Spiritual Sense Can't Detect Me! I Am the Phantom of the Night

The ravine stretched onward beneath their feet, its earth packed hard as porcelain.

The captain walked at the front, then suddenly froze mid-step.

He abruptly raised his right hand.

The four outer sect disciples following behind hurriedly stopped. The short, fat man with the leg wound failed to brake in time and crashed headfirst into the tall man's back, hissing in pain.

"Captain, why have we stopped?" The tall man lowered his voice, still clutching that high-grade Fireburst Talisman.

The captain did not turn around.

He stared rigidly at a spot over a dozen zhang ahead. His Adam's apple bobbed twice as he sucked in a sharp breath.

Following the captain's gaze, the others all looked up.

At the end of the dim forest, behind the vines halfway up the mountainside, an outrageously massive black shadow blocked the way completely.

It was the thirty-thousand-jin City-Guarding Stele.

The ancient, intricate rock patterns across its surface radiated an overwhelmingly tyrannical pressure amid this wilderness.

"Th-that's the black stone from the inner city plaza?" The short, fat man forgot all about the pain in his leg. His teeth began chattering uncontrollably.

No one answered.

The minds of these cultivators had completely stopped turning.

A thirty-thousand-jin dead object. Even if ten Ironclad Giant Rhinos from the sect—the kind specially used for heavy labor—were brought here, they could never drag it into the steep forestlands of Immortal-Breaking Mountain.

The captain's palm, gripping his flying sword, was drenched in cold sweat.

"What kind of monster dragged this here..." the captain muttered, his voice trembling. Everything he knew about the common sense of the cultivation world shattered at that moment. This was not something a mortal without spiritual roots could accomplish, nor could it have been done by demonic cultivators like those from the Blood Demon Sect, who only knew how to hide in the shadows and toy with blood essence.

"Captain, are we still going closer?" The young disciple took half a step back, the longsword in his hand swaying with him.

"What are you afraid of?!" The captain gritted his teeth and forcibly steadied himself. "The spiritual energy here may be thin, but we're still Qi Refinement cultivators! If he dragged this stone here, he must have exhausted all his strength."

"Spread out! All of you, spread out!" The captain waved his hand repeatedly. "Approach in a semicircle! Form a Four Symbols defensive formation! Slap every protective talisman in your storage bags onto yourselves!"

The four disciples did not dare delay and hurriedly pulled yellow paper talismans from their pockets.

Faint golden lights and watery blue barriers lit up one after another. Keeping their distance, the group carefully stepped over dead leaves and closed in on the enormous stele in a half-circle.

Deep within the cave.

Lu Chen sat with his eyes closed.

The sound of those people stepping on dead leaves outside was nearly imperceptible to an ordinary person. Yet to Lu Chen's ears, it was as clear as drums beating beside him.

It was not just their footsteps.

There was also the thump, thump of their heartbeats.

All five hearts were pumping blood madly from extreme tension. Even the faint friction of blood flowing through their meridians was caught with perfect clarity by Lu Chen's senses, enhanced by his supreme vitality and blood.

Lu Chen opened his eyes.

He turned and walked to the flat, dry boulder at the deepest end of the cave.

A-Nan was wrapped in thick Netherwind Wolf hide, her breathing long and even as she slept deeply. The monstrous strength she had unleashed to snap the Black-Iron Chain had drained much of her stamina. This was the most critical recovery stage of her jade-bone transformation.

Lu Chen extended his rough, broad hand and tucked the edge of the wolf hide down, wrapping the little girl even more tightly.

He rose to his feet and strode toward the cave entrance.

Turning sideways, he squeezed out through the crack less than half a chi wide.

The chill outside cut to the bone.

Lu Chen did not stand somewhere conspicuous. Instead, he pressed himself directly into the deepest shadowy blind spot along the outer side of the stele.

The violent vitality and blood of the eleventh layer of Iron Cloth Shirt were forcibly suppressed at that moment.

Cultivators relied on concealment talismans or turtle-breath techniques to hide their true essence fluctuations. But Lu Chen had no need for such flashy spells.

His vitality and blood drew inward.

The great river that had been surging wildly beneath his flesh abruptly fell still.

Lu Chen's heartbeat began slowing by multiples. Thump—thump—the intervals between beats stretched to extraordinary lengths.

The scorching heat rapidly faded from his iron-gray skin. His body temperature dropped swiftly until it became exactly the same as the weathered thirty-thousand-jin black stone behind him, without releasing the slightest trace of warmth.

He stood in that patch of shadow, completely merging with the stele.

"Scan with spiritual sense!" The captain walked in the middle and gave the order in a low voice.

The disciples immediately closed their eyes and forcibly summoned the pitiful slivers of mental power between their brows, sweeping them toward the cave and stele ahead.

To cultivators, spiritual sense was their most reliable set of eyes. So long as their target carried spiritual energy fluctuations, even a low-grade demon rat could be detected clearly.

A moment later.

The young disciple on the left flank opened his eyes. His face twitched twice, utterly bewildered.

