The first city.
The moment he entered the nearest artifact shop, Ise handed over a spirit stone and asked,
“Have you heard of anyone recently looking for a magical artifact related to breaking seals?”
“You’re not looking for a seal-breaking artifact yourself, but asking about someone who was?”
“Yes.
I’m looking for a wanted criminal.”
Ise answered honestly, worried that the artifact merchant might find his question suspicious and report him to the Heavenly Ice Palace.
“Well.
As far as I know, no.”
He thanked the man and proceeded to visit every artifact shop in the surrounding area to make inquiries.
Next, he visited bookstores and public libraries.
“Has anyone been coming here unusually often lately?”
“We mostly deal with regular customers here.
Why do you ask?”
He got no useful information, but Ise didn’t give up.
He checked the identities of the Foundation Establishment cultivators within the city and compared them against the rumors he had heard.
Once he had confirmed their faces with the Wide-View Talisman, verifying their identities wasn’t difficult.
Most were established figures who had lived in the city for a long time, or elders and sect masters of various sects.
When his information gathering failed, he went to the center of the city, activated the Spirit-Detecting Mirror, and waited patiently for at least three days.
He had already confirmed that even if someone normally concealed their spiritual energy with Silver Spirit Art, the moment they began circulating their cultivation energy to cultivate, the mirror would detect them.
Once he was certain that no one had appeared on the mirror after deactivating his Silver Spirit Art, he moved on to the next city.
***
Thus, he reached the third city.
Ise spotted a Foundation Establishment cultivator using Silver Spirit Art.
It was the largest bookstore in the city.
At the sensation of divine sense meeting divine sense, Ise turned his gaze.
The other person was concealing his spiritual energy with a Silver Spirit magical artifact.
‘Could it be?
Did I find him?’
Without making it too obvious, Ise slowly examined his face.
It was different from the wanted poster.
But changing one’s appearance was the most basic precaution imaginable for a wanted criminal.
Ise looked away first.
He could feel the divine sense that had been examining him gradually lose interest.
‘He’s quite relaxed.’
The Foundation Establishment cultivator glanced at Ise before leaving the bookstore as though he couldn’t care less.
It was far too leisurely an attitude for someone on the run.
Either he wasn’t the wanted criminal, or he was an extraordinarily composed actor.
Ise hurriedly approached the bookstore owner, handed him a spirit stone, and asked,
“Excuse me, Daoist.
Do you know who that cultivator who just left is?”
“Ah, him?
He’s the master of Gaedubang.”
Ise immediately gathered information about the nearby Gaedubang, only to become disappointed.
The master of Gaedubang was an established figure who had been active in the area for quite some time.
‘So even people with perfectly legitimate identities sometimes carry Silver Spirit magical artifacts.’
Bounty hunting wasn’t going to be as easy as he’d thought.
With a slightly exhausted expression, Ise moved on to the next city.
***
The fifteenth day of the search.
It was around sunset as Ise finished searching the fifth city and moved toward the sixth.
There was still no clue that would lead him to Jang Yeonggeol.
Instead, somewhat ironically, he happened to stumble upon another wanted demonic cultivator who had been hiding, and captured him in the Demon Beast Sealing Album.
His strategy and tracking process were flawless.
Ise calmly activated the Spirit-Detecting Mirror and searched each city.
But inside, negative thoughts kept creeping in.
He couldn’t continue searching every city forever like looking for a needle in a sandpit.
He had already invested a considerable amount of resources.
‘At this rate, I might not even recover what I’ve invested….’
Three large cities and four medium-sized cities remained.
If he searched all seven of them and still couldn’t find him, he would have to consider his initial strategy a failure.
After that, he would have no choice but to waste an enormous amount of time searching aimlessly.
At that point, giving up would probably be the correct choice.
***
A month into the search.
Just as Ise was wandering through the tenth city, barely keeping his mind under control on the verge of succumbing to an inner demon, a Foundation Establishment cultivator’s spiritual energy appeared anew on the Spirit-Detecting Mirror.
It was a point that definitely hadn’t been there moments ago.
Ise’s gaze immediately shot toward that direction.
A mountainous region with four rather rugged peaks rising from the terrain.
It looked like an exceptionally suitable place to hide.
Ise’s body vanished, and his spiritual energy was concealed.
Then, while reducing his divine sense to the smallest possible range, he calmly advanced toward his target, relying solely on the Spirit-Detecting Mirror.
After using the Wide-View Talisman to expand his field of vision, what he discovered was a type of barrier formation.
A barrier concealed a cave in such a way that it would be difficult to detect with the naked eye or even ordinary spiritual vision.
He wasn’t even inside a secret realm, yet the man had gone so far as to deploy a barrier and hide himself.
Ise’s hypothesis was gradually becoming a certainty.
Like a predator waiting for its prey, he held his breath and waited.
