Primeval Swordwood Forest

Gu Yang picked up the cup of spirit tea that had long since grown cold. He took a gentle sip, the corners of his mouth turning down slightly as he swallowed the chill.

"Given how much Ji Shuanghua knows about the Supreme Sword Sect's plot to seize the Nine Yin Origin, she will be a useful lead sooner or later."

A trace of understanding rippled through Zhao Yuelian's bright, autumn-water eyes.

Securing Ji Shuanghua's position wasn't about forming an alliance; it was about raising a pawn. It was about using the Supreme Sword Sect's own people to pry open the Supreme Sword Sect's secrets.

"Yuelian."

She immediately sat up straight, her waist elongating naturally, her voluptuous silhouette faintly discernible beneath her gray robe. "Your servant is here."

"Go and get me one of the valley entry quotas allocated to the Falling Cloud Sect." Gu Yang placed the teacup back on the stone table, his voice indifferent. "I want one that only has a name registered, without being entered into the sect's archives."

Zhao Yuelian was slightly taken aback.

To go in silently and come out silently, leaving no trace in the Falling Cloud Sect's records.

"This matter... requires your servant to make some preparations." She spoke carefully, her voice deliberately lowered with a trace of caution. "Will three days be enough?"

"Enough."

Gu Yang closed his eyes, his long eyelashes casting a faint shadow.

"Go."

Zhao Yuelian stood up. As she took a step outward, she quietly glanced back at him.

That broad, straight back was as calm as a mountain in the residual light of the night-luminescent pearl.

The Dao Seed within her dantian twitched again. She clenched her hands tightly within her sleeves, quickly pushed open the stone door, and disappeared into the night.

...

...

Fourteen days later.

Zhao Yuelian returned on a dusk when the dark clouds hung low, placing a warm jade talisman in his palm.

The jade talisman was as thin as a cicada's wing, engraved with a line of fine text using spiritual energy.

She didn't say where she got it, how she got it, or what methods she used to obtain it.

She simply stood quietly before him, waiting for him to inspect it.

Gu Yang swept his divine sense over the jade talisman, his knuckles tightening slightly.

The surface of the talisman was clean, completely devoid of any aura branding for sect archives. The spiritual energy imprint on the name was also done with a technique he was familiar with—wiped completely clean and re-engraved with an unfamiliar alias.

Whoever entered with it would not leave any real trace on any sect's roster.

"The extra preparations, as you instructed, are all settled."

Zhao Yuelian spoke softly, lowering her eyes, not saying a single extra word.

Gu Yang didn't ask what she had prepared.

Those abyss-like black eyes simply lingered quietly on the jade talisman for a moment before he clenched it in his palm.

"Very good."

It wasn't a compliment, just a statement of fact.

But Zhao Yuelian's eyelashes trembled. She lowered her head, hiding whatever flashed through the depths of her eyes.

The hour of Zi. There was no moon.

The jade talisman in his palm finally lit up with a scarlet thread of blood.

Like a living creature, it wriggled madly through the cracks of Gu Yang's fingers, greedily absorbing a drop of lifeblood he forced out from his fingertip.

The astral winds at the top of the cliff were like blunt knives, scraping against the crude hemp garment typical of a rogue cultivator that he wore.

Gu Yang pressed down the tattered bamboo hat on his head. Through the falling shadows, his deep black eyes coldly stared at the main peak of the Supreme Sword Sect, towering into the clouds tens of thousands of miles away.

There, a terrifying sword qi shot straight into the sky, savagely tearing open a pitch-black rift tens of thousands of fathoms long in the firmament.

The Shattered Star Sword Domain had opened.

There were no grand sect rallies, no earnest teachings from elders.

This was, at its core, a flesh-and-blood sacrifice of tens of thousands of people, veiled under a thin guise of propriety.

"Om—"

The nameless jade talisman in his hand let out a shrill sword cry.

The surrounding space instantly filled with cracks like a shattered bronze mirror. A violently irresistible suction force transformed into an invisible giant hand, violently seizing Gu Yang by the throat and ruthlessly dragging him into that bottomless void rift.

An extreme sense of weightlessness.

By his ears was the endless, ear-piercing howl of spatial turbulence.

Gu Yang did not close his eyes. Enduring the stinging pain of the void winds tearing at his eyes, he stared fixedly at the scene before him.

Below that bizarre void tunnel, which was filled with gloom and the aura of death.

Lay a broken world so vast it was suffocating.

The earth presented a dark brown hue, like dried blood that had soaked the ground. The sky had no sun or moon, only rolling ashes and endless chaotic storms.

And at this moment.

Tens of thousands of streaks of light were plummeting down from the void rifts in all directions like a torrential rain!

Golden Buddhist light, azure Daoist true qi, blood-red demonic sect baleful aura, and the obscure, insidious escape lights of rogue cultivators...

Thousands upon thousands of Foundation Establishment cultivators were like dirt mercilessly shoveled by a massive iron spade into an unimaginably colossal ancient meat grinder.

What a magnificent yet despairing sight it was.

Under the broken laws of this place, filled with the residual sword intent of ancient mighty figures, those sect geniuses who stood high and mighty in the outside world were now as insignificant as flies dancing in the sky.

"Bang!"

A violent impact shot straight up from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

Gu Yang crashed heavily into a pile of dead leaves as hard as iron, like a falling meteor.

The massive recoil brought a trace of metallic sweetness to his throat, but he didn't pause for even half a breath. Like an alert leopard, he executed a highly ungraceful roll on the spot, using the momentum to vanish into a patch of deep shadow.

And in the exact moment he left his original spot.

"Sizzle—"

Three Death-bringing Nails, gleaming with a dark blue poisonous light, embedded themselves in a triangular formation into the deep crater he had just smashed open, their placement incredibly vicious.

The few tough dead leaves at the bottom of the crater were instantly corroded into a puddle of foul-smelling black liquid.

Gu Yang held his breath, his back pressed tightly against a rough tree trunk.

Only now did he clearly see his surroundings.

An endless primeval forest, but the trees had not a single leaf, nor even a single side branch.

The grayish-brown trunks, hundreds of feet tall, shot straight into the sky like a hundred thousand rusted, giant wooden swords planted upside down in the dark brown permafrost.

As the fierce wind blew through the forest, it didn't produce the rustling of leaves, but rather the teeth-aching sound of clashing metal.

The Wilderness Sword-Wood Forest.

A strong smell of rusted iron and blood permeated the air. With every breath, it felt as though countless tiny steel needles were scraping against his lungs.

"Such bad luck, it's actually a broke rogue cultivator."

From behind a sword-wood tree ten paces away, a cultivator as thin as a twig with a hooked nose stepped out.

He wore an inconspicuous gray martial outfit and was playing with a poisoned dagger in his hand, his eyes filled with bloodthirsty irritation.

Under the rules of random teleportation, the biggest fear was landing near someone of the same cultivation level. But this hook-nosed man was clearly a repeat offender; the moment he landed, he concealed himself and looked for prey.

The hook-nosed cultivator licked his cracked lips, his gaze sweeping over the empty crater as he sneered.

"Your footwork isn't bad. Too bad you've been hit by my 'Soul-Locking Incense'. Even if you drill into the ground..."

His voice abruptly ceased.

Because a ghostly gray afterimage had, at some unknown point, smoothly "floated" out from the shadows right beneath his feet.