Above the Sand Sea.
Ji Yuan had been gone for only a short while.
Then two streaks of light, one blue and one white, swept in from the direction of Autumn Maple City.
They circled the area halfway before stopping above the battlefield and resolving into a man and a woman.
Both were at the Spirit Transformation Early Stage.
The man was thin, with a gaunt face. He wore a drab gray Daoist robe with a small autumn-maple crest embroidered on the cuff.
The woman wore a long indigo dress, her hair swept up into a high bun.
Her gaze fell on the traces left on the ground, and her pupils abruptly contracted.
"That's—the Buried-Sand Scorpion's aura!" She could not hide her shock. "Someone actually killed it?!"
The Buried-Sand Scorpion had ruled this stretch of the Sand Sea for over a thousand years. Autumn Maple City had organized three hunts, and each had ended in defeat.
On the most recent hunt, two Spirit Transformation Middle Stage cultivators had led the force. One had died, and the other had been wounded.
After that, Autumn Maple City had declared this part of the Sand Sea forbidden. No one dared set foot here lightly.
After all, the scorpion would fight cultivators at the Spirit Transformation Early or Middle Stage. But if someone at the Spirit Transformation Late Stage came, it hid underground and refused to show itself.
The man did not answer. He descended and made a low circuit over the battlefield.
The cracked earth and leveled dunes lay fully exposed beneath the moonlight.
"It wasn't just one person, by the looks of it."
He held out two fingers, plucked a wisp of lingering spiritual energy from the air, and sniffed it. "The aura of a lightning cultivator, and a sword cultivator too.