"Fifty high-grade Ling Jing Crystals for the map!" shouted Lin Xiao’s envoy from box one.
"Eighty!" roared a cultivator in red tunics in the western sector.
"One hundred twenty!" intervened a woman from the Black Lotus Clan.
The price escalation was ferocious and uncontrolled. Within minutes, the verbal tension transformed into palpable physical hostility.
"A hundred more crystals and the Pill is mine, you frontier insects!" roared an expert in the Foundation Establishment stage from the eastern box, violently releasing his spiritual pressure.
A wave of oppressive Qi descended upon the ground floor. Several cultivators in the Qi Condensation stage who stood nearby fell to their knees, spitting blood from their mouths due to the brutal level difference. Panic began to spread.
"This is an auction, not a battlefield!" shouted a mercenary trying to stand up.
"It is a black market, garbage!" mocked the expert from the box, intensifying his aura until the stone of the railing groaned under the strain. "Here the rules are written by whoever has the biggest fist! If you cannot withstand the Qi, then rot!"
A second cultivator, an ally of the first, joined his aura to the spiritual pressure, threatening to crush more than half of the attendees on the ground floor. The structure of the subterranean ceiling began to shed dust and cracks.
Shen Tian kept his head lowered beneath his straw hat, channeling his own compressed Level 5 Qi to neutralize the pressure on his body while hiding his existence.
Suddenly, the temperature of the room dropped to sub-zero levels.
"The biggest fist...?" said a voice.
It was a distorted, double tone, as if two entities spoke at the same time through a throat that tore at the air.
The air above the stage fractured. A feminine figure descended slowly from the gloom of the ceiling, floating by her own power, while spiritual swords and wind amulets hung useless in the air around her.
She wore an imposing black silk hanfu, embroidered with red dragon patterns whose scales seemed to move with the candlelight. Her hair was a blazing orange with black strands falling over her shoulders like frozen flames. Her face was exceedingly beautiful, but her eyes were two orbs of pure crimson light.
The auction manager.
The reasons why an entity of her level deigned to manage auctions at the frontier remained a mystery. Some said she was looking for something. Others claimed she simply enjoyed chaos. Whatever the truth, the question stayed private.
"The insects of the minor clans always forget where they are stepping," murmured the woman in the black hanfu, lazily raising a single finger of her right hand.
A spiritual pressure infinitely superior to anything Shen Tian had felt in this life descended upon the two experts who had caused the chaos in the boxes.
The space around the two cultivators contracted abruptly, crushing the combat before it could begin and nullifying any defense technique. A wet and horrifying sound resonated throughout the amphitheater.
CRACK! SPLASH!
The two men of the Foundation Establishment Realm were crushed against the floor of the box by an invisible force. Their bones pulverized in a second; their eyes popped from their sockets, and their internal organs burst, spreading a mass of blood and ground meat against the stone walls. The blood dripped from the wood of the box down to the first row of the ground floor.
The room fell into a sepulchral silence, the crackling of the torches filling the stillness.
Shen Tian looked at the mass of deformed meat in the upper box. The metallic smell of fresh blood flooded his nostrils, provoking a slight movement in his throat.
In an instant, the scene erased the subterranean market from his mind and dragged him into an involuntary flashback of his past life. He remembered the battlefields of the Blood Demon Valley, the stench of blood and viscera, the bodies piled like firewood. He saw himself crawling among the dead, covered in others’ blood, fighting to survive one more day. That was an era of industrial violence, cold and brutal, while poets sang of glories that lived only in their verses.
He clenched his fists beneath his sleeves. His experience as a survivor of sect wars and his 135 years of accumulated existence held his stomach steady and his face composed, while deep disgust drew itself beneath the shadow of the straw hat. He hated the unnecessary waste of life and effect-driven violence.
"Control your mind, Shen Tian," Xue Huang warned him with a voice that transmitted absolute caution. "And if that woman looks your way, drop your gaze to the floor."
"What is she?" Shen Tian asked mentally, stabilizing his pulse.
