Sunlight crested the high courtyard walls and flooded the quiet side courtyard with morning light.
Mo Fan stood behind the gap in his window, watching the leaves sway in the breeze outside, brow locked in a deep frown.
Could it be... I really was overthinking it? Just paranoid?
But before the self-doubt could settle, the noise from the next room killed it dead.
BANG.
The door to Wu Feng and San Niang's room was shoved open hard.
San Niang stormed out, her face—already showing its years—twisted with open irritation, eyes shot through with red.
She'd clearly spent the entire night the same way Mo Fan had: strung tight as a wire in that deceptively peaceful courtyard, waiting for something that never came.
Wu Feng followed right behind her, expression dark, his black short blade creaking in his grip.
These two were professional robber cultivators.
They'd come along specifically to exploit the chaos of an "evil entity attack"—to loot, to profit, and to swallow Mo Fan and Fang Tong whole while everything was burning.
But the situation had stayed calm as standing water.
No chaos. And without chaos, jackals like them had nothing to fish out of the murk.
"This isn't working. We can't just sit here."
San Niang ground her teeth, stamped her foot, and dropped her voice to a sharp hiss.
"There's nothing to squeeze out of this place. Let's go find that old village head and push him."
Wu Feng's eyes narrowed. He gave a slow nod.
"Right. He claims the mutant weasel was smashed to paste—then we want proof. We need to see the meat if it's alive, or the corpse if it's dead."
"Bring the remains back to Greenwood Market as evidence. The General Affairs Hall isn't going to hand over the reward just because some old man says so."
The justification was airtight. Perfectly reasonable on the surface.
What they actually wanted was to force a crack in this village's facade—stir the water until something floated up.
With their minds made up, the two of them moved toward the courtyard gate with purpose.
"Hey, hey, hey—where are you two off to in such a mood?"
Just as they were about to step through the archway, Fang Tong's face appeared from the side—wearing that same good-natured, peacemaker's smile—and planted itself squarely in their path.
He rubbed his hands together and adopted the tone of a patient elder offering hard-won wisdom.
"We all came out here to make money, right? And making money means staying out of trouble. Since the village head's already offered to hand us the reward title for free—why go stirring things up when we don't have to?"
"But Old Fang—" Wu Feng started.
"Take my advice." Fang Tong clapped a hand on Wu Feng's shoulder.
The smile didn't waver, but something in it didn't leave room for argument.
"We're deep in the mountains here. If things turn ugly, nobody comes out ahead. Stay one more day, eat well, sleep well—tomorrow morning we walk out with our money and nobody gets hurt. What's wrong with free loot?"
A brief standoff settled over the courtyard corridor.
Behind his cracked-open door, Mo Fan watched the whole exchange through the gap with cold, unreadable eyes.
His alertness, in that moment, spiked to its absolute ceiling.
This Fang Tong...
His gaze went completely flat.
If Wu Feng and San Niang were venomous snakes straining at the leash to bite, then Fang Tong was the camouflage net being thrown over them.
Working hard to keep the snakes covered, working desperately to preserve this village's illusion of peaceful, quiet times. He was terrified that Wu Feng would shatter the peace.
The water here was murkier than Mo Fan had imagined.
In the end, under Fang Tong's combination of soft persuasion and quiet pressure—and with the unfamiliar environment making them cautious—Wu Feng and San Niang could only let out a pair of cold, frustrated snorts.
They turned around and returned to their room.
The courtyard settled back into its eerie quiet.
But Mo Fan was done waiting. Passive defense wasn't going to give him answers. Time to move proactively.
He slipped out of his room without alerting anyone, Mo Yan falling in beside him—mask on, playing the part of a silent cousin.
The two of them drifted out of the courtyard like a pair of idle wanderers with nowhere particular to be.
Noon sunlight lay warm across the village. Everything looked peaceful.
On the surface, Linshui Village wasn't much different from the mortal settlements on the outer edges of Azure Cloud Sect's territory.
If anything, it looked slightly more prosperous.
And that prosperity was exactly what made Mo Fan's hair stand on end.
Something was wrong.
