By late afternoon, the narrow mountain path spilled out onto a broad road paved with ancient stone.
The air changed.
Smoke from cooking stalls coiled upward in greasy ribbons, mixing with the sharper bite of spirit herbs and beast meat. Hawkers shouted over one another, their voices layered with the buzzing hum of crowding qi—young cultivators testing each other's auras just by standing too close, older experts moving with the quiet pressure of rivers running deep.
Ahead, rising in tiers, was a city.
High walls of weathered stone ringed it, the gate towers bristling with banners. Symbols from countless sects snapped in the wind—lion crests, river sigils, blazing suns, obscure talismans of small schools hoping to be noticed. Cultivators flowed in and out like tidal currents: Heavenly Dao Academy students in scholarly robes, Eternal River disciples with cold, mist-wrapped cores, Lion's Roar aristocrats riding beast carriages, and a hundred nameless hopefuls trying to catch fate's eye.
One of the great cities of the Hundred Cities region—an ancient crossroads where the ambitions of the human race tangled with the old bones of history.
"Feels different from home," Xu Pei murmured.
Cleansing Incense, for all its deep foundation, was still a sect in revival—a mountain gate reclaimed from decline. Its peaks were wild; its disciples still few. The qi there was clean and fierce, like a river cutting a fresh channel.
This place was an old battlefield of fame. Its air was heavy with accumulated desire: to rise, to conquer, to be remembered.
"Too crowded," Bai Jianzhen said simply.
She stood straight, sword at her waist, gaze moving over the towers and walls with the same calm she might give an enemy formation. To her, all that noise and color was just another kind of killing field.
Chen Baojiao sniffed the air, lips curving into a sharp grin.
"Too many people who need their faces beaten," she said.
Her eyes glittered, taking in the banners of rival powers, the swagger of other young geniuses. Battle-lust rose in her chest like spring thunder.
Li Shuangyan looked up at the gate, veil fluttering softly, eyes as clear and cold as autumn water.
"With Young Noble here," she said quietly, "this place will not be peaceful."
Ling Feng laughed under his breath.
"Compliments make me shy, Shuangyan."
He did not sound shy at all.
His tone was lazy, amused, the tone of a modern man who had seen traffic jams and office politics and decided they were all nonsense compared to the Dao. But beneath that relaxed drawl was a calm, crushing confidence that did not fit this era at all.
They entered the city.
Inside, alleys branched like river channels cut by generations of footsteps.
Tall inns leaned over the streets with scarlet lanterns hanging from eaves, their paper skins inscribed with formation lines that swallowed noise and filtered killing intent. Weapon shops lined one avenue, their racks glittering with sabers, halberds, and swords nurtured in blood qi. Pill stores perfumed another street, jars of medicinal pills behind crystal screens, their fragrance thick enough to make ordinary cultivators dizzy.
Talisman stalls overflowed with handwritten seals, auction houses boomed about "Ancient Era treasures" with more boasting than proof, and small shrines to various True Gods hid in side streets where old women and young disciples alike still burned incense and muttered quiet prayers.
Ling Feng let the girls drift as they walked, watching them take in the surroundings with faint amusement.
Li Shuangyan paused at a stall of jade slips. She picked one up with slender fingers, spiritual sense sweeping through it. The slip contained a so-called "Profound Merit Law" that claimed to harmonize water and sword.
Her brows barely twitched.
In her mind, she could already hear Ling Feng later, lazily tearing it apart: "This part's decent, that part's trash, and whoever wrote this section definitely studied with their head stuck in a chamber pot."
She set the slip down and moved on, eyes calm, the faintest warmth in their depths.
Xu Pei stopped dead at the first proper alchemy shop.
Rows of pills sat behind protective formations—bone-washing pills, marrow-refining pills, mind-calming incense. Jars of dried herbs and sealed boxes of rare ingredients lined the walls. Spirit fire arrays flickered deep inside the building.
Her fingers tightened on the strap of her dark-green cauldron. The world seemed to narrow down to cauldrons, flames, and ingredients. In her head, she was already rearranging recipes, thinking how her Violent Cloud Chant would compress medicinal power instead of wasting it, how much faster she could climb realms if she had access to these materials.
