Lin Mo felt there was a very high chance that Zhang Gonglian would encounter the Hidden Sects after descending the mountain.
After all, when a Daoist descends the mountain, they are bound to run into some trouble.
The position you stand in determines the things you encounter.
Just like how food delivery riders will inevitably encounter bizarre orders.
And homicide detectives will inevitably encounter murder cases.
Different positions lead to different encounters.
"It seems you have personally tested them," Lin Mo glanced at him.
"Ahem, I've just seen a few brats who came down the mountain to gain experience."
A hint of smugness flashed across Zhang Gonglian's face. "They seem to have some rules about not causing too much of a ruckus during their trials. They have an agreement with Yanhuang Awakening. To put it bluntly, they are in charge of showing off, and Yanhuang Awakening is in charge of wiping their messes. Of course, they also do things for Yanhuang Awakening in return."
Lin Mo nodded.
In the database of Yanhuang Awakening's Yangcheng Branch, the information regarding the Hidden Sects was indeed vague, only mentioning them in passing. It seemed they belonged to a faction that required close attention but did not need to be dealt with for the time being.
Looking at it this way, it wasn't a big problem.
As they spoke, the two had already walked to the entrance of the passage.
Lin Mo thought for a moment, raised his hand, and swiped twice at the entrance, directly setting up a formation there.
"Study this formation thoroughly yourself. It can help you open and close this passage at will, so you won't have to wait for specific days to open the door."
This formation was equivalent to a door switch.
However, it was a way to open the door from the inside.
Watching Lin Mo construct this formation so casually, Zhang Gonglian couldn't help but smile bitterly.
"So what kind of sect is the Wind Spirit Moon Shadow Sect anyway?"
"Don't ask me, I haven't even been to the mountain gate once. It's probably not here, but somewhere else in the world."
At this moment, Lin Mo suddenly remembered something.
"Right, if the people from Yanhuang Awakening come asking, just tell them I left after having a meal with you that day, and that I never interfered in your affairs."
Lin Mo's words puzzled Zhang Gonglian.
"Why?"
"It's better to let Yanhuang Awakening think I'm here to pick a fight."
Lin Mo only said one sentence, but Zhang Gonglian understood.
Lin Mo could feel that Yanhuang Awakening did not want him to have too good of a relationship with Dragon Tiger Mountain.
Because they couldn't figure out the Wind Spirit Moon Shadow Sect.
Director Long might stand on his side, but Yanhuang Awakening was not a dictatorship.
Many people still harbored ulterior motives.
Moreover, Lin Mo didn't want to expose too much. The more Yanhuang Awakening knew, the more people in other places would know.
The talent reserve plan for the Human Emperor Banner had to be taken slowly.
If he exposed it too quickly, he would have to stop eating beef all at once.
What difference would that be from a fully completed save file and infinite money?
As the host, Zhang Gonglian politely escorted Lin Mo to the Celestial Master Mansion on the other side of the passage.
Just as they stepped out of the passage, a strange aura mixed with the smell of char and frost rushed at their faces, making both of them stop in their tracks.
Not far away, a humanoid piece of charcoal lay on the cold ground. To be precise, it was half a piece of charcoal.
The left half of the person's body was completely carbonized, its pitch-black surface like rotten wood, even emitting faint wisps of blue smoke.
The right half of the body still had skin and flesh, but it was frozen white. The two halves spliced together formed a spine-chilling sight.
Even more terrifying was that his body was haphazardly pierced with crystal-clear ice spikes. Some penetrated the charred parts, while others were stuck in the still-intact flesh.
Zhang Gonglian frowned at first, then narrowed his eyes, carefully examining the corpse and the surrounding traces.
He recognized whose handiwork this was, and he also recognized who was lying on the ground.
A moment later, a gloating smile bloomed on his face.
"Heh, I was wondering why it felt so much quieter along the way. It turns out this annoying dog died here."
"You know him?" Lin Mo glanced at the corpse, his tone flat.
"More than just know him. Even if he turned to ash, I'd recognize the smell of his bone scraps!" Zhang Gonglian's tone revealed a ruthlessness that had been suppressed for a long time.
"This is Ghost Face from the Mask Society, also known as Xu Dog of the Twelve Earthly Branches in Yanhuang Awakening. Back when I first descended the mountain, this guy was the most arrogant, opposing me at every turn."
He paused, seemingly remembering something, and the pleasure on his face restrained slightly. "If Xiaoxue hadn't stopped me, saying he was a mole planted in the Mask Society by Yanhuang Awakening, I would have slapped his head into his own chest cavity to use as a chamber pot long ago!"
Listening to this, Lin Mo roughly understood the situation in his heart.
"Will his dying here cause trouble for you?"
Zhang Gonglian's gaze fell on the corpse again. After scrutinizing it for a moment, he shook his head: "It might be a little troublesome, but since no one from Yanhuang Awakening has come over yet, it means he didn't have time to send a message back before he died, or he didn't report this incident at all. Dead men tell no tales, so it's not a big deal."
Despite saying so, it was ultimately still a hidden danger.
Lin Mo looked at his expression of both satisfaction and annoyance at the trouble, suddenly chuckled softly, and reached out to pat his shoulder.
"Forget it, consider this the final ripple from your father."
As soon as he finished speaking, Lin Mo raised his foot and gently kicked the corpse on the ground with the tip of his shoe.
There was no earth-shattering sound, nor were there any radiant special effects.
Under Zhang Gonglian's watchful eyes, the half-charred, half-frozen corpse rapidly dissolved and weathered away like a sand painting.
The charred carbon blocks and frozen flesh turned into the finest dust together, dispersing along with those ice spikes, and eventually gathered in place to become an ordinary blue-gray piece of rubble, perfectly blending into the garden floor.
Even the strange smell of mixed char and frost in the air vanished without a trace.
Zhang Gonglian's smile froze on his face, his eyes widening bit by bit.
He immediately released his divine sense, sweeping over that stone again and again, but no matter how he probed, it was just a stone, a stone so ordinary it couldn't be more ordinary, with no residual energy and no traces of any illusion techniques.
Xu Dog's corpse, along with all traces that a living person had ever existed, was just kicked into nothingness?
"This..." His throat went dry, a word stuck in his mouth, unable to be spoken for a long time.
"Want to learn?"
Lin Mo already had his hands resting behind his head, taking leisurely steps toward the outside of the Celestial Master Mansion, his voice drifting over lazily.
"What a pity, this can't be taught."
Leaving Zhang Gonglian standing there alone, his face displaying a newly learned expression of utter speechlessness.
After Lin Mo had walked far away, he finally walked up to that stone, picked it up, and examined it carefully.
There were no traces on it at all; it was just a quaint stone.
After pondering carefully, Zhang Gonglian tucked the entire stone into his pocket, then turned and walked toward the Dragon Tiger Dojo.

