Decaying World Chapter 226

Chapter 226

The only thing Lin Shunhe couldn't quite get past was how thoroughly his son had concealed his true strength.

He thought of the grand future he had so painstakingly mapped out for his family—the one he'd spent years piecing together. Given his son's actual power, the boy could have had it all with a flick of his wrist. That realization left Lin Shunhe feeling strangely deflated.

"Stop talking about your son. What about you? You hid your strength just as thoroughly! If we hadn't run into trouble today, were you planning to keep it from forever?" Yao Shan's temper flared.

"I... I was doing it for the good of the family..." Lin Shunhe's voice dropped to a murmur.

"Then what about you?!" Lin Shunhe suddenly rembered sothing. He slapped the small table in the carriage and jabbed a finger toward the window, pointing at the formation of white-armored guards advancing alongside them.

The group had arrived without warning. Their three leaders were all Divine Officer-level experts—evident from the Void Force coiling around their weapons.

Three Divine Officers, one Circulation Realm expert, nine Internal Force martial artists—and the mont they appeared, every last one had dropped to their knees before Yao Shan, addressing her as the Holy Origin Law Godmother and declaring they had co to protect her on their Sect Master's orders.

The entire group had been left dumbfounded.

Nobody had any idea where this company of Divine Officers and the Circulation expert had co from. Lin Shunhe could even faintly detect a trace of death aura clinging to them.

When he pressed her for answers, Yao Shan couldn't explain it clearly herself. She only said she had joined a mysterious sect, and that it posed no threat to the family—she had joined purely to protect them.

Watching Lin Shunhe and Yao Shan continue to bicker, Liu Shenglan and Liu Xiao couldn't help but sigh.

In the beginning, everything had seed perfectly normal.

After breaking away from the main Liu family, Liu Shenglan had chosen Lin Shunhe—a penniless man from the Outer City who had risked his life to save her. The match was considered marrying down. She had always assud it ant her side carried the greater burden, quietly supporting the Lin family through the years.

But in the span of half an hour, that notion had been upended entirely.

First, Lin Shunhe had made his move out of nowhere, going from portly rchant to a martial artist capable of holding off a Divine Officer.

Then, the perpetually gentle and soft-spoken Lin Hui had sent a suspected Palace Master powerhouse flying into oblivion with a single sword strike.

Finally, Yao Shan—who should have been the most ordinary of them all—had inexplicably summoned an entire company of experts to ring their convoy.

Taking it all in, Liu Shenglan was left speechless. Not one mber of this family was a pushover. Every single one of them hid so devastating secret. Only the three from her own family were apparently the honest ones.

"I'm so stupid, really..." Liu Shenglan let out a long sigh and looked up, eting her daughter's eyes. The sa stunned bewildernt stared back at her.

"Right now, all I hope is that Big Brother gets here soon..." Liu Xiao sighed. If she spent much longer with the Lin family, her nerves would give out entirely. Especially after what had happened earlier—watching Lin Hui face down the full-field suppression of a Palace Master-level expert, she'd felt her heart lurch straight into her throat.

"Right, right—Ah Jun! If Ah Jun were here, that whole situation never would have happened!" Liu Shenglan nodded vigorously.

"Mother... you overestimate Big Brother. That Palace Master from earlier was not soone he could handle. He'd have been beaten soundly," Liu Xiao sighed, puncturing her mother's fantasy.

Liu Shenglan fell silent.

"But why are Mother and Big Sister sighing?" Lin Xiaoliu, held in her arms, suddenly spoke up. "Aren't we family?"

The two shook their heads, unsure of how to explain the complexities of their family dynamic to Lin Xiaoliu.

"As long as we're still family, Brother Hui definitely won't cut down," Lin Xiaoliu whispered.

What a simple, childish mindset, Liu Xiao lanted inwardly.

What she was grateful for, right now, was that Lin Hui—whose habit of concealing his strength bordered on pathological—was on their side. If his enemies ever learned he'd been hiding a cultivation level spanning at least three full realms, they'd have fled straight into the Mist Zone and never looked back.

For others, concealing even a single tier of cultivation was already considered extre. But this man...

Thinking of this, Liu Xiao looked again at the bickering Lin Shunhe and Yao Shan.

Her stepfather seed like an ordinary person on the surface, but in reality, he was an Imitation Evil Weapon assimilator with a major faction clearly backing him from the shadows.

Her stepmother looked no different from any other woman, yet a single talisman from her could summon Divine Officer-level guards. Clearly, she had her own formidable backing—and no small amount of standing.

And their son had seed like a re Internal Force martial artist, but was in fact a top-tier powerhouse at the Palace Master level.

Looking at it this way... this whole family was full of hidden monsters. The kicker was that they apparently didn't even know each other's true situations.

Wait, I'm part of their family now too... But why don't I have any hidden trump cards? Liu Xiao fell into deep thought. Am I too naive?

"Speaking of which, the Clear Wind Dao's side doesn't seem to know about Ah Hui's situation either..." Liu Shenglan's remark piqued Liu Xiao's curiosity once again.

"I'll go take a look." She lifted the carriage curtain and vanished from the cabin in a flash.