"Later," Ling Feng's voice ghosted over her shoulder.
He hadn't moved closer, but she felt him all the same.
Xu Pei blushed, tearing her gaze away. "...En."
Chen Baojiao, by contrast, went straight for a weapon street like a wolf catching the scent of raw meat.
She hefted a long spear from a stall, swung it twice, and clicked her tongue in disgust.
"Too light," she said. "If I hit someone with this, it'll break before their bones do."
The shopkeeper's smile froze.
She tried a halberd next, then a hammer. Each time, her expression grew more unimpressed. The Tyrannical Valley Immortal Spring Physique in her body thrummed faintly, chaos-enhanced springs hidden in her flesh ready to swallow force and spit it back doubled; these toys could not stir her blood.
Finally she tossed a bronze bangle, like the one on her wrist, up and down in her palm and smiled with satisfaction. That weight felt right.
Bai Jianzhen barely glanced at the noisy main avenue. She was pulled as if by fate toward a modest sword shop tucked half in shadow.
No grand banners, no loud barker—just an old sign and rows of simple, unadorned blades.
She stepped inside.
Lines of swords hung on the walls, their scabbards plain, their qi restrained. A few had tiny nicks along the edges, signs of real combat rather than decorative forging. Bai Jianzhen's hand hovered over one hilt, then another, eyes growing a fraction brighter.
Sword intent quietly rose and fell with her breath.
Outside, Ling Feng smiled.
He didn't hurry them.
He walked slowly, hands in his sleeves, letting the city's weight brush against his senses. The Hundred Cities were the home of the human race—nations and sects piled atop one another, their glories and grudges sinking into the earth over endless years.
Everywhere he looked, he saw threads of cause and effect, of karma and ambition. Young geniuses walking with overinflated pride. Old monsters hiding behind merchant fronts. Scouts of great powers watching from teahouse balconies.
If he wanted, he could reach out and tug any of those threads and see what kind of chaos spilled out.
For now, he just walked.
By the time they ended up standing beneath the eaves of a spacious inn with clean formations and not too much noise leaking from within, the sky had turned gold.
The plaque above the door was old sandalwood, characters carved deep and stabilized with Dao patterns. The welcoming formation at the threshold tasted of peace—not too weak, not overly restrictive.
Ling Feng tilted his head, then nodded.
"Mm. This will do."
Inside, the innkeeper took one look at their bearing—Li Shuangyan's ethereal nobility, Chen Baojiao's tyrannical heroism, Bai Jianzhen's hidden sword edge, Xu Pei's quiet but intense aura—and swallowed a gasp. He lowered his head even more deeply when his gaze brushed Ling Feng and his mind failed to sense any cultivation, yet his soul instinctively wanted to kneel.
"Honored guests, honored guests," the man said quickly. "We have top-floor rooms, separate courtyards, sound-suppressing arrays—"
"Top floor," Ling Feng said mildly. "Just four large room. Good formations. No neighbors with loud snoring."
"Yes, yes!" The man bobbed his head. "This little one will see to it personally."
They took their room.
Upstairs, the corridor was quiet, evening light spilling in through lattice windows and painting the floor in warm lines.
Chen Baojiao crossed her arms and leaned against one wall, eyes narrowing as she studied him.
"You look like you're about to sneak off," she said.
Li Shuangyan's gaze flickered, understanding already dawning. Xu Pei's fingers tightened on her cauldron strap, lips pressing together. Even Bai Jianzhen paused halfway into her room, hand resting on the door frame.
Ling Feng raised both hands, palms forward.
"Relax," he said. "I'm not going to pick up a girl in the first hour we arrive."
Chen Baojiao snorted. "You've done it before."
"...That was different," he coughed.
Xu Pei hesitated, then spoke softly. "Feng… do you need help with anything?"
Her eyes were clear. She knew he was not a man who left his women aside when dangers approached. If he wanted to go alone, it meant either he was certain… or it was something only he could do.
His expression softened when he looked at her.
"It's fine," he said. "There's just a little thing nearby I want to borrow before someone else does. A trinket. Useful for later."
