Lian Yi stepped outside and saw ten large trucks and a forklift driving into the residential complex. She felt ready to kill someone.
Even moving house hadn't involved a production this big.
She took out her phone and opened Taobao. Only then did she notice she had ordered a whole bunch of Stone Lions and Stone Bollards.
They weren't expensive-just a few tens of thousands of yuan. That amount wasn't enough to trouble her.
The real problem was that she lived in an apartment building. Where was she supposed to put these things?!
Forget fitting them inside her apartment-they wouldn't even fit through the building's entrance!
When the driver opened the truck, revealing a load packed with Stone Lions over two meters tall, Lian Yi's face turned green.
It was daytime on a weekday, so there weren't many residents around, just some elderly men and women chatting and enjoying the sunshine beneath the trees. They loved nothing more than a spectacle.
They called their friends over and gathered in groups to see what was happening. The truckload of Stone Lions left them marveling.
"What's such a pretty young girl buying all these Stone Bollards for?"
"A young girl like her ought to know better. What a spendthrift."
"Whoever marries that girl is in for some bad luck."
The corner of Lian Yi's eye twitched. When had anyone ever spoken about her like that?
Usually, she was the one savoring other people's negative emotions. Now it was her turn to savor her own.
At this point, she didn't even have a chance to move the Stone Lions and Stone Bollards into her storage space.
If she told the delivery driver, "I don't want them anymore. Take them back," she wouldn't get past him.
Lian Yi suspected that if she did that, every delivery driver in the area would blacklist her. She would never receive another package without trouble for the rest of her life.
Cultivators used to live in remote mountains. Whenever they wanted to buy something, they had to make a trip down the mountain, sometimes traveling even farther to shop in a large city. Nowadays, cultivators were used to living in cities. The convenience of modern shipping was far beyond anything in ancient times, and Demon Alliance members enjoyed modern life too.
The delivery driver looked Lian Yi up and down resentfully. He had heard older drivers talk about people who had nothing better to do than order Stone Bollards and Stone Lions online, but those drivers had only ever delivered them to places like villa neighborhoods or parks.
Delivering them to an apartment complex was a first-and she had ordered so many.
Lian Yi wore loungewear and slippers, her hair tied together in front of her chest. She looked delicate, frail, and pitiful, which eased some of the driver's resentment.
But only some.
Looks like a pretty lunatic.
Pretty or not, if she dares say she ordered them by mistake and wants to return them, she'll regret it!
"Hey, hey! What's going on here? You can't deliver this stuff here." A security guard from the complex came out to intervene.
"Yes, yes, I'll have everything moved right away." Lian Yi didn't want trouble and hoped to handle this quietly.
In the end, she rented a warehouse on the outskirts of town and hired people to haul everything there. Only then was the matter settled.
Su Tingxue had spent the past two days thinking about the Demon Alliance and Lian Yi.
After returning from Ji Sen's home, she had immediately reported the Demon Alliance to her master. Yet even her master knew very little about the organization, had never heard Lian Yi's name, and had no good way to deal with a cultivator so proficient in the Transformation Technique.
Su Tingxue had loved the idea of slaying monsters and demons since childhood. As a little girl, she would often swing a wooden stick around with cries of "hiya," jumping from the bed to the sofa, then from the sofa to the floor, imagining herself an unrivaled expert traveling the world to punish evil and uphold good.
After joining Dragon-Tiger Mountain, that wish had come true.
Yet when Lian Yi had walked away openly right in front of her, she had actually felt relieved. She couldn't even muster a parting threat. She had done worse than Chu Xiaoyao, who had no cultivation at all.
And then there was Zhou You. According to his later explanation, he had only gained a rudimentary grasp of his Poverty Ghost spell and couldn't use it skillfully yet. He didn't know what he had bought for Lian Yi, but at least he had acted against her.
By contrast, she had possessed the highest cultivation of anyone present and done nothing.
It was humiliating.
"My mental fortitude and cultivation still aren't enough..."
Su Tingxue sighed and silently resolved to break through to Foundation Establishment as soon as possible.
She was now only half a step away from returning to the innate state and reaching Foundation Establishment. Once she did, Lian Yi wouldn't escape.