…

At the rear of the convoy, everyone from the Clear Wind Dao was embroiled in a heated discussion.

The disciples and sect mbers were flushed with excitent, reliving their Dao Master's heroism over and over—how he had turned the tide single-handedly and withstood a Palace Master. Every praise-worthy word they'd ever learned was being poured onto Lin Hui without restraint. Nothing else mattered.

"You can't bla anyone for being fired up. Even I feel like I've hit the jackpot! What on earth did I, Wang Hongshi, do to deserve following a figure as terrifying and supre as the Dao Master? This is the fortune of three lifetis!"

Beside the horses at the front of the convoy, Wang Hongshi led the white horse he had finally managed to pacify, chatting with Chen Sui and Huang Shan as he walked.

"The Dao Master is a peerless genius, a destined figure who cos once in a thousand years! He's the absolute protagonist out of so storybook—he either holds back entirely, or when he acts, the heavens crack, the earth splits, mountains shudder, dust flies, the sky goes dark, and ghosts wail while gods howl!" Little Hu had clearly drunk too much. He held a wineskin in one hand, drinking and boasting at the sa ti.

Among the top ten disciples, nearly everyone had a flask out. Too elated for words, they were drinking dicinal wine to replenish the nerves they'd burned through during the earlier ordeal.

"Your vocabulary is getting bigger these days, huh?" Huang Shan shot Little Hu a flat look.

"Of course! I enrolled in an academy of letters. I study for half an hour every day, so I'm definitely different from before!" Little Hu explained, his eyes wide.

"Little Hu is amazing. So ambitious!" Huang Shan smiled and patted his arm.

"Senior Sister Shan-shan is also very outstanding. Reaching the Perfected stage of Internal Force at this age is an extrely rare feat in the entire Outer City!" Little Hu laughed.

"I'm still far from it..." Despite the complint, Huang Shan's expression barely shifted. No pleasure showed through.

The others nearby noticed and drew their own conclusions. Among all the top female disciples of the Clear Wind Dao, none had been spared the crude rumors outsiders circulated about them and the Dao Master. And yet hardly any of them had ever bothered to deny it.

Anyone could see the female disciples practically worshipped him. If the Dao Master had actually done the reckless things those rumors described, they might have gone along willingly.

Unfortunately, the Dao Master was like a painting behind glass—beautiful and undeniably present, yet utterly untouchable.

"After this, what do you think will happen to the future of our Clear Wind Dao?" Huang Shan asked softly, changing the subject.

"Do you even need to ask? We'll grow stronger, expand fast, and march right into the Inner City!" Little Hu was the first to answer.

Wang Hongshi and the others didn't make a sound, however. Instead, they fell into deep thought.

Once the shock and excitent faded, there was serious thinking to do about how Dao Master Lin Hui's sudden display of terrifying strength would reshape everything. Every one of them had family, people they cared about. What beca of the Clear Wind Dao would inevitably touch all of it.

Gradually, the celebrating disciples around them caught the sa current of thought and fell quiet.

…

Far away in the Mist Zone, a squad from the Mystic Eagle Sect—dressed entirely in black armor, their helts masked—watched the Lin Manor and Clear Wind Dao convoy fade into the distance.

Tao Xuehai and his partner, a man from the Wanhua Sect, stared blankly in that direction, not making a sound for a long ti.

"Was that... your master?" His partner, behind a white mask, had lost all his sharp, heroic bearing. What remained was a rather bewildered, sheepish look.

"Mm," Tao Xuehai grunted.

"That's... honestly beyond all reason," the Wanhua Sect man sighed.

What he actually wanted to say was that it was simply underhanded. A Palace Master-level powerhouse disguising himself as an ordinary Internal Force martial artist—who the hell wouldn't be confused running into that?

It was like reaching into a chicken coop to clean it out, only to have a Tyrannosaurus Rex co barreling out from among the chicks. He looked like one of them on the outside—but once he revealed himself, the T-Rex devoured everything in a single bite.

Could anyone ss with that? If the ambushed Palace Master died, then whatever. But if he was lucky enough to escape, he'd probably have a massive phobia of little yellow chicks for the rest of his life.

"Sigh... This sect of yours..." The white-masked man sighed again, not knowing what to say. He planned to quit the Wanhua Sect as soon as he got back. With all these sudden frights, his heart really couldn't take it anymore.

Tao Xuehai glanced at him and said nothing. He was at a loss for words himself. His teacher's concealnt of strength was, truly, a little too much to process—his mind was still faintly scrambled.

"From today onward, the Clear Wind Dao... might beco a legend." His companion's voice echoed in his ears.

Tao Xuehai didn't answer, but he silently agreed.

Suddenly, his eyes sharpened. He looked up toward the distant sky.

"Master is here."

His companion hurriedly looked over as well. Just in ti, he saw three figures shooting down from high in the air, heading straight for the Clear Wind Dao convoy.

The three figures flew in a tight triangle formation. At the very front was none other than Dao Master Lin Hui, Ruyi hanging at his waist, black hair streaming down his back.

He wore the sa eternal, unchanging smile. In the past, Tao Xuehai had only ever found it warm. But now, he could sense sothing else beneath it—sothing lofty, and ever so faintly contemptuous.