"A 'trinket' that makes you sneak off alone?" Chen Baojiao raised a brow. "Sure."
He grinned at her. "You girls take a bath, rest, go explore the night market if you want. I'll be back before you finish arguing over who gets the biggest bed."
That earned him the exact reaction he'd expected.
Chen Baojiao clicked her tongue. "Obviously I get the biggest bed."
Xu Pei's cheeks turned pink. "W-we can share…"
Li Shuangyan looked at him for another long breath, then inclined her head.
"Young Noble has his own plans," she said. "We will wait."
Her tone was composed, but the way her fingers lightly brushed the veil at her throat betrayed a quiet tension. She knew better than anyone how terrifying his "little errands" could become.
Bai Jianzhen's lips curled faintly.
"If you cause trouble, call me."
"If I cause trouble," Ling Feng said cheerfully, "they won't have time to react before it's over."
He turned away, took two steps down the corridor—
—and vanished.
To ordinary eyes, he simply disappeared, as if he'd never existed.
In truth, the Cyan Chaos Emerald in his inner void flared. Time around him thickened into shining syrup, the world's heartbeat slowing by half, then half again. The lantern flames outside the rooms were suddenly slow-motion flowers of fire; drifting dust motes became tiny planets in lazy orbits.
Chronos Perception sharpened the edges of everything. Chaos Drift coiled around his bones.
Ling Feng stepped forward.
The corridor went blurry.
In the span of a single ordinary blink, his figure slipped out of the inn, through the city streets, past the outer walls, and across miles of countryside, his body moving at a speed that would have made Enlightened Beings scream about ghosts and illusions. To anyone watching, it would have looked like he had simply never been there to begin with.
....
Outside the city, beyond farmlands and scattered clan graves, the land sagged into an ugly scar the locals called the Forgotten Wasteland.
Once, it had been ordinary hills and low plains. Then war had come—sect wars, kingdom wars, personal grudges of great experts that toppled mountains as an afterthought. Sects had risen and fallen, leaving behind ruins that no one wanted to claim, tombs that no descendant dared to maintain.
Over time, it had become a place of collapsed mausoleums and half-buried coffins, stone markers broken and sunk sideways, ancient Dao patterns weathered into nonsense. The earth itself tasted of stale blood and lingering resentment.
In the midst of this desolation, carved into a low hill and wrapped in heavy arrays, stood a multi-storey stone building.
Today, it was crowded.
Dozens of banners flew over its roof—pill sects, treasure houses, small kingdoms, itinerant alliances. A constant stream of cultivators came and went: merchants in fine robes, old experts with cloudy eyes and sharp senses, young geniuses seeking to snatch fortunes from the dead.
The Grave Auction.
Dig up a grave. Drag out whatever was buried—a coffin, a cauldron, a ruined imperial seal. Put it on a platform. Sell it to the highest bidder. The morality was questionable; the profits were not. Naturally, cultivators loved it.
Ling Feng stood on a nearby rise, hands stuffed into his sleeves, looking down with mild interest.
"Lively," he muttered.
His Named Hero cultivation was like a small lantern compared to the bonfires gathered in that stone building.
But he wasn't here to show off.
He didn't walk to the gate.
Instead, he took one step forward.
The world dimmed.
The Cyan Emerald spun faster, its time Dao coiling around his will. Chaos Force seeped into the seams of reality; the laws of this tiny region of the Mortal Emperor World buckled and froze.
Lantern flames in front of the auction house halted mid-flicker, as though nailed to the air. A gust of wind that had been bending flags sideways became a glass sculpture of motion. Spittle from a shouting bidder hung between his teeth and the floor. A servant halfway through pouring tea created a perfect arc of suspended liquid.
The shouts of bidders cut off mid-syllable.
The flow of qi within hundreds of cultivators—bright and turbulent, slow and ancient—stagnated in an instant. Meridians froze. Sea of consciousness locked. Dao runes stopped circulating.
Time, within the range of Ling Feng's field, had been placed under his heel.
Only Ling Feng moved.
He walked through the silent crowd like a phantom, shoulder brushing against people who might be able to destroy dynasties with a wave of their sleeve. They did not feel it. They did not even dream that an entire slice of their lives had been emptied out and pocketed by a stranger.
