Lingfeng crushed the jade communication token in his hands with a horrible bitter expression on his face. If anyone was ever going to try and trace them, then they would only be able to come as far as this place.
After he had ferried the entire group across the chasm on his sword after they had left the Library, a feeling of unease had kept building-up stronger and stronger inside the Windmage’s heart, so he had attempted to reach out to some of his contacts on the surface level and had gotten back an unexpected and quite upsetting reply.
The few words that he had exchanged with the Sect Master had left him with a brewing amalgam of bad feelings festering inside of him, from a deep sense of betrayal, of sorrow, and most of all, an overwhelming sensation of disappointment when the Sect Master had begun to yell at him in a madman’s rage, blaming the downfall of most of the Sect on his head.
The Windmage could somewhat understand why the Sect Master was so upset, since Lady Yao was the Sect Master’s First Wife and she had almost died during the conflict, not to mention that most of the Sect was now probably lying in ruins because of the surface fighting, but blaming it all on him wasn’t FAIR!
It wasn’t HIS FAULT that all of this madness had spiraled-down in such a messed up way! If anything, they should be kissing him in the ass for his donation of all of those “super-valuable” spirit stones that had been used to summon the Templar reinforcements just in a nick-of-time to counter the Demonic Sects.
If it hadn’t been for him, they would have been totally overwhelmed instead, and the Sect would have been completely destroyed! How could the Sect Master even point the finger at him in such a cruel way, when all he had ever tried to do was what was best for the Sect? This wasn’t…
And suddenly, Lingfeng realized how Trina must have felt all of this time, after being tossed into this new world as a victim of circumstance where everything was seemingly out to get her. Even the talk he now recently had with the Sect Master seemed to mirror a discussion from his past, except that he had been on the delivering end instead of the receiving one during that time, and the whole talk had been an incredibly petty thing to do.
Because that's exactly what the Sect Master was becoming at this moment, a petty little man that just wanted to project all of his frustrations and feelings of helplessness onto somebody else. He had expected more out of the Sect Master, since they had been friends for so many years, but he also realised that you would only find out a person’s true colours when some real trouble came their way, and himself and the Sect Master had only known eachother during peaceful times so far.
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After dumping any-and-all communication devices that he owned from inside of his spatial ring, then crushing them into tiny pieces to make sure that nobody would be able to trace our group from this spot onwards, Lingfeng turned the glowing dwarf lady towards another direction and asked her to give him an approximation as to where we might be located underground. With the help of her new [Tunnel Map] skill and using the collapsed Hall of Medicine building as our reference point, we were able to get a pretty accurate idea about where we were located under the whole Sect.
Not wanting to leave behind my Pill Forge nor the Immortal Rooster, we had decided to take our time and just simply just tunnel our way through the rock until we had reached beneath my house, since the new digging speed that the Legendary Pickaxe could exhibit was simply insane. In truth, it wasn't as much as the pick doing the digging, but rather the Mother System moving the earth away from it's path. After I had suggested for Carmine to temporarily loan her pickaxe to the golden Golem child and ask him to dig for us instead, the speed at which we had begun to move through the bedrock had increased tenfold.
Mining Automation was the way of the future, I was certain of it now! It also helped that the little Golemn baby seemed to quite enjoy his newly- assigned task, as he moved huge swathes of earth with an incredible strength, precision and speed making him worthy of his Dwemmer Automaton’s name.
Fortunately, a lot of the tunnel work had already been created during the previous years by Carmine, as she had been cluelessly digging in all directions while trying to find her way out, Including through some bedrock layers that were a bit further away from my house. In all honesty, I don't think that there was even a single spot under the whole Sect that did not have one of her tunnels somewhere beneath it, making the whole base of the Sect a literal rock-sponge of criss-crossing dwarven tunnelworks. It’s no surprise that a lot of the buildings had collapsed.
After reaching the tunnel that had been previously dug near the proximity of my house and then creating a new side-branch into it, we finally burst our way through the floor of my house, and right into the kitchen chamber. Fortunately, this was one of the rooms that was still standing, as the rest of the house had been crushed into tiny little bits and pieces by some of the Demon’s siege spells. It didn't take that long for us to retrieve the Immortal Rooster after we had dug it out from underneath a few piles of crushed ceiling rocks, and also grabbed and stored inside of the baby Golem’s Core my Rare Pill Forge that had already been lying inside of the kitchen alongside with all of its weird attachments plus many leftover ingredient-jars and Essences.
Since I had an entire Warehouse-worth of space at my disposal because of the little Golem dude, I then grabbed as many of my own and Liliam’s belongings that I could find and then tossed them inside of the storage space before we decided to jump back into the tunnels and leave my house by facing towards an entirely different new direction which would allow us to dig our way out from the earth tunnels at a location that was beyond the Sect’s barrier formation.
