That night, the moonlight was hidden by thick clouds, and all was quiet. The residence of the Fang Clan loomed faintly in the deep darkness. Shi Yu slapped a Concealment Talisman onto herself and silently approached.
Normally, a prominent clan's mansion would be heavily guarded, making scaling the walls a foolish pipe dream. However, with Fang Yushan gone, the remaining disciples and servants of the Fang Clan looked utterly defeated and lifeless, rendering the guards virtually useless.
Without much effort, Shi Yu found a collapsed section of the wall and casually walked right in without even having to climb over.
Yet this did not lower her guard. “Patriarch Fang has the highest cultivation, but there's also a Golden Core ancestor who spends years in secluded cultivation, as well as six or seven elders at the Foundation Establishment Realm Great Perfection... I must not alert them.”
Crouching low against the wall, she slowly made her way deeper inside.
Before doing anything else, she needed to locate Fang Sheng.
Considering how much Patriarch Fang valued his youngest daughter, leaving her behind in the estate while traveling to Wanchou Prefecture meant her location was almost certainly protected by defensive arrays and other measures, making it difficult for anyone to approach.
After creeping forward a bit further, Shi Yu hid behind a withered tree and silently produced eight array flags.
She planted one array flag in each of the eight cardinal and ordinal directions to form a circle. Stepping into the middle, she formed hand seals. Spiritual energy flowed in through the eastern flag and swept outward through all eight flags before briefly settling into silence.
This was a simple method for detecting the presence of nearby array formations. Though somewhat crude, it suited her needs well enough.
A night wind suddenly whipped up, yet the eight array flags remained still. As she watched them, the flag representing the northwest direction suddenly began to quiver violently.
Shi Yu frowned, using her spiritual power to draw the eight array flags back into her hand. “The flags reacted quite strongly; that array is clearly no small matter.”
Composing herself, she dared not be careless. Even with the Concealment Talisman masking her body and concealing her aura, she remained vigilant, quietly taking detours whenever she spotted Fang Clan disciples or servants as she headed toward the northwestern section of the estate.
She quickly discovered Fang Sheng's location: a small house in the backyard surrounded by high walls and dense woods, appearing quite secluded. Outside the house, two guards paced back and forth on patrol.
Both possessed cultivation at the Foundation Establishment Realm. Shi Yu cast only a single glance before withdrawing her gaze to avoid being sensed.
“Under the cover of the Concealment Talisman, I shouldn't be detected.”
Fortunately, the two guards seemed thoroughly resentful of their assignment. They conversed in low sighs, maintaining a considerable distance from the small house as if unwilling to draw near.
This played right into Shi Yu's hands. Concealed by her talisman and aided by an Escape Talisman, she bypassed both guards smoothly and arrived right before the small house.
A Tier-3 defensive array protected the exterior, preventing the Escape Talisman from taking her directly inside. Unfazed, she relied on her expertise in array formations, locating the array core without difficulty. After manipulating the spiritual energy hub for half an hour, she slipped inside smoothly without disturbing the array's operation.
The array showed no signs of disturbance, and the two guards outside had no idea someone had already snuck inside.
“Fortunately, it's only a Tier-3 array...” Anything higher, and given her current strength, she would have struggled to enter without making a sound.
Inside the house, the room was completely bare.
Shi Yu looked around until her eyes landed on a cellar trapdoor on the floor.
She carefully opened the trapdoor, revealing a narrow, pitch-black passageway that seemed bottomless.
Taking a deep breath, Shi Yu stepped into the passage, pulled the trapdoor back into place, produced a spirit stone lamp, and slowly walked downward.
After the time it took for an incense stick to burn, the passage opened up into a stone chamber several dozen zhang across.
Upon seeing the sight before her, Shi Yu gasped in shock.
Inside the chamber, seventy-two array flags fluttered and snapped without any wind, forming a spell formation. At the center of the formation was Fang Sheng, her limbs shackled by heavy chains.
Shi Yu's pupils shrank in horror. Around Fang Sheng's arms—so thin they could be encircled by two fingers—were locked Xuanyin Iron rings three inches wide and an inch thick, connected to enormously thick chains.
