Liu Chengjun did not love or respect his father, but that did not mean he wanted him dead right away.
Liu Feiyu was also frozen in place. He stared at the father he had once feared, now dead before his eyes. Aside from shock, there was also a trace of indescribable delight in his gaze.
A crucial part of the plan had fallen apart.
An Changqing’s expression darkened at once.
“Everyone, seal off the scene. No one is to come near!”
He issued the order immediately.
Long Ao and Hong Yuan moved to guard the entrance, blocking the guards who came rushing over after hearing the commotion.
“How could this happen…?”
Hong Yuan murmured to herself as she stared at the carnage inside the room.
Long Ao’s brows drew tightly together as well.
An Changqing strode into the study. He quickly examined the locked alloy windows and the walls before finally returning to the doorway.
“There are no signs of a struggle. The windows were sealed from the inside, and the ventilation system has only extremely narrow air vents.”
He looked at everyone and enunciated each word:
“This was a murder in a sealed room.”
Chen Guan ignored the looks of those around him and slowly walked over to Liu Tiancheng’s corpse.
He closed his eyes.
“Heh heh heh.”
Baal’s gloating voice rang out in his mind.
“That’s right. It has Astaroth’s scent. Very clean.”
“After killing him, the murderer conveniently wiped away every trace of his presence. A meticulous killer.”
Chen Guan asked inwardly, “How did he leave?”
“Who knows?” Baal replied carelessly. “Maybe he walked through the walls, maybe he dug a tunnel, maybe he teleported. Who knows? They’re all Espers now. Why bother with these useless mechanisms?”
By this point, nearly everyone had reached the same conclusion.
An Changqing was the first to reveal the note Chen Guan had received. Then his voice echoed through the hall, calm and analytical.
“Based on the note Chen Guan received, we can make the following deduction.”
“Liu Tiancheng discovered that Liu Xiao was a fake—in other words, that he was Thousand Faces. He wanted to confront Thousand Faces alone, so he brought him into the sealed room.”
“As a result, he was killed by Thousand Faces instead.”
“While on the verge of death, Liu Tiancheng used the last of his strength to push the note containing the clue through the ventilation shaft. It happened to be discovered by Chen Guan.”
The theory sounded perfectly reasonable.
The bloodstained note and Liu Tiancheng’s death formed an irrefutable chain of evidence pointing to Thousand Faces.
“Thousand Faces!”
Liu Chengjun suddenly turned around as if he had seized a lifeline. His bloodshot eyes fixed on the humanoid figure being guarded in the distance.
“Bring that impostor over here!”
His voice was distorted by rage.
“Interrogate him! Use every method necessary!”
“I want to know exactly how he killed my father—and how he escaped from that damned sealed room!”
The stalemate had been broken by Liu Tiancheng’s death, allowing Liu Chengjun to seize back the initiative.
The blame was now aimed squarely at Thousand Faces, who was still unconscious.
Chen Guan watched Liu Chengjun’s performance, but he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong.
He was certain that when he found the note, Liu Tiancheng’s heart had still been beating. It had been weak, but it had not stopped.
If Thousand Faces was the killer, and he had already accomplished his goal, why had he not left immediately? Why would he give Liu Tiancheng time to write a note asking for help?
Could a ninth-tier killer capable of erasing every trace of himself really make such a low-level mistake? Why had he not even delivered a finishing blow?
And then there was the note.
He recalled the scene when he found it. The note had been pushed out of the ventilation shaft by some kind of force.
How could a man who had been run through the heart by a sword and was on the verge of death possibly have had the strength to send a note through the complicated ventilation ducts and all the way to the door of his room?
There had to be another exit in the sealed room—or some other mechanism.
Chen Guan’s gaze fell on the blood-written note in An Changqing’s hand, held up as evidence.
Under the dim light, the words “Save me! He’s not Liu Xiao!” appeared especially glaring.
Suddenly, a flash of insight crossed Chen Guan’s mind.
The blood.
He stared at the pattern of the blood on the characters.
The degree to which the blood had clotted, the way it had dripped, and how it had spread while the words were being written…
Anyone who had often hovered on the brink of death could tell that this handwriting did not look as though it had been written by a severely wounded, dying man who had dipped his finger into the blood from his own chest.
