"Something is wrong..."
The double report Lin Ping had rattled off in rapid-fire succession — driven by sheer panic — was now being dismantled and replayed in Lin Mu's mind, over and over again.
The White Bone Stockade's "come-and-get-beaten" friendly tournament reeked of conspiracy, but it could still be rationalized as some scheme of Li Mang's.
The intelligence about the Jia Clan Caravan arriving three months ahead of schedule, however, was something else entirely. It was a sharp, ice-cold poisoned thorn driving straight into Lin Mu's taut nerves.
In the ten-thousand mountains of the Southern Border — a land riddled with danger, overrun by demonic beasts — a caravan's route and schedule were iron law, written in the blood and bones of countless generations.
When to move, when to stop, where beast hordes migrated, where toxic miasma erupted — all of it was the product of meticulous calculation and endless bloody lessons, refined into the optimal windows of travel.
A behemoth like the Jia Clan Caravan moved with the weight of a thousand interconnected threads.
How could they possibly, for no reason whatsoever, set out in full force in the depths of autumn — spring not yet arrived, wind and snow not yet spent — absorbing enormous losses and risks just to advance their schedule?
When something defies all reason, a great demon lurks behind it.
"The Jia Clan Caravan... ahead of schedule..."
Lin Mu paced back and forth across the courtyard, his brow locked into a deep furrow. He tore through his exhausted, chaotic memory with frantic urgency.
Then —
Crack!
A name long sealed away detonated like a bolt of savage lightning splitting a pitch-black sky, cleaving through every last shred of fog in his mind.
Jia Jinsheng.
In the light of that lightning strike, every cause, every contradiction, every piece that had refused to fit — in that single instant, they snapped together into a perfect, airtight, bone-chilling loop.
"I see it now..."
Lin Mu's pupils contracted to pinpoints. He drew a sharp, icy breath.
"The reason the caravan is pushing forward at full speed — throwing all convention aside, disrupting their schedule by three full months — is because of something catastrophic that befell the caravan's leader, Jia Fu, when they passed through Qing Mao Mountain."
"His younger brother. Jia Jinsheng. Died at Gu Yue Village."
Jia Fu needed to return and answer to the clan's upper echelon. He needed to avoid falling behind in his succession struggle against his rival.
Under that crushing political and psychological pressure, he had no choice but to take the most aggressive course of action — depart early, accumulate achievements, and travel to Gu Yue Village to investigate his brother's death.
That was what had thrown the entire caravan's schedule into chaos.
And the true culprit who had assassinated Jia Jinsheng on Qing Mao Mountain — the one who had set this butterfly effect in motion —
"Fang Yuan."
Thud. Thud. Thud.
The moment the deduction crystallized and that suffocating name surfaced in the depths of his mind, Lin Mu's heart began to pound in his chest with a force he could not suppress.
Even his breathing grew heavy and labored.
His hands clenched into fists at his sides. His fingernails drove into his palms. He did not feel the pain.
The precise coordinates had finally been locked.
Before this moment, Lin Mu had known he existed within this brutal world of Gu, and had known of Fang Yuan — that supreme killing star.
But he had been like a ghost adrift in the river of time, never able to accurately determine which point in the timeline he actually occupied.
He had not known whether this was Fang Yuan's first life or his second. Though every prediction he had made was calibrated against the reborn Fang Yuan, that had always been an assumption.
But now, the intelligence of the Jia Clan Caravan's early departure had become an iron-clad, irrefutable piece of evidence.
Jia Jinsheng was dead. The Qing Mao Mountain arc had officially begun.
And that meant something even more scalp-numbing, something that sent a chill crawling through every nerve — the world he currently inhabited was the very timeline where the truly reborn Fang Yuan already walked.
Confirming this fact struck Lin Mu with a psychological impact unlike anything he had ever felt. It was an overwhelming, mountainous force.
It was a feeling that mixed terror, trembling, and a thread of hidden, feverish excitement into something extreme.
And yet, it was precisely that extreme stimulation — like staring directly into the face of death — that hit him like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head.
Under that violent, shuddering shock, his mind — somewhat dulled and muddled from the long days of closed-door cultivation — suddenly became razor-sharp. Crystalline. Operating at a speed that surpassed its ordinary limits.
"Wait..."
Lin Mu's head snapped up. Two terrifying flashes of light erupted from his dark eyes.
He turned back and re-examined the first matter Lin Ping had reported — the one he had mentally set aside the moment the caravan news hit.
White Bone Stockade's Patriarch Li Mang, acting entirely out of character, proactively proposing a "Friendly Tournament Between the Two Stockades."
Before, he had made a simple deduction: Li Mang wanted to use the tournament as a pretext to search the area near Black Blood Stockade for the inheritance.
But now, under that ice-cold, "Fang Yuan-style" clarity of thought, Lin Mu saw it — the single greatest blind spot in his thinking.
A fatal blind spot. One that had nearly cost him everything without him ever realizing it.
"Inheritance resonance."
A dense layer of cold sweat broke out across Lin Mu's forehead and ran down his face.
"My Pitch-Black Bone Plate is only a half-ruined 'instruction manual.' So I have no signal — I cannot sense him."
"But what made me think — even for a moment — that Li Mang cannot sense me?"
If his act of forcibly awakening the Black Bone King's will within the Bone Plate, down in that underground chamber, was like lighting a torch in the darkness — then Li Mang, holding his Bone Scepter, would have caught that signal the instant it flared.
Hah... hah...
Lin Mu breathed in sharp, ragged pulls. Cold sweat soaked through to his bones. Every piece of the puzzle snapped into place at once.
"If that old fox Li Mang could precisely sense that the Bone Plate was on me — on Lin Mu — then with his terrifying peak Rank 3 power, he would have long since abandoned all restraint and come for me in the dark. He would have flayed me alive and taken the treasure."
But he had not come to kill.
"He didn't come to kill me. Instead, he dangled this enormously troublesome 'Friendly Tournament.' That means his resonance is imprecise."
"He knows the inheritance was activated somewhere deep within Black Blood Stockade's territory — but he cannot narrow it down to a specific individual."
The objective was now plain as day.
Lin Mu stared in the direction of the External Affairs Hall. His gaze was cold to the point of being glacial.
"Resolving old grievances. Fully sponsored. What a story."
"The one and only purpose of the tournament that old ghost Li Mang has cooked up is to use the pretext of an inter-stockade exchange to walk through Black Blood Stockade's gates in broad daylight, with every justification in the world."
He intended to use the close contact of the tournament to conduct a systematic, sweep-by-sweep inspection — right under everyone's eyes.
At close enough range, that Bone Scepter would pinpoint exactly who was carrying the Bone Plate.
Which meant him.
Every thread of the situation was now clear.
Lin Mu snapped fully awake from the lingering satisfaction of his successful cultivation.
He had thought he had finally earned the right to place a piece on the board — only to find that the moment he sat down at the table, a peak Rank 3 old monster had already pressed a blade against his throat.
Ahead of him: the supreme old demon Fang Yuan, reborn and returned, on the verge of throwing the entire Southern Border into chaos.
Behind him: Li Mang, the White Bone strongman, Bone Scepter in hand, marching his forces to the doorstep to conduct a sweep that would leave nowhere to hide.
The weight of reality crashed down onto Lin Mu's shoulders like a mountain.