Was this definitely his intended prey?
Were there perhaps other accomplices?
Were there hidden defensive formations or traps?
A battle between cultivators was always a succession of variables.
And this time, he even had the added restriction of having to fight without attracting attention.
Even checking everything carefully two or three times wouldn’t be enough.
The man was indeed a cautious fugitive.
He remained holed up in his hideout for several days before finally emerging on the fourth day.
Ise used the Wide-View Talisman to secretly follow him without allowing his divine sense to be detected.
The man made a circuit around the nearby city before returning.
Once every seven days and seven nights.
That was the interval at which he left his hideout.
Every time he emerged from his residence, his face was different.
He was probably using a single-use disguise talisman that altered his appearance.
The instant the man stepped into the barrier surrounding his hideout, at the fleeting moment when the disguise talisman was deactivated, Ise didn’t miss his chance.
The man had even disguised himself further with a wig and a fake beard, but the appearance Ise saw through his divine sense was unmistakably identical to the portrait on the wanted poster.
He had finally found Jang Yeonggeol.
Once Ise was finally certain that he could make his move, he acted.
‘It has to end in one strike.’
‘If I don’t even give the enemy a chance to respond, the scene of the battle won’t attract attention.’
‘I have to cut his head off in one blow.
I can’t afford to damage the Storage Pouch.’
Ise infused the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner with spiritual energy and sent it flying with telekinesis.
He embedded it into the cliff above the cave, causing it to envelop the man’s hideout, and immediately burrowed underground using Earth Escape Technique.
The reaction came almost immediately.
The Foundation Establishment cultivator, finding his breathing cut off, hurriedly probed outside his hideout with his divine sense.
The moment his divine sense touched Ise’s, he hurriedly withdrew it like a snail whose eyes had been poked.
Although Ise couldn’t read his thoughts, the man’s panic was palpable.
For an instant, time seemed to slow to a crawl.
In the end, unable to withstand the silent pressure exerted by the Twin-Curtain Spirit-Domain Sealing Banner, Jang Yeonggeol burst out of his hideout.
“Who are you?!”
A murderous aura poured forth.
He seemed to have decided that he would kill the intruder who had invaded his residence, silence him, and then flee.
As a Foundation Establishment cultivator himself, he should have been able to accurately determine the range of the barrier.
But perhaps the situation was too urgent for him to think of probing underground with his divine sense.
Or perhaps he had judged that escaping the barrier formation that sealed spiritual energy was the safer option.
The instant he hurriedly stepped outside the barrier—
Ise’s Small Axe shot out from behind Jang Yeonggeol, swung with his primordial qi.
The pitch-black edge of the Black-Scale Axe flowed gracefully through the air, and the Foundation Establishment cultivator’s head rose into the air with almost absurd ease.
It was a hunt that could hardly have been more perfect.
Thud.
Rumble, roll…
Rather than displaying the severed head on an Earth Spear, Ise checked once more to make sure the cultivator’s life had truly been extinguished.
‘I have no personal grudge against you, but you too harmed others for the sake of a fortuitous opportunity.
Consider this karma coming back to you.’
He felt no guilt.
He merely avoided unnecessary killing whenever possible.
He wasn’t some leisurely pacifist.
Senior Ujeol had told him that taking things from thieves didn’t cause their resentment to accumulate as one’s karma.
So he had advised Ise to treat ordinary people carefully, but to kill cultivators on sight whenever possible, for the good of the world.
Ise was good at listening to his Seniors.
However, since he had killed someone with whom he had no ill fate, he offered only a small amount of consolation to the spirit of the dead as compensation.
With a tense expression, Ise searched Jang Yeonggeol’s robes and checked his Storage Pouch.
Fourteen thousand spirit stones.
And quite a number of magical artifacts.
It was clear that he had prepared meticulously for his betrayal of the sect.
The Storage Pouch was filled with various magical artifacts for fleeing, hiding, and avoiding pursuit.
Ise carefully gathered everything and stored it away.
The last thing he obtained was a jade slip considerably larger than the ones normally used to contain cultivation techniques.
The name Five-Element Life-Promoting Art (五行促生功) was written across the front.
It was a name he had never heard before.
For the time being, Ise cleaned up the scene, buried the corpse underground, and returned to his rented residence.
He desperately wanted to try breaking the seal immediately, but staying at the scene for too long was dangerous.
***
After returning to his residence.
The first thing Ise did was take out the jade slip containing the sealed secret map.
Five-Element Life-Promoting Art.
Ise first tried to infer the nature of the cultivation technique from its name.
Five elements, referring to the five attributes.
Life-promoting, meaning to promote life.
The name didn’t make its contents easy to guess, but it was common knowledge in the cultivation world that when the character 生, meaning “life” or “birth,” appeared in the name of a cultivation technique, it indicated an extraordinary, superior cultivation technique.
