Chapter 996: An Old Acquaintance

Seasons changed and years passed. Everything in the outside world continued to evolve at its own pace. The world hadn’t stood still while he was in seclusion.

Li Guanqi found this strange sense of disconnection deeply unsettling. He’d woken to too many changes at once. He was beginning to understand why the ancestors of powerful clans cared so little about bloodlines and succession. A single period of seclusion could leave a clan utterly changed. Those in charge would all be strangers, leaving the ancestor with little sense of belonging or connection to his own bloodline.

They said the path of cultivation led to the heartless Dao. Everyone you knew would eventually die. The road to immortality was lonely beyond measure. For cultivators who’d walked it long enough, emotions and desires were perhaps the most useless things of all.

Li Guanqi forced these thoughts down. He took out a special jade slip. “Brother Ji, how is everyone doing?”

As he expected, Ji Yuchuan hadn’t replied. Just like Coward Li, Xi Yunhuai was a person in his own right.

Xi Yunhuai was actually aware of certain things, but he didn’t mind. He was content living as “himself,” seeing nothing wrong with it.

Li Guanqi set down the jade slip, suddenly overcome by a sense of emptiness. He’d once had Peng Luo, Nine Heavens, and Sword Spirit at his side. His sworn brothers had been there too, with Meng Wanshu always close by.

Now, he was utterly alone, and that took some getting used to.

“Hoo… It’s been a long time since I’ve felt this way,” he murmured.

He retrieved a familiar set of black robes from his storage ring and put them on. The Face-Changing Bug changed his features into those of a handsome young man. Then he stepped forward, and his figure flashed thousands of zhang away in an instant.

He checked his current position. He was still in Falling Sunset Territory. The nearest target was the Chi family in Daochan Territory, but he didn’t plan to go there just yet. Since the matter with the Heavenly Intelligence Pavilion had come up, he’d save the Daochan Territory for last.

He studied the map and decided to head for the Taiqing Territory first. Lightning crackled beneath his feet as he flew at incredible speed.

After roughly an hour, he frowned. He wouldn’t reach the Taiqing Territory quickly enough at his current pace, so he had the Guanyun Pavilion send him a map. He located the nearest city with a cross-territory transport array and changed course.

Three days later, Li Guanqi walked out of Huanyao City wearing his black robes. He’d concealed his aura and drawn no attention whatsoever. His figure flickered, and he vanished.

The array’s guard rubbed his eyes and muttered, “Did someone just come through…? Why couldn’t I sense any aura at all?”

Li Guanqi flew through the sky toward the Yao family’s location. As he glanced at the map, a strange sense of familiarity came over him. His gaze shifted slightly. “The Yao family isn’t far from the Central Prefecture…”

He hadn’t expected them to be near the Central Prefecture. He checked the distance and estimated that if he flew at full speed, he could arrive within a day, so he didn’t need a transport array. Furthermore, the travel time would give him a chance to think things over.

Thoughts raced through his mind. As he recalled the ruins of the Duan family’s estate, something struck him as wrong. The residual aura there had definitely belonged to Ye Feng, but now that he thought more carefully, the traces left behind in that estate seemed almost too numerous. No matter how he thought it through, he couldn’t make sense of it.

The lingering aura had been extremely faint. If Li Guanqi hadn’t been so familiar with Ye Feng’s aura, he might have overlooked it entirely. Those scattered traces felt… deliberate.

That’s it!

The traces seemed to have been left for him to find, yet they conveyed no message. Li Guanqi had previously thought that if Ye Feng ever had a chance to cross paths with him, he would surely leave some kind of clue. That was why Li Guanqi wanted to visit every site where a clan had been wiped out.

Night had fallen over the mountain range where the Yao family’s estate stood. A figure in black robes appeared atop the forest canopy.

Li Guanqi gazed down at the crumbling walls below, sighed inwardly, and flashed into the courtyard. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust, and faint demonic qi lingered in the air, refusing to dissipate. The place lay in ruins, its collapsed pavilions hinting at its former grandeur. The white jade stones underfoot had been stained purplish-black by blood, and scattered bones gleamed eerily in the moonlight.

Li Guanqi walked through the deserted ruins, dead branches crunching underfoot. He closed his eyes and surveyed the entire estate with his divine consciousness. More than two hundred people had died here. Like the Duan family, the Yao family appeared to have been wiped out. Apart from the person taken away, no one had survived.

His divine consciousness revealed nothing unusual, though he noticed that the Yao family’s treasury had been dug out by scavengers. As he turned to leave with a sigh, an idea suddenly struck him.

Boom!

A devastatingly powerful lightning domain engulfed the area within a thousand zhang.

Li Guanqi’s sea of consciousness hummed as his divine consciousness surged outward. An image of the Duan family’s estate appeared a hundred zhang above the ground, spanning a thousand zhang. He formed another image of the Yao family’s estate in its current state and overlaid the two. Reaching out, he slowly rotated the Duan estate’s image to show it from above, then adjusted the Yao estate’s image to show it from the side.

A character took shape, jagged and incomplete. It was 安, meaning “safe.”

The chaotic, crisscrossing sword cuts at the two estates had formed that single character. Emotions churned within Li Guanqi. He looked up at the sky, his eyes moist and his lips trembling as he whispered, “You… you were that sure I’d figure it out?”

He waved away the projections, took a deep breath, and withdrew his lightning domain.

Buzz!

“Who dares trespass on the ruins of the Yao family’s estate?!”

Li Guanqi looked up. A white-robed young man with features as refined as jade hovered in midair. He had a scholarly bearing, but vital force surged violently within his body. His eyes were narrowed, and he was poised to strike at any moment.

When Li Guanqi saw who it was, his expression became impossibly complex.