Chapter 1316: Where Is Phei?

Chapter: Old Blood Beyond the Horizon

Where was Phei Ryujin Tiamat?

By the end of the week, everyone seemed to have arrived at the same question, although the people closest to the Young Dragon had developed a rather impressive talent for answering everything except that.

Even the families had already reached out to their daughters now living around Phei, hoping at least one of them would accidentally provide something useful. Instead, every conversation seemed to wander into the same beautifully irritating wall.

But the girls were safe. Nothing terrible had happened to them. They were comfortable. Phei was alive; Phei would return.

Wonderful.

Where was he?

Apparently that particular sentence had been cursed.

For the Heavenchilds and Maxtons, the continued lack of an answer only strengthened the suspicion neither family had managed to shake since the disastrous night in Anactica. Phei had disappeared from sight around the same period Danton vanished, the eleven World Transcendents accompanying him went silent and the Coffer ceased being where it was supposed to be.

None of that was proof; heck, it was barely even evidence once each matter was separated and examined on its own.

Put everything together, however, and coincidence began looking suspiciously overworked.

The two families needed something firmer than suspicion.

So they took Anahita to Anactica.

The Fallen Angel had entered the Dead Winter Realm beneath a heaven still howling with its eternal storms. Frozen winds screamed over the ancient glaciers, carrying enough cold to turn ordinary flesh brittle within moments, while the colossal corpse of the Titan remained stretched beneath frost and broken mountains as though the disasters of the previous days had been beneath its interest.

Anahita stood amid that impossible winter and slowly opened her perception.

Her mismatched wings spread behind her, one white with its lingering golden brilliance and the other carrying that magnificent darkness which had long ceased looking like corruption and instead resembled a night sky that had simply decided Heaven was overrated.

She searched.

Carefully.

Thoroughly.

The answer she eventually gave them appeared absolute.

The Void had been there.

Danton’s energy had been there.

The eleven World Transcendents had been there.

But Phei Ryujin Tiamat had not.

That was all the Heavenchilds and Maxtons needed to hear.

If Phei had ever stepped foot in Anarctica, Anahita should have known.

There were beings with exceptional perception, cultivators capable of following spiritual traces across impossible distances, treasures built to expose hidden bloodlines and ancient arts meant to uncover what ordinary senses could never reach. Anahita’s awareness belonged to something more fundamental than most of those.

She had been born from the World Essence itself.

And the world always remembered what touched it, and Anahita could listen.

Trying to hide one’s energy from her was one thing. Erasing every trace of having ever existed within the place she was searching was another matter entirely. Phei was abnormal enough that nobody sensible underestimated him anymore, but even his growing collection of absurdities of insane powers did not make them believe he could casually deceive something rooted so deeply in the World itself like Anahita’s senses if he was really here.

More importantly, why would Anahita lie?

She couldn’t.

The thought never seriously crossed their minds to start doubting her when she told them exactly what they wanted to hear.

That was perhaps the funniest part of the entire investigation, although nobody present possessed enough information to appreciate the joke.

Danton was absent and therefore unable to challenge a single word she said that Phei had been indeed here. Even had he somehow returned in time to stand beside them while she searched, what exactly could he contradict?

He had seen Consort.

There was certainly no confusing that woman with anyone else after she attacked him.

Phei himself?

No.

Danton had never laid eyes upon him in Anactica.

Perhaps he had heard his voice. Perhaps somewhere amid the violence, the hidden movements and the increasingly ridiculous sequence of events, Phei’s voice had reached him.

But what did a voice prove?

This was a world where cultivators altered appearances, concealed anything, distorted perception and used treasures capable of doing things ordinary mortals would file beneath witchcraft before running in the opposite direction:

Mimicking a voice hardly ranked among the grand mysteries of existence.

Someone could fake a voice, transmit one or they could make another person sound exactly like Phei if sufficiently determined.

So Phei had never been there.

That conclusion settled comfortably enough.

It simply did not clear suspicion off him.

The Heavenchilds and Maxtons still believed the Young Dragon might have been involved, indirectly if anything. Perhaps he knew what would happen and he had arranged something. Perhaps someone was acting for him had entered Anarctica while he remained somewhere else entirely.

Consort had been there, after all.

And the increasingly impossible Void surrounding Phei made the idea of coincidence harder to swallow every time his name appeared near another catastrophe.

Yet suspicion remained suspicion.

