Chapter 203 - The False Trail and the Sealed Flesh
Su Bai ran.
He did not run in a straight line. Straight lines were for people who believed the world was fair, enemies were slow, and Void-Shattering Returnees respected distance.
Su Bai believed none of those things.
The moment he vanished from the Returnees’ sight, he scattered more Nether Threads behind him.
He did not simply leave threads behind. Every thread said something different.
One suggested he had gone left. Another carried a faint trace of his Qi toward a broken pillar. A third trembled with false movement.
Su Bai moved through the solid miasma barrier again.
His Qi drained continuously as the Nether Thread Network stretched farther and farther behind him. Every step left tiny sensing points along the ground, walls, channels, and broken formations.
Each thread consumed almost nothing alone, but there were too many of them. Together, they were like countless small leaks in a water jar.
Su Bai’s foundation was enormous, but even an enormous jar should not develop the habit of leaking everywhere.
He did not dare rest.
Something stepped on a thread behind him, then another, then a third.
Su Bai’s eyes narrowed.
The Returnees had entered the trail.
A black-red rift began forming several hundred steps behind him. He felt it through the threads before he saw it. Space thinned like cloth being pressed by a blade.
Su Bai did not wait.
He activated Falling Leaf Substitution.
His body shifted away from the path where the rift would open. The next instant, a Void-Shattering Returnee stepped out from the torn space behind him, landing where Su Bai should have been if he had continued forward.
It found nothing.
Su Bai was already elsewhere.
He repeated this again and again.
It was exhausting, but it was effective.
Eventually, the pressure of the deepest altar weakened behind him.
The oppressive feeling of being watched by the sealed source did not vanish completely, but it became distant enough that Su Bai could breathe without feeling as if something enormous had placed a finger on his soul.
Layer Two appeared ahead. The active battlefield.
Su Bai’s eyes widened slightly when he saw familiar markers.
Lin Weiyang must have left them behind.
Su Bai did not stop, but something in his chest loosened for a moment.
That woman was practical. Practical people saved lives even when they were not present.
The markers pointed toward a safer retreat route.
Su Bai followed them for a short distance, letting his Nether Threads touch each mark gently, copying the path into his own perception. Then he stopped following the route directly.
If he could read the markers, the enemies might eventually read the traces around them too.
So he prepared a small gift.
Su Bai took out a needle.
He attached a Nether Thread to it, then wrapped the thread with a layer of his Qi.
And then, he threw the needle.
The needle shot forward along Lin Weiyang’s marked trail, threading through broken stones and half-collapsed structures. As it flew, the Nether Thread behind it unwound continuously, catching onto the markers, wrapping around them, and building a convincing path of movement.
The false trail was convincing enough. Su Bai, however, had already turned away. He moved in a different direction entirely.
A breath later, a rift opened where he had been. Another followed the flying needle’s false trail. Lower Returnees found the Nether Threads wrapped around the markers and followed them.
The needle continued flying, dragging false traces behind it like a fleeing shadow. It passed through two marked turns, crossed a broken channel, and vanished into a region where an old blade intent cut the miasma into strips. The pursuing enemies surged after it.
Su Bai, meanwhile, slid beneath a collapsed stone arch and severed every thread connected directly to his body.
The feedback vanished. The chase moved away.
For the first time in what felt like far too long, no rift opened immediately beside him.
Su Bai stood in the shadow of the collapsed arch, listening.
There was nothing. There’s only the distant groan of old formations and the hiss of Ashen-Blood Miasma being cut apart by ancient weapon intents.
He had escaped... temporarily.
Su Bai let out a slow breath.
His Qi was not depleted, but the familiar hunger had begun gnawing at him again. The hunger scratched at his organs and reminded him that prolonged use of Dao-Shattering Jade, micro-Qi threads, repeated substitutions, array activations, and battlefield-scale manipulation had a price.
The Parasitic Beast-Master’s Branding Iron had kept his stamina high. The Wraith-Slumber Manacle on his wrist also helped dull fatigue and stabilize exhaustion.
Because of those two, his body did not feel as tired as it should have.
That was useful. It was also dangerous.
A body that did not feel tired could still spend too much.
Su Bai looked down at his palm. The faint trembling in his fingers was not from fear. It was from Qi strain and too much precise control in too short a time.
He needed to hide.
Su Bai moved deeper into Layer Two.
He did not choose the easy routes. Instead, he relied on the battlefield map pieced together from dead memories.
He passed near a sword intent scar that had torn a permanent slit in space. The wound in the air was thin, almost beautiful, like a black line drawn across reality. Anything that touched it was cut without sound.
Su Bai kept a respectful distance.
Beyond the sword scar was a trench half-hidden by collapsed stone. It lay behind overlapping weapon intents.
The place was terrible, which meant it was good.
Even the Returnees avoided this area. Anything entering carelessly would be cut, pinned, crushed, or shaken apart.
Su Bai slipped into the trench.
He carefully lowered his body, tightened the tenth tribulation mark’s suppression around himself, and withdrew the exposed ends of his Qi.
