Two weeks.
That was how long they had been running.
From the moment they had stepped out of the Moon Shrine Tomb, it had been a constant cycle of fleeing, resting, and fleeing again. Xu Yang still didn't know exactly how Ling Zhi planned to cross the valley between domains — and frankly, he didn't ask. He had learned quickly that questioning her plans was an excellent way to get ignored, and questioning her competence was an excellent way to get hurt.
So he kept his mouth shut and let himself be dragged along.
Literally dragged, as it happened. For two weeks, Ling Zhi had been flying at full speed with Xu Yang dangling from her grip by the collar of his robes, like a mother cat carrying a particularly useless kitten. It wasn't dignified. He had stopped caring about dignity somewhere around day three.
The elders pursuing them were at the Soul Fusion realm — two full realms above Nascent Soul. On paper, there was no world in which a freshly broken-through Nascent Soul cultivator and a peak Foundation Establishment disciple should have been able to evade them for this long.
But Ling Zhi, as Xu Yang was quickly learning, did not operate within the boundaries of what was supposed to be possible.
She had come prepared for nearly everything. Among her many artifacts was one that sent out a silent alert the moment a cultivator above a certain threshold entered a fixed radius around them. The moment it triggered, they packed up and moved — no hesitation, no debate. It had saved their lives more than once.
As for how the sect had found out about Dai Qing'an's death so quickly — the answer was almost embarrassingly obvious once Xu Yang thought about it.
The soul lamp.
Every disciple of significance had one kept within the sect — a flame that burned in tandem with its owner's life. The moment Dai Qing'an died, his soul lamp had gone dark. The Sect Leader would have felt it immediately.
Whether the elders had been sent out of grief or greed was debatable. Xu Yang privately suspected it was mostly the latter. The Sect Leader knew what kind of tomb that had been. He knew what might have been retrieved from it. And now someone had walked out with his son's token and his son's corpse left behind in the dark.
That wasn't the kind of thing a Sect Leader let go of quietly.
Xu Yang did notice, with some private satisfaction, that Ling Zhi didn't have a way to deal with the soul lamp. She had prepared for trackers, for pursuit formations, for ambushes — but not for that. It was a small thing, barely a crack in her otherwise impenetrable composure, but it told him something important.
She wasn't omniscient.
That thought gave him more comfort than it probably should have.
With nothing to do but hang from her grip and watch the landscape blur past below him, Xu Yang's mind was left to wander. After a while, it landed on something practical.
"Senior Ling Zhi," he said, raising his voice slightly over the wind. "Now that we've left the sect behind, what am we supposed to do about cultivation techniques? We'll need something for future cultivation eventually."
She glanced down at him briefly.
"Speak for yourself. Did you think that essence orb I absorbed was only for increasing my talent?"
Xu Yang blinked. Then it clicked.
"You mean — it contained a cultivation technique as well?"
He processed this for exactly one second before his expression shifted entirely. Whatever remained of his pride quietly excused itself from the conversation.
"Ahem." He cleared his throat with great solemnity. "My most powerful, magnificent, and incomparably wise master — would you perhaps consider sharing even a fragment of that technique with your humble and devoted servant?"
He looked up at her with the most genuinely pitiful eyes he could manage.
What pride? What dignity? If I can get my hands on a Heaven Ascending cultivator's technique, none of that matters even slightly.
He knew it was a long shot. But he had to try.
Ling Zhi stared at him for a moment.
"Sure."
Xu Yang blinked again.
"…Really?"
"I won't give you the main technique of the moon emperor" she said flatly, "but I have more than enough supplementary ones that can get you to Core Formation. Don't get ahead of yourself."
The excitement dimmed slightly. Xu Yang already had several techniques capable of getting him to Core Formation — the problem was that all of them were mediocre at best. Adequate for breaking through, yes, but none of them offered any meaningful boost to combat ability. None of them would give him the kind of edge that let a cultivator survive an encounter with someone a minor realm above them.
That was what he had been quietly waiting for. Not just a technique that could push him through to the next stage, but one that could make the journey worth taking — something that gave him genuine self-preservation capability, the kind that kept you breathing when someone stronger decided you were in their way.
