The talisman half-activated—then spun in the air before falling flat, failing to release its spell. Han Yu laughed softly.
"Sabotage potential confird."
He cleaned up the remains of the broken talismans and stored the few unused ones back into a pouch.
The courtyard was quiet now, lit only by the soft amber glow of the spirit lantern near the entrance. Han Yu sat down on the stone bench, feeling the residual warmth of exertion in his limbs and the subtle satisfaction in his chest.
With these tests, he now had a clearer picture of his current Soul Skill arsenal.
Soul Needle: Fast, invisible, and good for piercing spiritual or ntal concentration. Useless against constructs.
Emotion Severing Slash: Visible, powerful, and disruptive. Consus more Soul Qi but can disable formations, talismans, and possibly affect ntal states of enemies. The more emotion embedded in a target, the more devastating it could beco.
And he wasn’t done yet.
There were more applications he could create. More emotions to harness. But for now, he had taken a major step forward in mastering what he already had.
Han Yu leaned back, hands behind his head, and smiled at the quiet sky above.
The night was calm. But beneath the surface of the Twin Leaf Peak Sect... a storm was brewing.
And he had just learned how to ride it.
A week passed, and the Twin Leaf Peak Sect returned to its usual rhythm—disciples training, elders guiding, outer courts buzzing with minor squabbles and the daily grind of cultivation. Han Yu had continued refining his Soul Qi control, quietly working on new experints and occasionally checking in on the murmurs and movents around Murong Xie’s courtyard.
At first, there was nothing. Murong Xie, despite the explosion that leveled half his compound, had vanished from the public eye. His faction had gone uncharacteristically quiet. Not submissive, but cautious—like a serpent that had been caught mid-slither and now waited for the shadows to deepen again before moving.
Then ca the news.
It broke like a sudden thunderclap across the inner sect.
"The disciples have returned!"
Han Yu had been seated in a side garden, feeding a rat infused with mild trace-seeking spiritual herbs when he overheard a pair of outer court disciples rushing past.
"They looked like hell. I swear one of them was missing a hand—and another was limping with a bone sticking out of his thigh."
"No way."
"I saw them with my own eyes! They were dragging each other back into the sect compound, and then they were imdiately taken to the infirmary."
Han Yu’s eyes narrowed slightly as he heard the nas of the disciples.
The ones Murong Xie sent to the mine... they’d finally co crawling back.
Of course, their timing was horrendous.
Not only had the explosion, beast stampede, and spiritual sabotage left them a ss, but now they’d returned to a sect already simring with suspicion. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Murong Xie.
Within hours, a second wave of gossip surged.
Apparently, the elders—three of them from the Disciplinary Division—had approached the returning disciples almost imdiately. At first, the young cultivators had tried to maintain their cover, insisting it had been an authorized delivery of good to a "Ore Mining Outpost."
But the elders weren’t fools.
The injuries didn’t match the story. The area they were sent to was entirely differnt from where the mine was. There were no beasts there since that area was regularly patrolled and cleared out of beasts.
Why were there so many burn wounds? Why the signs of beast mauling when no beasts were registered in the area of their claid location? And most importantly—why did none of the disciples file a proper mission report upon return?
The lies started to fall apart fast.
Han Yu, seated calmly in his courtyard, observed it all unfold. Chitterfang had returned not long ago, his tiny claws twitching with excitent as he conveyed ssages from the rat network embedded throughout the sect. Tiny informants scurried through floorboards and rafters, hiding in attics, and chewing tiny holes in wooden screens to listen in on hushed voices.
Through them, Han Yu learned the real storm was taking place behind closed doors.
The Disciplinary Elders had called an ergency hearing with the returned disciples. They subjected them to multiple rounds of spiritual lie-detection, pressure techniques, and isolation.
And the contradictions began spilling.
"They said they were on a mineral retrieval mission—but another said it was a scouting task."
"One of them even slipped and ntioned they’d seen a ’crate full of samples’—but no such samples were submitted."
Han Yu couldn’t help but smile coldly as he listened.
"They said they got ambushed by wild beasts... but also ntioned soone sabotaging the barrier. That ans there was a third party."
"Idiots," Han Yu muttered under his breath.
But what finally tipped the scales was the question the elders asked next: Who ’really’ assigned you this mission?
At first, the disciples remained silent. Even under pressure. But the stress of being injured, interrogated, and disoriented—combined with a few probing soul-severing questions from Elder Qiang, a well-known interrogator—cracked their defenses.
They didn’t na Murong Xie outright.
But they didn’t have to.
They all described the sa person.
"An Outer Sect Disciple, tall, black robes with crimson embroidery... always accompanied by a bunch of his companions..."
"That was enough."
The rumor spread like wildfire within hours.
Murong Xie had secretly commissioned a team of disciples to investigate and mine Spirit Stones from an unauthorized location.
Murong Xie had bypassed the Council.
Murong Xie’s faction disciples had returned injured and full of lies.
Han Yu didn’t even need to confirm it through his own eyes—the sheer weight of Eight Emotions Energy pouring out of the sect’s central compound told him the truth more clearly than any spy.
From the towering Elder Assembly Hall ca waves of rage, shock, disappointnt, and a seething betrayal. The elders were angry—not only at the breach of protocol, but the embarrassnt it caused the sect. Such actions could not only taint their reputation among other sects, but might draw the ire of external forces who could claim nn regional mining rights.
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