Such massive, heavy rings weighed at least a hundred catties, and four of them bound her hands and feet.
Fang Sheng lay collapsed on the ground, unable to move, curled up in quiet sleep with barely a trace of breath.
Shi Yu took a deep breath and focused her gaze. Beneath Sheng'er, a vast array of obscure, complex runes was carved into the ground, so intricate that even Shi Yu could not immediately grasp their meaning. Centered around Sheng'er, these runes lit up from the inside out, rippling with flowing silver light.
The silver light seemed to be extracted directly from Sheng'er, flowing like water along the carved channels toward a single point.
Shi Yu followed the streams of silver light to their destination and saw a jade bottle floating in midair. Its top was open, holding a faint silver liquid that emitted a profoundly mysterious, inexplicable aura.
The converging silver light condensed into liquid right above the bottle's mouth. After a long moment, a single new drop of silver liquid formed and fell silently into the jade bottle, merging into the pool within without a ripple.
The moment the drop fell, Sheng'er's aura weakened just a bit further.
“That is... fortune force condensed into physical form...”
What Wanzhi Tower said was true. A Fortune-Gathering Physique should have granted extraordinary fortune and opportunity, yet Sheng'er's life force was nearly drained away, her entire body oozing a deathly languor—all likely caused by this spell formation before her.
“The aura of this formation is bizarre and obscure; it's likely an ancient array handed down from antiquity.” Shi Yu's expression turned grave as she tried to examine its full layout to decipher its secrets.
But as she looked at the entire formation, her vision grew dim, as if a black veil had covered her eyes. In her ears echoed a deep, ancient chanting whisper from time immemorial, intertwining and rising in waves that threw her mind into turmoil and made her dizzy.
Right then, Fang Sheng, lying at the center of the array, seemed to sense something. She opened her eyes, slowly raised her head toward Shi Yu, and softly called out, “Sister Shi.”
With that gentle call, the black veil lifted instantly, the chanting vanished, and everything returned to normal.
Shi Yu pulled her mind together, feeling a lingering sense of dread. “Just observing it carries such terrifying power.”
She shook her head gently and met Sheng'er's eyes.
The girl's eyes showed little emotion, appearing neither surprised by Shi Yu's presence nor particularly responsive to the world around her at all.
For a moment, Shi Yu did not know what to say.
She had no real relationship with this child, nor did she know if there were other hidden details. Taking her away right now was practically impossible. Setting aside whether she could sneak someone past the guards, Patriarch Fang alone was a late Golden Core Realm powerhouse whom no one in Lingtai Prefecture could match. Offending him completely would likely drag down many others in the future.
She could easily cut and run herself, but she couldn't just leave such a mess behind for President Song and the others.
Yet if she pretended to know nothing and concocted the Mengtian Pill for Patriarch Fang as planned, Shi Yu feared she would be aiding a villain in his tyranny.
According to the intel from Wanzhi Tower, although Fang Yushan had possessed decent talent in his youth, he had been merely average among the geniuses of Hengze Prefecture. Yet in just a few short years, his cultivation had skyrocketed to the late Golden Core Realm, an utterly astonishing feat.
The underlying reason was now clear. Sheng'er possessed a one-in-a-million Fortune-Gathering Physique that absorbed the fortune of the entire clan, yet she derived zero benefit from it herself. She was merely being used as a vessel to nourish Fang Yushan alone, propelling him to his current strength.
However, this method went against the Heavenly Dao. While Fang Yushan siphoned away fortune and heavenly secrets to boost his cultivation, he paid a steep price. Patriarch Fang bore signs of premature aging on his face—which Shi Yu had originally assumed was due to excessive worry over his daughter. Now she realized that was the very backlash he suffered, which was why he dared not be overly greedy and had restrained the siphoning process.
Furthermore, his desire to refine the Mengtian Pill was naturally not for Sheng'er's sake, but for himself—so he could consume it and siphon fortune and heavenly secrets without paying the price.
In that case... it was not hard to imagine what Sheng'er's ultimate fate would be.
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