A few breaths later, Li Yan's figure had already vanished from the room.
The formation's restriction around the inn room remained active, with no fluctuation of aura leaking out, as if no one had passed through it. Naturally, no one noticed.
At this moment, a sliver of sunlight appeared on the eastern horizon. The entire city was still in a state of semi-consciousness.
In the backyard of the Hundred Dao Heavenly Treasure Pavilion, space suddenly distorted for a moment. A gray figure, wavering between illusion and reality, appeared standing in the courtyard.
The gray figure was none other than Li Yan. He stood silently in the backyard for a moment, his face devoid of expression. His Divine Sense detected no one probing the area. The faint figure quickly dissolved again, melting into the hazy light of early morning.
In a bedroom in the backyard, the black-robed middle-aged man was meditating with his eyes closed, circulating his breath. A gentle surge of Spirit Power ebbed and flowed around him. With each breath, the Spiritual Energy expanded and contracted in tune with his body.
A faint Demonic Qi emanated from the black-robed man. This Demonic Qi was very pure; it was orthodox Demonic Origin Power.
Just then, an extremely faint, illusory figure appeared abruptly behind the black-robed man. Despite someone appearing at such a close distance, the man remained completely oblivious, still slowly circulating his breath.
Li Yan's gaze was icy as he looked at the black-robed man. He could feel that the Demonic Qi emanating from the man was different from that of the demonic cultivators on the Desolate Moon Continent. To be precise, it was different from the Black Demon Clan's demonic cultivators. The Demonic Qi on the black-robed man lacked the aura of tyranny and bloodlust, instead giving off a feeling of profound weight.
'So this is an orthodox demonic cultivation method? It's a special racial power, similar to the Demonic Essence of the Demon Clan. Some magical treasures and legacy immortal arts can only be activated with Demonic Qi. This is one reason why the Demon Clan and Demonic Beast Clan are stronger than human cultivators. Their Demonic Qi and Demonic Essence can not only strengthen their physical bodies but also allow them to use both Spirit Power and Demonic Qi or Demonic Essence to cast different arts simultaneously.'
Li Yan thought of the Demonic Clan magical treasures he possessed; Spirit Power was completely unable to activate them.
After observing the man for less than a breath, Li Yan's Divine Sense quickly began to explore the room. About thirty breaths later, Li Yan withdrew his Divine Sense, a strange look on his face.
"It's not here!"
In Li Yan's understanding, cultivators would either carry their secrets with them at all times or keep them within their sensory range. He hadn't found what he was looking for in the man's most important cultivation chamber. Searching the Storage Pouch on the man's body was the last thing Li Yan wanted to do right now. He was absolutely confident he could kill the man silently. But as long as the man wasn't dead, trying to open his Storage Pouch without him knowing was simply not something he could achieve at his current cultivation level. Besides, he had come this time to find something else he had surmised.
His figure faded away again. In the cultivation chamber, the black-robed middle-aged man had no idea he had just taken a stroll before the gates of hell.
Li Yan's indistinct figure returned to the courtyard. He then swiftly drifted through every corner several times, like a phantom descending upon the land. But the result was the same; he saw nothing out of the ordinary. It seemed the other party hadn't done anything unexpected in the courtyard either.
Li Yan was a very suspicious person, and his style of doing things was different from others. He would either go straight for what he suspected most—the black-robed man's cultivation chamber—or he would first check the places others would most easily overlook, like the courtyard, several times over. After finding nothing in these two most likely places to uncover a secret, Li Yan quickly searched the main hall. He had been monitoring that area with his Divine Sense almost constantly, so this was just another sweep.
The result was exactly as Li Yan expected: no surprises, and no disappointment.
Only then did Li Yan stand before the last room. The door here was slightly ajar, as if it were an undefended room that anyone could push open and enter.
A light flashed in Li Yan's eyes. During his surveillance these past few days, he had seen the black-robed man push open this door and enter several times. However, when his Divine Sense detected a formation restriction on the room, he had immediately withdrawn and not attempted to force his way in. If he wasn't mistaken, this room was the shop's entire warehouse. He had seen the black-robed man enter this place more than ten times in the last few days, and when he came out, he would often be holding some materials. Furthermore, his Jade Slip had been placed in a Storage Pouch and carried into this room by the black-robed man. When he emerged again, his hands were empty. The Jade Slip was likely stored here as well.
A white light flashed faintly in Li Yan's hand, and a square, jade-white kerchief appeared. He had just used the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief to break the restriction and easily enter the black-robed man's cultivation chamber. Now, he was just repeating the process.
Li Yan had studied the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief countless times. But no matter what methods he tried, he was ultimately unable to uncover more of its secrets. Even at his current cultivation level, if his Divine Sense remained immersed in it for too long, he would still feel dizzy and light-headed, his entire mind nearly lost within the chaotic, yet crystal-clear, interwoven threads. Each time, the result only made Li Yan sigh. His cultivation was still too weak, his knowledge too shallow. The secrets of the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief could only be left for later.
Li Yan flicked his palm, and the white light in his hand shot towards the crack in the slightly ajar door.
The next moment, Li Yan's eyes narrowed.
'He really did set up a clever defensive restriction!'