Besides finding out that the whole house had been ransacked, I was hoping that nobody would notice that we had come and gone through the hole in the floor of my house, since I was not sure if the surveillance formations were still active or not, even though half of the house had been totally wrecked down to the foundations, including the formation circles that had been built within it.
I was also amused to find out that the baby Golem’s Core did not have any protection against storing living creatures when I had promptly attempted to store the immortal rooster inside of the warehouse space, since the Core had probably been fabricated waaay before any of the legislations imposed upon Spatial Ring Crafting had come into existence.
I was also amazed to find out that this was one of those extremely-rare types of storage spaces, the kind that froze items in time as I had tried to overheat a tomato that I had recovered from the food leftovers of my house and then stored it while the fruit-vegetable was near boiling point inside the Golem’s Core. After about 10 minutes of waiting, I retrieved both the rooster and the tomato out of the storage space, only to find them exactly in the way that I had stored them, as the rooster had not suffocated or been affected in any way and the tomato was still boiling hot even after being left inside of the storage space for such a long period of time, a duration that would have normally caused it to cool back down to average room temperature if the Golemn Core had not been equipped with a time-freeze feature inside of it.
After leaving the premises of my house, we just kept digging away from the Sect, as the whole idea was for our entire group to vanish into thin air and never be found, since it was simply too dangerous to go back into the Sect again, as it was clear by now that there were some Traitors lingering somewhere inside of it, and we did not want to expose ourselves to the bad guys once more.
We cracked the earth open about half a mile away from the barrier formation, as we had simply left the tireless little Golem to keep on digging throughout the entire night as our entire group had simply fallen asleep inside of the tunnels. All of us had probably kept ourselves awake for more than a day and a half ever since the Hall of Medicine had collapsed into the dungeon, with very few rest-breaks inbetween all of the crazy events, so all of us children had simply gone into shutdown mode because of the exhaustion, even with all of the monotonous digging noise happening in the background. We had also made sure to collapse some of the tunnels behind us, to impede any would-be followers from getting to us too quickly.
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We weren't really that worried about the cultivators from the Blue Mountains of Books discovering the Heavenly Library, because there was absolutely no way that any of them would be able to open the Konami door and get inside of the real building. And even if they somehow managed to do that, all of the parked automatons that we had never disturbed in the first place would simply tear them into pieces, and there were a lot of those machines lying in waiting.
As we had climbed down from the upper levels of the Library after releasing the Archangel, I had taken my time to look around the entire place and I had finally spotted what I assumed were the actual automatons-in-waiting, who had all seemingly blended with the entire Dwemmer architecture of the Library by posing as decorative Dwemmer statues, and were simply camping for somebody unauthorised to lay their hands on the books so they could proceed with the smashy-smashy laserburn protocols.
The direction in which we had dug our tunnel had been straight towards the wild forested area surrounding the Sect, as we finally came out of the dirt in the middle of nowhere and found ourselves surrounded by the canopy in all directions. Fortunately, I wasn't that afraid of being inside of a forest anymore, since all of those trips that I had undertaken with Fungus while we were looking for ingredients had been sufficiently difficult to cause my brain to adjust to the dangers that the wild green expanse might throw against a group of unprepared people, at least when it came to this relatively “safer” area of the forest which did not have have a very high concentration of Qi yet.
Noticing stuff like the dangerous plants that should be avoided, the game animal trails and the traces of predators had almost become second nature to me and Fung, so I did not need to spend too many mental resources to keep an eye out for those.
Still, I wanted to know what Lingfeng was planning to do from now on and in which direction we were heading. He told me that remaining inside of the Sect was quite unwise at the moment, because there were too many people that were interested in getting their hands on myself and the Hero of the Flame, for either good or evil, so we had to make ourselves scarce and leave no traces behind of us. That meant a total abandonment of our current identities, and a donning of a set of disguises that would make us look inconspicuous when we travelled from place to place. The best simulacrum that he could think of was for us to pose as a bunch of Buddhist Monks and Acolytes on a pilgrimage, which you could easily find just about anywhere throughout the entire countryside, a disguise that would not look suspicious in any way especially when it came to crossing the borders from one province to another. Lingfeng then pointed out that he had a specific target in mind for our end-goal of the journey, which was a Buddhist Temple located near a village in a rather remote area of the Empire that nobody ever bothered to visit, and was considered to be quite a “safe” location for us to hide inside and lay low for the moment.
We had kept running away from the Blue Mountain of Books across the forest throughout the entire day, until we had neared the evening hours and had been forced to stop. We had then told Will-E to dig a night shelter for our group into the side of a rocky cliff, and he had created a makeshift cavern large enough to fit everybody at an amazingly fast rate by using the Legendary Pick.
