Night Visit to the Red Chamber, Heretical Cultivators Harvesting Life

"Qi-Seeking Dragon-Finding Art?" Chen Mu was slightly surprised.

Today's evaluation had been passable. He swiftly put away the Bone-Strengthening Pill, then took out the secret manual to inspect it.

This so-called "Qi-Seeking Dragon-Finding Art" was, astonishingly, a secret mystical technique.

In this world, there were martial artists as well as practitioners of the mystic arts. Buddhism, the Daoist School, foreign tribes, shamans, and barbarians all possessed secret mystical arts passed down through their traditions.

There were those who controlled corpses and commanded ghosts, held thunder in their palms, or breathed water and fire from their mouths.

Yet the spiritual energy of heaven and earth here had run dry. Most such mystic arts possessed limited power, and in a true killing fight, they were far inferior to the domineering vitality and blood of martial artists.

Chen Mu had only heard storytellers speak of such things before. He had never expected to obtain a mystical art himself.

At once, his heart filled with anticipation as he carefully studied it.

The manual described a method of washing and refining one's eyes using ox tears supplemented with the sap of a century-old yin locust tree.

By performing this method, one could temporarily open the "Heavenly Eye" and glimpse the flow of fortune throughout heaven and earth.

According to the book, people and objects all possessed their own corresponding Fortune Aura, difficult to perceive through ordinary sight.

Once this art was activated, nothing could hide!

A martial artist's blood and vitality rose like a dragon, ghostly qi coiled like a python, while heavenly materials and earthly treasures gleamed with flowing rosy light.

Chen Mu immediately thought of countless uses: finding people, locating places, digging up treasures, detecting ambushes...

What a good thing!

With this secret art, finding A-Ning on this trip would be much easier. Perhaps he could even hunt for treasures in the Ghost Market.

But all that had to wait.

Tonight, he first had to eliminate that vile woman of the Li family. Only then could Chen Mu leave the city with peace of mind.

He put away the manual, abruptly rose, changed into night clothes that concealed his face, and headed straight for the eastern part of the city.

Half an hour later, the night watchman on the street struck his gong three times.

The night had grown deep, and the wind colder still. In the rear courtyard of the Li Residence, two guards were making their rounds.

"Old Eight, who do you think offended Second Miss today?"

"I heard tonight that Little Qiuxiang, the one serving tea in the west wing, got twenty lashes from her. It was miserable..."

The one carrying the lantern yawned and picked a topic to pass the boredom.

The other guard, called Old Eight, rested a hand on his saber and frowned as he snapped in a low voice:

"Are you tired of living? You dare wag your tongue about Second Miss? Watch out, or she'll feed you to the yellow dog."

At those words, the first guard immediately shut his mouth.

The thought of the old yellow dog with red eyes in Second Miss's courtyard made his spine turn cold.

Whenever someone angered Second Miss, they would be beaten half to death and fed to that beast.

It had developed a taste for human flesh.

He did not dare say another word. Just as he was about to leave, a gust of yin wind suddenly swept through the courtyard.

Whoosh! The lantern light in their hands dimmed.

"Hm...? Who's there?!"

Old Eight immediately went on guard. His hand pressed against his saber as he shouted his challenge, staring fixedly toward a corner of the courtyard.

Beneath the tree there was a patch of pitch-black darkness. In that brief instant, it had seemed as though a human figure had appeared!

The lantern-bearer was startled as well and raised the lantern to illuminate it.

As the flame flickered, he saw clearly.

What person? It was merely a broken wooden post that the wind had blown crooked.

He burst into laughter and mocked, "I say, Old Eight, your courage is even smaller than a rat's..."

Before his laughter faded, the shadow behind the post suddenly shifted.

It was Chen Mu, launching himself forward with Ghost-Shadow Step.

His entire body was like a streak of black smoke as he slipped along the base of the wall and reached the two men's sides.

One was still laughing, while the other's pupils widened as he opened his mouth to shout!

But he was too slow!

"Watch out!"