There was little they could do with it.

What they could do was continue staring at the other wound left behind by that night.

The Coffer was gone.

They could no longer enter it without the keys either, and that simple reality ended the matter there for now. Whatever remained inside, wherever it had been taken and whatever would eventually happen with it, none of that changed the one thing both families already knew with certainty.

It was no longer there.

The Heavenchilds felt that loss most keenly.

There were many ways for an old family to suffer humiliation.

Losing the Coffer had somehow found one of the expensive ones.

Still, even their restlessness paled beside the Ashfords.

They had lost something considerably more precious than treasure.

Althea remained missing.

Hayashi and Ashworth had never stopped the searched all these past days but to no avail.

Neither had been fortunate enough to find her.

Every attempt ended the same way, with another road closing beneath their feet and another possibility becoming useless. Yet neither man seemed particularly interested in learning the peacefulart of accepting that the next search would probably end exactly like the previous one.

Maya eventually told them they would not be able to find Althea.

She said it gently, without drama, almost too gently considering what the words meant.

Hayashi and Ashworth listened but then both continued searching anyway.

Sienna watched them go and did not waste her breath.

She already knew they would.

Love had always possessed a remarkable talent for making otherwise intelligent beings temporarily immune to advice. Gods and Immortals themselves did it. Mortals perfected it and then had the audacity to call themselves the rational species.

If there was even the smallest chance that one more search might find Althea, neither Hayashi nor Ashworth was going to sit somewhere peacefully because Maya had told them otherwise.

So Sienna allowed them to go.

Maya remained beside her for a little while, watching the direction the two men had disappeared.

"They won’t find her," she murmured.

"I know."

"They know too."

Sienna’s violet eyes moved toward her.

Maya thought about that for a moment before adding softly, "That seems inconvenient."

"It is called being stubborn."

Maya’s lips curved. "You do that too, Nether Goddess."

Sienna stared at her.

Maya decided the conversation had reached a natural and very healthy conclusion.

Three days after Phei and Melissa had been taken away by Sienna, Melissa had returned but Dravenna did not.

The missing Dragoness naturally invited questions, but Melissa possessed enough experience dealing with curious people to make useless answers sound warm and satisfying; the girls therefore had not learned much more about Dravenna from her.

Melissa herself, however, was much harder to ignore.

To ordinary eyes, the changes were almost invisible. She remained the same beautiful woman who had left days earlier, carrying her familiar warmth and that almost unfair gentleness which somehow made entire rooms feel more comfortable whenever she entered them.

Those capable of sensing essence noticed something underneath.

Melissa had restarted her cultivation.

At first, several of them merely assumed they were mistaken. Her awakening had only just resumed, yet the essence moving quietly inside her possessed a potency far beyond anything they expected from someone taking those first steps again. It was refined, deep and strangely rich, resting beneath Melissa’s familiar presence without demanding attention and somehow becoming more startling precisely because she seemed completely unconcerned by it.

Melissa offered very little explanation for that either.

She did though, give the household one thing they desperately wanted:

"Phei will be back soon."

Almost immediately, several of the women relaxed with their expressions softened and the questions that had been circling for days finally lost some of their teeth.

Across the room, Sienna stared at them.

Then slowly rolled her eyes.

’Fools.’

She had been saying exactly that for days.

She was the one bound directly to Phei’s soul. She could sense him when none of them could. She was the one who knew he was alive and where he was, the one who could bring him back when the time came, and for days she had already told these women there was no reason to panic.

Did they listen to her? Apparently not.

But Melissa walked through the door, smiled and repeated practically the same thing, and suddenly everyone believed civilization would survive another morning.

’Fools.’

Maya had even helped her explain.

That somehow made the betrayal more damning.

Sienna’s eyes narrowed another fraction.

Maya, sitting nearby, immediately noticed. Her mouth twitched.

Sienna turned toward her.

Maya lifted her cup and became deeply interested in whatever was inside.

’Another fool.’

Fortunately, Infinity Chaos had acquired enough new distractions that nobody needed to spend the entire week wondering where Phei had disappeared to.

The household had grown.

Again.

For the first few days, the women surrounding Phei displayed considerably less dignity than any of them would later admit.

They gawked.

There really was no more flattering word for it.

Ancient races they had heard about through stories, histories and cultivation lore were suddenly sitting inside their home, eating at the same tables and being asked whether they wanted coffee.