d intelligence to keep the plot moving, and sometimes even the protagonists are forced into absurdly dumb decisions. Why does the A-list celebrity heroine in urban romance novels ditch the top-tier movie star and become a lovestruck fool for a pockmarked male lead? Why do the leads in historical tragedy novels keep dancing between love and death, only for the blind healer to end up suffering the most? And Gu Wei never expected that after finally landing a villain role to stir up trouble, she’d pick the wrong gender! No choice now—she’ll just have to crush the protagonists as a girl!

transmigrates into the world as the sect master of the Heavenly Yan Sect, which is on the verge of being wiped out. He binds a system that grants him cultivation power based on the number of disciples he has: for each disciple, he automatically gains a year's worth of cultivation every single day! Take one disciple: every day he gains 1 year of cultivation power. While others struggle through a year of bitter training, he gets the same just by sleeping through a single night. Take ten disciples: every day he gains 10 years of cultivation power. Foundation Establishment, Core Formation, Nascent Soul—he breezes through all bottlenecks without lifting a finger. Take one hundred disciples: every day he gains 100 years of cultivation power. Even a Soul Transformation Venerable before him can’t survive a single blow. Take ten thousand disciples: every day he gains 10,000 years of cultivation power! With a wave of his hand, he topples empires. With a single step, he crushes the sacred grounds of the universe. ... While others fight tooth and nail for secret techniques, Lin Yan casually hands out Nascent Soul-level cultivation manuals as beginner textbooks. While others strain to find talented recruits, Lin Yan opens his doors to anyone—so long as they’re human. In just three short years, the Heavenly Yan Sect went from a backwater sect made up of three crumbling huts to a sacred land that every cultivator under heaven would kill to enter. ... One day, otherworldly demon gods invade, with a million demon soldiers pressing down upon the realm. Lin Yan, yawning, rises from his lounge chair and glances at the system panel: [Current Disciples: 1.28 million] [Daily Cultivation Increase: 1.28 million years] He waves his hand casually, and the countless demon soldiers are reduced to ashes in an instant. “So noisy… interrupting my fishing.”

ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!

ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!