Old Eight had only managed half a shout when Chen Mu's fan-sized palm came crashing down!

His hands pressed against the backs of both men's necks at once, one on the left and one on the right, then he violently slammed them together.

Two short, muffled groans merged into one.

Chen Mu did not take their lives. He merely knocked their heads together until they fainted, then dragged them into the western woodshed.

A moment later, several brief screams came from the woodshed.

"Sir, sir, don't kill me... We can talk this out..."

Muffled pleas for mercy sounded from within, along with Chen Mu's low interrogation.

A quarter of an hour later came the dull thuds of two corpses striking the ground.

Chen Mu pushed open the door and walked out.

Behind him, the wooden door creaked and shut on its own despite the windless air. A pool of dark-red blood flowed from the crack beneath it.

"So she wasn't in the residence. No wonder..."

He lifted his head and looked at the sky.

Clouds had tightly veiled the moon above the courtyard. It was already the hour of the tiger.

The yin energy was at its heaviest at this time of night.

Just now, relying on Ghost-Shadow Step to come and go like the wind, he had secretly turned the Li Residence's inner quarters upside down.

Yet Li Bingyan's bedchamber was completely empty, and even the bedding was cold.

Even her personal maid was sleeping in the outer room.

That meant this Second Miss had left before nightfall, without bringing any attendants.

Chen Mu had originally only wanted to secretly kill that vicious woman and avenge Aunt Wang, without causing any commotion.

By dawn tomorrow, he would leave the city. When the case came to light, he would already be long gone.

The plan had been sound, but when he came here, he ran into an unexpected twist.

Where could an unmarried daughter of a wealthy family go in the middle of the night if she was not in her room?

Helpless, Chen Mu could only seize the two guards and interrogate them.

The answer greatly surprised him.

According to the two men, Second Miss should be spending the night at Red Luan Pavilion.

That was the "Red Chamber" passed from mouth to mouth among common folk, the largest pleasure house on Caiyi Street.

A young woman spending the night at a brothel?

Even from Chen Mu's perspective as a transmigrator, it seemed wildly unrestrained.

"But that works out nicely. There are plenty of people there, and plenty of eyes..."

He had only just joined the martial academy and did not want to come into direct conflict with Zhao Dong yet.

The Red Chamber was crowded and chaotic. If Li Bingyan died there, the Li Residence likely would not dare make a fuss for fear of damaging its reputation.

It was just that finding her would probably take some effort. Chen Mu did not want to barge into rooms one by one and disturb those filthy affairs.

"Perfect. I'll test the Qi-Seeking Art."

Having made his decision, Chen Mu immediately withdrew in a flying retreat and vanished into the night.

Before leaving, he casually took a pearl-and-jade hairpin that Li Bingyan kept close from her dressing case.

Two strands of hair were still wrapped around the pin, carrying the scent of orchids. It could serve as a sympathetic medium for the Qi-Seeking Art to find her.

After the time it took to drink a cup of tea, at the City God Temple.

Chen Mu crouched beneath the century-old yin locust tree behind the temple. He took out a small porcelain bottle and used the edge of a blade to cut a slit an inch deep into the bark.

Before long, dark brown sap slowly seeped out, gleaming with a deep, ghostly light beneath the moon.

He tore off a corner of his clothing, soaked it thoroughly in the sap, and laid it over his eyelids.

Then he took out a thumb-sized vial containing ox tears he had saved from slaughtering livestock years ago.

This stuff could be used in medicine. Chen Mu had always collected it to sell to apothecaries.

Now, by sheer coincidence, it was exactly what he needed.

As he mixed the two materials, he immediately felt an icy chill that pierced to the bone emanating from the vial.

A thread of yin energy coiled around his fingers, trying to invade Chen Mu's body.

But his blood and vitality were now as strong as an ox. The yin energy had barely touched his skin before it was scattered.

"Let me see where you're hiding..."

Muttering softly, Chen Mu applied the mixed secret medicine to his eyelids.

