Chapter 1628: Who is Scheming Against Whom
Mu Guyue was actually somewhat dissatisfied with her performance. Having practiced soul cultivation for so many years, she had failed to shatter the white-robed youth’s spirit in a single strike. Since being with Li Yan, she had gradually grown fond of his combat style.
The Demon Race generally preferred direct, overwhelming attacks and loathed the idea of stealthy assassinations, viewing them as the cowardly work of those who feared death. But Mu Guyue now found that killing people invisibly was far more efficient and saved a lot of time and effort. Why bother with a long, drawn-out battle?
Her dissatisfaction stemmed from Li Yan’s standards—he always aimed for a one-hit kill. But she had forgotten that she had only entered the Spirit Transformation realm a few years ago. In those four strikes, she had shattered Feng’s soul so completely that he didn’t even need a finishing blow. As for the late-stage expert, she had only needed two strikes to end him.
If outsiders knew that a newly ascended expert could slay her peers so easily, they wouldn’t believe it. This was the terror of soul cultivation, though it had its own fatal weakness: a fragile physical body. Li Yan had exploited this very weakness back in the Nascent Soul realm to kill a powerful soul cultivator.
However, soul cultivators usually made up for this by relying on sudden, hidden strikes. If a soul cultivator faced someone from the Five Immortals Sect of similar rank, the outcome would be uncertain even with a sneak attack. The Five Immortals Sect’s techniques became terrifyingly powerful as they progressed, creating an unbreakable internal five-element system.
The rules of the five elements would lock the Sea of Consciousness, the Nascent Soul, and the spirit within. To touch the soul, one first had to break the internal five elements. Thousand-Layer True Lord, the master of the earth element, possessed the strongest defense of his rank; even a late-stage Body Integration soul cultivator would struggle to break through his shell. Similarly, the spirit and Nascent Soul of someone like Dong Fuyi were merged into the Black Water, providing another layer of protection. However, reaching this level required being at the late stage of the Void Refining realm. Before that, the internal five elements were still developing. This was why the Five Immortals Sect was so formidable in the later stages of cultivation.
Mu Guyue had reached the seductive woman. The woman realized that her momentary shock had prevented her from converging with her allies. Now, this cursed Demon cultivator was locked onto her, and she wasn’t about to let herself be killed. As she retreated, she opened her mouth and unleashed a stream of emerald water at the approaching Mu Guyue.
She only needed to delay her for a second. The other three were closing in. A cold light flashed in Mu Guyue’s eyes. There was a reason she had pursued this woman specifically. During her scouting trips over the past few days, she had done more than just look around. The remaining four Mocha Palace experts were now focused on her, their Divine Senses locked onto her every move.
At this point, another soul-based ambush was risky. But as the woman retreated, Mu Guyue saw her opportunity. The woman was moving toward a specific spot on the ground. She was a mid-stage expert, and Mu Guyue was confident she could kill or severely wound her if she could get close enough.
As the woman spat the emerald water, her heart suddenly clenched.
“Oh no!” she cried out. She felt a sudden surge of power from below, aimed directly at her.
The four of them were already on high alert after Mu Guyue’s strange assassinations. Both of their comrades had stiffened before being killed. So, even though the surge from below was weak, the woman’s fear caused it to be magnified a thousand times in her mind. Her terror prevented her from assessing the situation properly.
She immediately redirected her emerald water downward to meet the rising surge. It was an instinctive reaction born of fear. The exchange happened faster than any of the Nascent Soul cultivators could see. The two figures collided just as the woman’s protective barrier erupted in a brilliant light. She twisted her body, trying to avoid Mu Guyue’s frontal assault.
The emerald water struck the rising attack, but the result was completely unexpected. The attack was incredibly weak; it shattered on contact, having absolutely no effect.
“This is…” The woman was stunned. It felt as though she had poured all her strength into a strike that hit nothing but air, leaving her off-balance.
But this was exactly what Mu Guyue wanted. She and Li Yan had buried several extremely weak arrays in the surrounding earth. They were so weak they would barely affect a Qi Condensation cultivator. But this was a tactic Mu Guyue frequently used in defensive warfare. Because these arrays were so small, the spiritual energy they released when activated was less than what was naturally in the air. They were easily overlooked, and even if detected, they were often dismissed as remnants of broken treasures or old formations.
Mu Guyue used these arrays to create a split second of distraction. She had noticed the woman was retreating toward one of them and used it to trigger her reaction.
Even Mu Guyue hadn’t expected the result to be this effective. Because of her two previous assassinations, the woman had made a catastrophic error in judgment. Instead of relying on her normal defenses against a weak aura, her fear had driven her to divert most of her power downward, leaving herself vulnerable.
By the time the woman realized her mistake, Mu Guyue was already upon her. Before she could even scream, Mu Guyue punched out. From the knuckles of her fist, four long, white bone spikes erupted.
Schlick!
Compared to a Demon cultivator of Mu Guyue’s level, the seductive woman was a caster-type cultivator who had diverted most of her power. In the heat of the moment, she couldn’t summon any more defense. Her protective barrier was no match for a Demon’s brute strength and was instantly pierced by the bone spikes.
The woman was no longer seductive. One side of her face—her cheek, temple, and skull—was skewered by the four spikes. Her mouth hung open, and the light vanished from her eyes as the spikes emerged from the other side of her head, tipped with crimson.
“Die!” “Bitch!” “Kill her!”
The other three experts were now upon her. Their convergence was as fast as Mu Guyue’s strike. Mu Guyue didn’t hesitate; she jerked her hand back.
