Chapter 168: Triumph? (Patreon)

“You are certain that this formation can keep him contained?”

“It was built for this exact purpose. If he was at the third stage of Dao Contemplation or above, it would pose a problem, but since he is only at the first…”, Lixian Shen responded.

Liu Wei nodded. It was notoriously difficult to keep cultivators of the Dao Contemplation Realm imprisoned, and that difficulty rose with each additional stage. The Lunar Peaks Sect’s best formation could handle someone at the fifth or sixth stage at most, which was considered the best anyone on the peninsula had managed to create.

“Very well. Thank you very much for your aid, it would have been troublesome to have to constantly supervise them.”

“You need not mention it after what you’ve done for us. Besides, if what you say is true, then these five were involved in actions against our own sect as well. We can hardly handle accusing senior members of the Lunar Peaks Sect ourselves, but helping you out in bringing them to justice is another thing.”

“You need not worry about that.”, Liu Wei assured her. “I shall retreat for a while now, let us speak more on this later.”

“The best of luck to you, Elder Wei.”

Lixian Shen bowed and Liu Wei returned the gesture by inclining his head before heading off to the residence the Burning Thorns Sect had provided him. He still needed to break open the ‘shadow’s’ spatial ring to search its contents. He’d already pried open the other four on the way back here – they had contained various poisons, weapons and cultivation resources, but nothing of greater interest to him –, but he suspected that this one would prove quite a lot more difficult.

The sun had already moved past its zenith and the treetops gently bent under a gust of wind, as he passed over them.

After the town governor had shown up at the inn, the cleanup had gone over delightfully quickly. The messenger sent to the Burning Thorns Sect had found a large force made up of the elders and many older members already ready to depart, as Lixian Shen had taken the liberty of alerting them that something was up when she had noticed Tang Luli’s absence herself.

Meanwhile, the governor had taken the nobles that had been caught mingling with the demonic cult into custody. The grand marshal, whom the cult leader had revealed to Liu Wei to be under the cult’s thumb, had also quickly been taken care off. To find and eliminate the remaining demonic cultivators, the town had been put under temporary lockdown and a large part of the delegation from the Burning Thorns Sect had remained behind. Using their soul sense, they could make out anyone who had started performing demonic cultivation. While it was doubtful that they would manage to catch every last one, this approach should mostly neutralize the problem.

Liu Wei landed right in front of his small pagoda and headed inside without delay. He hoped that the last spatial ring would contain something he could use as further evidence for the Zhong Family’s guilt, though he knew that the chances of being the case that were middling at best.

He sat down in the center of the room and pulled the ring out of the pouch he had been keeping it in. He held the ring in the palm of his hand, simply examining it for a while, before he closed his eyes and began.

Opening a locked spatial ring was a complicated and arduous process. The ring’s enchantments could not simply be destroyed by force – not only was that incredibly difficult, it also risked damaging the ring’s contents as they were forcibly ripped out of the collapsing spatial dimension. Instead, one had to carefully disable the enchantments that kept the ring locked without triggering them, a process that required great finesse and patience.

Liu Wei had much experience breaking open spatial rings, but this one turned out to carry a lock of a higher quality than even that of Liu Wei’s own. The night came and went again before, after dozens of failed attempts, setbacks and curses, he finally managed to slip past the enchantments and disable them. Liu Wei could hardly imagine that its contents would match the rigor with which they were kept hidden.

A single glimpse inside the ring, however, sufficed to change his mind. Because besides poisons, treasures and a truly jaw-dropping collection of daggers, the ring contained something he wouldn’t even have dared hope to find here. With a triumphant smile, he materialized the candleholder on the floor right before him. Now he could understand that even someone as otherwise jaded as the ‘shadow’ had hesitated to hand the ring over to him.

This artifact was exactly the missing piece that made someone at the Dao Attunement realm even capable of committing Lixian Shen’s murder in the way they had witnessed it. It was the best piece of evidence that Liu Wei could have asked for.

That Tang Luli had been killed was still greatly unfortunate, but Liu Wei still had plenty of witnesses that could attest that the former head elder had been missing for three weeks straight in the relevant timeframe. Along with having caught members of the Zhong Family with this artifact, that was enough.

In a situation like this, his word as an elder would be counted above that of the Zhong Family’s members. The evidence he had likely wouldn’t be enough to implicate Yue Zhong personally, but Liu Wei could return to the sect, get his banishment lifted and bring a proper punishment down on the Zhong Family. And that was besides the fallout they would suffer with the other Pillar Families for having secretly raised a second member of theirs to the Dao Contemplation Realm, severely violating their unspoken agreement.