"People say the heavens are ruthless," Ling Feng murmured. "Old Villainous Heaven would be jealous if it saw this."
Chaos Energy from another reality pulsed quietly in his blood—power outside the karmic web of this world, beyond the Old Villainous Heaven's gaze. It was not heroism that kept this act invisible; it was simple incompatibility. The Heavenly Dao here could not judge what it could not recognize.
He stepped through the main doors of the Grave Auction.
Inside the great hall, coffins and strange items sat on stone platforms under fixed arrays.
There were jade slips, ancient cauldrons, decrepit banners, rusted weapons whose legends had been lost along with their owners. A colossal thigh bone from some unknown beast. A shattered war chariot. A broken stone tablet still leaking a trace of imperial might.
To most of the frozen bidders, it was a forest of possibilities and traps.
To Ling Feng, with Chaos-tuned perception extending outward like a calm tide, ordinary treasures were just stones in shallow water—each one with ripples, but nothing that stirred his soul.
The thing he wanted was different.
It was not loud. It did not blaze with power. It sat in silence, a cold, heavy weight wedged into the seam between life and death, like a piece of the underworld that had refused to stay buried.
His gaze swung to a corner platform.
There, bundled with several other relics, lay what looked like an old wooden ruler, worn and faintly warped with age. Ninety-nine tiny ghost figures were carved into its surface, each expression different, each face caught in a perpetual silent scream or sly grin.
Ghost's Origin Ancestral Key.
In another flow of fate, another man would have stood where he did—Li Qiye, the dark hand behind the scenes—and obtained it from this auction in the Hundred Cities. He would have used Ghost Locust Tree runic arrays and Ghost-Attracting Medicine to charge it, then eventually gone deep into the Prime Ominous Grave, opened an Ancestral Domain beneath millions of corpses, and erased a terror that had haunted the ghost race since the legends of the Ghost Ancestral Tree.
Ling Feng picked up the ruler.
The wood was cold, almost clammy, like it had been soaked in ghost mist for ten thousand years. For a heartbeat, the layer of time-freeze trembled as a stubborn, ancient will pushed back—a congregation of ninety-nine ghost souls, the remnants of a tribe that had gambled its entire existence pursuing the true origin of the ghost race.
"It's been waiting for someone," Ling Feng murmured. "Sorry for cutting the line."
The ghostly resistance pressed down on his palm like a mountain made of whispers.
He smiled.
Within his inner world, the Green Emerald—space—the Red—force—the Yellow—energy—and the Cyan—time—responded together. Chaos Energy moved, not gently, not seeking permission, but with the casual tyranny of a higher law.
He did not summon fire, or black light, or chains. He simply let Chaos Force seep into the ruler, grain by grain, rune by rune.
The Ghost's Origin Ancestral Key was made from Ghost Ancestral Wood taken from the Ghost Ancestral Tree itself; it had been refined by a ghost tribe that believed in the third origin theory and had found the answer they were seeking at any cost.
All of that history rose up in a rush.
For an instant, the silent hall around Ling Feng dissolved.
He stood instead among countless suspended corpses in a lightless domain, each one chained to invisible cannons the size of islands, their maws pointed at a universe that had long since forgotten them. Far above, a titanic tree of ghostly wood spread its branches across a sky made of dead stars, and at its roots, something half-dead and half-true slumbered—a being whose mere exhalation could erase sects, a thing at least on the level of a Supreme Giant, perhaps worse.
The ninety-nine ghost figures carved into the ruler opened their mouths and shrieked in unison.
You are not our master.
The Chaos Force in Ling Feng's body stirred.
"Yeah," he said mildly. "I'm worse."
He was not an Immortal Emperor. His cultivation base, if one measured it by the realms of this world, was "only" Named Hero. But the Chaos Force that had chosen him had nothing to do with this world's river of time, or with its Heaven, or with the karmic net that tried to bind all things.
Chaos energy pressed forward, swallowing those rebellious ghost cries, not destroying them but rewriting their context. The ninety-nine faces shuddered—and then knelt, one by one, their carved mouths closing.