"Captain, there's nothing." Gripping his longsword, the young disciple pointed toward the stele. "When my spiritual sense swept over it, there was only a cold, broken rock ahead. Forget spiritual energy fluctuations—there wasn't even a breathing living thing."

"I didn't detect anything either," the tall man on the right flank echoed.

The captain frowned.

Under their spiritual sense, that area was indeed utterly clean, without a single trace of life.

Had that brat thrown the stele here and run away himself?

"Do not let your guard down." The captain tightened his grip on his sword hilt. "Move closer slowly. Circle around and check behind the stone."

The young disciple was on the far left.

Holding his flying sword gleaming with cyan light, he inched forward bit by bit. His shoes pressed into the slick mud, and he did not even dare breathe too heavily.

He drew closer and closer to the stele.

The pressure emanating from that black stone grew stronger and stronger.

Just as he was about to press against the side of the stele, the young disciple stopped.

He stared at a crevice in the rock beneath the stele.

Within it, several incredibly faint blood-colored desolate patterns flickered. That strange radiance belonged to none of the cultivation arts he knew.

In an instant, curiosity overwhelmed fear.

He swallowed, gathered his courage, and took another half-step forward. Leaning over, he extended the flying sword in his hand, intending to poke at those blood-colored desolate patterns with its tip.

He had just rounded the darkest blind spot along the side of the stele.

During that half-breath when his gaze was drawn to the desolate patterns—

A heavy, exceptionally rough hand emerged from the shadow ahead without warning.

Its speed was utterly unreasonable.

There was no opening move, no fluctuation of spiritual power.

Like iron pincers, that huge hand clamped over the young disciple's mouth, covering half his face and jaw within its thick palm.

The young disciple's eyes instantly widened, his eyeballs nearly bulging from their sockets.

Overwhelming terror poured from the crown of his head straight down to the soles of his feet.

He desperately tried to cry out for help, tried to raise his hand and form the simplest Exploding Art.

Too late.

Lu Chen gave him no time to react. As one hand covered his mouth, the other had already hooked around the back of the disciple's head like an iron claw.

The muscles in both arms suddenly tensed. His powerful tendons burst forth with force.

Both hands twisted violently to one side.

Crack.

The incomparably crisp sound of breaking bones was muffled completely within Lu Chen's palms.

The young disciple's cervical vertebrae were snapped on the spot by that violent supreme brute force. His head drooped limply at an utterly grotesque angle.

The protective talisman barrier cultivators took such pride in did not provide the slightest cushioning.

The man did not even manage a muffled groan before dying on the spot. The longsword slipped from his hand, but before it could hit the ground, Lu Chen steadily caught it underfoot without making the slightest sound.

Expressionless, Lu Chen smoothly pinned the limp corpse beneath his foot, holding it firmly in place.

He crouched halfway down, his rough fingers expertly tearing the storage bag from the disciple's waist.

The entire killing was clean, brutal, and silent.

At the outer position over a dozen steps away.

The captain was staring intently at the movements of the men ahead.

In the left front of his vision, the flying sword in the young disciple's hand, which had been glowing with cyan spiritual light, suddenly went dark.

Without any warning.

The captain's heart gave a violent lurch.

He immediately released his spiritual sense and frantically swept the left flank.

Nothing.

There was nothing at all.

There was no scorching heat from a falling fireball, no sharp whistle of a water arrow tearing through the air, not even the most basic ripples from colliding spiritual energy.

The man had simply vanished into thin air.

An unprecedented terror splashed over the captain's head like a bucket of ice water.

This completely defied the common sense of cultivators. If one were attacked, a cultivator's instinctive counterattack would absolutely trigger violent true essence fluctuations.

How could someone vanish without even letting out a fart?

"Xu Lin!" Unable to suppress the panic in his heart, the captain's voice cracked as he shouted sharply toward the left.

No one answered.

The surroundings were terrifyingly quiet. Only a night wind swept past, stirring the dead leaves overhead with a fine, rustling shashasha.

To the remaining three, that sound was more tormenting than the Sanskrit chants of death itself.

"Where's Xu Lin? Wasn't he just beside that stone?" The tall man panicked too, the Fireburst Talisman in his hand trembling violently.

The short, fat man was so terrified that he collapsed directly into the mud, scrambling backward again and again.

They had not come to surround and kill a mortal.

They were being hunted one-sidedly by an invisible phantom!

Their treasured spiritual sense and spells had become nothing but worthless scraps of paper behind that black stone without the slightest spiritual energy fluctuation.

The group stood back-to-back, waving their longswords wildly in every direction. Their formation had fallen completely apart.

In the darkness.

Just as the tall disciple turned around and warily stared at the thicket behind him—

A nearly imperceptible sliding sound came from the pile of dead leaves beneath his feet.

It was a thick Black-Iron Chain.

Hugging the ground, it slithered silently over the mud and fallen leaves.

Like a venomous snake in the night that had fixed its gaze on prey.

One end of the chain silently rose and wrapped around the tall disciple's ankle with flawless precision.

The icy touch of metal passed through his boot.

Every hair on the tall man's body stood on end in that instant.