CHAPTER
37
Plans and Spoils
I
Hao Zhen’s gaze lingered on the dead inner disciple for a while longer, immersed in his thoughts, before he snapped out of it. He then made his way over to Tian Jin, who glanced at him as he approached.
“Well, I believe that’s over,” Tian Jin said. There was something off about the way the other boy was looking at him. Hao Zhen reckoned that it had to do with the last few questions he had asked at the end. Well, no matter. He’d be addressing them shortly.
“Right,” Hao Zhen said. “First things first, get rid of the tracking matrix on your spatial ring.”
Tian Jin promptly nodded his head. He then once again removed the spatial ring from his finger and started scrutinizing. Probably because he had already analyzed it earlier, Tian Jin only spent a few moments looking at it before there was a burst of spiritual power from his hand.
Hao Zhen kept his eye trained on the ring, but from where he stood, he couldn’t see the tracking matrix, so he didn’t see any change. He wondered how a matrix could be inscribed on something that small. The inscriptions on the walls of the cave were each about the size of the ring, and a matrix was supposedly made up of multiple inscriptions. Were there miniature inscriptions for such cases, or was there some kind of way to compress a matrix? Probably the latter. If he ever decided to get into inscriptery in the future, that’d be something to look into.
Tian Jin then held the ring to his eye, giving it another look-over, before nodding to himself. “It’s gone.”
“Good.” Hao Zhen’s narrowed his eyes at the ring. “You’re sure about it, though, right? There’s no chance there’s another matrix in it?”
“None,” Tian Jin said, placing the ring back on his finger. “I inspected it thoroughly.”
“All right,” Hao Zhen said. “Now—”
“Now I believe you’ve got some explanations to make,” Lan Yue said. Startled, Hao Zhen turned back and saw her standing just behind him, her arms crossed as she regarded him intensely.
“Right,” Hao Zhen said. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that now that Lan Yue had brought up this matter, Tian Jin wasn’t bothering to hide his suspicion any longer, the other boy’s gaze just as intense as Lan Yue’s. “Don’t worry. I’ll explain what’s going on. But not now.” Seeing Lan Yue frown, he quickly added. “Later today. It’s just that right now, we should wrap things up over here.”
That got a quick nod from Tian Jin and a slower, more hesitant one from Lan Yue.
With that out of the way, Hao Zhen returned his attention to the inner disciple’s corpse. “I think we should store that away for now, just like with the elder’s corpse,” he said, after a moment of deliberation. “What we’ll do with the corpses will depend on what our plan of action will be after returning to the sect.”
“What do you mean?” Tian Jin asked.
“Well, there are a couple different variables we need to consider,” Hao Zhen, said, looking away from the corpse. “First of all, it depends on how exactly the sect will react to an inner disciple and an inner elder being killed.” A fairly common cultivation novel trope came to mind. This wasn’t usually the kind of stuff found in low-level sects in cultivation novels, but… “Does the sect have some way of tracking when a member is killed? Is there, like, some sort of magical jade slip connected to someone’s life that breaks when that person dies?”
“What.” Lan Yue gave him a blank look. Tian Jin similarly looked at him in clear confusion.
Yeah. If that kind of stuff did exist in this world, it was really probably the kind of stuff only really found in higher-grade organizations, after all. “Never mind that,” he said. Before either Tian Jin or Lan Yue could ask any questions, he continued. “What are the chances of the other elders realizing that one of the elders is missing? Or of someone in the Inner Forest realizing that he”—Hao Zhen glanced at the corpse—“is gone?”
“Fairly low, I believe.” Lan Yue frowned. “At least in the case of the inner disciple. I’m not so certain about the elder. I don’t know if the elders supervising the forest are in constant communication with each other.” Her frown deepened. “There’s also a chance that if someone sends either the elder or the inner disciple a sound transmission, and there’s no response, they might alert the other elders.”
