Chapter 375 - A Hidden Barrier and an Unfinished Formation

Chapter 375: Chapter 375 - A Hidden Barrier and an Unfinished Formation

The district lord offered to send a guide, but Su Bai asked him to show Liu Meng the road on the map instead.

Once she knew which bend to look for, there was little a man on horseback could do for them.

Xiao Ran stayed at the residence with the auction-house staff while the five cultivators took to their swords.

They reached the settlement under moonlight.

Most of the houses were dark, and the few people still outside were bringing in tools or checking the doors of their sheds.

Su Bai swept his spiritual sense along the lanes and across the yards. He found no trace of demonic Qi. Even the dogs had settled for the night.

In one house, however, a woman had set a lamp on the sill and kept returning to the window. Two bowls waited on her table, one across from the other.

Su Bai withdrew his awareness before he could see whether she meant to clear either of them away.

"Has anyone found anything?" Liu Meng asked.

Ji Ruyue shook her head. Han Yuelin and Qin Baoshan had come back from the far end of the village with much the same answer.

Su Bai looked past them toward the woods. A search of the houses might tell them who had gone missing, but if the demonic groups here worked the way Ning Shuang had described, the ground they wanted would lie outside the village.

He remembered the points she had drawn around a settlement on the tea house table. They had been unevenly spaced, but the suitable places had one thing in common. People could work there for some time without being seen from a house or a well-used road.

"There’s a rise behind those trees," Su Bai said. "We’ll start there."

They followed him along the edge of the woods until the roofs disappeared behind them.

The first place he wanted to check was a broad shelf of land screened by the slope on one side and thick trees on the other. The nearest path turned downhill well before reaching it.

From above, Su Bai could see a clearing with enough open ground to lay a formation, though at first it appeared to hold little besides weeds and a fallen branch.

His eyes passed over it and told him much the same thing. He nearly moved on.

That’s when the Needle Intent in his Sea of Consciousness stirred as his attention crossed the base of a tree.

Su Bai went back over that spot.

His sense followed the ground around the roots easily enough, yet every time he tried to trace the narrow strip just beyond them, he found himself examining the same patch of weeds.

He chose a root he could see in the moonlight and followed it outward. The root continued for another foot. The impression returned to him ended at precisely the same place as before.

His True Needle Intent settled on the discrepancy.

He narrowed his spiritual sense to a thread and guided it past the spot where he kept losing track of the root.

This time it went through.

Only then did he realize why his eyes kept returning to the same patch of weeds. A concealment array had been guiding him away from the clearing.

The empty clearing remained before his naked eyes, but his spiritual sense found people moving where there should have been nothing.

There were four people in the clearing.

Three Foundation Establishment Demonic Cultivators were drawing lines across the soil under the direction of a man at Golden Core.

Near the edge, several villagers lay in the grass. One of the cultivators knelt beside them, drawing fresh blood into a shallow bowl. He stirred it into a dark paste, tested the mixture with his brush, and went back to work.

A woman lying nearest the trees still had a gathering basket strapped to her back.

"Senior Brother?" Liu Meng had drawn close enough to see his face.

"There’s a concealment array," Su Bai said, pointing toward the exposed root. "Try sending your spiritual sense just past the tip."

Liu Meng followed his direction, then frowned. "I keep coming back to the weeds."

"That’s where it turns you aside. Narrow your sense and keep it in line with the root." He waited until she was ready to try again. "Stay close to the trees once you’re through. I can get close without being noticed, but they may feel it if your sense brushes against them."

Liu Meng tried again. The clearing looked just as empty from where she stood, yet this time she could sense someone kneeling in the grass.

For a moment she thought he was tending to an injured villager. Then he lifted the bowl, and she realized what he had been collecting. Her fingers curled into her palm.

The others followed the route Su Bai had shown her. Han Yuelin’s hand went to his sword when he saw how many bodies lay in the grass. Beside him, Ji Ruyue’s brows rose as the man dipped his brush into the bowl, and Qin Baoshan eased his shield forward without letting the rim catch on a branch.

The Golden Core cultivator stopped one of his subordinates just as the man was about to join two lines.

He pointed with a finger, and the disciple scraped away a section he had spent some time drawing.

Su Bai studied the correction. The nearest line appeared to feed into its neighbor. The instant the brush lifted, however, the Qi took hold farther along, at a point with no visible connection to either.

He had seen the same principle in the arrays etched into the disciples who had traveled with Ning Shuang. He still could not tell what this formation was meant to do. He knew enough to recognize why its lines had bothered him.

The man at Golden Core watched the disciple make the correction. There was an ease to the way he directed the work, and the others obeyed before he had finished speaking.

Neither that nor his knowledge of formations would have meant much on its own.

What unsettled Su Bai was the moment the man reached down to adjust the brush himself.

His Qi moved ahead of his hand, and for an instant his fingers seemed to be catching up with something that had already decided where they should go.

Ning Shuang’s possessed companion had given him that same impression.

Su Bai lowered his Glacier-Lung Bone Mask into place. "Cover your faces. We don’t know who else comes here."

Qin Baoshan reached into his storage and took out three plain masks he had made himself. He passed them to Ji Ruyue, Han Yuelin, and Liu Meng before putting on his own.

Liu Meng tied hers with some difficulty. Her hands had only just begun to unclench.

"I’ll take the one at Golden Core," Su Bai said. "The rest are yours, but stay clear of the lines if you can. Once the clearing is secure, we’ll store the villagers’ bodies and bring them home."

Liu Meng looked once more toward the edge of the clearing, then shifted her attention to the man with the bowl. Across from her, Ji Ruyue adjusted her grip on her sword.

They were ready.

Su Bai summoned his nine Natal Needles and separated one from the rest. The opening he had used for his spiritual sense was too small to bring the whole barrier down by itself, but he could now follow it to the place where the adjoining sections drew their strength.

He set the needle on that line and sent it forward.

Half a breath later, the clearing shattered around the people it had been hiding.