Infiltrating Iron Bone Sect required resources Lin Xuan had accumulated: spirit stones, blackmail materials, identity forgeries. He created "Disciple Outer," a wandering cultivator seeking sect membership, background supported by destroyed villages and fabricated witnesses.
The sect's recruitment process tested cultivation, loyalty, and potential. Lin Xuan displayed Qi Refinement sixth layer—suppressed from Foundation Establishment to avoid attention—and demonstrated adequate sword technique. His "age" of sixteen made him unremarkable, acceptable, forgettable.
Acceptance granted access to outer disciple facilities: shared quarters, basic manuals, restricted library sections. The true target—inner library containing temporal research—remained distant, requiring years of service or exceptional contribution.Lin Xuan accelerated through contribution. His pill knowledge, carefully disguised as "intuition," produced minor innovations outer disciples couldn't replicate. He identified herb combinations improving common medicines, suggested training methods reducing injury rates, located spiritual energy concentrations others missed.
Within six months, "Disciple Outer" became notable, promoted to inner disciple candidate status. This provided library access one level deeper, where he found references to Heaven's Mandate Rebirthed—cultivators who died and returned, documented across millennia.The records were fragmentary, heavily censored, suggesting systematic suppression. What remained described reborn souls as "temporal contaminants," dangers to heaven's order, targets for elimination by specialized hunters.
Heaven's Enforcers. Entities or organizations dedicated to preserving timeline purity by destroying reborn cultivators. The description matched nothing Lin Xuan had encountered, but Hong Ming's paranoia suddenly seemed justified.He copied everything, memorized more, destroyed evidence of his research. The risk of discovery increased with each forbidden page turned; Iron Bone Sect's security was crude but sufficient against normal intrusion.Escape required abandoning "Disciple Outer" entirely. Lin Xuan engineered his death—apparent cultivation accident during energy deviation—leaving a body burned beyond recognition, actually a purchased corpse modified through pill techniques.
He returned to Azure Cloud City as Lin Clan's third young master, now possessing critical intelligence. Reborn souls were hunted. His alliance with Hong Ming became survival necessity rather than convenience.The fractured ley line's sealing approached in eighteen months. He needed maximum exploitation before fleeing to wider world where Heaven's Enforcers might operate more freely.Time compressed. Plans accelerated.