Chapter 94 - 93: Trespass? (3)
At the central courtyard, Lin Yuan stood over the intruders, his tunic perfectly still in the breeze. His eyes were entirely devoid of the warmth he had just shown Bai Qingyue in the master pavilion. Right now, he was not the doting husband, but a Nascent Soul expert passing judgment upon those who dared trespass upon his home.
"I am not a man who enjoys wasting time," Lin Yuan’s voice broke the silence, calm, even, and echoing with a terrifying resonance that vibrated directly within the captives’ bodies. "You have trespassed upon my domain. You have threatened the peace of my family. I will ask my questions once. If I am forced to wait for your answers, the consequences will be etched permanently into your soul."
The three men—two at the Middle Foundation Establishment realm and their leader at the Early Core Formation realm—twitched violently on the ground. The lightning coiled around their limbs was not just a physical restraint; it actively suppressed their cultivation, leaving them feeling as frail and vulnerable as mortal peasants.
"Let us begin with the simplest of matters," Lin Yuan said, taking a slow step forward. "Where did you come from, and which faction do you belong to?"
The two Foundation Establishment scouts exchanged a frantic glance. They were highly trained operatives, conditioned through decades of brutal torture resistance to never reveal their origins. Their silence was instinctive. They clenched their jaws, shivering under the tension, hoping their leader would dictate the protocol.
The hesitation lasted for precisely two breaths.
Then....
BOOM!
Lin Yuan immediately allowed a mere fraction of his Nascent Soul Aura to bleed into the physical world.
The spiritual pressure within a ten-foot radius of Lin Yuan violently multiplied by a factor of a thousand. The floor immediately spider-webbed, emitting a deafening crunch as the sheer weight of Lin Yuan’s cultivation pressed down upon the three captives.
"GAAAH!" The two Foundation Establishment intruder screamed in agony. It felt as though an entire mountain range had just been dropped onto their spines. They could physically hear their own ribs beginning to micro-fracture under the crushing pressure.
"We are from the capital!" one of the scouts shrieked, completely breaking under the pressure. "The capital! Sky Jade City! We belong to the Shadow-Wind intelligence network! Please, Senior, have mercy! We are just humble trackers!"
Lin Yuan withdrew the crushing aura as quickly as he had applied it. The sudden release of pressure caused the three men to violently gasp for air, coughing up small amounts of blood onto the floor.
"Sky Jade City," Lin Yuan repeated softly, his mind rapidly processing the information. The capital of the Zhao Province was a sprawling metropolis filled with sects and towering political figures. It was a place far beyond the petty squabbles of Azure Cloud City’s three clans.
He slowly shifted his gaze from the weeping intruder to the leader. The Early Core Formation expert was faring slightly better than his men, but his face was deathly pale, covered in a thick sheen of cold sweat.
"Now for the primary question," Lin Yuan said, his voice dropping to a chilling tone. "Who sent you?"
The leader clamped his mouth shut. To reveal his employer was an absolute death sentence, an unparalleled taboo in the underworld of Sky Jade City. The man who had hired them possessed a reach so vast and terrifying that betraying him guaranteed not only the leader’s death but the brutal eradication of his entire bloodline back in the capital.
Ten breaths passed in heavy silence. The leader squeezed his eyes shut, preparing for the inevitable.
Lin Yuan did not immediately flare his aura. Instead, he stepped directly in front of the bound Core Formation expert and crouched down, bringing his face mere inches from the terrified leader.
"You are weighing my wrath against the wrath of your master," Lin Yuan whispered. "You believe that whoever sent you is a monster capable of punishing your betrayal. But you are failing to realize your immediate reality. Your master is miles away in a comfortable pavilion. I am right here. And I possess the ability to pull your Golden Core from your chest, shatter it, and force your conscious soul to watch as I feed your cultivation to the lowest beasts of the Endless Forest."
To demonstrate, Lin Yuan lightly placed his index finger against the center of the leader’s chest. A single needle of thunder pierced through the man, instantly tapping directly against the surface of his Golden Core.
The sensation of having one’s spiritual foundation directly touched by a higher-dimensional destructive force was beyond pain. It was profound horror.
"Who sent you?" Lin Yuan asked again.
The leader’s psychological sense completely shattered.
