The second note from Zhang Lifen in as many weeks had been a simple one. “I’ll be away for a bit longer than I anticipated. Make the most of the opportunity provided.”
He Yu wasn’t certain what opportunity she could be referring to. Time to train on his own? As often as he found himself resenting whatever she’d been putting him through, he couldn’t deny that Zhang Lifen’s training was effective. Time to take more jobs? Assuming he could even find a job at the assignment hall, the last three he’d taken had gone much the same way as the village investigation. He’d shown up to resolve whatever issue the sect needed resolved, only to find that he couldn’t.
Infestation of Third Realm spirit rats? Cleared by the time he arrived. Dispute between two baronial families in a nearby territory that needed a neutral party? Resolved, and the hatchet buried. Another spate of disappearances in the south? This time the missing villagers had returned the previous day, claiming they’d awoken to find the bandits that had abducted them dead and their cages unlocked.
Worse still, each time he returned to the sect, the assignment hall would come up with some reason why he wouldn’t be paid. He Yu was feeling the pinch in a way that he hadn’t worried about since his first days at the sect. Although part of him knew it would be fruitless, he accepted yet another job after reading Zhang Lifen’s note. Maybe this one would be different.
The job would have him leaving the sect and heading north. To the territory he’d hunted King Hao down in. Fortunately, it wasn’t bandits. Even over a year later, King Hao’s suppression at the hands of three sect disciples—and the ensuing clash at his camp—had seen the region remain fairly calm. No, this was something that, in He Yu’s estimation, was more appropriate for immortals to handle.
A wealthy merchant had died some ten years prior. Although he’d been a cultivator in life, he had no talent and was more dedicated to accumulating mortal wealth than his advancement. He’d only managed to achieve peak Foundation before his dantian degraded and he died. Of course he’d been well over a hundred years old, but he hadn’t realized that the end of his life was rapidly approaching.
The merchant had been a miserly sort, and was just as like to cheat his clients or sell them low-quality goods as he was to conduct fair business. He’d made a lot of enemies. One such enemy was the local priest. So when he’d been laid to rest in his extravagant tomb, the priest had cursed him in one last act of vengeance.
The job didn’t specify what had caused the priest to neglect his duties so, and he’d left town shortly afterwards. The Foundation stage cultivator rose as a Foundation stage ghost and began terrorizing the nearby countryside. Soon the restless spirit had advanced to the Third Realm, and was verging on growing powerful enough to be equal to a Fourth Realm. As it advanced, it started venturing closer to settlements, sometimes even bypassed poorly maintained formation barriers in the smaller villages. This had caused the sect to take notice and decide to put the thing down for good.
Doing so would require a disciple skilled at formations. He Yu both hoped this would mean he’d actually be able to complete it. He also knew just the person to bring along, since he wasn’t particularly skilled with formations, having no real patience for the tedious calligraphy work involved in creating and maintaining them.
When he finally tracked Chen Fei down, she was up on one of the nearby mountains, sitting on a boulder in the center of a small lake. Formation characters floated around her, and earth qi coursed throughout the entire area, pushing the waters of the pond away from where she sat. Leaving her to her training, He Yu sat down and waited, occupying himself by staring at the clouds. He absently wondered if this sort of thing was why all the higher realm cultivators had hobbies. Like Zhang Lifen and the paintings she kept in her storage treasure.
A soft thump from very close by brought him back into the moment.
“Want to take a trip with me for a sect job?” he asked as Chen Fei gave him a small wave.
Her normally cheery disposition somehow brightened even further. “Sure! Where are we going?”
Chen Fei dressed as she typically did. All leather and fur. It was easy to see why many of the nobles in the outer sect had called her a barbarian, despite that she was clearly a citizen of the empire. While she may dress like one of the steppe clans, she had an imperial name, spoke the imperial tongue—albeit with a bit of an odd accent—and she practiced the imperial system of cultivation. But living so close to the flat rolling expanse the nomad tribes called home had left its mark on her.
Once she’d joined the inner sect, she stopped wearing the uniform of the outer disciples, as was common practice among the higher-ranked cultivators. She’d gone back to the sort of outfit he’d first seen her in, but with the addition of a bear pelt draped over her shoulders. She’d fortified the pelt with formations even before she entered the inner sect, and it was truly on its way to becoming a treasure in its own right.
“There’s a ghost that’s causing trouble up north. Late Third Realm, almost Fourth. Merchant died and the local priest cursed him before leaving.”
“I mean, I’m not saying no, but do you really need my help?” she asked.
“Well, I’ll need a formation expert, but that’s not why I thought to ask. I just thought it would be nice if you came,” He Yu answered, looking away at a particularly interesting tree on the far side of the lake. “If you want, that is.”
“Sure,” she said, bumping his shoulder. “I thought you’d gotten too busy for me now that you’ve advanced.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
It was true that he’d gotten incredibly busy. Between Zhang Lifen snatching him away whenever she was at the sect, all the time he’d spent over the past year pushing to reach Golden Core, and then finally having to focus on dealing with Sha Xiang, he’d been afraid Chen Fei would think he was avoiding her. At least in the recent months Zhang Lifen had taken to training all of them frequently enough that they’d not drifted completely apart.
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry, there was just a lot going on.”
“When do we leave?” she asked as they headed back down the mountain. They kept a leisurely pace by He Yu’s standards. Of all his friends, Chen Fei was the slowest, with only her body enforcement techniques to rely on. While she was capable of incredible bursts of speed, her real strength relied on her monstrous endurance. She could run for days on end if she had to, and He Yu wouldn’t be surprised if she could go for weeks now that she was so close to forming her own Golden Core.
