Gu Ning was beginning to suspect that Yu Ruo meant to lure the snake out of its hole.
Use this business of fish and water to set off her Mystic Maiden Violet Yin Body, and strike while she was helpless!
Gu Ning could already feel that the spiritual energy she had suppressed was stirring again, running loose around her lower belly.
It was as though a wave of heat rose straight from the crown of her head.
"Cough."
Gu Ning coughed lightly, dragged her eyes off the tangled scenery, and turned aside without thinking to block Su Qiuyin's view.
"Children shouldn't look."
Su Qiuyin let a pair of watery eyes show through the gaps in her fingers and said in a small red-faced voice.
"S-Senior Sister, I'm already eighteen..."
"Doesn't matter!"
Gu Ning said it with absolute finality. The last thing she wanted was for Su Qiuyin to turn out like Yu Ruo, head full of filth, forever trying to lure her senior sister into bed.
All she wanted was to get every heroine onto the right track.
That said, Gu Ning turned and fixed a sharp eye on Yu Ruo, who was taking it all in at her leisure.
"Is the intelligence genuine?" There was a grinding edge in Gu Ning's voice. "This is the demonic sect stronghold you spoke of?"
Gu Ning badly wanted to add one more line. Are you sure this isn't an excuse to show me your orientation?
"The jade slip says it plainly. Yihe Court, the Heaven-grade room." Yu Ruo spread her hands, her face all helplessness.
"I have already wronged Senior Sister once. Why would I bring false intelligence to deceive her?"
Gu Ning stared at her for three seconds and could not find so much as a flaw. If it was a lie, the girl's acting deserved an Oscar.
"...Let us take a look for now, then."
Gu Ning genuinely had nothing better. However full of poison the girl was, she did not think Yu Ruo would put herself in danger.
If things went badly, they could simply run.
Still, as a precaution, she would have Yu Ruo and Su Qiuyin wait outside while she went in.
Yu Ruo should have no reason to move on Su Qiuyin. At least... not yet.
But that cold, celibate immortal-fairy look of hers was practically a lit lantern in a place like this.
Gu Ning held her breath and walked deeper in, though the suggestive glances from both sides still put her to shame.
A good many eyes lingered on that peerless face, with undisguised interest and admiration.
"This fairy is a new face. Is this your first visit to our Yihe Court? Shall this servant introduce you to a few understanding little sisters?"
A seductive woman in scarlet gauze blocked her path, her gaze rippling.
"That will not be necessary."
Gu Ning cut her off coldly, letting a little of her Golden Core pressure out, and the face of the alluring woman, who was only at Qi Refining, went white as she fell back half a step without meaning to.
Leaving those four words behind, Gu Ning went around her and walked straight into the depths of the building.
The Heaven-grade room was on the third floor.
Gu Ning stood outside the door and sent her divine sense in, only to find that the room had been set with a sound-proofing ward and she could learn nothing of what was inside.
She frowned faintly, laid her right hand on the Azure Frost Sword, and pushed the door open with her left.
Creak.
The door swung wide, and the fragrance of spirit tea rolled out to meet her.
The room was elegantly furnished.
A red sandalwood table stood in the center, and three people sat beside it.
Two men in black, powerfully built, wearing snarling masks. And seated between them a girl in white whose bearing was nothing like theirs.
The girl wore a long plain white dress, her black hair falling like a waterfall, her face fine-boned and quietly elegant.
Hearing the door, the girl lifted her head, revealing eyes as clear as water.
"And the fairy is...?"
Her voice was soft and fine-grained.
To anyone else, this would look like a courtesan's room, and two guards protecting her would be nothing out of the ordinary.
But in Gu Ning's eyes, this was plainly a hidden stage.
Two elite mobs for close-range pulling, and the girl in the middle was the ranged boss.
"What a classic boss-room layout."
Though the girl was nothing like the seductive, ravishing Tao Yao of her memory. Had a new character been unlocked?
Gu Ning chose to hold her position and feel her out.
"I am a disciple of the Mystic Light Sword Sect, come to investigate whether there are demonic sect personnel in this town."
The girl set down the teapot and rose, her bearing poised and gracious.
"This humble girl is Bai Zhi, and I am the proprietress of Yihe Court." She smiled faintly and walked toward Gu Ning with unhurried steps.
Bai Zhi?
Gu Ning searched her mind at speed for the name and came up with nothing. There was no such person in the original plot.
Bai Zhi came right up to her, mid Foundation Establishment and no more.
