Questioning Heaven, Desiring the Way - Chapter 123

“I thought only seven keys had surfaced. Why is the door being revealed ahead of time?” thought Gu Suihan as he used his finger to rub against the secret key hidden in his sleeve which had evolved several times now. He could sense that there must be some reason for this.

“What a coincidence.” Gu Suihan sent his spiritual sense out and quickly detected a lot of qi on the move. He cast a spell to help him see better, flew into the air, and looked down to see a group of people about a kilometer away from him hurrying toward the pillar of light.

The person leading the group was the Ethereal Court disciple who had tried to buy Gu Suihan’s secret key earlier on.

When he heard that voice, he turned to see Gu Suihan in his black robe that flapped even in the absence of wind staring at him indifferently. His expression faltered slightly and he responded, “Indeed!” His voice was bright, but he suddenly started speeding up in a clear attempt to shake Gu Suihan off.

“Fate has brought us back together again, hasn’t it? Why are you in such a hurry to leave, my fellow cultivator?”

Gu Suihan’s voice was soft and gentle, but it rang in the ears of everyone in the group. He appeared in front of them after he had finished saying these words.

It was as though a ghost had suddenly appeared before them, which was a thought that sent shudders through the group.

The one leading the group had a slightly grim expression as he put a palm over his other fist and gave Gu Suihan a polite smile. “Fellow cultivator Gu, my name is Zhang Yan and I’m an internal disciple of the Ethereal Court. May I ask why you are stopping us from moving forward?”

“I assume you are the current top senior of the Ethereal Court.” Gu Suihan glanced at the younger Foundation Establishment cultivators behind Zhang Yan with a strange twinkle in his eye.

Zhang Yan cursed inwardly. The last thing he needed was to run into this lunatic lone ranger. To him, a person like Gu Suihan was an unscrupulous madman. Worse still, Gu Suihan was an extremely intelligent and formidable madman.

“I am here purely because of a series of coincidences. Compared to you, I am restrained by more responsibilities and I’m not able to move as freely as you.” Zhang Yan had no idea what Gu Suihan wanted, so he just responded politely while thinking hard of a way to get away from this crazy young man. Who knew what this fellow was scheming?

Gu Suihan had a flicker in his eyes, like the twinkle of the stars, as though he didn’t care about Zhang Yan’s polite response. Instead, he asked flatly, “I’m here to ask if you’ve ever met disciples from the War Demon Sect before. I have a good friend in that sect and I heard that he’s in this secret realm as well. I’m hoping to find him, so I thought I’d ask you.”

“Yes, I’ve seen them before,” said Zhang Yan without thinking as he looked at Gu Suihan in confusion for a second. He then looked at Gu Suihan warily because he could sense that this was no innocent question. That ridiculously fake smile on Gu Suihan’s face did not help at all.

But no matter how grossed out he felt from seeing that smile on Gu Suihan’s face, Zhang Yan forced himself to smile as he asked a little curiously, “What are you trying to do?”

“Nothing, really. I just wanted to ask that.” Gu Suihan laughed a little awkwardly, then excused himself and left.

Zhang Yan simply couldn’t think of what intentions Gu Suihan could possibly have, so he had no choice but to suppress the uneasiness in his heart and raised an arm to call his juniors together before continuing on their journey.

“The War Demon Sect has joined the alliance after all,” thought Gu Suihan as he flew into the air. “That means that only the Seven Kill Sect and the Yin Principle Sect are on their own.”

Based on his observations of the corpse inside the cave, that War Demon Sect disciple had died for at least a few hundred years. The Ethereal Court had probably discovered this domain a long time ago and wanted to use it as the venue for this inter-sect competition partly to greatly reduce the numbers and overall power of the Seven Kill Sect and the Yin Principle Sect, and partly to gain the trapped legacy.

The other sects probably agreed to form this alliance because they too, coveted this legacy left behind by a Divine Soul cultivator.

It wasn’t difficult to see that gaining benefits was always the main thing on a cultivator’s mind. Suddenly switching sides or stabbing someone in the back was extremely commonplace.

Gu Suihan was an example of this himself. The Seven Kill Sect was in a precarious situation and it was hard to say if they’d be able to get through this ordeal. Instead of working hard for the sect, he actually foiled the sect’s plans and made things even worse for them. That was as good as pushing the Seven Kill Sect to the edge of a cliff.

You Hantian was a Nascent Change cultivator, so it was impossible for him not to have noticed anything. He definitely either had plans that nobody else knew about, or the Seven Kill Sect had a trump card up their sleeve.

Gu Suihan started thinking through every detail of the Seven Kill Sect and tried to think of what this trump card could be.

Was it the Demon Abyss? Or the Upper World?

Or was it the secret realm containing the greatest secrets of the Seven Kill Sect that You Hantian was holding onto?

