Behind Dragon Gate

"Splash!"

Chen Xuan swept along the mountain path and charged into the woodland where ancient trees towered into the sky, hot on the heels of an Over Mountain Treasure Fish.

"Where do you think you're going!"

Chen Xuan activated Little White Ape Trick, seized a fist-sized mountain rock with tremendous force, and hurled it like a cannonball at the Treasure Fish ahead.

"Roar!"

The Treasure Fish was struck by the rock. A ring of silver ripples shuddered across its body, and several scales split open. It let out a shriek and flew far away, then shot upward like a silver-white bolt of lightning. In fury, it smashed headfirst into the rock, shattering it to pieces, and continued swimming frantically toward the depths of the Southern Wilderness.

A force in the depths of the Southern Wilderness was summoning it, driving it forward without regard for anything else.

"His body is that hard?"

Chen Xuan was stunned. His full-powered strike had merely scraped the Treasure Fish's scales?

Even Qi Refiners wouldn't dare take a mountain rock he had thrown with all his strength head-on. That had been an eruption of over ten thousand jin of force—an ordinary body would have been pierced straight through, leaving a bloody hole. Yet the Over Mountain Treasure Fish had actually withstood it?

"Aw-oo!"

A passing wild wolf spotted the Treasure Fish and pounced at once in wild delight. With a bang, the wolf's mouth exploded, its jaws filling with blood as every sharp tooth was blasted out.

Clutching its blood-soaked mouth, the wild wolf rolled across the ground, howling miserably. Its hunt had failed!

"Did the people of Green Deer Mountain really catch a Treasure Fish?"

Seeing this, Chen Xuan's eyes widened. He now deeply doubted the claim. In his view, with the strength of Senior Brother Chu and the other three, they simply couldn't have caught a Treasure Fish.

"I'll have to do it myself!"

One interception after another slowed the Treasure Fish's attempt to leap the Dragon Gate. Chen Xuan finally caught up with it as it skimmed along the ground. With a simple, direct tiger-pounces-on-its-prey move, he grabbed the Treasure Fish with both hands.

"Roar!"

The Treasure Fish let out a clear dragon's cry. Its body was slick as oil, impossible to hold, and it possessed tremendous strength. With a powerful dragon's tail sweep, it slipped free from Chen Xuan's hands.

Chen Xuan kept after it. This time, he had learned his lesson. He soon seized his opportunity, hooked his fingers into the fish's gills, and jerked it up. Then he swung it like a club and smashed it against a nearby tree.

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

After smashing it more than ten times, wood chips filled the sky and fish scales flew everywhere. The tree, as thick as a man's waist, broke cleanly and crashed down with a rumble. The Treasure Fish was battered dizzy, then went rigid and fainted in Chen Xuan's hands.

"Aw-oo..."

In the distance, the wild wolf stood dumbfounded. Terrified, it sprang to its feet with a swish, tucked its tail between its legs, and fled rolling and scrambling. This human was far too savage. It feared being treated the same way. This wasn't hunting—it was brutal slaughter.

"I finally caught the Treasure Fish... I used up even more strength than I did fighting with spells."

Chen Xuan was drenched in sweat as he lifted the foot-long Over Mountain Treasure Fish to examine it.

The Treasure Fish was covered in wounds. A gentle silver radiance and a soul-refreshing fragrance wafted from the flesh beneath its damaged scales. There wasn't the slightest fishy odor. Just leaning closer for a sniff left one feeling clear-headed and refreshed, almost as though one were floating toward immortality.

This was a great flesh-and-blood medicine comparable to the Terrestrial Treasure Tree!

Deep in the mountains of the Southern Wilderness.

Atop a mountain more than a thousand zhang high, a pool lay at its summit. At this moment, the "Dragon Gate" had opened its great maw, waiting for the Treasure Fish to leap through.

Suddenly.

The "Dragon Gate" slowly closed, and a snow-white Old Turtle, more than half a person tall, emerged from the bottom of the pool.

The Old White Turtle did not crawl on all four limbs. Instead, it stood and walked like a human. Its luminous white shell resembled a rotating diagram of the Taiji and the Eight Trigrams, while its wrinkled, bark-like skin and its neck, head, and limbs looked as though they had been molded from modeling clay...

It craned its long neck, puzzled, unable to understand why its food supply had suddenly stopped.

The so-called "Dragon Gate" was actually the Old White Turtle's mouth.

The Over Mountain Treasure Fish from Small Stone Lake endured countless hardships, broke through mountain after mountain and danger after danger along the way, and finally leaped into the "Dragon Gate," "ascending" to become food for the Old White Turtle...

"The mountains have been too chaotic lately. People don't follow the rules... They've even started stealing an old man's food."

The Old Turtle's eyes were deep. With his hands clasped behind his back, he resembled a withered old man as he gazed into the distant night sky.

The entire mountain was deathly silent. All the ferocious beasts, insects, birds, and ghosts lay dormant, trembling in fear and not daring to make the slightest sound at such a time.

"You're my food, so behave yourself!"

