At the summit of the mountain where Zhong Ren was hiding.
A massive boulder suddenly came loose and thundered down the sloping mountainside.
The boulder was a full hundred feet wide. It sped downward faster and faster, unstoppable in its momentum.
Whether trees or jutting rocks, everything was crushed to pieces.
The boulder itself split apart under the continual impacts, becoming chunks of various sizes that continued tumbling down in a scattering shower.
When those rocks reached the mountainside, they seemed to strike an invisible wall. They shattered into even smaller pieces, then changed direction and rolled away to either side.
Yet a thicket on the mountainside remained completely unscathed beneath the onslaught of that torrent of stones.
The Purple Firmament Dove, which had already flown several miles away, abruptly halted and turned its sharp eyes back toward the mountain.
It noticed both the Shadow King Gu at the summit and the thicket on the mountainside.
The boulder had been pushed down by the Shadow King Gu, which was now burrowing deeper into a crevice in the mountain.
But the Purple Firmament Dove paid little attention to the sesame-seed-sized Shadow King Gu.
While such insects were not everywhere in Rotting Miasma Ridge, they were hardly rare.
That thicket, however, clearly bore the handiwork of a human cultivator.
"Screech—"
The Purple Firmament Dove suddenly let out a long cry.
A bolt of silver lightning shot from its beak toward the thicket.
Boom!
A transparent barrier abruptly appeared and blocked the silver lightning.
Beneath the barrier, Zhong Ren stared into the sky with panicked terror. The Purple Firmament Dove had returned.
The formation he had set up was merely a top-tier fifth-rank concealment formation, enough to deceive the divine sense of Void Refinement cultivators. The reason it had blocked the Purple Firmament