Boom!
The woman’s body exploded into a mist of blood, which Mu Guyue flung at the approaching three, forcing them to swerve. She twisted her body and slid backward, avoiding their encirclement.
A piercing, venomous voice rang out. “Kill her!”
A flash of golden light revealed a two-inch tall Nascent Soul—the seductive woman. Her face was twisted in hatred. She pulled a purple light from her storage ring and flung it at Mu Guyue’s receding shadow.
Mu Guyue felt a pang of regret. If those three hadn’t been so close, she could have destroyed the woman’s Nascent Soul. Now that her tricks were spent and the enemy was on high alert, she knew she couldn’t achieve another such victory against the remaining three.
But just then, her expression shifted, though she didn’t stop her retreat. Four attacks, including the one from the Nascent Soul, were locked onto her.
“Retreat into the array!” Li Yan’s urgent voice rang in her mind.
At that same instant, the four Mocha Palace attackers also paled and swerved to avoid an attack from behind. As they moved, their treasures aimed at Mu Guyue slowed down. Mu Guyue was incredibly fast at short distances; without a second of hesitation, she shot upward and then veered sharply, breaking the lock of the enemy weapons.
The moment she landed on the wall, Li Yan appeared beside her. His aura was unstable.
“Full power to the array!” Li Yan commanded as he slid toward the room where the Nascent Soul cultivators were.
Almost simultaneously, a powerful aura appeared on the horizon. Mu Guyue realized everything—the enemy had indeed fallen for the trap.
Boom!
A second after Li Yan and Mu Guyue entered the room, a deafening explosion rocked the Beacon Tower. A brilliant white light erupted from the array. The sound of groaning metal and straining stone echoed through the outpost—the array was being pushed to its limit. Beneath the walls, the ground was empty.
The shockwave shook the tower, and dust puffed from the gaps between the stones. Screams and the sound of coughing blood came from several of the rooms.
Outside, a furious roar rang out. “Cunning brat! Good, very good!”
A figure appeared in the sky above the tower—the sickly, blue-robed man. His eyes were cold with fury, and he laughed with a chilling, manic edge. He held a long ghost-blade in both hands; the previous strike had been his.
The sickly man was livid. The boy had escaped him. Back in the grove, he had shattered the youth’s array, but the black-robed boy had used that brief window to dive deep into the earth and vanish. He had been stunned by the sophistication of the boy’s concealment art. He had scanned the area with his Divine Sense but found nothing. Then, he realized what was happening and shifted his focus to the Beacon Tower.
But the moment his sense moved toward the tower, a blinding light appeared, causing him to falter for a split second.
‘Poison!’ He realized with a surge of rage that he had been poisoned. He circulated his massive power, clearing his head instantly.
Li Yan had left a cloud of hallucinogenic poison as he entered the array. He didn’t know how effective it would be against a Void Refining expert, and he didn’t expect to kill him. He just needed to buy that one second.
The sickly man saw a Spirit Transformation cultivator slip away under his very nose and charged the tower. Seven thousand li was but a blink of an eye to him, but the delay had cost him that one crucial second. He felt humiliated. His own trap had been turned against him by a junior. He no longer concealed his power.
As he rose into the air, he saw a figure reaching the tower, striking his subordinates before slipping into the safety of the array. He narrowed his eyes and brought his blade down in a massive arc on the spot where Li Yan had vanished.
But Li Yan had planned for this. He had entered the array ahead of the man and immediately took control. The man’s strike didn’t catch him; instead, it hammered against the array, shaking the entire tower.
The man saw he had missed, and his Divine Sense caught the bloody remains of Feng and the white-robed youth, as well as the woman’s fleeing Nascent Soul. His rage turned into a cold, murderous fury. He realized now that he hadn’t anticipated the enemy’s plan—they had anticipated his. They had set a double-layered trap and boldly lured him in.
He had not only been outplayed but had lost two of his best men, with a third now forced into a long recovery. The enemy had only two experts, yet they had decimated his force.
“I will see you all dead!” he roared, bringing his blade down again.
Boom!
He hated the black-robed boy most of all. A mere Spirit Transformation cultivator had set a trap knowing full well that a Void Refining expert would likely fall into it. Such audacity was a greater insult than the death of his men.
Inside the tower, many Golden Core cultivators had already collapsed. They had been struggling to hold the line against the Mocha Palace squads, and the Void Refining expert’s strike had knocked most of them unconscious. This was despite Li Yan and Mu Guyue having taken over. The attack had come too fast; although the Golden Core cultivators had surrendered control, their Divine Senses and magical power hadn’t fully disengaged, and the gap in power was simply too great.
Three of the Nascent Soul cultivators were also bleeding from their mouths and noses, but they refused to let go, continuing to assist Li Yan and Mu Guyue. As the second strike hit, dust rained from the ceiling. But the four Nascent Soul experts realized that they were no longer feeling the brunt of the impact.
They looked at Li Yan and Mu Guyue. Although the pair’s auras were churning violently, they weren’t coughing blood. They looked perfectly capable of continuing the defense. The four experts exchanged a glance, a single thought in their minds: ‘They’re just initial-stage experts… how can there be such a massive difference?’
In the Immortal Realm, Nascent Soul cultivators saw Spirit Transformation experts all the time. Some of them had even fought against initial-stage experts using high-level treasures and techniques. While they would lose, they never felt the gap was unbridgeable. But Li Yan and Mu Guyue felt like bottomless pits—deep and unfathomable.