The patriarch looked down at them the way a mountain looks down at travelers. Not with hostility. Not with interest. With the simple, immovable weight of something that has been there longer than you and will be there after you leave.
"Where do you think you're going?"
His voice carried without effort. It didn't echo — it simply filled the courtyard, pressing into every corner, every wall, every ear. The black-uniformed cultivators stood in their semicircle and but moved back a couple of steps. Lei Yan stood beside Ye Song, dressed and still, his eyes tracking the patriarch the way an animal tracks a larger animal. An Ning stood next to Di Yusheng and felt the weight of the patriarch's presence settle on her shoulders like a physical thing. Her knees didn't buckle. Her master had given her enough training. But she felt it — the density of a nascent soul's attention, the way it compressed the air, the way it made breathing feel like a conscious act.
Di Yusheng stood still.
"That depends why do are asking," he said. "Are you going to stop us? i'm warning you the two of us are going to cross continents a mere nascent soul can't stop us."
An Ning looked at Di Yusheng in disbelief, right now the sword didn't feel so trustworthy.
"You can go," the patriarch said. He was looking at Di Yusheng
"Nobody is stopping you from leaving."
A pause. The banners hung motionless.
"But no member of the Ye Clan is leaving with you."
The words landed with the weight of a gate closing. Final. Administrative. Not a negotiation — a ruling. The patriarch had assessed the situation and issued his decision the way a judge issues a sentence. Clean. Without appeal.
Di Yusheng didn't move for a long moment. The courtyard was silent. The black-uniformed cultivators watched. Lei Yan watched. An Ning watched but for a different reason.
"No," Di Yusheng said.
One word. No emphasis. No challenge in his voice. He said it the way you'd correct a minor error — calmly, without heat, as though the patriarch had misstated a fact and Di Yusheng was simply setting it right.
"These are my creations and," he continued. "The ship requires a crew. Navigation, maintenance, operations." He spoke practically.
The patriarch's expression didn't change. He looked at Di Yusheng the way you'd look at someone who'd just explained why they should be allowed to take your furniture. With a patience that was worse than anger.
"No?" the patriarch repeated.
Di Yusheng looked back at him. Flat. Steady. Already past the conversation.
For humans though thier bodies aren't strong they compensate it with Qi.
The higher the level the more control one has over Qi, the more Qi one has. But Qi isn't all powerful for example Ye Zhenghe though he was a nascent soul despite all that Qi he had he got too close to bothe Luoxue and Yusheng hence never got a chance to put up a fight.
These two bodies are stronger and faster than the average human and they do not even need to circulate their Qi in a close range fight.
The patriarch drew.
It happened without transition. One moment it was still , cultivators standing, the air thick with nascent soul pressure. The next, the air split.
More than twenty swords erupted from the patriarch's storage ring in a single burst. They materialized in a fan formation behind him — long, straight, single-edged blades of dark steel, each one identical, each one wrapped in a dense layer of Qi that made the air around them shimmer. The Qi wasn't decorative. It was structural — reinforcing the steel, sharpening the edge, adding weight and density to weapons that were already deadly. The patriarch's cultivation poured into those blades the way water pours into a channel, and the blades received it and held.
Then they launched.
All of them. At once.
The speed was wrong. Not fast — wrong. The kind of fast that the eye registers as absence rather than motion. One moment the swords were hovering behind the patriarch in their neat fan formation. The next they were converging on the space where Di Yusheng stood, twenty-plus blades crossing paths from twenty-plus angles, a web of steel and Qi with no gap, no opening, no direction of escape.
The impact didn't come. The swords struck the ground, the trees, the paving stones — kicking up a storm of dust and debris that filled the air in a choking cloud. Stone chips flew. Earth erupted. The sound was enormous — a sustained crashing, twenty blades hitting solid surfaces simultaneously, each one driven deep by the Qi coating.
The patriarch felt none of them connect.
Not one. Not a single blade had registered the resistance of a body. He'd felt the swords hit stone, hit earth, hit empty air — and nothing else.