He Yu glanced up at the sky, judging the position of the sun through the pine boughs that canopied the path. “It’s early enough that we could head out now. I don’t need anything other than what I’ve got in my storage treasure.”
“Sounds good,” she said. It wasn’t a surprising answer. Chen Fei lived simply by cultivator standards and often disappeared for days or weeks at a time. Camping up in the higher parts of the Shrouded Peaks, she’d once told him. She tended to carry most of her possessions with her.
Although they were limited by Chen Fei’s lower cultivation and relative lack of speed, they still reached the area in just over a week. It was one more little reminder of how far He Yu had come. At early Foundation, it had taken Li Heng, Yan Shirong, and him over a month to travel the same distance. While they had also been hunting for beast cores along the way, there still wasn’t a chance they’d have made the trip so quickly no matter how hard they pushed.
At first, He Yu was a bit nervous about the trip, but for reasons wholly unrelated to their travel. Once they left the sect, he realized that he’d be alone with Chen Fei for the duration of the job. He immediately imagined all the possible ways he could shove his foot in his mouth. Li Heng’s advice from his earliest days at the sect came back, and he turned it into a mantra. He just needed to be himself.
By the time they reached their destination, he came to realize he’d been worried for nothing. Although he’d always known that Chen Fei was cheerful and outgoing, he quickly learned that meant it was incredibly easy to follow Li Heng’s advice around her. Almost as if the casual chatter that she filled their days with worked to calm all the worry he had about—well, he didn’t really know what.
They talked about anything and everything together. She told him more about her home on the western slopes of the north mountains that looked out across the vast steppe. He told her about all the legends and stories that had made him want to be a cultivator. It almost made him forget about why they’d come north to begin with.
When they finally reached the town, an older man dressed in an official’s robes and cap greeted them. He looked to be in his late fifties and had a cultivation base of late Foundation. Although a dozen of the town guard flanked him—each of them early Foundation—it was clear that they were there only for ceremony. It seemed that He Yu and Chen Fei were expected.
“Honored Disciples,” the official said, bowing over a cupped fist. “This official is called Wu Jingguo. Your timely arrival is most welcome.”
The town itself wasn’t quite a city, but it was large enough to have a wall, a regular posting of cultivator guards, and an imperial minister assigned to it. After He Yu and Chen Fei introduced themselves, Wu Jingguo ushered them to his home. There, they took the opportunity to refresh themselves after their trip. Over tea, Wu Jingguo briefed them on the situation.
The ghost had indeed advanced to Fourth Realm some weeks ago, as the job had warned it might. That seemed to worry Chen Fei, but He Yu focused on a different bit of information. Just over a week prior, all sightings of the ghost had stopped. Wu Jingguo pointed it out specifically because the ghost had become more active as it advanced, and this struck him as odd.
“Have there been any reports of other immortals in the area? Besides the locals, I mean,” He Yu said, trying his best not to grimace. “Higher realm. At least Golden Core.”
“Apologies, Disciple He, but none that I have heard of,” Wu Jingguo said. He must have noticed He Yu’s expression, as a moment later he asked, “Is there some problem?”
“No problem,” He Yu said. “Will you describe the location of the merchant’s tomb to us? I’m simply eager to be about our business.”
Once they’d left Wu Jingguo’s home and passed through the town gates on their way to the merchant’s resting place, Chen Fei asked, “What’s wrong?”
He told her.
“Huh,” she said once he’d finished. “That is weird. But what makes you think it’s all the same person, though?”
“It’s the regularity of it, you know? The thing with the demons was just once. It could have been a passing rogue cultivator, sure, but it just keeps happening. And you know how Minister Wu said the ghost’s activity stopped just over a week ago? That’s when I accepted the job. It’s always been like that. Whatever job I accept, it’s like someone from the sect immediately goes and takes it for themselves. At this point, I’m certain it’s not a coincidence.”
“You should ask Yan Shirong for help. He’s good at these sorts of things,” she said.
“I’d thought about that, but I don’t want to bother him.”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t be bothered,” she said. “Especially if you paid him.”
“That’s the problem. Can’t really get too many spirit stones now that I can’t actually finish jobs.”
“You can work something out. I’ll loan you some if you want. I still owe you for that mid-grade stone from before the tournament, anyway.”
He Yu was about to protest, saying that he never expected her to compensate him for that, but the merchant’s tomb came into view. Or what was left of it. Rubble was strewn about a now-open pit. The remains of where the merchant’s body once rested were likewise ruined. While there was no sign of the merchant’s ghost, or who had destroyed it, He Yu didn’t think for a moment that the spirit still remained in this world.
The tomb was ruined, the surrounding area was similarly damaged, and there was no sign that any sort of pitched battle had taken place. Like all the previous times, someone had shown up shortly after He Yu took the job and simply destroyed the objective.
“I guess we can at least hunt cores on the way back,” Chen Fei suggested, giving him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder.
“I don’t get it,” He Yu said. “Why would someone go to the effort of making sure that I can’t complete jobs? What does it even accomplish?”
The two of them returned to the town and informed Minister Wu that the ghost wouldn’t be bothering them any longer. He thanked them profusely, and Chen Fei looked about as uncomfortable about it as He Yu felt. He didn’t like taking credit for a job that someone else had done, even if it was only in terms of his local reputation, but it didn’t seem right to bring the minister into whatever weird twist of inner sect politics He Yu had found himself caught up in. He could no longer deny that was exactly what this was.