The forest was no longer quiet.
Though the glade where Li Xuan trained Yuan Fei still shimmered with faint residual qi, a tension had settled over the trees like mist. Birds no longer sang. The usual rustle of beasts in the underbrush had given way to stillness.
Li Xuan stood at the edge of the clearing, his gaze distant. The Starling Phoenix circled above, issuing short, clipped cries—each one a warning.
He extended his senses. Qi perception rippled outward.
Then he felt it.
A faint disruption—not just spiritual energy, but… malice. Something old. Hungry.
"Yuan Fei," Li Xuan said without turning, "stay here. Keep the barrier formation active. If I don't return before dawn, flee north. Don't argue."
Yuan Fei opened his mouth to protest, but the look in his master's eyes silenced him. "Yes, Master."
With that, Li Xuan vanished into the undergrowth, cloak fluttering behind him like a shadow.
Deeper into the woods, the trees grew twisted. Black moss clung to their trunks, and the air carried the scent of damp earth and rot. Li Xuan crouched low, examining a patch of ground where something unnatural had taken root—dull red soil pulsing with weak spiritual energy.
"A corrupted spirit vein," he muttered. "But how?"
Then he saw it—half-buried beneath the roots of a collapsed tree. A shattered mask, bone-white with a sigil etched in gold. His eyes narrowed.
Demonic cultivators.
So they've reached this far…
Before he could retreat, the forest groaned. Roots shifted. And from the shadows, something emerged—a twisted beast, half-spirit, half-corpse, its body stitched with black qi. It let out a shriek that made the trees shudder.
Li Xuan drew his blade. "So it begins."
Elsewhere – Beneath the Whispering Walls of the Li Village
In the heart of the Li Clan estate, shadows moved more quietly than before. Whispers drifted like smoke from the corridors, and tension coiled behind every door.
Elders meetings had grown more frequent, yet none bore fruit. The patriarch, Li Feng, looked more gaunt by the day. The disappearance of Elder Zhao still remained unresolved, and strange irregularities in the clan's spiritual vaults had set the elders on edge.
Only one among them pursued the matter with relentless resolve—Li Xioran.
The young girl, once dismissed as merely a child of a disgraced bloodline, now moved with quiet fire. She had been sneaking into the old records room at night, tracing inconsistencies in the scroll logs and tracking spiritual fluctuations left behind in the vault.
"This… shouldn't be possible," she murmured one evening, her eyes narrowed at a faded scroll. "This array signature—it matches the technique used in the Moon Sect's ancient sealing methods."
She turned to the small shrine tucked in her room's corner, where she lit incense each night. A hand brushed the side of the offering bowl.
"Brother… wherever you are, I'll uncover the truth."
That very night, she made her way to the sealed portion of the vault where only select elders had access. Using a talisman swiped weeks ago and modified with help from an old formation manual, she bypassed the outer lock.
What she found chilled her.
Several scrolls were missing—but their qi signatures lingered, as if absorbed by someone with perfect compatibility. And among the sealed relics was something half-concealed in jade cloth: a fragment of the Nine Heavens Moon Sect's legacy map.
"How did this end up here?" she whispered, heart pounding.
A theory bloomed like wildfire in her mind.
What if someone didn't steal from the Li Clan… but returned something that had always belonged to them?
What if Li Xuan was never the thief/betrayer… but the heir?
She stepped back, a mix of awe and dread building in her chest.
"Then Elder Zhao's disappearance… wasn't just about betrayal. It was about silencing the truth."
And for the first time, hope—real and dangerous—kindled in Li Xioran's eyes.
Back to the forest, The corrupted beast lunged forward, its body steaming with black qi and the scent of decay. Twisted horns jutted from its malformed head, and spirit fire flickered in its hollow eyes.
Li Xuan's sword hummed to life, spiritual runes etched along its blade glowing faintly.
"Spirit-Devoured Abomination," he murmured, recognizing the signs. "A corpse fused with demonic qi. Someone created you."
He vanished in a flash of light, reappearing above the beast, blade descending like moonlight cleaving the night.
Clang!
The creature blocked with a mangled arm reinforced by bone and qi, forcing Li Xuan backward. The air trembled. Trees around them cracked from the sheer pressure.
The beast roared and launched a barrage of corrosive black qi needles. Li Xuan activated his movement technique—Moonshadow Steps—dodging between the thorns of death. His cloak tore in places, but no wound pierced his flesh.
I can't destroy it head-on, he thought. But I can unravel it.
He drew his left hand into a mudra, and glowing formation symbols began to swirl. He struck the ground. A silver array activated—an Anti-Demonic Seal from the Nine Heavens Moon Sect.
Light flared. The beast screeched as half its body began to dissolve into ash.
But the forest didn't fall quiet.
Instead, the air shivered.
Something—or someone—was watching.
Li Xuan turned sharply. From deep within the trees, a presence stirred. Faint, ancient. Like a sleeping predator yawning awake.
He sheathed his blade slowly.
"That thing wasn't the threat," he muttered. "It was the bait."
He stepped forward, eyes narrowing as he stared into the woods. "Now… what are you?"
As the echoes of the beast's death faded into the wind, Li Xuan returned swiftly to the glade. Yuan Fei stood at the edge of the barrier, tense but alert, his hands clenched around the hilt of a crude practice sword.
"Master!" Yuan Fei rushed forward. "Are you hurt? What was that thing?"
Li Xuan placed a hand on the boy's shoulder. "Not yet something you need to face. But it's close. Closer than we thought."
Without further delay, he led Yuan Fei back to the concealed cave—now more of a hidden sanctuary than a simple retreat. As they descended, Li Xuan summoned his formation flags from the storage ring and began carving new array paths into the surrounding stone with a flick of his fingers and a whisper of qi.
"Triple-Seal Isolation Array. Spirit Veil Concealment. Beast-Repelling Web. Reinforced Locking Formation—Stage Four."
The array lines pulsed with blue and silver light, sinking into the stone like veins in a living organism. With each sigil placed, the cave became quieter—vanishing entirely from spiritual detection, sight, and sound.
"No beast, no cultivator, no wandering spirit will find this place now," he said as he stepped back, satisfied.
Yuan Fei watched with awe. "Master, will I learn to do this someday?"
"When you reach the 3rd Layer of Qi Refinement," Li Xuan said with a faint smile, "I'll teach you the first formation."
Then, without resting, Li Xuan ventured out again—this time to hunt.
He returned an hour later, dragging the massive corpse of a mid-stage Qi Refinement Flame-Tusk Boar. Its body radiated warmth, and its inner core still pulsed faintly with qi. He skinned and preserved it with formation heatstones, storing the meat in a stasis array beside the cave's inner chamber.
"This will last you two weeks. Train. Meditate. If I'm not back within that time, follow the backup plan."
Yuan Fei nodded, though worry flickered in his young eyes.
"Don't die, Master."
Li Xuan ruffled his hair. "I won't. I've still got things to settle and a legacy to pass on."
And then, cloaked in silence, he vanished into the deeper forest—toward the presence that watched, toward whatever ancient thing had stirred.
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