The cold within the ruler shifted.
What had been an ancestral key bound tightly to the ghost race's fate became something else: a door that now opened and closed according to Ling Feng's whim, its path marked by his brand instead of the calculations of Daoist Heaven Calculating or the desperate prayers of a ghost tribe.
He did not bother with Ghost Locust Tree formations or carefully prepared medicinal offerings. Why nudge the door politely when he could simply take hold of the hinges?
Chaos existed beyond the reach of this world's laws. It ignored rules.
Ling Feng's eyes half-closed.
On the other end of this key lay the Ancestral Domain—where the Ghost Ancestral Tree still lurked, where the ninety-nine Primal Ghost-Cannons waited in the dark, where a certain ghost-devouring monster slept under a lost mythical island. A domain whose destruction had once shaken entire seas.
He could, if he wished, condense another Emerald to anchor a trip there soon.
But erasing a creature that had terrorized the ghost race from behind the scenes, a thing tied to the Twelve Forbidden Burial Grounds and the Prime Ominous Grave itself… that was not something to attempt half-heartedly.
"I don't like leaving ticking bombs behind me," he said softly. "Especially not ones that eat souls for breakfast."
He snapped his fingers against the side of the ruler.
The Ghost's Origin Ancestral Key shivered, then quieted. A faint Chaos mark sank into its core, twining around the ghost runes without clashing—the way a new road might overlay an old one, leading to the same destination but under new management.
Ling Feng weighed the ruler in his hand once.
Then, on a whim, he plucked a nearby piece of rotten wood from another lot—a broken length of coffin plank, soaked in stale yin energy. He brushed a thin layer of Chaos illusion over it, painting the surface with a false pattern of ninety-nine tiny ghosts.
From a distance, even a careful expert would see only the image they expected: an odd wooden ruler, ominous and old.
"Can't have people noticing the item just evaporated," he said. "Let the auction finish their little show."
He set the fake in the Key's former place and walked back out through the frozen hall, passing by men and women whose future lives he had just quietly diverted.
At the threshold of his time field, he snapped his fingers.
Time rushed back in.
The torches flared, embers continuing their fall. Shouts resumed exactly where they had cut off:
"—too low, you insulting dog! My sect—"
"—ten thousand more! Ten thousand!"
Somewhere inside, a bidder was loudly cursing another buyer's ancestors, completely unaware that an artifact capable of later erasing an entire ghost domain had changed ownership in the gap between his syllables.
An old cultivator in a corner frowned faintly, as if something in his bones had felt a strange itch—but after a moment, he shook his head. The Heavenly Dao had given him no warning. How could he suspect that time itself had been cut and stitched?
Ling Feng left the Grave Auction behind without a sound.
On the way back, he did not immediately release Chaos Drift.
He moved through the slow world like a man strolling through a painting.
In one street, he passed by a young man in scholarly robes standing stiffly beneath a carriage window, face pale with stubbornness. Inside, the silhouette of a young woman sat motionless, her hands clenched in her lap. Noble guards watched with thinly veiled contempt.
Politics wrapped around them like a net.
Ling Feng glanced once, and the corners of his lips tilted.
"Found you," he murmured.
This was one of the little love stories he remembered from the "original script"—a pair of stubborn fools whose feelings would have been crushed flat under arranged marriages and sect alliances if not for a certain dark hand meddling. In that flow, Li Qiye had stepped in.
In this world, Ling Feng had no intention of letting a good romance go to waste.
Further ahead, on the distant horizon, his perception brushed against something massive buried under the foundations of the Eastern Hundred Cities—an ancient presence chained to Heavenly Dao Academy, a Realm God that should have returned to ashes long ago but had been held back generation after generation. In his mind, it was a giant turtle sleeping with its shell buried under mountains.
"Old turtle," he said under his breath. "We'll talk soon."
He stepped again.
The world blurred.
By the time he released Chaos Drift, he was already standing in front of the inn once more, the evening sounds of the city surging into proper motion around him.
He walked upstairs at an ordinary pace, footsteps as casual as if he had just gone downstairs to buy snacks.
Back at the inn, in the largest of the four rooms, steam curled thickly from a wooden bath.