His ambitions weren't grand. He had no desire to fight across multiple major realms or carve out some legendary reputation. He simply wanted to survive long enough to keep breaking through, and eventually — if fate was willing — to achieve immortality.
Everything else could wait.
He was still turning this over in his head when a sharp slap landed on the back of his skull.
He looked up immediately, arranging his expression into something appropriately apologetic.
"Are you looking down on my technique?" Ling Zhi asked, her tone carrying the specific kind of calm that suggested her anger.
Before he could answer, a jade slip sailed down from her hand. He caught it reflexively and pressed his spiritual sense into it.
He started reading.
The further he got, the more his expression changed.
********
Core Formation was, in most respects, a brutal process.
A Foundation Establishment cultivator spent years — sometimes decades — building up their qi sea, filling it layer by layer until it became a vast liquid ocean of compressed spiritual energy. The breakthrough to Core Formation then required the cultivator to take that entire ocean and compress it further, collapsing it inward with brutal, sustained force until the liquid solidified and the pressure became so extreme that the dantian itself shattered — and from that destruction, a core was born.
The core was everything. Its quality determined the ceiling of the cultivator's future, and that quality was sorted by colour and structure into distinct tiers.
At the lowest end sat the Common Core — golden in colour, but plain, unmarked, unremarkable. Above it was the Earthly Core, a deep and luminous purple that indicated exceptional foundation and talent. And at the pinnacle sat the Divine Core — golden like the Common Core but alive with engraved runes that seemed to pulse with a rhythm of their own, as though the core itself was already beginning to understand the language of heaven.
The smaller the core, the higher its density and the greater its quality. And paradoxically, a smaller core made the next breakthrough — the formation of the Nascent Soul — significantly easier. To reach Nascent Soul, a cultivator had to dissolve their core and fuse it entirely into their sea of consciousness, allowing it to gestate into a nascent soul. A large, low-quality core was difficult to dissolve and even harder to fuse. A small, high-density Divine Core practically guided the process on its own.
What made Ling Zhi's technique extraordinary was what it did to the compression process itself.
Normally, compression was a solitary act. The cultivator used their own spiritual energy and spiritual sense to guide the collapse inward, relying entirely on their own strength and will to sustain the process. Outside interference was impossible — the slightest disruption could shatter the forming core entirely.
But this technique changed the architecture of the process. It opened a carefully structured channel that allowed an external cultivator — one of significantly higher realm — to contribute their own energy to the compression from the outside, magnifying the inward pressure to a degree no single cultivator could achieve alone.
The result was a core compressed beyond what the cultivator's own power could ever have produced. Smaller, denser, more perfect. Given the right assistance, a Divine Core wasn't just possible — it was almost guaranteed.
Xu Yang slowly withdrew his spiritual sense from the jade slip.
He looked up at Ling Zhi.
"Senior," he said carefully, "am I correct in assuming that you're willing to assist me when the time comes?"
She gave a single nod, saying nothing.
He studied her face for a moment, suspicious of the uncharacteristic generosity — and she seemed to notice, as she sighed.
"Do you want me to carry you by the collar for the rest of your life?" she said. "I need you to pull your own weight. I need you strong enough to deal with minor threats on your own so I don't have to waste my attention on every ant that crosses our path." She paused. "We are not going to the Southern Domain to enjoy the scenery, Xu Yang. I have a great deal to accomplish there, and I promise you — before long, the entire Southern Domain will want us dead because of what I intend to do."
Xu Yang felt a chill run from the base of his spine to the back of his neck.
He breathed through it.
Then, after a moment of quiet calculation, he let it go. Because if Ling Zhi was planning something that would bring an entire domain down on their heads, then she almost certainly had a reason for it — and if she had a reason for it, there was almost certainly something in it for her. And if there was something in it for her, then there was probably something in it for him too, if he played his cards carefully enough.
He could work with that.
He could work with most things, as long as he was still breathing at the end of them.
"I understand," he said. "Then I'll begin with this technique as soon as those elders stop breathing down our necks."
Ling Zhi looked forward again.
"Good."