Three hours after the Alliance Summit adjourned, Yin Luo departed with Jerry via the East Peak's teleportation array.
The array dumped them onto Green Pine Ridge at the outer border of the Myriad Demons Palace's domain, leaving more than half a day's flight back to the sect.
Yin Luo kept her light-escape speed sluggishly slow, trailing a ribbon of purple light behind her like a stubborn tail.
Jerry stood within her radiant streak, his boots planted on the platform of spiritual energy she had condensed beneath him.
"Can't you fly any faster?"
"What's the rush? Once we're back, I have to write meeting minutes. I don't want to write them."
"You demonic cultivators in the Myriad Demons Palace actually have to write meeting minutes?"
"Sect Master's rules. Every Elder attending an Alliance Summit has to write them."
"Your Palace Master has quite the scholarly ambitions."
"When he was young, someone from the Taixu Sword Sect mocked demonic cultivators for being illiterate barbarians. He's held that grudge ever since."
West of Green Pine Ridge lay an undulating expanse of rolling hills blanketed in black pine forests, where the concentration of spiritual Qi was ten percent richer than the outside world.
Yin Luo's streak of light cruised at a steady height of thirty zhang above the pine canopy, moving roughly at the speed of a cruising bicycle.
Jerry's right hand gripped his wand inside his sleeve.
Ever since leaving the teleportation array, he had maintained a continuous release of diagnostic sonar pulses.
The ripples covered a hundred-zhang radius around them, refreshing once every three seconds.
On the seventh refresh, the pulse returned an anomaly.
"Halt."
Yin Luo's flight streak hitched slightly.
The ribbon of purple light carved a brief arc in the air, its velocity dropping from bicycle-pace down to zero.
"How many?"
"Nine. In the pine forest, deployed in a fan formation. Directly ahead, between thirty and seventy zhang out." Jerry twisted the wand half a turn inside his sleeve. "Eight of them have normal spiritual energy signatures. The ninth..."
He paused for a beat.
"The ninth is radiating magic."
Yin Luo turned her head.
"Magic? Wizarding magic?"
"Yes. Yet his spiritual meridians are operating concurrently. One person running spiritual Qi and magic simultaneously—dual energy systems running in parallel."
Yin Luo's black-painted fingernail clicked against her palm.
The ambush in the pine forest sprang the exact microsecond the pair halted.
Nine streaks of light lanced out from beneath the canopy: eight golden, one off-white.
The eight golden streaks swept forward in a crescent pincer from the front—exceptionally fast, boasting cultivations between early and mid Nascent Soul.
The off-white streak flanked from the side with an eerie, erratic trajectory, speeding up and slowing down erratically, every shift in acceleration accompanied by an energy signature Jerry knew intimately.
Apparition.
The figure inside the off-white streak of light was interspersing Apparition directly into his flight.
A cultivator's light-flight blended with a wizard's instantaneous displacement—alternating between both mobility methods produced a trajectory that was near impossible to anticipate.
"Heavenly Secrets Pavilion." Yin Luo recognized the spiritual frequency within the eight golden lights. "Their standard light-flight techniques carry distinct identifying patterns."
"Is the one who can teleport one of theirs too?"
"Don't know. Kill them first, ask questions later."
Yin Luo pulled her hands from her sleeves.
Dark purple threads of spiritual Qi shot from her ten fingertips, weaving an impenetrable web across the sky.
The web expanded across a fifty-zhang radius, completely blanketing the flight paths of the eight golden streaks.
The eight Heavenly Secrets Pavilion cultivators attempted to swerve before crashing into the spiritual net.
Yet Yin Luo's net unfurled far too rapidly, taking merely 0.4 seconds from fingertip discharge to total deployment.
Six of the golden lights managed to veer off and evade the net's vanguard, while the other two failed to change course in time, slamming headlong into it.
The threads sheared straight through the radiant light.
Beneath the slice of the threads, the light-auras parted like paper.
Two Heavenly Secrets Pavilion cultivators tumbled from their shattered flight auras; before they could even summon their defensive artifacts, Yin Luo's threads had already coiled around their throats.
Two heads detached from their necks.
Clean and lethal.
Before the blood could even fountain, the wounds were cauterized and sealed by the dark purple spiritual energy adhering to the threads.
Two headless corpses plummeted from thirty zhang high into the pine forest, snapping several branches before crashing into the dirt.
