Chapter 144: Search Efforts (Patreon)

“…we’ve been searching the sect grounds for the past five days with increasing effort, but to no avail. It’s as if the two just vanished into nothingness.”

Liu Wei’s frown deepened as he stroked his beard.

“You should have informed me sooner.”

“We- I- I apologize, Elder! We didn’t deem it serious at first and did not want to bother you!”

“It’s alright. But next time, inform me as soon as you’ve excluded the possibility of a simple mistake.”

“I understand, Elder!”

“Chao,” Liu Wei turned to his assistant, “please inform the Enforcement Hall of the matter posthaste. If we want to mount an organized search, we will need their cooperation.”

“Yes, Elder!”

He bowed and marched out of Liu Wei’s office. The latter focused back on the instructor that had come to him bearing the news.

“Please inform your colleagues. I want you to cooperate with the Enforcement Hall’s members as soon as they arrive. In the meantime, I will personally search through the surrounding forests, please make sure that they’re as empty of other disciples as possible.”

“Understood, Elder!”

He hastily left the room, Liu Wei standing up and following him outside where he immediately took to the air. The disappearance of two disciples was a serious matter – his other work could wait.

Liu Wei could understand why the responsible instructors hadn’t informed him at first. The younger disciples technically weren’t allowed to move freely outside the Training Hall’s grounds, but this rule wasn’t rigorously enforced. The entrances were only lightly guarded and if one of them was caught outside without permission, they’d only be in for a light chiding.

Hence, it was not too uncommon for the Training Hall to be unaware of the location of a younger disciple for a while. However, that apparent negligence came from well-earned confidence.

Liu Wei spread out his soul sense to the furthest possible extend as he glided through the air, just over the treetops.

The forests around the sect weren’t altogether tamed, but they were harmless. They weren’t so dense as to be difficult to traverse if one took their time and any and all animals that had the potential to harm humans had long been driven out or hunted to extinction. And with the three mountains as points of orientation, and the many pathways running through the forests in all directions, there was little to no danger of getting seriously lost.

Even if someone were to injure themselves seriously enough to keep them from moving, searching for someone who was lost in a limited area became almost trivially easy when the searching parties had access to soul sense. Because of that, any ‘missing’ disciples usually turned up within the day again.

Still, five days was too long a time to wait before informing him. A disciple staying missing even after search efforts had been mounted was an exceedingly rare occurrence. With two disappearances at once, the chance of this being a harmless accident were vanishingly small. If it was an accident at all, it wasn’t unlikely that the two had been immobilized by serious injuries – in which case finding them after five days may already be too late.

Liu Wei’s senses picked up on the presence of some younger children, but there were more than two of them and they were accompanied by an instructor – not what he was looking for.

Truthfully, Liu Wei hardly believed that this was an accident at all. Nature around the sect was just not treacherous enough for two people to seriously injure themselves at the same time. Also, there was no reason for a seventeen-year-old disciple to head out of the Training Hall’s grounds in the first place. There had to be more to this.

The question was what it was. At first glance, neither of the two seemed to be out of the ordinary in any significant way. Just two normal outer disciples, one of them just barely having become one.

He’d have a background check conducted on them later on, but right now he couldn’t think of anything that would make them important enough for anyone capable of orchestrating such a disappearance within sect grounds to care.

He continued scouring the forest to the best of his abilities, circling the Training Hall with increasing distance, but to no avail. Nothing his senses picked up on turned out to be the two missing disciples and after several hours of flight, Liu Wei had to admit that this method just wasn’t working.

The forests were just too filled with Qi and other interruptions for him to reliably pick out presences while he was moving quickly, especially since he had to account for the possibility of those presences being massively weakened or deliberately hidden, so he was not covering a lot of ground.

He returned to the Training Hall just in time to see Qingge arriving at the head of a large group of members. That was good. If anyone was capable of organizing a proper search, it was her.

Liu Wei descended from the air to meet his disciple, though with more worries than he usually had when doing so.

…

Nothing.

One week of searching and they had found nothing.

Not a trace of either Liting or Ye, the two disciples that had gone missing. At this point, the probability of their disappearance having been an accident had dropped to near nothing, so Liu Wei had called off the regular search with a heavy heart. Someone had to be behind this.

Unfortunately, they’d made no progress on that front either. Qingge had helped them conduct an investigation into the two, but they hadn’t come up with anything significant.

Both of them hailed from noble families, neither of whom were significant; Liting was a child of the Fei Family, a small family of warriors associated with the larger Li Family. Ye was the heir to the Wudi Family, a clan seated in Ashwood Town, a backwater territory of the Lunar Peaks Sect. In short: both of them fit the profile of an ordinary outer disciple from a well-off but largely insignificant background.

The most noticeable bit was the fact that Ye had only just entered the sect, having been among the candidates of the admittance exam, and apparently having become acquainted with Xinming during this time. Still, this wasn’t nearly enough for them to go off.

Liu Wei had even contacted the Information Gathering Hall, but they hadn’t been able to find anything noteworthy either – if they had told him everything they knew, that was. He was in no way ignorant of the possibility that, for whatever unknown reason, an elder was involved in this disappearance and Elder Zhong was certainly among those who could pull something like this off.

With a sigh, Liu Wei put down the latest report on the matter and rubbed his temples. What a damn headache this was.

As much as he wanted do dedicate all of his time to this case, he couldn’t neglect his many other duties. Not to mention, the first general sect assembly was coming up only two weeks from now and while it would officially be held by the Patriarch’s Palace, being the one who had pushed for it in the first place, he had agreed to help organize it.

They’d at least have to send a message to the two’s families soon, to inform them of the matter. Liu Wei made a note to draft those up tonight, once he was done with the rest of his work. Then he rose to head out. He’d need to meet some people at the palace today.