Other than the location of the elders though, there was the other hotspot.
Murong Xie’s current residence.
The second courtyard he’d moved to after his main one exploded.
From there, Han Yu detected sothing different.
Fear. Bitter regret. A coil of rage trying desperately to stay hidden. Murong Xie had clearly realized sothing was very wrong—and worse, that soone had deliberately exposed him.
But he didn’t know who.
Han Yu imagined the elder pacing furiously, demanding reports from his injured disciples, failing to control the narrative, and feeling the net tighten around him. Perhaps he even suspected foul play, but without proof, he couldn’t lash out.
Han Yu sat beneath his peach tree, sipping quietly on herbal tea while the energy flowed to him.
Fear. Rage. Shock. All of it being sucked toward him in drifting wisps, invisible to the world.
He hadn’t even needed to speak to anyone. The sect itself was feeding him.
Chitterfang returned once more, whiskers twitching, and a tiny scroll in his hands.
’News! Disciplinary Elder Qiu has officially launched a full investigation. They’ve sealed access to the sect’s mission archives and summoned Murong Xie to appear tomorrow for a Council hearing!’
Han Yu gave a soft laugh.
"Perfect."
He looked at the sky, watching as a few clouds drifted past the golden rays of late afternoon sun.
It was poetic in a way.
Murong Xie had plotted in secret.
Han Yu had burned his secrets to ash—and now the man’s own disciples had finished the job by crumbling under pressure.
The trap hadn’t needed springing. It had collapsed under its own weight.
And best of all?
Han Yu had done it all without lifting a blade. He didn’t even need to wait for ng Jueyan to spread the news through her channels, Murong Xie’s own people had done it for him.
He leaned back, gaze thoughtful.
Now all he had to do was wait.
The fall was only beginning.
A few more days passed, and Han Yu did little but breathe, cultivate, and listen.
He didn’t need to move an inch. His courtyard had beco a spiritual wind tunnel, the Eight Emotions Energy flowing in from various parts of the sect, feeding his cultivation without him having to lift a single finger.
The epicenter of these emotions?
The Disciplinary Hall.
That somber, weathered structure in the heart of the inner sect had beco the stage for a long, slow unraveling. And the one being unraveled was none other than Outer Court Disciple Murong Xie.
The once-feared talented disciple, known for his cold efficiency and influence, had beco a ghostly fixture in the corridors of the Discipline Hall.
Multiple sightings described him entering the place at dawn and not leaving until dusk, face ashen, expression wooden, his robes gradually growing more wrinkled and worn by the day. Rumors began spreading like wildfire.
"He’s being kept for questioning every day now."
"I heard they even called in a Truthseeker from the Mirror Mind Pavilion to monitor his spiritual fluctuations."
"They say he’s not cooperating at all. But the elders already know everything!"
Han Yu, of course, was always one step ahead of the gossip. While the disciples talked, he ditated on a branch in his spirit tree, eyes half-lidded as dozens of rats fed him a quiet stream of hard intelligence.
Chitterfang and his network had embedded themselves into key places—rooftops of elder halls, cracks in the records archive, even hidden behind vases in the Discipline Hall itself. No one cared much about a bunch of rats that were naturally present everywhere in the sect.
Sure if spotted they would try to get rid of them, but when one rat went down, ten more were ready to take its place. They bred like rats after all.
According to them, the sect’s internal intelligence division had struggled at first to learn the truth of the mine.
It wasn’t located in any of the standard maps, and no sect disciples had any records of it. The elders believed at first it was just so low-grade illegal mineral harvesting—dangerous, yes, but not unprecedented.
That changed when the tip-off ca.
A scroll delivered via encrypted courier. Authenticated by an out-of-sect stamp sent by an ’honest’ individual with sympathies to the sect..
It included detailed maps of the mine’s layout, docuntation of spiritual residue, and—most damning of all—a complete analysis of several Spirit Stone samples, done by a neutral appraiser unaffiliated with the Twin Leaf Peak Sect or the Murong Clan.
Han Yu imdiately knew where it ca from.
ng Jueyan.
Her timing was perfect. Likely, she’d waited to see if Murong Xie could wriggle out first. But once Han Yu confird the sect was serious about the investigation, she had dropped the hamr.
And what a hamr it was.
The appraiser’s seal was a clear identifier—Master Luo Fen, a mid-tier cultivator known for honest work in the central regions, affiliated loosely with a trade union and known for operating independently. With the weight of the Twin Leaf Peak Sect bearing down on him, Luo Fen had no reason to lie and every reason to survive.
Within hours of being summoned, he confessed.
He didn’t even know what he’d been involved in.
"I was asked to analyze so raw ore—just to determine if it was authentic Spirit Stone material. I did the work, wrote the report, and handed it over to the client. I never knew it ca from a restricted area. I never knew it was tied to any sect at all!"
When asked who his client was, he hesitated, but eventually revealed that the cultivator was likely working on behalf of a third party—an unaffiliated cultivator group suspected to be a Murong Clan front.
From that point, the investigation snowballed.
The elders traced several spiritual signatures. The sample stones matched the residue patterns found on the injured disciples. One of the spatial storage pouches retrieved from the group still had faint traces of soil unique to the Ending Spine Mountains’ southern foothills.
The elders couldn’t have asked for a better chain of evidence.
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