The sound-suppressing array hummed softly; outside, nothing could be heard but faint water and the occasional rustle of cloth. Inside, the air was warm and damp, scented with spirit herb infusions the inn had provided.
Xu Pei sat with her knees hugged to her chest in the bath, cheeks pink from both heat and shyness. Her hair floated around her shoulders, dark strands clinging to pale skin. She listened as Chen Baojiao, perched half-in, half-out of the tub with a towel draped loosely over her shoulders, complained about a flimsy spear she'd seen in a street stall.
"If you're going to call it a 'dragon spear' and then make it that light," Chen Baojiao grumbled, "at least have the decency to not charge so many spirit stones. I swung it once and wanted to apologize to actual dragons."
Xu Pei giggled, the sound small but sincere. "You still bought it?"
"I bought it," Chen Baojiao said, "so no one else would embarrass themselves using it. I'm going to melt it down later."
Li Shuangyan sat at a small table by the window, veil off, quietly drying her hair with a soft cloth. Without the veil, her face was like jade carved by a patient artisan—cool, restrained, yet with a softness at the edges when she looked at the other girls.
Bai Jianzhen leaned against the wall near the window, arms folded, eyes half-closed, one hand resting on her sword. The steam beaded on her eyelashes, but she did not seem to notice. Her mind was already replaying sword forms she'd seen in the city, matching them against her own sword heart.
When the door slid open, four heads turned.
Ling Feng stepped inside as if he'd only gone downstairs to argue about food prices.
"Miss me?" he asked.
Chen Baojiao looked him up and down slowly, from his relaxed shoulders to his faint smile, and narrowed her eyes.
"You came back too calm," she said. "Definitely did something outrageous."
"Just picked up a small insurance policy," he replied. "Useful for later. You'll see."
He didn't elaborate.
He crossed the room in a few easy steps, reached out, and ruffled Xu Pei's damp hair. Droplets scattered; she squeaked softly, then leaned unconsciously into his hand, eyes lowering.
"Feng…" she murmured.
"You worked hard on the road," he said, softer. "Soak longer."
He passed by Li Shuangyan next. Their eyes met briefly.
No words were needed. She saw the faint trace of foreign death aura clinging to him, the way his qi had shifted ever so slightly. She knew he had walked somewhere foul and come back untouched.
"Young Noble," she said quietly, "has obtained what he wanted?"
"Mm." Ling Feng tilted his head. "A key. Several graves. A future headache for the ghost race. Nothing urgent."
Her fingers tightened on the cloth for a heartbeat, then relaxed.
He flicked the edge of Bai Jianzhen's scabbard lightly with two fingers.
She opened her eyes fully, gaze sharpening. "No blood on your shoes."
"If I kill people every time I leave the room," he said, "you'll complain that I never let you play."
She snorted, but the corner of her mouth twitched upward.
Ling Feng straightened, glance moving over the four women—the shy alchemist, the cold fairy, the tyrant princess, the sword maniac. Warmth moved under his laziness.
"Rest today," he said. "Tomorrow, we're not going to the Academy yet."
Li Shuangyan lifted her head. "Oh? Then where?"
Ling Feng smiled.
"To visit a turtle," he said. "And to make sure someone's love story doesn't get stomped flat by politics."
Chen Baojiao blinked. "You… care about other people's romance now?"
"I've always cared," he said, perfectly serious. "I'm a romantic guy. If I see a good story about to be ruined, my hands itch."
Xu Pei laughed softly, a tiny, happy sound. "Feng is… kind."
Bai Jianzhen muttered, "…Nosy."
He grinned wider.
"Call it meddling, call it fate, call it me being bored," he said. "Either way, tomorrow we're going to step on some people's faces and fix their marriage problems at the same time. That's what I call efficiency."
Chen Baojiao's eyes lit up. "So there will be a fight."
Ling Feng tilted his head as if considering.
"If they're smart," he said, "they'll just bow, apologize, and change their marriage contract."
"And if they're not smart?" Li Shuangyan asked.
He smiled, lazy and cold all at once.
"Then," he said, "I'll show Eastern Hundred Cities what happens when you step on someone's feelings in front of me."