Just like famous techniques known throughout the Zheng Empire, such as the Longevity Art and Heaven-Earth Life-Spirit Art.
Perhaps Jang Yeonggeol had known the true nature of this technique.
Ise carefully examined the sealed jade slip.
He tried injecting spiritual energy.
Then demonic energy.
Then both spiritual and demonic energy together.
There was no reaction.
Even when he cautiously poured Origin Energy into it, worried that he might damage the jade slip, nothing happened.
Not even the slightest change.
‘I expected it wouldn’t be easy.’
Nothing was displayed on the jade slip except its name.
It was designed to fold in half, yet the seam where it folded was joined so tightly that it was nearly impossible to see.
‘Strange.’
Ise didn’t know much about seals professionally, but he had heard that the seals left behind by ancient Immortals shared a common characteristic.
They left clues.
Like eccentric old monsters who enjoyed testing the qualifications of those who came after them, they would establish some sort of qualification and demand that the successor fulfill it.
They wouldn’t have designed it to be opened through external assistance, such as the help of an artifact refiner or formation master from a family.
Yet no matter how carefully Ise looked, he couldn’t find anything resembling a clue.
For several days, Ise tried everything he could think of.
He put it in water.
He lightly scorched it.
He examined it under darkness and under light.
He even used a single-use appraisal talisman.
He even had his spirit beast, Bisang, try biting it.
Bisang opened his beak as wide as he could and bit down on the secret map with all his strength, only to roll around on the floor as though his beak hurt.
Ise even sought out and tried the methods said to be used by artifact refiners when appraising objects.
All of them were useless.
‘The secret must be hidden somewhere within this jade slip.’
It wouldn’t be something that could be discovered through ordinary methods.
It would only be something the person who obtained the jade slip could figure out for himself.
It had to be marked on the physical object itself.
How could something be hidden?
By covering it with something.
Or by making it incredibly small.
He had already tried every means of removing anything that might be covering it.
Then perhaps…
Could it have been written in lettering so incredibly tiny that it couldn’t even be seen with a cultivator’s naked eyes?
Ise used the Wide-View Talisman.
His vision expanded dozens of times beyond what the naked eye could perceive as he carefully examined the enlarged jade slip.
In the end, there wasn’t a single mark on either side of the jade slip.
‘If it could have been discovered simply by magnifying the view, there’s no way Jang Yeonggeol wouldn’t have tried that.’
But if Ise were the creator of this jade slip, he would have gone one step further.
Ise held the jade slip vertically.
Then he traced his fingers down the seam.
And finally, he found it.
Along the straight seam were five tiny grooves, so small that they were barely visible even with the Wide-View Talisman.
He inserted his divine sense through the grooves.
Inside each one, he saw an incredibly tiny bead of one of five different colors.
The problem was what came next.
Even when he carefully poured a minute amount of spiritual energy into the seam, nothing happened.
Ise’s mind began racing.
Five-Element Life-Promoting Art.
Five elements.
Why five elements?
The colors of the beads inside the grooves represented the five colors of the Five Elements.
‘Could it be?’
A hypothesis flashed through Ise’s mind.
A cultivation technique with the Five Elements in its name.
Five grooves that could only be discovered through the Wide-View Talisman and divine sense.
Could the qualified successor sought by the creator of this cultivation technique be someone who possessed a Five-Element Spiritual Root and had reached the Foundation Establishment Realm?
For someone with a Five-Element Spiritual Root to reach Foundation Establishment was like reaching for the stars.
There were relatively more such people in the Great Exorcist Order thanks to its unique cultivation techniques, but even then, they were a drop in the ocean compared to the total number of cultivators.
So what about the other continents?
Among all the Foundation Establishment cultivators he had encountered so far, Ise had never seen a single Five-Element Spiritual Root cultivator outside the Great Exorcist Order.
Even Ryu Seonghan, who possessed a Two-Element Spiritual Root, had estimated that it would take him about a hundred years to reach Foundation Establishment.
Of course, his circumstances had been poor, and he was somewhat lazy by nature.
But unless one lived in an environment where one could consume medicinal pills as easily as food, the cultivation world was such that a Four-Element Spiritual Root cultivator might barely reach Foundation Establishment even after using up the entirety of their 150-year lifespan.
Therefore, a Five-Element Spiritual Root cultivator who had reached Foundation Establishment would certainly be…
A rare talent.
Ise simultaneously cast one spell of each of the Five Elements and pushed them into the corresponding grooves.
He had always been focused on increasing the power and size of his spells, so he had never operated them with such extreme delicacy and precision.
It took him quite some time to manage it.
And finally, the moment he succeeded in simultaneously pushing the Five-Element spells into those tiny grooves—
The folded jade slip began unfolding, emitting a dazzling light.
Inside was a map showing the location of the Abyssal Labyrinth.