All of these were possibilities.

The gleam in Gu Suihan’s eyes grew brighter and brighter. As the layers of fog cleared up, he began to see the powerful one that had been hidden by the shadows all this time.

“It’s here.” Gu Suihan stood on a tree branch and looked out at a majestic giant bronze door in the distance. The giant door was built on a towering and steep mountain that looked like a 3,000-meter sword pointing at the sky. A large rock that measured nearly three meters wide sat in front of the door and there were nine slots on it.

A few hundred people had already gathered and they were more or less split into three factions. They huddled together and stared warily at the other groups. The atmosphere between them was tense and it looked like a fight could break out at any moment.

Perhaps Gu Suihan was the last one with a key to arrive. Once he walked toward them, everyone started whispering among themselves. They looked unkindly at him, but all of them gave way to him as he walked through the crowd.

It was all because he was holding onto a gleaming secret key.

“Which sect is he from?”

“I don’t know. I’ve not seen him before. Maybe he’s a lucky fellow who happened to pick up a secret key.”

“Oh? Then how about we…”

Before that man could finish speaking, a gleaming sword stabbed into the area between his eyes and sliced his body into two. The stench of blood instantly filled the air and his limbs and flesh spilled all over the ground.

Everyone instantly felt a shiver down their spine as they gasped and looked at Gu Suihan warily, as Gu Suihan put his sword aside and walked on as if nothing had just happened. The crowd was horrified, but nobody dared to speak anymore.

“Such wicked people.” Gu Suihan scanned his surroundings with a look of disgust in his eyes. But he did not attack anybody else. He flew past everyone like a ghost and arrived at the large rock that was about 300 meters away.

“Have you brought what I wanted?” asked Gu Suihan with a frown as he looked around while walking toward Li Xiaoyao.

“I’ve got one.” Li Xiaoyao dragged an exhausted Seven Kill Sect disciple who was all tied up and flung him onto the ground. At the same time, he used his chin to point at the group consisting of Seven Kill and Yin Principle disciples and said, “The rest are there.”

“And which Peak Leader are you?” Gu Suihan squatted down and looked curiously at the tied-up disciple as he pulled out the rag in the disciple’s mouth.

The disciple spat several times and glared venomously at Gu Suihan. “I am Wang Xiantu! I can’t believe there’s a traitor like you in the Seven Kill Sect! If I get out of this alive…”

“Tsk!” Gu Suihan scoffed disdainfully. He couldn’t believe that this fellow still hoped to make it out alive at this stage.

He had a black thread around his hand that solidified the violent and frosty qi around it into a black mist as he prepared to suck the soul out of Wang Xiantu.

“Stop right there!” yelled a voice accompanied by a frosty qi aimed at the back of Gu Suihan’s head.

“Humph!” Gu Suihan turned his head. Questioning Heaven shone like the sun as it came down heavily on his attacker while his left hand stabbed its fingers into Wang Xiantu’s skull and grabbed Wang Xiantu’s struggling soul out of his head. He then proceeded to swallow the soul immediately.

“You…how DARE you!” yelled Gu Suihan’s attacker furiously when he saw what Gu Suihan just did. The temperature of the area within a hundred meters of the two of them suddenly dropped to freezing point. Frosty qi surged through the area and turned the area into an icy zone in an instant.

“Not bad, but it’s too bad that this is a body you’ve taken over by force. You’re still limited by this body’s level of cultivation and you’re not able to bend the rules of nature,” Gu Suihan gave a compliment as he felt several ice crystals fall from the biting wind. They were so incredibly cold.

Gu Suihan then moved like the wind, splitting himself into more than ten different images of himself. Some were smiling, some were sad, some were upset, and some were indifferent. Every single one of them looked so real.

When the images disappeared, Gu Suihan disappeared into thin air as well.

“He’s behind us!” The disciples with the keenest sense of sight from the various sects had a look of horror in their eyes as they saw a figure suddenly reappear, a figure who seemed to ascend directly from hell.

Gu Suihan’s attacker had a bad premonition when Gu Suihan disappeared, so he quickly retreated and shouted loudly, “Dark Elements and Heavenly Souls!” Runes glowed brightly on his robe and the glow instantly created a protective wall of frosty qi around him.

Gu Suihan reappeared from the shadow at his attacker’s feet. He raised his sword and thrust it at his attacker’s waist, but the seemingly frail protective wall blocked his sword.

Bam! The collision between sword and wall caused the wall to shake, so the attacker flew into the air and cast a spell. His robe flapped wildly and his black hair danced even though there was no wind.

The icy zone howled as it surrounded both of them. The icy wind was like knives, and the attacker turned the bits of ice in the air into several giant ice hurricanes. They roared furiously as they surrounded Gu Suihan, threatening to turn Gu Suihan into minced meat.