He called them back. The swords pulled from the ground, from the walls, from the air, and returned to their formation behind him with the precision of birds returning to a wire. Dust settled. Twenty holes in the paving stones, the earth split in shallow trenches where the blades had skimmed the surface.
Di Yusheng stood in the center of it. Untouched. His clothes were dusty.
The patriarch's eyes narrowed. Not with anger — with recalibration. The swords hadn't worked because the target hadn't been where the swords were. Speed. Pure, physical speed. The boy had moved between the blades, through the gaps, faster than the blades could converge. Not Qi technique. Not footwork. Body. Raw, physical, impossible body.
The patriarch stopped using his eyes.
His divine sense expanded. A nascent soul's spiritual awareness — not sight, not sound, but a direct perception of Qi and presence that operated independent of the physical senses. It washed over the courtyard like a flood, touching everything — the black-uniformed cultivators, the buildings, the gate, the road, the sky. And there. Di Yusheng's position, locked and held in the patriarch's awareness like a stone held in a closed fist. Wherever the boy moved, the divine sense would track him. Speed didn't matter against divine sense. You couldn't outrun something that can track your every move.
The patriarch reached back. One sword separated from the formation and flew into his hand. He gripped it, adjusted his stance, and swung.
The Qi slash was a crescent of compressed energy — sharp, dense, cutting through the air with a sound like tearing silk. It wasn't a sword swing. It was a wave. A wall of force that traveled along the ground and through the air simultaneously, erasing everything in its path for a width of ten feet.
It missed Di Yusheng. It didn't miss everything else.
The black-uniformed cultivators broke.
They transformed. Not together — individually, each one reacting on instinct, the survival reflex of cultivators who'd trained for this. Bodies dissolved. Fire bloomed where a man had been standing — a column of flame that twisted and scattered, leaving a pile of black cloth on the ground. Water burst outward from another position, a surge of liquid that spread flat and flowed away through the cracks in the paving stones, uniform collapsing in a wet heap. Soil erupted from a third, a fourth, a fifth — bodies dissolving into earth, sinking into the ground, dispersing into the terrain itself. Clothes fell where people had been. Empty uniforms littered the courtyard like shed skins.
The Qi slash continued past them . Stone dust billowed.
The patriarch was already swinging again.
A second Qi slash. Di Yusheng moved. The slash cut through the space he'd occupied and carved a trench in the paving stones behind him. A third. He shifted — not dodging, not ducking, just not being there. His body moved the way water moves around a stone, flowing out of the path of force without apparent effort. A fourth slash. A fifth. The patriarch fired them in succession — not rapid, not reckless, but methodical. Each slash aimed. Each slash tracked by divine sense. Each slash placed where Di Yusheng was.
Each slash missed.
Six. Seven. Eight. The black banners tore from their poles and scattered in the wind of displaced air. The transformed cultivators scattered further — fire climbing the rooftops, water flowing through the gates, soil sinking into the foundations. They weren't fighting. They were surviving.
Twelve. Thirteen. The patriarch's breathing was steady. His Qi was steady. Nascent soul Qi reserves were deep enough that twenty Qi slashes was a fraction of his capacity. He could do this for an hour. The question was whether the boy could dodge for an hour.
Di Yusheng's pupils turned red.
Not gradually. Not a shift. A switch. A deep, saturated crimson that glowed faintly in the dust-choked air, the color of arterial blood, of heated metal. The red wasn't Qi. It was written into his blood the way the runes were written into his skin.
Luoxue's bloodline ability. He got this the night he drunk her blood together with other abilities especially one that particularly saved him.
The world changed. The patriarch's body — which had been a presence, a pressure, a source of force — became a structure. Di Yusheng could see it. The patriarch's internal body laid bare. Muscle fiber dense with Qi reinforcement. Meridians wide and thick, carrying energy in steady rivers. Bone dense with age and cultivation. The heart — powerful, rhythmic, pumping Qi-saturated blood through a body that had been refined for centuries. The core — the nascent soul itself, seated deep in the patriarch's dantian, a condensed knot of pure spiritual energy that pulsed like a second heartbeat.