“Hmmm.” Hao Zhen considered that for a moment. He had no way of telling what exactly would happen. There were just too many variables. Since that was the case…
“I think we should keep the corpses in our spatial rings for now,” he said. “The sect rules forbid elders from investigating the spatial rings of disciples, right? We’ll just bet on that.” Sect rules were broken more often than they were followed in cultivation novels, however, so Hao Zhen added, “Assuming that they do decide to investigate our rings, then we can simply tell the truth—the entire situation with Du Qing and what’s going on.”
The idea of carrying corpses around with them made him a little unsettled. At least every different thing stored in a spatial ring occupied a separate space, so it wasn’t like the corpse would be touching their belongings. That was even more important since he had quite a lot of monster meat inside his spatial ring, which he had taken from the monsters they had killed so far to use for cooking in the future.
“And they’ll believe us?” Lan Yue said, frowning. “I don’t see that happening unless I use my real identity.”
“I was thinking more of using Tian Jin’s identity,” Hao Zhen said, nodding at the other boy, who blinked in surprise at suddenly being referred to.
“Mine?”
“Well, yes.” Hao Zhen pointed at the sword Tian Jin was holding. “The fact that you can use the sword means that you’re a descendant of the founder of the sect. Or at least it’s supposed to. We don’t know if that’s really the case, but it doesn’t matter. We can even say that you’re the descendant of Protector Na.” Hao Zhen nodded at the corpse sitting cross-legged in the middle of the cave.
The realization that there were as many corpses inside this cave as living people gave him a pause, but he carried on. “That should give your words some credence—or at least make the sect value you enough to actually properly look into this situation.” He returned his attention to Lan Yue. “If that fails, then we can rely on your identity. Either way, I believe that by relying on your identities and the incriminating jade slip we found in Ke Li’s spatial ring, we should be able to not only get ourselves out of trouble—but get Du Qing in hot water.”
Lan Yue pursed his lips. “Why can’t we just hide the corpses? Or, even better, feed them to a monster? They wouldn’t be able to connect us to it, otherwise.”
Hao Zhen shook his head. “The only reason why they’d search our spatial rings would be if they were already suspecting us, and that’d mean that Du Qing would have tipped them off, as he’s the only one that knows of our involvement.” He shrugged. “In that case, it’s better to have the corpses on hand and say that we were already planning on presenting these corpses to the sect after investigating this matter ourselves. If we try to get rid of the corpses, it makes us look more suspicious, as if we had something to hide. And that’s not exactly ideal, as we want to present ourselves as the victims.”
He hadn’t come up with this plan on the spot—since realizing that the cave had restraining arrays and that they’d be using it to kill, he had been considering how they’d handle the aftermath. He’d never commit to a plan before exploring every avenue.
Tian Jin and Lan Yue seemed to finally accept his plan. Hao Zhen stored the inner disciple’s corpse in his own spatial ring. Although spatial rings could hold a lot of things inside them, there was still a limit to how much they could. Spatial rings weren’t divided into orders, only grades, and red-grade spatial rings could hold at most ten cubic feet, divided between the volume of every separate item inside it.
Tian Jin could probably fit another corpse inside his, but it’d take up precious space. In any case, the inner disciple had only been killed because of Hao Zhen’s need to interrogate him—otherwise, they could have just destroyed the tracking matrix and rushed to the Inner Forest—so he reckoned that the least he could do was hold onto the corpse.
Now, the only question left was what to do with the dead Protector Na Ren. Hao Zhen shifted his gaze to the corpse. It didn’t unsettle him nearly as much as the two other ones, but then again, it was the only dead body that had been in the cave before their arrival. It didn’t even look dead, in any case, as it was somehow perfectly preserved.
A cultivator’s powers and magical abilities came from their soul, so when they died and their soul entered the cycle of reincarnation, their body should have been no different from that of a graysoul’s. He could see no signs of rotting or decomposition, however. Considering neither Tian Jin nor Lan Yue seemed to find the state of the corpse strange, he reckoned there had to be a reason for it. It had been less than three months since he entered the magical world, so there were still a lot of things he didn’t know. Whether a cultivator’s corpse underwent decomposition wasn’t exactly a common conversation topic.