The instant the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief covered the crack in the door, countless blue points of starlight instantly lit up in the otherwise ordinary-looking opening, and they grew brighter and brighter. Just then, a hazy white light on the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief pulsed rapidly. All the blue starlights were instantly extinguished, and a small hole slowly began to expand before Li Yan's eyes.
Without the slightest pause, Li Yan's figure immediately transformed into a streak of gray light and shot into the small hole. The moment his figure disappeared through the hole, he snatched back the Heaven-Stealing Kerchief. The expanding hole vanished in an instant, and the slightly ajar door stood there as before.
Inside the room, several glowing moonlight stones were embedded in the center and four corners of the ceiling, bathing the entire room in a soft white light. This gave the edges of everything in the room a slight halo, a hazy glow. Because this room was protected by a formation restriction, not even a sliver of this white light could leak out, even at night. The few windows were merely for decoration.
There were six rows of wooden shelves in the room, laden with numerous herbs, unidentified beast hides, bones, Jade Slips, and various small porcelain bottles of different colors. Each row of shelves was also shrouded in a faint yellow light. Li Yan knew these were individual, small-scale defensive formations. First, they acted as a secondary defense if the external one failed, preventing anyone who entered from taking things from the shelves, mainly serving as an early warning system. Second, they protected the raw materials and medicinal pills on the shelves, preventing their medicinal efficacy from dissipating. Therefore, Li Yan couldn't sense any Demonic Qi or Spiritual Energy from these bones and herbs to judge their rank.
Although Li Yan had the thought of taking these for his Earthen Patch, he could only give up the idea with a sigh of resignation. Doing so would be tantamount to telling the owner that someone had been here, an outright confession. Regardless of whether the Hundred Dao Heavenly Treasure Pavilion had any connection to the person who took Zhao Min as a disciple, it would cast suspicion upon him.
Li Yan quickly turned his attention to the other parts of the room. In just a moment, his expression shifted, and his figure appeared in a corner of the room. Before Li Yan, a stone platform half a person's height stood there.
Standing before the stone platform, Li Yan looked at it for a short while and then became somewhat dazed. Although he had his suspicions before, seeing it with his own eyes now confirmed them, and he couldn't help but curse inwardly.
"This... this is too cunning! To actually use this method to transmit information!"
The half-person-high stone platform wasn't very large, only about the size of half a tabletop. It had sixteen corners and was carved with complex runes that Li Yan couldn't fully decipher. At this moment, the sixteen corners were emitting a faint white light, almost blending in with the light from the moonlight stones in the room. If one wasn't careful, it would be difficult to notice anything special about it.
Although Li Yan couldn't recognize all the runes, he had read many ancient texts and had come into contact with some common ones from the hundred arts of cultivation. He, of course, knew what this object was: a teleportation formation, an extremely exquisite, small teleportation formation. But this was the first time Li Yan had seen such a small one. It was incapable of even teleporting a single person.
However, it was clear that if the other party was only teleporting a Jade Slip, some medicinal pills, or the like, there would be no problem at all.
Li Yan's face was a little grim. Back in the inn, when he wondered if the person coming for the Jade Slip was delayed because the journey was too far, which was why they hadn't arrived in Mingdu City after six or seven days, the thought of a "teleportation formation" had suddenly occurred to him. He immediately realized that if there was a teleportation formation inside the Hundred Dao Heavenly Treasure Pavilion, the black-robed man could enter and exit Mingdu City at any time without outsiders being able to easily detect it. Normally, any teleportation formation within a city protected by a grand formation would surely be controlled by the governing cultivators, but perhaps it was possible to build one in secret.
So, Li Yan decided to risk coming to investigate. Now it seemed that not only did the other party have a "teleportation formation," but they were also a step ahead of him. Li Yan had never considered that a "teleportation formation" would be used to transport something other than living beings. Then again, who ever said a "teleportation formation" had to transport living things?
Li Yan repeatedly scanned the stone platform with his Divine Sense for a long time before letting out a long sigh in his heart.
'The person who thought of this method is truly brilliant. If a large-scale teleportation formation were built, the spatial fluctuations generated during its operation could not be concealed by just any defensive formation. Each use would surely alert many cultivators in the city, making the Hundred Dao Heavenly Treasure Pavilion too conspicuous. The teleportation formation before me can at most be considered 'micro-sized.' It probably couldn't even teleport slightly larger items. But it's perfectly fine for teleporting small things, and the spatial fluctuations it generates are reduced to an extremely low level.'
Li Yan thought to himself that with the external formation providing cover, people outside wouldn't notice anything here. At least, he himself hadn't detected any abnormalities.
Li Yan's Divine Sense quickly swept through the room again. Although there were more than a dozen storage pouches on the six rows of shelves, most of them had not been claimed by an owner through refinement; they were new storage pouches waiting to be sold. The remaining few storage pouches did contain items, but their size and shape were different from the one that held the Jade Slip that day. With a cultivator's memory, Li Yan was absolutely certain he hadn't misremembered what kind of storage pouch his Jade Slip had been placed in.
His Jade Slip had clearly been teleported away by the other party. Although this teleportation formation was very small, too small to transport a person, that didn't mean its range was short.
He had been thoroughly deceived. The other party was indeed connected to that Nascent Soul cultivator. The burly man, the two visits—not a single word the black-robed man had said was true. In this game, he had been outmaneuvered.