Then he closed his eyes for a moment, deliberately restraining his blood and vitality as he felt the yin energy corrode his eyelids.

When he opened them again, the world had changed completely.

His vision became threads of black, white, and red, countless strands entwined in every direction.

Caiyi Street was still the same Caiyi Street, but the lights, crowds, roof tiles, beams, and pillars all gave off spiritual radiance of different colors.

"So this is Fortune Aura?"

Chen Mu's pupils had turned pitch-black, bottomless and unfathomable.

Within a dimension invisible to ordinary people, he saw huge pillars of multicolored light gathering in the direction of the Red Chamber and soaring into the sky.

It was late at night, the hour when the Red Chamber had the most customers, with all manner of demons and monsters gathered there.

From this far away, Chen Mu could not tell which pillar of qi belonged to Li Bingyan.

He immediately took flight and swiftly arrived atop the upturned eaves of a three-story tavern opposite Red Luan Pavilion.

Now that he was close, he looked down from above.

The entire Red Chamber completely transformed in his eyes into a three-dimensional cage composed of light and shadow.

Chen Mu adjusted to this novel perspective as he observed the customers entering and leaving.

Everlasting Prosperity Town lay on the frontier, and scholars were scarce.

Most visitors to the Red Chamber were wealthy merchants, soldiers, or martial wanderers.

Black qi billowed around these people, and some were even wrapped in crimson baleful light stained with blood.

After a brief thought, Chen Mu understood.

It seemed they were all people whose fortunes had declined, doomed to suffer bloody calamities.

Meanwhile, the spiritual radiance around the prostitutes leaning against the windows was shallow and drifting. Their pink seductive qi was mixed with the chaotic auras of three to five men.

"Hm? Is that where she is?"

Chen Mu stood where he was, slowly sweeping his gaze across the building before it suddenly fixed.

Under the Qi-Seeking Art, Red Luan Pavilion had become a three-dimensional grid woven from mottled lines.

It was like a 3D game map from the games he played in his previous life.

And within this three-dimensional map, two auras were particularly striking.

One golden and one red pillar of light were shooting into the sky.

Li Bingyan's qi was unmistakably within that golden light!

The pearl-and-jade hairpin in Chen Mu's robe also trembled faintly in distant resonance.

This was the wonder of the Qi-Seeking Art's method of finding people.

Li Bingyan's true Fortune Aura was only as thick as an ordinary person's arm.

It was dim and gray, swaying on the verge of collapse within the soaring golden radiance, even weaker than those prostitutes' auras.

Chen Mu immediately furrowed his brow, faintly sensing that something was wrong.

When he had dragged that woman from her horse this morning, he had known Li Bingyan practiced martial arts. She should have possessed the cultivation of the second or third level of Body Tempering.

She had crossed the Hundred-Blood Trial. She should not have been this weak.

Just as he was about to leap over to investigate.

Suddenly, the crimson pillar of light surged and twisted around her, forcibly shredding another wisp of Li Bingyan's Fortune Aura.

The golden radiance answering it dimmed as well, while that scarlet pillar grew another thirty percent stronger.

"Something's wrong. That aura is...?"

Chen Mu's heart instantly clenched as realization flashed through his mind!

Fortune was a person's vitality, the spiritual radiance of life itself.

At this moment, Li Bingyan's fortune was draining away at high speed, her life force rapidly swallowed by the crimson light.

The symptoms were incomparably strange. It was clearly like the crooked methods used by heretical cultivators who harvested others to supplement their own cultivation!

At this rate of extraction, after another two or three times, she would likely die.

"Could they be from Rakshasa Gate?"

The first thing Chen Mu thought of was that group of heretical cultivators who extracted souls and refined corpses.

But then his gaze turned cold. There was no point thinking so much.

He was already here. Even if he had discovered something strange, how could he possibly endure not going to take a look?

He immediately concealed his breath, unfolded his body, and streaked through the air with Ghost-Shadow Step, landing on the eaves of the Red Chamber.

No matter who was there tonight, that wicked woman had to die!