Still, even though all he should have felt right now was triumphant glee, there was still something nagging Liu Wei at the back of his mind. As he looked down at the candleholder, he couldn’t help but shake the feeling that something was wrong with it.

He picked it up and infused it with some of its Qi, and it reacted the same way it had when he had first seen it – this was undoubtedly the real artifact. It seemed somewhat less alluring to possess now, that considered it again, because the degree to which it would be capable of fortifying the flame attacks of someone of his level was rather limited and trying to use it in a fight would mean giving up his usual fighting style – back then, the excitement of having found something that actually matched his element had pushed these considerations to the back of his mind –, but it was undoubtedly perfect for someone at the Dao Attunement Realm to commit the assassination.

No; what was disturbing Liu Wei was certainly not the artifact’s authenticity or its capabilities. It was… the context, that seemed off.

Yifei Xia’s assassination had taken place months ago, and it had so on the grounds of the sect. Now that Liu Wei thought about it, why in the world would this group of Zhong Family members be carrying it around here? They could have easily locked it away in some vault, returned it to the treasury or simply gotten rid of it. Nothing about the artifact was wrong, it was the fact that it had made its way into Liu Wei’s hands like this that simply didn’t make sense.

The feeling that something was off grew stronger as Liu Wei reflected back on the events that had transpired to bring him to this point, going back in time memory by memory. The first thing that caught his attention was the town governor’s arrival at the demonic cult’s hideout. The old man had told him that the town’s council had received a message, informing them about the hideout’s location, but he had not known who had send that message.

Then, there was the formation that had suppressed his soul sense: it had almost certainly been created at the hands of, or at least with the help of the Zhong Family. There was no way they would have built it in a way that didn’t exempt themselves from the suppression. So why, then, had they not caught onto his disguise? He was confident that he could hide his cultivation from cultivators at the Dao Attunement Realm, and at the time he’d though that that was all he was dealing with, but there was no way he should have been able to fool a stealth expert in the Dao Contemplation Realm. The mysterious shadow should have caught him the moment he even came near the building.

The next thing that stood out to Liu Wei was Tang Luli himself. Why would the Zhong Family, renowned for their professionalism and airtight operations, lower themselves to working with someone who had turned out to be such a… well, such a moron? Surely he had not been the only elder who would have been willing to carry out an assassination in return for becoming the next patriarch? Liu Wei could hardly imagine a council of cultivators that principled. Perhaps he had been the only one reckless enough to work with a demonic cult?

But then, for that matter – why even involve a demonic cult in the first place? A group like the Zhong Family should have easily been able to push a candidate of their favor into the position of patriarch of a weakened minor sect and the only assassination that had truly been necessary for it – that of patriarch Sha – had almost certainly needed to personally be carried out by them either way.

Perhaps the cult had been supposed to serve as a distraction, but was that really proportionate to the hassle it must have been to organize the whole ordeal? In the end, all that involving the cult had done was catching Liu Wei’s attention and getting their assassin to expose himself.

In hindsight, the whole setup that Liu Wei had come into seemed convenient… a little too convenient, actually. Like the plan had been deliberately carried out in a way that had allowed Liu Wei to unravel it without too much difficulty.

There was one more thing that Liu Wei remembered now: The letter he had received the day after arriving at the Burning Thorns Sect. He took off the spatial ring he had just finished opening to swap it for his own, where he had kept the letter, summoned it and unfurled to read through it once more.

Honored Elder Wei,

I apologize for this unconventional means of contacting you, but I do not want it to be known who I am, should this message not reach its desired recipient. If you desire to know so, I am sure you have some means of finding out yourself. For my purposes it is enough to tell you that I am one of this sect’s elders.

To be frank with the plea I want to make: Please do not follow Elder Luli’s suggestion to leave the demonic cult alone. I do not know his reasons for making it, but if he truly believes that our sect is equipped to deal with this cult on its own, he is terribly mistaken. He is severely underrepresenting the danger that we are currently in. As it stands, we won’t make it for much more than a month or two before disbanding, should the assassinations not stop, and I have no confidence in Elder Luli’s ability to make that happen. He should know so himself, after he stayed away from the sect for over three weeks after the patriarch’s death, only to return with empty hands.

Thus, my plea: Do not abandon us in this time of need.