He could see everything. Every vital organ. Every opening. Every point where a blade could enter and a life could end.
Di Yusheng dropped low. His legs bent — knees compressing, muscles loading, every fiber of strength in his body channeling downward into his thighs and calves. The ground beneath his feet cracked from the pressure. His nails extended. transformed. Curving into claws that gleamed dull black in the red light of his eyes.
One hit. One kill. Close the distance before the patriarch could deploy his Qi. Tear through the body before the body could respond. The patriarch was stronger in Qi. Stronger in cultivation. Stronger in every way that mattered at range. But Di Yusheng was faster. His body was faster. And the patriarch's body, for all its refinement, was still flesh.
He attempted a launch.
The ground began to crack. But before he could The Patriarch spoke.
" Fine since you want them so much keep them"
And he flew back.
The message. It had come in the instant Di Yusheng's eyes turned red— a transmission from the clan ancestor, Ye Zhenghe. Late-stage nascent soul. Old. Deteriorating. His breakthrough had been forced, his foundation cracked, his body failing. His body was weak. His reflexes were slow. He'd lost to Di Yusheng and Luoxue not because they'd overpowered his cultivation but because they'd hit him — physically, directly — and his body hadn't been able to take it. He hadn't expected them to strike.
Whatever Ye Zhenghe's message said, it meant either he'd given up or come up with a better way of handling Yusheng.
The clan's arrays activated. All of them. Every formation, every barrier, every defensive seal inscribed into the walls and foundations and earth of the Ye Clan compound lit up simultaneously. Walls of golden light rose from the perimeter. Barriers shimmered across every entrance. The sigils carved into the gate blazed white. The entire clan locked down — sealed, shielded, shut. A fortress in an instant.
Di Yusheng stood in the ruined debris. His claws retracted. His pupils faded from red back to black. The killing intent drained from his body like water from a cracked vessel, leaving behind the same flat, empty expression he'd worn since the stream.
He looked around.
Empty uniforms littered the ground where the black-uniformed cultivators had transformed and fled. The air still smelled of ozone and crushed stone.
He looked for An Ning.
She wasn't there.
The road. The sky. The rooftops. The space beside him where she'd been standing when the patriarch drew his swords.
Gone.
An Ning flew away.
She'd flown the moment the swords appeared. The second the patriarch's storage ring had opened and the fan of blades had materialized behind him, she'd made her decision. Her master was right never talk to strangers.
She was still flying. Fast. Straight. Away.
Golden cores weren't supposed to do this. Flight was Qi-expensive — every second in the air cost more than ten seconds on the ground. The drain was continuous, exponential, unforgiving. Fly for too long and you'd land empty, vulnerable, unable to defend yourself. Every cultivator knew this. Every teacher drilled it. Flight was for emergencies. For short bursts. For situations where the ground was worse than the sky.
An Ning didn't care.
She'd gotten away from Di Yusheng. That was the thing. That was what mattered. Not the patriarch, not the swords, not the Qi slashes that had torn the courtyard apart.
She flew.
The sword was warm against her back. Warm and steady, the way it had been since the stream. The voice hadn't spoken since. Just warmth. Presence. The feeling of something held.
He was trouble. That was the clearest thought. Not evil — she didn't know enough about him to call him evil. Not malicious — he hadn't actually hurt her, hadn't raised a hand against her. But trouble. The kind of trouble that attracted swords and nascent souls and clan patriarchs. The kind of trouble that a girl carrying a sword to her master's sect, alone, on her first time down the mountain, could not afford.
She flew.
The Qi drain was building. A pressure behind her ribs, a thinning sensation in her meridians, the gradual depletion of reserves that her master had spent years filling. She could feel it — the cost of every second in the air, the Qi bleeding away like water from a cracked cup.
But for her this was worth it.