The remaining six golden streaks scattered.
The six Heavenly Secrets Pavilion cultivators formed an aerial encirclement, boxing Yin Luo and Jerry in the center.
All six simultaneously retrieved a synchronized set of artifacts from their storage pouches: six bronze mirrors.
The bronze mirrors hovered across six strategic vectors with reflective faces turned inward, locking them within a six-sided containment array.
Jerry ignored the six bronze mirrors entirely.
His entire focus was locked onto that off-white streak of light.
In the exact second Yin Luo slaughtered his two comrades, the figure within the off-white light completed another Apparition, flanking around to emerge directly behind Jerry's back.
He materialized from the light.
A middle-aged cultivator clad in the astrological star robes of the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion, holding a flying sword in his right hand, and in his left—
In his left hand, he gripped a wand.
Peach wood, eleven inches, phoenix feather core.
The instant the wand's tip sparked with light, Jerry identified its composition and build.
It was a standard Ollivanders-crafted wand, belonging to the exact same batch Mad-Eye Moody had purchased.
The middle-aged cultivator fired a Stunning Spell from the wand in his left hand straight at Jerry.
A beam of violet light lanced from the tip.
Its velocity was considerably slower than an ordinary wizard's, his wandwork clumsy, his grip angled fifteen degrees off-true.
Yet it was unequivocally a complete Stunning Spell, its energy signature fully identical to standard wizarding incantations.
Jerry's wand slid into his right hand from his sleeve.
He didn't even raise his arm.
With the wand dangling loosely at his side, tip pointed down, he simply flicked his wrist forty-five degrees.
A beam of grey-black light cleaved straight through the center of the violet Stunner, splitting the hex cleanly in two.
Losing structural stability, the severed spell dissolved into two harmless puffs of purple mist in mid-air.
The grey-black light didn't halt.
Piercing through the Stunner, it surged forward at triple the spell's speed.
The cultivator brought his flying sword up to parry; the moment the grey-black beam struck the blade, the steel snapped cleanly in half.
The broken half of the sword spun twice through the air before plummeting into the pine forest.
Simultaneously, Jerry raised his left hand.
Wandless magic.
A transparent, near-invisible force field unfurled from his left palm, constricting the middle-aged cultivator's entire frame.
The cultivator felt himself clamped by an intangible vise; spiritual Qi and magic were suppressed simultaneously, his meridians and magical circuits locked solid by the field.
Jerry finally raised his right hand holding the wand.
The tip leveled dead against the cultivator's chest.
"Where did you learn magic?"
A complicated tapestry of expressions washed across the cultivator's face—terror, fury, resentment, and the guilt of being caught red-handed.
His lips twitched as if to speak, but the force field crushing his throat choked his vocal cords down to a breathless wheeze.
Jerry eased the force field around his throat.
"Speak."
"...Our Heavenly Secrets Pavilion established a covert conduit with the wizarding world three years ago," the cultivator rasped. "The wands were provided by them. The magic was taught by them. We studied it for two years."
"Taught by whom?"
"I don't know."
Jerry's wrist shifted slightly.
The wand tip glided from his chest to the dead center of the man's forehead.
"Three years ago. Which means, before the war even officially broke out, the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion had already established contact with the wizarding world."
"...Yes."
"The twenty-eight wand bombs at the Alliance Summit were planted by the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion."
The cultivator clamped his mouth shut.
Mid-air, Yin Luo dispatched the remaining six Heavenly Secrets Pavilion cultivators.
Deprived of their controllers, the six-mirror containment array collapsed on its own, the bronze mirrors clattering into the pine woods below.
Retracting her spiritual threads, she wiped a few stray drops of blood from her fingertips against the side of her robes, floating casually to Jerry's side.
"Done interrogating?"
"Refusing to name names!" Jerry tersely summarized what the man had confessed.
Hearing this, the corner of Yin Luo's mouth curved into a sinister smirk.
"One final question. Answer, and I let you live." He stared at the peach-wood wand still held in the cultivator's left hand. "How many in your Heavenly Secrets Pavilion have learned wizarding magic?"
"...Seven."
"Of those seven, how many can cast a complete incantation?"
"Three. Including me."
"Where are the other two?"
The cultivator swallowed hard.
Jerry's force field clamped down sharply.
