The sect sent cultivators back the following morning.
Not their strongest. The lesson of the mountain crater was still fresh enough that nobody with real seniority was volunteering to return to the site of whatever had killed Soj's barrier in a single strike. They sent middle ranks. Capable enough to handle whatever remained. Expendable enough that losing them would not be a strategic problem.
They teleported in at the crater's edge and spread out immediately.
The valley was quiet.
The village was empty. The ruins of the houses still stood but nothing moved inside them. The trenches were abandoned. The forge was cold. The storage houses had been cleared out. Whatever army had operated here had dispersed completely and left behind only the physical evidence of what they had built.
The cultivators moved through it systematically.
They found mortals in the surrounding area. Farmers from nearby settlements. Traders on the roads. People who had heard the explosion and the rumors and were trying to understand what had happened to the mountain that had always been there.
The sect cultivators killed them quietly and efficiently.
Information containment. Standard procedure after an incident of this scale. Anyone who had seen the weapons. Anyone who had heard descriptions of the weapons. Anyone who had been close enough to the valley during the fighting to have observed anything worth reporting. The circle of knowledge had to be reduced to the people inside the sect who were already studying the problem.
They worked through the day.
In the sect's records hall a junior archivist had been pulling everything available on the mountain cultivator's disciple roster when she found the anomaly.
Houji had no entry record.
Every disciple registered with a sect went through intake documentation. Origin village. Cultivation aptitude assessment. Date of arrival. Sponsoring senior. It was bureaucratic and tedious and absolutely mandatory.
Houji had none of it.
He appeared in the mountain cultivator's correspondence approximately one month before the incident. Referenced casually as "my disciple in the eastern village" with no preceding documentation of how he had come to be in that position.
She flagged it and moved on. There were larger problems this morning than a paperwork irregularity.
Huang Shing had known they would come back.
He had known it before the cannon had finished firing. A sect that had sent a fifth rank cultivator through a teleportation formation to investigate a mortal rebellion was not going to leave the site unexamined afterward. They would send someone. They would sweep the area. They would find every mortal they could locate and remove them as potential sources of information.
He had moved three days before they arrived.
Not quickly. Not frantically. With the methodical patience of someone who had planned for this contingency from the beginning. He had taken everything worth taking from the settlement. Every weapon. Every schematic. Every piece of documentation he had produced during the preparation months. He had destroyed what he could not carry and left the rest to look like the abandoned remains of a failed rebellion rather than the forward operating base of an ongoing operation.
Then he had gone deeper into the forest.
Much deeper.
The forest was vast and old and full of things that made cultivators cautious about extending their divine sense too far into it. Huang Shing had mapped it thoroughly over the preceding months through his drones and he knew exactly where the boundaries of cultivator comfort ended and the unchecked wilderness began.
He set up past that boundary.
In the quiet of the deep forest with his equipment around him and his audio feed still running and his cloning machine humming its steady rhythm he sat down and drank his tea and listened to the sect cultivators moving through the empty valley below.
They found nothing he had not intended them to find.