"The Envoy!" the leader sobbed, his voice cracking violently. "It was the Envoy of the Cultivation Council! Envoy Zhao Wuhen!"
Lin Yuan’s eyes flickered, the revelation locking into place like a final puzzle piece. Envoy Zhao Wuhen—the Middle Stage Nascent Soul monster he had engaged in the Wang Clan estate. The very same man who had attempted to recruit him, and upon being rejected, had politely bowed and seemingly washed his hands of the entire affair.
"Explain," Lin Yuan demanded, keeping his finger pressed against the man’s chest.
"He hired us through a proxy in Sky Jade City!" the leader stammered rapidly, desperate to appease the person crouching before him. "The Envoy did not want any official Cultivation Council operatives involved! His orders were incredibly strict! He commanded us to track your aura from Azure Cloud City and locate your permanent place of residence!"
"And what were your orders upon finding me?" Lin Yuan pressed, his gaze cold.
"To observe and report!" the leader cried out. "He explicitly ordered us not to engage you under any circumstances whatsoever! We were told that you were an unfathomable monster at the Nascent Soul realm, and that any hostility would result in our immediate deaths. We were only supposed to confirm your exact location, map out the defensive arrays of this estate, and immediately escape to report back to him!"
Lin Yuan slowly stood up, withdrawing his finger. He looked out over the darkened emerald valley, his mind working through a thousand different scenarios in the span of a single second.
Zhao Wuhen was an Envoy of the Cultivation Council. He was a man who operated on absolute pragmatism. He had witnessed Lin Yuan’s terrifying soul foundation and his peerless Dao firsthand. A direct confrontation had yielded no benefits for the Envoy.
So why hire shadow-scouts?
Is it for revenge? Lin Yuan mused internally. Does he intend to rally the other two Envoys and return to crush me for the seemed slight against his authority? Or is it something far more insidious? Does he intend to use my location as leverage? To find my weaknesses? To discover Bai Qingyue and Bai Chen, and use them as hostages to force me into the Council’s servitude?
Whatever the Envoy’s true intentions were, Lin Yuan did not know them yet. But one thing was absolutely, undeniably certain.
He looked down at the three intruders.
"I do not yet know what Envoy Zhao Wuhen plans to do with the intelligence you were supposed to gather," Lin Yuan stated, his voice devoid of any mercy. "But I absolutely cannot allow him to possess it. My wife rests within these walls, and her peace is the one thing in this universe I will protect at all costs. I cannot have the Cultivation Council knowing the layout of my home."
The leader’s eyes widened. "Senior! We told you everything! We swear on our Hearts we will flee the Zhao Province entirely! We will never speak a word of this!"
"A sworn Heart can be broken. A severed tongue cannot speak, but a dead man can be subjected to soul-searching techniques," Lin Yuan replied coldly. "I will not kill you yet. There are certainly more things I want to know about the Cultivation Council and its shady dealings. For now, I will imprison the three of you."
With a swift, sweeping gesture of his arm, Lin Yuan lifted all three men into the air.
When he had seamlessly accepted this grand estate from Wang Tianze, his divine sense had rapidly mapped every single inch of the property. Because it was formally owned by a merchant clan known for holding high-value hostages and storing dangerous, living beasts, the estate came equipped with a specialized containment facility.
Lin Yuan floated the three captives across the courtyard, heading toward a heavy iron door built directly into the base of a retaining wall.
With a pulse of his Qi, the heavy iron doors groaned open, revealing a dark staircase leading deep underground. Lin Yuan descended into the damp subterranean level, dragging the floating captives behind him.
At the bottom of the stairs lay a row of heavy underground cells. The walls were forged of absolute dark-iron, etched with suppression arrays designed to completely drain and nullify the cultivation of anyone locked inside.
Lin Yuan callously tossed the three men into the cell at the end of the corridor. They crashed against the cold floor in a tangled heap, entirely unable to break their falls due to the Qi Ropes.
"You will remain here," Lin Yuan declared, stepping back and watching as the heavy dark-iron bars forcefully slammed shut, locking into place with a finalizing clang.
He activated the spirit-sealing array on the wall. The runes flared to life, instantly cutting the captives off from the ambient spiritual qi of the world, condemning them to the cold darkness of the underground dungeon.
With his home now secured, Lin Yuan walked back up the stairs, returning to the surface to his wife.