With this occasion, I had also found out that Will-E was rather fond of words of praise and gentle headpats, as he was seemingly able to feel pressure and heat all across his entire metallic frame like it was an actual layer of skin, which was an amazing automaton design feature. I had to give bonus points to whoever had created the original blueprints of the Dwemmer Golems, as they were quite some amazing Android-Like servile machines that would have put even the most advanced AI robots from Earth to shame in the blink of an eye.
They were well behaved, obedient, and extremely well built, ensuring that they would be able to function for hundreds, if not thousands of years at a time. They were the ideal household or industrial servants, and for that reason I knew for sure that the Mother System would never allow them to proliferate, which made me even more grateful for having little Will-E in our party.
As we had tucked ourselves in for the night while encircling the burning campfire, we had left little Will-E to guard the entrance of the cave against any threats that might come from the forest side, but nothing had disturbed our slumber throughout the entire night, which had allowed me to finally get a good night's rest. It had been quite a blessing that I had managed to retrieve most of my household items, as I had shamelessly looted even my bed's mattress and had stored it inside Will-E's warehouse which had allowed me to retrieve it back and use it right here in the middle of the forest to achieve an incredibly good night's sleep.
When I woke up during the next morning, I found Lingfeng going through the whole inventory of his own spatial ring, and tossing out any and all items that looked even remotely suspicious, as he feared that some people were still tracking us through some unknown ways.
After he finished sorting through all of his stuff, I saw him pull out a bunch of Kasayas aka Buddhist Monk Robes and lay them flat on the nearby rocks, and I immediately knew that those were probably meant for us to wear from now on. Still, most of the robes would probably require size adjustments, so I got my silk thread and needle ready to go and do some improvised stitching.
As I was measuring the robes and adjusting them to the bodies of all of the other members of my group, I saw Lingfeng pull out a straight razor blade set and soap from inside of his ring as he began to shave off all of his bodily follicles, including his hair, beard, moustache and even eyebrows, until he was left looking like a shiny little egghead into the morning sunlight.
"Wait, you don't actually mean to do that to everybody here, now do you?" I asked the Windmage with the panicked tone in my voice.
"Hehehehehe…"
"Ugh...Seriously? Do I have to shave my head too?"
"Not necessarily, real monks do not need to do that until after they have taken their vows, but for now, if you sported a shaved head, you most definitely will become less recognizable. Therefore..."
Before I even knew what hit me, Lingfeng had already grabbed me from the scruff of my neck, and had to dragged me back into the makeshift cave like some sort of primitive Neanderthal claiming his woman, then proceeded to trim away every last trace of hair from my head even while I screamed and wiggled in his grasp.
Timmy: Congratulations! You have managed to somehow become even more hideous! You will receive an extra -2 temporary penalty to your Charisma until you fix that state of your hair.
The other boys did not get spared either, as Jin and Xibei had also found themselves swiftly getting “processed” and had joined the Kinder-Surprise White Chocolate Egghead Club.
Carmine had been spared though, since nobody knew her and she could pretend to be our escort from the Adventurer’s Guild, as she was still in the possession of her old Silver Adventurer’s Plate.
"Also, tell Fung to grow his hair and leave a beard. He’s way too easily recognisable the way he is at this moment." Said Lingfeng as he began to sharpen his razor blade set against a leather strip.
"Yeah, sure, I have some Hair-Growth pills for that that I discovered during my Alchemical Experiments. I never used them because they cause TOO MUCH hair growth all over the body, but I do not think that certain problem is valid when you try to change your whole bearing to something different."
Unfortunately, I had to swallow my words back into my throat after Fungus took one of the follicle-growing pills, as over the next few hours he had sprouted hair from all over his body in vast amounts, making him look like some sort of long bearded and long-haired Sasquatch, as it was befitting of his Gorilla frame body. He had also shriveled up by a significant amount, as growing the hair had eaten most of his body-fat deposits, causing him to look like an emaciated Bigfoot. Lingfeng then almost broke his razor blade while trying to shave off the excess hair while everybody laughed their arses off at Fungus’ continued misfortune.
When it came to our most conspicuous member which was unfortunately little Will-E, Lingfeng had decided to paint him in full obsidian-black using my leftover alchemical dyes, and then attach a few wood-carved antennae and mandible-like things to his metal frame, to make him look like one of the Insect-People Beastkin that you could find around the world, instead of a suspicious Metal Golem of unknown origins.
After Lingfeng had shaved-off everything and had donned his Buddhist Kasaya and a pair of simple metal spectacles, he had become a totally different man, becoming almost unrecognizable even to our own group.
"Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my Lingfeng?!!" I quipped towards him.
"Elder Lingfeng is currently unavailable as he is trying to prevent some idiotic children from getting themselves killed, but you may speak with Senior Monk Zhang of the Armor-Ignoring-Fist Temple at the moment for any other inquiries!" Lingfeng grinned back at me.