"She is a Demon Queen," the ancestor responded, and Shen Tian could feel the tension in the Empress’s soul. "She is in the Changing stage, hiding her true form beneath that human skin. It is a rank within the Nascent Soul Realm, when the cultivator can change form at will. Demons call it that because their soul mutates, adapts, transforms. Her real power is equivalent to that of an Ancestor of the Nascent Soul Realm or higher. If that thing decides this room is her feeding ground tonight, your cloning technique and your System will buy you only one option: burning every Suppression Point you have just to escape if she raises her hand again."
Shen Tian internalized the warning and began to trace escape routes toward the emergency exits in his mind, keeping his energy signature at an absolute minimum.
The Demon Queen in the black hanfu swept the room with her crimson eyes. Everyone held their breath.
"The auction continues," the woman said with her distorted voice. "The next one who interrupts commerce with his pathetic aura will feed my pets."
She floated back into the darkness of the ceiling, the air closing behind her with a strange emptiness.
The auctioneer, wiping the cold sweat from his forehead with trembling hands, resumed the event in haste. From then on, the Lin Clan envoy used his family’s fortune to award himself the incomplete map and the Elixir Stage Pill for an astronomical sum of high-grade Ling Jing Crystals. For her part, the Star Gem was bought by a hooded cultivator from an unknown clan who withdrew immediately after paying.
Shen Tian disappeared among the shadows of the side corridors as soon as Lin Xiao’s envoy collected his purchases and left the box protected by his guards.
He emerged to the surface of Dust Border City under the closed night. Adjusting his straw hat to block the cold wind, he activated Spiritual Sight and fixed his attention on the energy trails that the Lin Clan group and the Zhao Clan elders had left upon leaving.
He began the tracking.
The pursuit was slow and cautious. Lin Xiao’s envoy and the Zhao Clan retinue moved with extreme caution, taking steep routes, changing direction in the pine forests, and avoiding the main roads to mislead possible ambushers. For four entire days, Shen Tian followed them at a distance of three kilometers, camouflaging himself with the vegetation, sleeping in the treetops, and using his concealment technique to become invisible to the exploration sweeps that Lin Xiao’s guards carried out periodically.
On the fourth day, at dusk, the trail led to a deep gorge hidden between two rocky summits, deep in the wilderness, miles beyond the reach of any mortal settlement.
Shen Tian moved like a ghost through the undergrowth of the upper slope, crawling over the ground covered with pine needles until he reached a rocky outcrop that dominated the bottom of the canyon. He pressed himself against the stone and looked down.
At the bottom of the gorge, surrounded by basalt walls, the Lin Clan envoy and the Zhao Clan elders were gathered. However, an unknown figure stood before them, completely covered by a plain gray travel tunic.
"Did you bring the piece we agreed upon?" asked Lin Xiao’s envoy, with an impatient voice that resonated weakly up to Shen Tian’s position.
The unknown figure remained silent and extended his hand beneath his tunic, drawing out a piece of ancient parchment, with irregular edges.
The Lin Clan envoy drew out the map he had bought at the auction four days earlier.
Both men brought the two parchment fragments together in the air. As soon as the burnt edges touched, the ancient runes engraved on the surface of both pieces shone with an intense golden glow. The two fragments merged magically, sealing the crack and forming a fully integrated map.
A projection of spiritual light emerged from the fused parchment, drawing in the air of the gorge the exact topography of a subterranean mountain range and pointing with a red rune to the location of the entrance to the secret cave of the Ancient Sword Elder.
The System emitted a pulse of blue light.
"[Mission Objective Detected: Complete Map of the Sword Elder’s Cave.]"
"[New Emergent Mission: Seize the map from the Lin Clan.]"
"[Reward: 300 Suppression Points + Access to the Sword Elder’s Cave.]"
"[Failure Penalty: Loss of the opportunity. The Lin Clan will obtain the inheritance.]"
Shen Tian read the notification, his lips curving into a thin, cold line.
"300 points," he murmured. "And the Sword Elder’s inheritance. Lin Xiao, my friend, today you are going to give me more than you imagine."