The starry sky stretched vast and boundless, its primordial energy surging like an endless sea.
Within that current invisible to the naked eye, a flying boat shaped like a giant fish cut through space. White mist, wispy as clouds, parted to either side of it, like waves before a ship cleaving through wind and water.
Far away, bright celestial bodies dotted the darkness like morning stars. Those were distant islands of enormous landmass.
This flying boat was the shuttle boat that had only recently departed from Windward Lodge. Half an hour before Elder Fang and the others arrived, Li Chen had already slipped into the air harbor, randomly chosen someone to possess, and boarded unnoticed.
Elder Fang and the others could not catch up with him. They could not even notify a Great Power to intercept him, because confirming Li Chen's whereabouts would take time. Intercepting this shuttle boat might mean missing another. Worse still, Li Chen might not be aboard at all, but possessing some cultivator who had left the Market District independently-or he might simply still be in the Market District.
Dispatching more than a dozen Primordial Spirit cultivators and over a hundred Nascent Soul cultivators at once might allow them to pursue every possibility, but that was hardly realistic.
Even the war in the Vast Sea had not seen such an extravagant lineup. Only two Great Powers of the Primordial Spirit Realm and a dozen or so Nascent Soul Realm experts had been deployed.
Inside the boat, Li Chen possessed a Wilderness Rogue Cultivator of the Qi Refining Realm, sealing his mind to control his body.
His every word and action, every movement, lay under Li Chen's control. Like a puppet used in String-Puppet Theater, he performed the role Li Chen had assigned him according to the