The cultivator's ribs groaned under the compression with an audible crack.
"En route back to the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion! With the Pavilion Master!"
Jerry released the force field.
The cultivator plummeted from mid-air, crashing into the pine canopy, snagged by branches before hitting the forest floor.
Both his spiritual Qi and magical circuits had been suppressed by Jerry's field; he wouldn't be recovering anytime soon.
"Not killing him?" Yin Luo glanced at the man dangling from the trees.
"Keep him alive. Let the Alliance interrogate him later; a living captive is far more useful than a corpse." Jerry sheathed his wand back into his sleeve. "The Heavenly Secrets Pavilion is collaborating with Moody on the wizarding side, while playing the warmongering enforcer on the cultivation side. Playing both sides against the middle, planning to crown themselves wartime leaders once the dust settles."
"Ambitious."
"Ambition outstripping their competence. Their strongest is barely Nascent Soul Great Perfection—not even a match for Xuan Shuang."
Yin Luo condensed her light-flight once more, and the two resumed flying toward the Myriad Demons Palace.
The pine woods receded beneath their feet. The headwind blew Yin Luo's long purple tresses across Jerry's face; he reached up to brush the stray strands from the corner of his lips.
"What's the plan once we get back?"
"First, organize everything that happened today. The evidence of the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion colluding with the wizarding world, paired with this captive's testimony, will be enough to nail them to the wall at the next Alliance Summit." Yin Luo accelerated their flight streak, shifting from bicycle-pace to motorcycle-speed. "Though before that, we need to ensure they don't make a desperate, suicidal move."
"Will they run?"
"They can't run. The Heavenly Secrets Pavilion's mountain seat is situated in the Eastern Borders of the Xuantian Realm, surrounded for three hundred li by territory belonging to the Six Righteous Sects. If they want to flee, they must cross the domains of the Taixu Sword Sect and Qingxu Palace. After you blew up their mountain gate and stripped the Sword Sect of its dignity today, neither of those two factions is feeling particularly charitable toward them."
"Good to hear." Jerry pulled a Qi-replenishing pill from his sleeve, chewed it twice, and swallowed. "And here I thought the flight home would be boring."
"You call this boring? Nine cultivators ambushing us, and that qualifies as boring to you?"
Yin Luo's light-flight sped over a mountain ravine west of Green Pine Ridge for about half an incense stick's time.
Jerry had just finished swallowing the residue of the pill when his diagnostic pulse exploded with alerts.
Within his pulse's radius, an area of a hundred zhang that was previously empty suddenly flooded with forty-seven living signatures.
Spatial rifts.
Someone had torn open forty-seven spatial rifts directly along their flight path, forty-seven cultivators emerging from the voids simultaneously.
"Is this the Heavenly Secrets Pavilion's doing?" Jerry straightened his posture atop the light-platform.
Yin Luo's flight streak ground to a halt.
Her hands formed half a mudra, casting out sensory Qi; the feedback froze her fingertips for a heartbeat.
"Of the forty-seven, six are late Nascent Soul."
"And the rest?"
"Early to mid Nascent Soul. Every single one is Nascent Soul—not a single one below Golden Core."
Jerry's wand slid from his sleeve into his right palm, his left hand spreading open at his hip.
The forty-seven cultivators established a spherical encirclement mid-air.
Above, below, front, back, left, right—sealing off all six vectors surrounding Yin Luo's flight path.
Their robes varied in color without uniform sect sigils, but every single spiritual frequency carried an underlying undertone Jerry had never encountered in Xuantian Realm cultivators.
Yin Luo recognized it.
"Their baseline spiritual resonance is cool-toned cyan," she whispered. "Cultivators from the Qingming Realm."
The Qingming Realm.
The world of the Xuanhuang Sect. The very first guest sect to enter the Alliance Summit.
"You can't hold out long—what about you?"
"I'll cover our retreat."
"Cover my ass. We leave together."
Yin Luo had no time to argue with him.
The six late Nascent Soul Qingming cultivators struck in unison.
Six cyan-blue blasts converged from six angles upon Yin Luo's flight-aura, each carrying the full destructive force of a late Nascent Soul strike.
Yin Luo's dark-purple spiritual shield spider-webbed with cracks the instant all six attacks landed simultaneously.
The shield didn't shatter entirely, but the concussive shockwave knocked Yin Luo back three paces, cracking the spiritual platform beneath her boots.
