Chapter 1428: The Great Cultivator's Contingency

Given how well the Chaotic Devil Elder knew Pure Sea Sect, the Feathered Robe Primordial Lady would never believe a claim that he had no idea what treasures it held.

The Chaotic Devil Elder's eyes shifted. When his gaze met hers, her heart tightened, though the smile stayed on her face.

He let out a soft chuckle, his expression somewhere between amusement and none at all. "Nothing escapes your discerning eye. I came for one thing only, a nautical chart. Should you find it, I hope you won't mind sharing it."

"A nautical chart?"

The Feathered Robe Primordial Lady was rather taken aback, and she misread his purpose. "With your strength, you'd hardly need a chart to cross the storm belt into Beichen Realm. I heard that you once ran into a mysterious expert from Beichen Realm and traded blows with him. Is that true?"

"It is. The man carried several incarnations, each worked to perfection. I gained little advantage. I struck a bargain with him and agreed not to set foot in Beichen Realm for three hundred years," the Chaotic Devil Elder admitted it frankly, then his tone shifted. "I have no intention of breaking his word. That chart points to a different place."

"A different place?" She was puzzled at first, then her beautiful eyes went wide. "Zhongzhou! The Zhongzhou of legend truly exists, and Pure Sea Sect had a chart leading there?"

The Chaotic Devil Elder neither confirmed nor denied it, asking instead, "You have heard of Zhongzhou as well?"

"I'd always taken it for a legend. I never imagined it was real, that a route from the North Sea to Zhongzhou actually existed..." She exhaled softly and steadied her thoughts. "But that route lives only in legend, and no one knows whether it exists at all. What makes you so certain that Pure Sea Sect kept such a chart?"

The Chaotic Devil Elder raised his black bamboo staff and pointed down at the sect below. "Doesn't it strike you as strange? In the North Sea, the Daoist and devilish paths both flourish, while the Buddhist sects are beneath notice, their lineages severed, with barely a Core Formation cultivator among them. So why should a Buddhist sect this powerful appear out of nowhere and remain unknown?"

The Feathered Robe Primordial Lady caught the implication, and her face filled with disbelief. "You're saying Pure Sea Sect came from Zhongzhou? How could that be possible?"

"It's only my conjecture." Chaotic Devil Elder laughed it off, unwilling to say more on the subject, and changed tack. "If you're interested, I can share the chart once it's in hand. After you break through to the late stage of the Spiritual Infant Realm, perhaps we can travel to Zhongzhou together and look out for one another."

"The late stage of the Spiritual Infant Realm. Heh!" She shook her head with a bitter smile and offered her thanks, then weighed her words before asking, "Would the late stage of the Spiritual Infant Realm be enough to cross the storm belt safely and reach Zhongzhou?"

"We'd have to obtain the chart and try before we'd know. Though if I am fortunate enough to break through to the Divine Transformation Realm, the chart would likely become unnecessary." The Chaotic Devil Elder ran his fingers over the bamboo staff in his hand, his tone uncertain.

***

Before the pagoda, the three of them landed one after another.

The thirteen-story pagoda rose high, each story twice the height of a man. It was built of stone, its doors and windows sealed shut, its surface carved with unnamed arhats and Buddhas so lifelike they seemed to be watching the intruders. A layer of golden radiance draped the whole structure, a distinctive Buddhist barrier.

It looked considerably dimmer here, the barrier weaker in power than the one over the golden roof.

The Ghost Mother had already paid the pagoda a visit. To help the seal hold a little longer, however, she had moved with great care and hadn't fully destroyed the pagoda's barrier, leaving no trace of human interference visible on the surface.

They tilted their heads back and studied it for a while. Buddhist barriers were unfamiliar to them, and a frontal assault was their only option. Unable to see inside, they had no idea the interior had already been stripped bare. To their eyes, the barrier here had been damaged by the crimson flames battering the seal.

No one noticed that something was off about the Precept-Keeping Sage's expression just then. He was nowhere near as excited as before, staring instead at the foundation of the scripture repository beside the pagoda, too grieved even for tears.

"Let's begin." The Precept-Keeping Sage sighed heavily and summoned a needle-shaped astra specialized in breaking barriers. The other two were not to be outdone.

He raised the astra and was about to act when an inexplicable unease crept over him, followed by a chill materializing out of nowhere on his left shoulder. He froze in horror.

"Don't move." A cold, sinister warning sounded beside his ear.

It was the Chaotic Devil Elder!

The Precept-Keeping Sage went rigid from head to toe as waves of shock crashed through him. He remembered at once what was perched on his shoulder. He had seen it with his own eyes earlier, during the ambush on Valley Master Mu, a ghostly spirit of some kind, deeply uncanny.

Had Valley Master Mu not summoned a strange protective treasure, he wouldn't have escaped either, and all three of them would have died at the Chaotic Devil Elder's hands.

Even before he became a great cultivator, the Chaotic Devil Elder's name had inspired terror. His enemies had a habit of dying suddenly, with no cause ever traced afterward, and this ghostly spirit's ability was likely why.

The Precept-Keeping Sage couldn't even tell when the thing had been planted on him. The Feathered Robe Primordial Lady and the others were standing right there, and none of them had noticed a thing!

No, that's not it. He couldn't have done it in front of so many people. It must have been during the attack on Valley Master Mu. The old devil seized the chaos to plant the ghostly spirit on me. He never trusted me... ThePrecept-Keeping Sage's mind raced, and one possibility surfaced.

"I know what you're looking for." The Chaotic Devil Elder's voice remained cold and detached. "You shouldn't have hidden it from me. I owe your master a favor. Bring me the Spirit-Calming Incense and I'll let this pass."

At the words Spirit-Calming Incense, the Precept-Keeping Sage lost his last shred of hope. Half his body felt frozen solid. He struggled to keep his expression unchanged and said hurriedly, "I was a fool, blinded for a moment. I beg your forgiveness, Senior. But... the scripture repository is destroyed. My master said the Spirit-Calming Incense wasn't in the pagoda. It was kept together with the method for refining it, both stored in the scripture repository, so I'm afraid it's also..."

He no longer dared conceal the smallest thing and laid out everything he knew.

The Chaotic Devil Elder seemed unsurprised and sighed faintly. "In the scripture repository after all. No wonder your spirits sank so low just now. Go. Open the pagoda and see what's inside."

Spiritual Infant cultivators could govern their own emotions. Some, however, saw no reason to bother, and in moments of grief or joy, ripples were inevitable regardless. They were still human, not lifeless things.

The Precept-Keeping Sage had gone to enormous trouble and believed himself on the verge of his goal, only to find that the scripture repository hadn't even left ruins behind. His state of mind hardly needed describing.

That even a fluctuation in his emotions could be detected by the ghostly spirit riding him left the Precept-Keeping Sage's nerves drawn taut, and his dread of the Chaotic Devil Elder's methods deepened further.

A moment later, he approached the pagoda with trembling steps, summoned the needle-shaped astra, and struck woodenly at the Buddhist barrier. The two beside him never noticed anything amiss.

***

Meanwhile, within the herb garden, Qin Sang and Tan Hao were hard at work harvesting the most valuable of the spiritual herbs.

Tan Hao had been guided by the Ghost Mother and had spent a fair stretch of time in Pure Sea Sect, so he knew its barriers intimately. Under his direction, Qin Sang did the work himself, and when the barriers broke, the resulting phenomena were so faint that no one outside would detect them.

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