While wheeling her bicycle home from school, Su Tingxue passed a residential complex where the security guards were changing shifts.
"You really missed out by not being here during the day." The day-shift guard sounded mysterious.
"Missed out on what?" The night-shift guard looked baffled. "Did some pregnant mistress show up? Or did a wife catch her husband cheating?"
Things like that happened a few times every year.
"Neither. Remember that really pretty girl in Building Nine?"
The night-shift guard thought for a moment, then quickly remembered. That girl was so pretty that once you saw her, you couldn't forget her.
"We haven't seen her in nearly a year, have we?"
"Right. Didn't we think she'd moved away? Turns out she hadn't. She came back today and bought a whole pile of Stone Lions and Stone Bollards."
"I counted twenty Stone Lions. There were even more Stone Bollards-fifty or sixty."
"Whoa!" The night-shift guard let out a drawn-out exclamation of surprise.
"What's she planning to do? Our whole complex couldn't use that many chunks of stone."
The day-shift guard shrugged. "Who knows? Anyway, I'm off. Don't fall asleep tonight."
"I slept before coming in. I won't."
Su Tingxue stopped in her tracks. Something felt wrong.
A very pretty young girl, absent for a year, twenty Stone Lions, fifty or sixty Stone Bollards... all of it seemed to fit Lian Yi.
At that thought, she immediately called her master.
"Hello, Master? I think I've found Lian Yi."
Perfected Person Mu Yu immediately grew anxious. "Don't go there alone. I'll find someone to help you."
Dragon-Tiger Mountain was too far away for Perfected Person Mu Yu to come at once. Fortunately, two fellow members of Dragon-Tiger Mountain happened to be in a nearby city, so Mu Yu sent them over.
"She's gone."
The two senior brothers from Dragon-Tiger Mountain spoke regretfully. Carrying their Magic Treasures and clutching Talismans, they had kicked down Lian Yi's door and searched her home, but found nothing. It looked like the ordinary home of someone who lived alone.
All the neighbors said the two of them were loan sharks.
"But we found some empty Healing Potion Bottles on the computer desk."
"They all held extremely valuable healing pills. It looks like she was badly injured." The two senior brothers clicked their tongues. As a top-tier sect, Dragon-Tiger Mountain's disciples had no shortage of money, but even they wouldn't casually use pills this expensive.
"Injured?" Su Tingxue frowned. That didn't make sense. Lian Yi had mocked everyone and left without a care. There hadn't even been a fight. How had she been injured?
Besides, her methods were unpredictable and her transformations endless. Who could hurt her?
Wait. Su Tingxue suddenly remembered what Chu Xiaoyao had said: "You think you can get away?"
Although afterward, Chu Xiaoyao had explained that she had merely disliked Lian Yi and wanted to scare her.
But could it really be such a coincidence? One moment, she had asked whether Lian Yi thought she could escape, and the next, Lian Yi had suffered serious injuries?
Lian Yi watched all this from the shadows, deeply alarmed and grateful that she had thought quickly enough not to return home.
While moving the Stone Lions to the warehouse, she had suddenly realized something was wrong. Ten trucks arriving in a grand procession had caused such a commotion that anyone looking for her could easily follow the clues straight to her door.
"What a formidable tactic! First, they bought a pile of useless Stone Bollards to cause a commotion and expose my whereabouts!"
Lian Yi had really liked this home. She had spent a fortune renovating it: a wall of Collectible Figures, a computer assembled at great expense, designer handbags... whenever she finished tormenting someone, she would come home and stay in comfort for a while, switch mental gears, and enjoy life.
Now that Dragon-Tiger Mountain knew her address, she could never return, nor could she take all her belongings with her. It felt worse than dying.
"Who exactly used my phone to buy those things?" Lian Yi spent the whole night pondering that question through gritted teeth, but couldn't figure it out. What kind of technique was this?
She knew ninety-nine percent of the methods in the Cultivation World, but she had never heard of anyone whose spell effect was "use someone else's phone to buy Stone Lions and Stone Bollards."
Cultivators were all pursuing modernized spells these days, but this spell was far too modern.
Was it the Red King? He doesn't look like someone who would use this kind of method.
It couldn't have been Chu Xiaoyao... could it?
Before you continue