Jerry leveled his wand, firing a compressed Demonic Sun straight at the late Nascent Soul cultivator ahead.
The fireball screamed forward; the cultivator dodged to the side, the flames grazing him, singeing the left shoulder of his robes.
But Jerry had achieved his objective.
A fleeting breach had opened in the frontal blockade.
"Go!"
Yin Luo's flight streak accelerated toward the breach.
The ribbon of purple light drew a straight line through the air, shifting from motorcycle speed to a bullet train.
Their silhouettes bolted toward the gap, and the very instant they crossed the threshold...
A strike slammed down from above.
Jerry's diagnostic pulse had failed to detect a forty-eighth person.
The attack had originated from beyond his detection radius, soaring at an altitude exceeding a hundred zhang.
A beam of pure white sword-light cleaved down from the apex of the sky, falling so fast his pulses couldn't sound an advance warning.
The sword-light's target was Yin Luo.
Yin Luo only sensed it when the blade-light was three feet from the crown of her head.
Her body instinctively tilted thirty degrees to the left; the sword-light cleaved down, grazing her right shoulder.
She hadn't completely evaded it.
Blood welled from the gash.
Yin Luo's light-flight destabilized the second she was struck.
The purple streak quivered violently like a severed live wire.
Her right arm lost all strength; the muscle from her right shoulder to her right breast had been mostly severed by the sword-light, her right arm hanging limp at her side, dangling solely by shoulder ligaments.
"Yin Luo!"
Jerry's left hand caught her waist right before her light-flight collapsed.
His wand unleashed a full-power Banishing Charm toward the origin of the skyward strike, blasting the ambusher hiding a hundred zhang above back by several dozen zhang.
His left arm pulled Yin Luo tight into his chest; planting his boots on the residual shards of her flight-platform, he Apparated both of them clean out of the encirclement.
Apparition.
The pair materialized inside a cavern a hundred li away.
Upon landing, Jerry's knee slammed into the cave wall, making him hiss in pain, but he never loosened his grip.
Yin Luo leaned in his embrace, blood still welling from her shoulder wound, dark purple spiritual energy hemorrhaging from the edges as though something were dismantling her energy circuits from within.
"That strike carried corrosive sword-intent," Yin Luo's voice was far fainter than usual, her breathing shallow. "It's running rampant through my meridians. The entire right side of my network is sealed."
Jerry laid her flat onto the cavern floor, stripping off his grey robe to cushion her head.
Aiming his wand at the entrance, he cast three layers of Concealment Charms and two anti-tracking wards, masking the cave on both spiritual and spatial planes.
He crouched beside her, pressing his left hand beside the wound on her right shoulder.
Magic seeped from his palm into Yin Luo's body, probing inward along her meridians.
"The residual sword-intent... is lodged between your lung and heart meridians. It's migrating toward your heart." Jerry's fingers traced across the skin above her right breast, tracking the foreign sword-intent. "I can contain it with magic, but not for long. I don't recognize its properties; it's completely different from ordinary cultivation sword-intent."
"The Qingming Realm's sword systems differ from the Xuantian Realm's," Yin Luo turned her head toward him, her lips still carrying a faint smile, though far smaller than usual. "Their sword-intent autonomously hunts down the host's most vulnerable point to take root. Once it anchors in my heart vessels, my spiritual energy will drain dry within half an hour."
"Then I'll purge it within half an hour."
"You know cultivation healing arts?"
"No. But I know other methods."
Jerry cast a Hemostatic Charm over her wound; the bleeding halted, the edges sealing beneath a thin membrane of condensed magic.
Then, flattening his left palm over the upper curve of her right breast, he steadily channeled magic into her, using a moving magical barrier to inch by inch drive the foreign sword-intent toward the terminus of her meridians.
Yin Luo lay upon the stone floor, her head resting on Jerry's robe, turning her face to look at the youth crouching beside her.
His expression was far sterner than usual, his lips pressed tight, his palm resting unmoving over her chest as an unbroken stream of magic poured from his flesh.
"Jerry."
"Don't speak. I'm forcing the sword-intent out."
"Just one sentence."
"...Say it."
Yin Luo tilted her head, her pale lips parting into a faint smirk.
"The way you held me while running for our lives was pretty damn hot."
"Shut up, you lovestruck fool!"