I cannot outbid or even match Elder Luli, all I can do is appeal to your conscience as a fellow cultivator of the Dao of Fire. Word has reached me that you are a man of great generosity and benevolence, so that remains my hope.

With deference,

A deeply worried elder.

He still hadn’t figured out who had wrote this letter, but it was hard to ignore, now, that whoever had done so had seemingly gone out of their way to point him to Tang Luli’s absence from the sect when, at that point, he hadn’t revealed to anyone here what the true purpose of his visit was. He had chalked it up to a lucky coincidence back then, but was it truly one?

Liu Wei sighed. He wanted to go back to the sect. He was sure that his presence there was duly needed, by his faction, his hall, his disciple. He certainly had enough to have his banishment lifted, and deal a proper blow to the pillar families’ faction while he was at it. He could write everything he found to be strange off to coincidence and incompetence, and leave it at that. Perhaps, if it was Ning Bai he was dealing with, he could even have believed it. But the Zhong Family? No. Never.

Liu Wei gathered his resolve. He had left the sect resolving to find out the truth. And whatever this was, he hadn’t yet to accomplish that goal. He’d have to continue his investigation for at least a while longer.

Turning his attention outward again, Liu Wei noticed the presence of Lixian Shen just outside, so he stood up and went to open the door. She sat suspended in a meditative position, her back turned towards him.

“Elder Shen.”

“Ah, Elder Wei.”

She stood up and turned around.

“I wished to ask for your progress, but did not want to disturb you.”

“Thanks for your consideration. I managed to open up the ring some time ago.”

“And?”

“It contained more than I had hoped for. However, I’m afraid things have become a little more complicated.”

Lixian Shen smiled bashfully and ran a hand over the edge of her mask.

“I don’t think I follow.”

“I will explain in due time. For now, there is someone I need to find.”

“Can I be of help?”

“I believe so. You remember the letter I asked you about back in the night of the attempt on your life?”

“Vaguely, yes.”

“This is the letter in question.”

Liu Wei handed it over and Lixian Shen quickly read through it.

“Ah, I see why you asked me about it. And have you found out who sent it yet?”

“That is the point: No, I haven’t.”

“Then…”

“It was delivered to me by a young disciple of your sect, and I would like to find that disciple.”

Lixian Shen nodded, not taking the time to question why he was so interested in the letter’s sender, though the question certainly would have to have crossed her mind.

“If you remember his appearance, that shouldn’t be too difficult.”

That assessment turned out to be correct. A much smaller sect than the Lunar Peaks Sect, the Burning Thorns Sect only had about two hundred disciples in total. And since Liu Wei could quickly cross out many of them by age and gender, he only had about fifty of them to look through. It took his memory, enhanced as it was by his cultivation, only a single glance to pick out the young boy from the crowd Lixian Shen had let gather.

“You were the one who delivered this letter to me, right?”, Liu Wei asked, kneeling down to look the boy in the eyes, while showing him the letter.

“Y-yes, honored elder!”

The boy stammered, scratching the back of his head.

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.”, Liu Wei reassured him. “I’m sorry I even need to bother you about this again, but I’d like to know a little more about the one who gave it to you.”

“I- I don’t know anything. They didn’t tell me.”

“But you surely got a look at them, didn’t you?”

“I…”, the boy paused, looking at the ground. “They gave me a spirit stone and told me not to say anything about them.”

Lixian Shen looked like she wanted to say something, but Liu Wei held up a hand to stop her.

“I understand you. It’s honorable of you that you want to keep your word. But you shouldn’t keep such secrets from your elders. And is an important matter to your sect.”

“I… I see.”

“Then can you tell me whether the person who gave you the letter was a man or a woman?”

“A man.”

“And did you ever see that man before?”

“…no.”

“Have you seen him since?”

“No… I don’t think so. I didn’t get a good look at his face.”

“And do you think he was part of your sect?”

“I… don’t know. I met him in here. But… he didn’t wear sect robes.”

“What did he wear?”

“…umm… I don’t know how to say it…”

“Did he wear dark, or black robes?”

“Yes. Black. They were black.”

Liu Wei exchanged a look with Lixian Shen, who looked visibly disturbed at the last answer.

Then, he pulled out the spatial ring of the shadow, materialized a spare set of the robes all the Zhong Family’s members had worn and wordlessly laid them out across the ground. Seeing them, the boy’s face lit up in recognition.

“Yes! Like that! He wore robes like that!”