The trench was narrow, dark, and filled with stale air sealed for countless years.
Su Bai finally sat down.
For several breaths, he did nothing.
That alone felt rare enough to be a treasure.
After his breathing steadied, Su Bai looked inward.
The first thing he checked was not his Golden Core, his Qi reservoirs, or his injuries.
It was the Soul-Bloom Bud.
The closed black-red crystalline bud rested on the Crystalline Tree Spirit Root. Compared to before, its surface had become deeper in color. Faint vein-like patterns moved beneath the petals, like threads inside crystal. It had absorbed several bloom eruptions, and traces from the chase.
It was still closed.
Su Bai stared at it for a long time, then his expression slowly became serious.
At first, he had treated the misrecognition as a convenient accident.
The Returnees saw the Soul-Bloom Bud as something familiar. Since it helped him, Su Bai had not questioned it too deeply.
But now that he thought about it again, something was wrong.
His tenth tribulation mark should have hidden his aura. Everything inside his body should have been covered by that suppression. The mark had always been reliable.
So how could the Returnees recognize the Soul-Bloom Bud?
How could the sealed source notice it?
The more Su Bai thought about it, the colder the answer became.
Maybe the problem was not that the tenth tribulation mark had failed.
Maybe the problem was that the sealed source and its creations were not reading him through the same rules.
A thought surfaced.
’Could it be that those things did not fully follow the Laws of the Heavenly Dao?’
Su Bai immediately pushed the thought down.
Some guesses were too large to chew while hiding in a trench with enemies searching nearby.
Still, dismissing the thought did not make it disappear.
If the sealed source and its creations operated outside, beneath, or against the normal laws of the world, then many things made sense.
The immortal seal. The way the Returnees moved like reconstructed identities. The way the Soul-Bloom Bud could be recognized despite his suppression.
His advantage had become a flaw.
The Soul-Bloom Bud helped him fool Returnees, collapse bloom eruptions, and feed on their power.
It also marked him as something the sealed source could notice.
Su Bai sighed.
"Nothing good is ever purely good."
He did not know when the enemies would find him again, but he knew they would. The false trail would not fool Void-Shattering Returnees forever. The sealed source was not stupid. The battlefield itself was not endless. Eventually, they would narrow the search.
Before then, he needed more advantage.
Su Bai opened the system inventory.
He originally planned to use the automatic sign-in rewards accumulated during the past few days, and see which items could help him cultivate or hide.
Instead, his gaze landed on several sealed jade boxes.
Su Bai went still.
Inside those boxes were the dead flesh fragments he had killed and sealed earlier.
A bad idea entered his mind. Then it sat down comfortably, as if it had always lived there.
He gulped.
"Just when I was getting hungry."
His stomach gave a faint response, but he remembered the sealed source at the center of the altar.
The pulsing palace-sized flesh. The overlapping mouths under the bronze pagoda. The jointless limb pinned by three swords. The eye opening beneath the chain-wrapped bell.
For once, his appetite hesitated.
Su Bai looked at the jade boxes in silence.
"Understandable."
But hesitation was not refusal.
For a normal cultivator, eating such a flesh fragment would be suicide. It might contaminate the blood, rot the meridians, twist the flesh, pollute the soul, and perhaps plant the beginning of a failed bloom. Even if the fragment was dead, its remaining essence was still born from the source of Ashen-Blood Miasma.
For Su Bai, that sounded suspiciously like cultivation material.
The only problem was the form.
It still looked like flesh.
Su Bai took out the sealed jade boxes.
He did not open all of them carelessly. He laid Nether Threads around the trench first, then placed a few small warning threads near the entrance.
Only then did he open the first jade box.
A dead black-red flesh fragment lay inside.
Su Bai formed several large Qi needles and pierced the flesh fragment. He pinned it in midair above a flat stone. Ashen-Frost Blight Flame rose from his fingertip and wrapped around the fragment.
The flame burned cold.
Gray-white frost formed around the meat-like surface, then sank inward. The outer layer stiffened, cracked, and began to release thin strands of red-black vapor.
The vapor tried to spread, but Su Bai inhaled lightly and let the Reversal Body seize the harmful essence.
The Soul-Bloom Bud pulsed. His Crystalline Tree Spirit Root stirred faintly.
Su Bai watched the flesh fragment slowly roast under a cold flame.
He had expected it to smell horrible.
It did not.
A rich aroma gradually filled the trench.
It was deep, heavy, and strangely enticing, like roasted meat, medicinal resin, and something ancient that should not be food but had somehow become food anyway.
Su Bai froze.
His stomach rumbled.
For a moment, man and flesh fragment stared at each other.
The flesh fragment had no eyes, but Su Bai still felt judged.
He cleared his throat.
"This is medicinal cuisine."
No one answered.
The Ashen-Frost Blight Flame continued burning coldly.
The aroma became stronger.
Su Bai’s expression turned solemn, as if he were facing a profound life-and-death decision.