If that was the case, then this was not a dying message, nor a final plea for help.
It was a carefully forged denunciation meant to frame someone else!
The real killer was definitely not Thousand Faces. There was someone else behind it.
And that person was very likely among them.
…
The main hall of the Liu residence was cleared out and temporarily converted into an interrogation room.
Two guards dragged Thousand Faces inside and threw him onto the floor in the middle of the hall.
He looked utterly wretched. His severed arm hung at an unnatural angle, while two dried streaks of blood ran down from his eyes, injured by the mental assault. His entire body lay limp and lifeless on the floor.
He lifted his head. A strange smile hung on his unfamiliar face.
Liu Chengjun looked down at him from above.
“Talk.”
His voice was cold as it echoed through the hall.
“How did you kill my father? And how did you escape from that sealed room?”
A hoarse, grotesque laugh forced its way from Thousand Faces’ throat, as though he had just heard the funniest joke in the world.
Using his intact hand, he propped up his upper body and looked up at Liu Chengjun, his eyes filled with undisguised mockery.
“I killed him?”
“First Young Master Liu, weren’t you praying for him to die a long time ago?”
“Doesn’t it tire you out, pretending to be such a devoted son now?”
Liu Chengjun’s face turned livid.
“You’re asking for death!”
Flames surged over his body, and a scorching pressure swept toward Thousand Faces, as if he intended to burn him to ash on the spot.
“First Young Master Liu, please remain calm.”
An Changqing raised a hand to block Liu Chengjun. A gentle smile still rested on his face.
“His mind has been damaged. He’s not in his right mind. You won’t get anything out of him like this.”
Liu Chengjun’s chest heaved violently, but in the end he forced down his anger and withdrew his power.
Only then did An Changqing turn around and crouch in front of Thousand Faces, his voice coaxing and suggestive.
“We all know that the person who hired you wasn’t First Young Master Liu.”
“Chen Guan saw a man in black robes in your memories.”
An Changqing stared into Thousand Faces’ eyes and slowly said, “Tell us who that man in black was. Perhaps we can grant you a quick death.”
At the words “man in black,” the mad grin on Thousand Faces’ face faded somewhat, and his eyes grew blank.
“The man in black…”
He murmured to himself as though trying to recall something.
“He gave me power… He was an envoy of Lord Astaroth…”
“Heh heh heh.” Baal let out a delighted laugh in Chen Guan’s mind.
“See? He admitted it himself. What an idiot.”
An Changqing and Liu Feiyu exchanged a glance, both seeing the gravity in the other’s eyes.
Astaroth.
That was the name of one of the legendary seventy-two demon gods.
A demon god who stood alongside Baal, ranked third among the Four Supreme Pillars.
Liu Feiyu stepped forward and pressed him in a dark voice, “What was his objective?”
The question jolted Thousand Faces, and his eyes focused once more. He swept his gaze across everyone present before finally settling on Liu Feiyu. That twisted smile returned to his face.
“His objective…”
nto another world, I bought a slave for the first time, never expecting the silver wolf girl to be so cute... Lin Feng: I know it's cold, but you don't have to sneak into my bed! Yuna: Just sharing body warmth, if you dare do anything naughty, I'll definitely...
s + Rent Collection Wealth】 At the start, he inherited a rundown house in the urban village from his grandfather. The house had no tenants, but the moment he was diagnosed with a terminal illness, a self-proclaimed empress from the Tianxuan Continent arrived as his first tenant. Ye Chuan soon discovered that with every new tenant moving in, not only did he receive massive daily payments, but he also obtained unique items related to their backgrounds. 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Tiger Strength Pill—dramatically enhances physical power!】 【Acquired Bai Qianshuang’s related item: Deer Blood Pill—significantly boosts vitality!】 …… From that day on, all sorts of bizarre tenants began appearing in the house: the empress from Tianxuan Continent, an apocalyptic sorceress from the Magic Realm, a mysterious scientific girl who fell through a spacetime rift… Every single day, he received strange, powerful items and endless money. Then one day, he suddenly realized—he had become invincible. Enough, enough! Stop giving me more!
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
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.”
