guiding the carpet. Yang held on as the sky around him blurred.

He could see almost nothing except the shapes of his Senior Brothers close around him, and then a red light appeared at the edges of his vision and he realised that one of his Senior Brothers had enclosed a barrier around them all. The carpet kept accelerating. And then the orientation of the world flipped.

The carpet was now plunging toward the ground instead of climbing into the sky, and they would have struck whatever surface was below them at full speed if Senior Brother Fan Xiao had not reacted quickly enough to make the carpet slow and straighten as they came to a stop. When he looked up, or rather down, or rather in the direction that was now simply forward, he found that they had arrived somewhere entirely new.

The sky looked the same but they were outside in a desert which looked brighter lit than the rocky place they had just come from despite having the exact same sky. The ground beneath the carpet was flat sandstone, carved with a formation. He could tell it was a formation from the layout, though the inscriptions and style were unlike anything he had seen used in formation work before. Four large humanoid stone statues stood at the corners of the formation, each one several metres tall.

Each one with sinister features. Yang was beginning to notice a theme in this realm, and he wasn't particularly fond of it. Everyone stepped off the carpet and cautiously approached the statues. Yang drifted to the nearest base and looked at the inscriptions carved into the stone. He could not read them. But there was something about it that kept pulling at his recognition. He leaned in, his hand rising instinctively, but before he could touch it, his wrist was caught in a grip as hard as steel.

He looked up to find Senior Brother Qing An's hand closed around it.

"Touching things in unknown places is seldom a good idea," Senior Brother Qing An said pleasantly, and let go.

"It looks familiar," Yang admitted.