After assigning two Ruhua to handle the cleanup and getting everything settled, Ma Xianhong was about to summon Kui Ox and leave. Then, however, he sensed another burst of hurried footsteps in the distance, and his eyebrows rose slightly.
He glanced down at the silver bead on his belt, which looked much like the original Devouring Pouch, and tapped it. His entire body instantly vanished.
A short while later, two figures in matching uniforms darted out of the woods. They exchanged a glance and surveyed their surroundings, but found no trace of Zhao Guizhen. The slightly heavier man frowned.
"Fuck me, we're too damn late again. That little bastard got away." Judging by his accent, he was from the Central Plains.
His companion, however, shook his head. "No. Someone beat us here and fought that Wild Maoshan practitioner first."
He could sense Zhao Guizhen's aura right here, though it was already extremely faint...
Wait!
Only then did they notice the pitch-black patch of ground in the woods nearby. The darkness had concealed it at first, but a closer look revealed that an entire stretch of earth had been shaved down a foot.
It was a perfectly square area ten meters across. Everything within it seemed to have been reduced to nothing, utterly annihilated. A lingering wisp of aura had yet to disperse, and merely sensing it sent a sharp sting through them.
"Holy shit! What the fuck happened here?!" The heavyset man examined the hoofprints and several scattered footprints, then stared at the marks left by the Immortal Slaughtering Sword Formation. He was completely rattled.
The thin man twitched his nose and approached the site of the earlier battle with a deep frown. His ability could lock onto auras, and Zhao Guizhen's trail ended right here. Moreover, unlike the sinister, baleful quality it had possessed before, his final aura was remarkably upright and balanced, as though... someone had fucking delivered his soul from suffering...
The footprints suggested that more than one opponent had fought Zhao Guizhen-there had been both people and a beast. Yet he could sense only one stranger's aura, which, like that Wild Maoshan practitioner's, had vanished on the spot.
It was truly bizarre.
Had the two killed each other, or did one possess an exceptionally sophisticated method of concealing their aura? Or was it something else entirely?
"Judging by the surroundings, that Wild Maoshan practitioner is probably dead. There's no sign of him leaving, and my ability can't track him any further. All things considered, my conclusion is that we should give up for now."
After frowning in thought and trying for quite some time, the tall, thin man shook his head helplessly.
"Huh? We finally tracked him down, but there's neither a living man nor a dead body to be found. We're really just giving up?"
"He's vanished without a trace. Where are we supposed to chase him? Stop wasting time. We're about to move against the Medicine Immortal Society. Compared to this guy, they're the real dagger in our heart. Get your priorities straight, clean this place up, and pull out!"
Shaking his head, the tall, thin man caught sight of some fine dust in the pit. He sensed an exceedingly faint trace of Zhao Guizhen's aura coming from it, and the corner of his eye twitched.
If his judgment was correct, that dust was most likely Zhao Guizhen.
In that case, he had met a fitting end. Most likely, some passing senior expert had found the Wild Maoshan practitioner's actions intolerable and dealt with him.
Even as an employee of the Nadu Tong Company, he did not see much of a problem with this sort of administering justice on Heaven's behalf.
"All right, fair enough. That fucking Medicine Immortal Society has risen from the ashes. They're the bigger threat." The heavyset man nodded, agreeing that his companion had a point. He took out his phone to document the scene, and after tidying things up, the two turned and left.
At the same spot.
Silver light flickered in the air. Space warped, and Ma Xianhong stepped out, his eyes gleaming.
One of the Devouring Pouch's upgraded versions-the Sun and Moon in the Pot.
The original Devouring Pouch could hold not only inanimate objects but living beings as well, provided those living beings were unconscious.
His modifications had produced several branches, and the one he had just used was one of them. Similar to Obito's intangibility, it allowed him to hide directly in the alternate space inside the Sun and Moon in the Pot. Its drawback was that it could not move while anything was inside. Its consumption depended on how many people it captured, whether they resisted, and how long they remained inside.
Trying to actively capture an enemy inside it for a one-on-one fight during actual combat would be rather difficult.
But Ma Xianhong had never intended to use this thing as a weapon against opponents. If it really came to a fight, he would be better off throwing it out and detonating it, creating an exploding spatial vortex. That would do more damage.
"The Medicine Immortal Society?" Ma Xianhong repeated the name the two men had mentioned, and the gleam in his eyes intensified.
Sure enough, he seemed to be a magnet for trouble too. At this point in the timeline, the Medicine Immortal Society really was a major incident.
Judging by their uniforms, the two men had undoubtedly been Nadu Tong employees pursuing Zhao Guizhen. Their accents sounded like they were from the Central Plains, so that should put them in the Central China Region, right? Zhao Guizhen certainly knew how to roam far and wide.
Or perhaps employees with useful abilities had been brought in from across the country because of the Medicine Immortal Society.
None of that was the point. The point was the Medicine Immortal Society, now rising from the ashes.
This cult had already been wiped out once, yet it was back to whip up wind and rain again.
Those lunatics were far crazier than the Uchiha. They believed that the rulers of the world were neither humans nor gods, but Gu Poison.
Unlike other sects that properly worked with Gu Worms, those maniacs cultivated Gu, not Gu Masters.
Ma Xianhong found them laughable. They had taken the wrong road from the very beginning, both in their beliefs and in their cultivation.
The world of The Outcast placed its emphasis on innate nature and life. How could they expect a good outcome after taking the wrong path?
Besides, those people would stop at nothing. They were every bit as bad as Zhao Guizhen, if not worse. Had he never encountered them, that would have been one thing, but now that he had, doing nothing would leave a bitter knot in his heart.
And the mention of Gu reminded him of a certain Primordial Saint. He wondered whether any of his counterparts in other worlds had transmigrated into the Gu World. Wouldn't they be screwed if they ran into that beast, Model Worker? Fuck, don't let me think about killing Model Worker one second, only for him to show up at my door the next.
(In another world, somewhere, a man with long, straight black hair was fleeing at full speed, cursing nonstop. All he had done was trash someone online, so why the fuck had he been transmigrated into this scumbag's body? He would have been better off becoming the Tang God-King, and so on.
The camera pulled back to reveal a black mass of pursuers behind him, with divine abilities and spells of every color roaring toward him, blotting out the sky.)
Merely imagining what might happen to a counterpart who had transmigrated into the Gu World, encountered Model Worker, and had no cheat made Ma Xianhong struggle to hold back his laughter.
But when his thoughts returned to the Medicine Immortal Society, he could not help rubbing his chin.
Chen Duo, whose fate left such a lingering ache, had come from there. According to the timeline, the company would rescue her around this time, only for her to pass from one tragedy into another...
"The Gu-Bound Holy Child? This child has a destined affinity with my Jiejiao."
With a faint smile, he reclined on Kui Ox. The wind-and-lightning patterns on Kui Ox's body began to glow faintly, and then both he and Ma Xianhong turned translucent, disappearing like a gentle breeze.
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