Song Wen did not secretly tail the stallholder.
Even though the man's divine sense was far weaker than his own, and he could never have detected Song Wen tracking him.
Song Wen had two reasons for doing so.
First, the stallholder might well have accomplices hidden somewhere in the market area. Tailing him would only expose Song Wen.
Second, although the divine sense mark Song Wen had left on the man was only at the Void Refinement stage, he had left several Mahayana-stage divine sense marks on those spirit stones.
The stallholder and the people behind him were merely a group of rogue cultivators. Presumably, none of them had reached the Mahayana stage, so they could not possibly discover or erase those marks.
Song Wen was not worried in the slightest that the man could escape his tracking.
He wandered around the stalls for a while longer, casually buying a few demon souls. Only when dusk approached did he fly out of the city.
He left in the exact opposite direction from the stallholder.
After traveling nearly a hundred thousand li from the city and confirming that no one was following him, he changed direction and headed toward the stallholder, guided by his divine sense.
The place the stallholder, Wang Qi, was heading for was both distant and secluded.
He had left the city more than six hours earlier and was piloting a flying shuttle at an extremely high speed, almost on par with a Void Refinement cultivator. Yet even when Song Wen caught up to within ten thousand li of him and could already sense him, he was still traveling.
By then, night had fully fallen.
Hidden in the darkness, Song Wen followed at a leisurely pace.
More than four hours later, the stallholder finally slowed down and stopped