He could feel it the way you feel a complex math proof slipping away—the answer right there, hovering at the edge of your tongue, but stuck on one critical step you cant quite work out.
The wrongness had a source. He just couldn't pin it down.
Where is it coming from?
He let his feet carry him toward the farmland at the village's edge.
In the midday sun, a few farmers were working the fields. Mo Fan's gaze drifted to the crops nearing harvest—and his feet stopped.
Golden wheat stretched before him. But the grain heads were full to an almost absurd degree—every single kernel identical in size, as if stamped from a mold.
Not one shriveled grain. Not one insect hole.
How on earth are these crops planted by mortals in the cultivation world? This looks like the perfect GMO wheat cultivated in top-tier, climate-controlled labs back on Earth!
Mo Fan thought back to the spirit fields he'd seen in Azure Cloud Sect's servant quarters.
Even those—regularly irrigated by low-tier cultivators using Spirit Rain Spells, tended by dedicated workers to remove pests—still produced their share of shriveled grain and bug damage. Growth was always uneven.
So how was a remote mortal village—lacking modern chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and even basic ambient spiritual energy to speak of—producing crops this flawless?
Too bizarre. This doesn't follow any natural law.
He turned and walked back toward the center of the village, carrying that shock and unease with him.
He hadn't gone far when his pupils contracted slightly once again.
Under the large locust tree at the village center, he spotted a fixed vendor stall—selling mixed grains, rough snacks, candy, and pastries.
A fixed stall.
In a tiny village of a few dozen households. Deep in the old mountains. Completely isolated. Where the economy was almost entirely self-sufficient.
The pitiful purchasing power here couldn't possibly sustain a permanent vendor.
In any normal ancient rural economy, villagers who needed needles, thread, or a small sweet would wait for a traveling peddler—someone who came through with a shoulder pole once every two weeks, maybe once a month.
A fixed stall in a place like this was extravagant. And completely illogical.
Too deliberate.
Mo Fan looked at the cheerfully smiling vendor, and the cold feeling in his chest grew heavier.
To test what was forming in his mind, he took a slow breath and walked Mo Yan over to the stall.
"What can I get for you, immortal master? All homemade—nice and clean," the vendor greeted them warmly, eyes clear and open.
The stall held ordinary mixed-grain steamed buns, rough-cut fried dough twists, and some dark-colored brown sugar cakes that looked like something children would enjoy.
Everything fit the rough, humble standard of mortal life in the Mystic Realm.
Mo Fan's gaze moved across the pastries.
"Give me one of those."
He pointed at the most ordinary-looking piece—a brown sugar cake with a slightly cracked, dry crust.
"Right away, immortal master!"
Mo Fan took it and took a seemingly casual bite.
He'd only meant to check what materials the food here was actually made of. Whether it was real. Whether it was some kind of illusion.
But the moment it hit his tongue, his chewing motion stiffened abruptly.
Hidden beneath that rough, cracked brown sugar crust was a texture that was impossibly dense and soft—melt-in-your-mouth sponge cake.
And then, right on its heels, a wave of perfectly calibrated, rich artificial buttery sweetness detonated across his taste buds.
...Hm. This is good.
It tastes exactly like the chain-brand cake delivery I used to order outside the university's south gate every day when pulling all-nighters revising my thesis back on Earth.
Exactly the same. Without a single fraction of a difference.
"That's not right..."
Mo Fan's throat worked with considerable difficulty. He spat the mouthful out—that "ancient brown sugar cake" with its unmistakable taste of modern industrial flavoring.
An indescribable, cross-dimensional chill crawled up his spine like a maggot burrowing into bone.
I am in the Mystic Realm.
I am in the deep mountains at the edge of Azure Cloud Sect's territory. There is no technology here to extract plant-based cream. And that delivery brand absolutely does NOT exist here.
Mo Fan's pupils, in this instant, shrank to pinpoints.
He snapped his head up and looked around—at the villagers smiling their honest, warm smiles at him, at the perfect golden wheat swaying in the fields, at the enthusiastic vendor waiting for his next customer.
Something's wrong.
Something is VERY wrong.