But Gu Ning did not dare relax, and when the girl's restless little hand was about to climb her arm, she blocked it.
Disappointment flickered through Bai Zhi's doe eyes, and she withdrew her hand, sulking.
But the smile stayed gentle, if with a touch more grievance in it, and her gaze wandered over Gu Ning's cold and flawless face.
She lifted a fair finger to tuck up a strand of hair, baring a neck of snow-bright white, and looked entirely at her ease.
"This concubine can hardly claim there are no demonic sect people at all." Bai Zhi's voice was as gentle as ever. "But the fairy will have seen for herself that everyone who comes here is..."
"A sister of like mind and shared purpose."
Bai Zhi's eyes traveled slowly over Gu Ning's shapely, full figure, hiding not a trace of her frank desire.
"It may fall within your honored sect's jurisdiction, but in the end your strength does not reach so far, and riff-raff of every stripe still run wild here. Wouldn't you agree?"
Bai Zhi tipped her pretty face up a little, and those once spotless, luminous eyes now glittered with something sly.
Her red lips parted, and out came three syllables.
"Fair—y—Gu?"
Gu Ning's head had been left hot by that silky little business combo of Bai Zhi's.
She opened her mouth to argue back, and alarm bells went off in her mind.
Coming to herself, she found that those two guards had circled soundlessly around behind her, one to each side, boxing her in.
How had they slipped past her divine sense?
There was no time to wonder.
"There's something wrong with this Bai Zhi."
Gu Ning's brows drew together.
In the next breath, the two black shapes behind her moved, meaning to strike first.
But she had been ready all along.
A flash of white light in front of the two men in black, and a silver longsword appeared out of empty air.
Gu Ning's fingers formed the sword seal at once.
The Azure Frost Sword became a silver rainbow, split in two in midair, and drove precisely into the chests of the two men, pinning them fast to the wall.
BOOM!
A great crash of steel on steel. Had there been no sound-proofing ward in the room, it would surely have brought all of Yihe Court running.
At the same moment Gu Ning turned her right hand over, and the scabbard came to rest steadily against Bai Zhi's neck.
The whole thing took less than a breath.
"Whew~"
Gu Ning looked at the girl standing white-faced before her and let out a breath.
Good thing she had been holding a skill ready from the very start, or she really would have walked into it.
Bai Zhi looked at the scabbard beside her throat, then back at Gu Ning, lowered her eyes, and sighed like someone resigning herself to fate.
"The Sword Sect's senior disciple... your name is well earned after all."
Seeing her take the loss like a good gambler, Gu Ning assumed the threat was neutralized.
She looked at her coldly. "Who exactly are you? Where is the Mystic Nether Sect's hiding place?"
Bai Zhi lowered her head, let out a soft sigh, and drew a plain white fingertip across the front of her robe.
Gu Ning frowned faintly, not knowing what she meant to do.
"Hee hee~"
Bai Zhi raised her head slowly, and those clear eyes were suddenly washed over with an eerie pink glow.
"I don't know~"
The long white dress slid down.
But what it bared was not skin. It was petal after pale pink petal of peach blossom, spreading from her collarbone all the way to her wrists.
And when she lifted her head, that fine, quietly elegant face had already changed.
Brows like distant hills washed in kohl, eyes like autumn water brimming with feeling. The features were the same, and yet a bewitching, heart-stopping beauty had been added to them.
It was the Saintess of the Mystic Nether Sect, Tao Yao!
Gu Ning's pupils shrank, and instinct told her she had to get away from this woman.
But it was already too late.
The scene before her shifted like ink running in water, and a faint black spiritual energy welled up around her.
The peaks of Tao Yao's lips curved up, and those eyes, brimming with allure, fixed on Gu Ning as she tried to flee, like a lamb waiting for the knife.
The red peach blossom mark on her forehead burst into sudden light.
The two guards' eyes bloomed with two points of uncanny red light, faint black smoke rose off their bodies, their forms slowly blurred, and at the end they became two lumps of deep black matter.
What shocked her more was that the two lumps could put out something like tentacles, and those tentacles came for her.
"Oh hell! A tentacle monster, aaaaah!"
Gu Ning could not dodge in time. A tentacle caught her by the ankle, her body checked in place, and then more of them swarmed in, dragging her four limbs apart and hanging her in the air.
What broke her heart was that the spiritual energy circulating inside her had gone sluggish, like a river icing over, and at last it stopped entirely.
Watching Tao Yao walk toward her at an unhurried pace, her pupils quaked and she felt the sky come down.
"Hee hee. Am I going to survive this?"