Amid the mountain woods, Chen Xuan scolded as he pinned down the Treasure Fish and smashed its head viciously with a mountain rock. Only after confirming that it was not merely temporarily unconscious but had truly stopped breathing did he calmly thread a vine through it and hang it from his waist.

After finishing all this, he drew a deep breath and looked back along the road he had come by, his brows drawing tightly together.

"That person on the road, from Green Deer Mountain... Shen Lingfeng?"

"The man chasing the fish... Chen Xuan!"

On the mountain path, Shen Lingfeng muttered to himself as he stared at the woods where that man and fish had vanished, his heart pounding with terror.

His eye for detail was viciously sharp. With just that fleeting glimpse, he had seen that the blood qi surging from the fish chaser as he ran was absolutely no less than six thousand jin. What was more, the speed of his pursuit was even several notches higher than Shen Lingfeng's when he had undergone his first Feather Transformation.

Shen Lingfeng was shaken. He himself was a rare genius, and during his first Feather Transformation, his blood qi had crushed that of his peers... Yet now, this person had firmly surpassed him.

An unknown genius of extraordinary talent was chasing the Over Mountain Treasure Fish from Small Stone Lake...

Other than Chen Xuan, he couldn't think of anyone else it could be.

"I already escaped. Why did I still run into Chen Xuan?"

Shen Lingfeng was inexplicably horrified. He thought bitterly, Could Yellow Millet Dream really be that effective? Is Chen Xuan truly determined to take my life...? Wang Chan dragged me into this mess. That damn bane of a man!

His heart turned cold. His fingers rubbed the mane of the Green Deer as he felt a terrifying sense of being anchored by fate, unable to escape.

"You... You're bullying people too much."

Shen Lingfeng ground his teeth. The more he thought about it, the angrier he became. He clenched his fists, his chest gradually filling with fury, and cursed the air at the top of his lungs.

"Chen Xuan, I admit your talent is extraordinary, but am I not also a one-in-ten-thousand genius? You've only been refining qi for a little over half a month!"

"..."

"Ha, a fledgling who's refined qi for just over half a month—and you actually killed four Qi Refiners from my Green Deer Mountain..."

"..."

"Forget it. Running into a monster like you means I've suffered eight lifetimes of bad luck."

Shen Lingfeng abruptly jumped down from the Green Deer, swiftly stripped off the green robe representing Green Deer Mountain, draped it over the Green Deer's head to block its vision, and drove a knife into its rump.

"Useless thing, run!"

Shen Lingfeng shouted harshly. Then he punched apart the bun atop his head, let his hair fall over his face, and leaped from the mountain path with his hair hanging loose, disappearing in another direction.

He still had to run.

"The six people from Green Deer Mountain have split up."

Chen Xuan walked out of the woods and stared into the darkness at the end of the mountain path. There won't be another opportunity this good.

He fell silent for a moment, then immediately gave chase along the mountain path. Tonight was the best time to strike.

So what if Shen Lingfeng had undergone his second Feather Transformation and possessed more than ten thousand jin of strength? He was alone.

"As long as you aren't impervious to blades and spears and impossible to kill, I'll weigh you up."

Chen Xuan rubbed his fingertips over the golden-green jade hairpin he had taken from the Underground Palace in Peach Town. The peerless chill at its tip calmed his mind.

A moment later, a green elk appeared in his field of vision. Its head was covered by a robe, and blood dripped from its rump.

"What's going on?"

Chen Xuan froze. He stared at the Green Deer grazing by the roadside, utterly baffled. "Where is Shen Lingfeng?"

The wound on the Green Deer's rump made it clear that it was deliberately luring someone into pursuit. Was Shen Lingfeng being hunted?

But as a Green Deer Mountain cultivator who had undergone a second Feather Transformation, someone others avoided at all costs, why had he fallen into a situation where he was being chased?

"Wait... Could I be the one chasing him?"

Chen Xuan was startled. He recalled that during their fleeting encounter earlier, the other man's eyes had seemed to suddenly narrow, and his reaction had been enormous.

He had recognized Chen Xuan and guessed that Chen Xuan would pursue him. That was why he had made this entire series of moves, trying to evade him.

"That makes no sense... Shen Lingfeng and I have never crossed paths. He shouldn't even know I exist."

Chen Xuan's head throbbed like a tangled mass of hemp. He muttered, "Besides, Shen Lingfeng is a second-Feather-Transformation expert. Why would he avoid me? By all rights, I should be the one avoiding him!"

"You people—what disgusting schemes are you plotting behind the scenes?"

Chen Xuan couldn't figure it out. He simply couldn't. He felt as though his brain wasn't enough for this. The more he thought, the more his head hurt, and he struck his head hard a few times.

It was as though a meticulously woven giant net had descended over him, viscous and gray, making escape impossible and even breathing feel difficult.

"Wang Chan... You've gone too far."

A moment later, Chen Xuan raised his head, his eyes webbed with blood. Then he turned around and headed straight for the Green Deer Mountain's base at Ox Horn Mountain.

Shen Lingfeng had escaped.

At most, only five first-Feather-Transformation Qi Refiners remained on the other side...

He would go smash open Wang Chan's skull right now and see what the Yellow Millet Dream in his brain really was!