He wondered how long it had been since the man died. Lan Yue had said that man should be a protector from the previous generation. He didn’t really know what that meant, but considering redsouls could live for two hundred years, he wouldn’t be surprised if the man had died over a hundred years ago.
“We should take him back with us to the sect,” Hao Zhen said. “I mean, his family…” He trailed off, turning to Lan Yue. “Are there any other descendants of the founder in the sect?”
“Yes. Grandfather is one of them.” Lan Yue’s gaze was also on the corpse, her expression somber. “Protector Na Ren is, in fact, his uncle.”
“Well, that settles it, then.” Hao Zhen nodded. “Now—” He froze. “Wait. Your grandfather is related to him? Blood-related? Or was Protector Na Ren’s wife that your grandfather was related to?”
“They’re blood-related. My grandfather is a Na.” As Lan Yue spoke, she turned to him. “You’re wondering why I can’t use the Radiant Light Sword.” Hao Zhen nodded, and she sighed. “I am the one who doesn’t share blood with Grandfather. It’s… complicated.”
That did sound rather complicated. Was she adopted? Or was it something else? Either way, it seemed like there was more to Lan Yue’s background than he originally assumed. He decided to save his questions for later, however, considering he had some pending questions of his own to answer, and he didn’t think Lan Yue would take kindly to being questioned right now.
“All right,” Hao Zhen said. “In any case, we’ll take it with us, and return it to his family. It’ll also help us confirm the legitimacy of our claims, so it’s the best option, no matter how you look at it.”
“I’ll take it,” Lan Yue said. Without waiting for their responses, she made her way over to the corpse before storing it inside her spatial ring, together with the cushion it had been sitting on.
They then retrieved the spiritual stones they had been using to power the restraining schema. They had used plenty of them, but they still hadn’t needed the full twenty minutes, so not only had they not used everything up, they actually still had more spiritual stones than they had prior to their conflict with Du Qing and his minions.
With that, there wasn’t anything left to do in the cave, but there was still something Hao Zhen wanted to confirm before they left.
“It probably isn’t the case, but…” He reached into his spatial ring, before taking out the enchanted pouch of Du Jian’s minion he had killed, as well as the spatial ring of the inner disciple. “We should probably go over the belongings of everyone that worked for Du Qing and look for more tracking matrixes, just in case. Let’s also take an inventory of our spoils while we’re at it.”
He had never seen an antagonist use more than one tracking matrix in a cultivation novel, but he wasn’t about to take any risks. Doing this now would also give him some more time to think of what exactly he’d tell Tian Jin and Lan Yue about his transmigration.
“That’s right,” Tian Jin said, giving him a firm nod. The next moment, two spatial rings appeared in his hand.
Lan Yue followed suit, taking out the enchanted pouch of the lackey she had killed.
They then emptied all the storage artifacts on the cave floor in front of them, and within moments, a pile with all sorts of pill flasks, magical artifacts, spiritual stones, jade slips, and talismans appeared before Hao Zhen’s eyes. Most of it had come from the two jade slips in Tian Jin’s hand—Du Jian’s and the inner elder—but the inner disciple’s spatial ring also had quite a lot of things inside it. The enchanted pouches, in comparison, didn’t have nearly as much. The only things they left behind in the storage artifacts were the body parts and magical plants. The elder’s spatial ring hadn’t had any of that, nor did the enchanted pouches, but Du Jian’s and the inner disciple’s spatial rings were filled with it.
As he stared at the person-sized pile of spoils in front of him, Hao Zhen couldn’t help but take a moment to wrap his head around just how much they had gained in the span of a day. Tian Jin and Lan Yue, on the other hand, didn’t appear at all affected by it. Instead, they were promptly removing items from the pile and inspecting them.
Hao Zhen shook his head. Considering who exactly was on his team, he was pretty certain that this would become a fairly common sight in the future. Tian Jin then gave him some instructions on what to look for, and he joined their search for tracking matrixes.
Thanks for the chapter.
from the two jade slips in Tian Jin’s hand—Du Jian’s and the
two spacial rings