Jing Wen stood on his flying sword with his hands behind his back. Beneath his feet, the Azure Edge Sword flickered with three inches of azure radiance, tracing a barely visible path through the clouds.
The mountain wind whipped fiercely, sending his ink-black robes billowing.
Between his slender fingers, he held a gilt-gold Sound Transmission Talisman. The intricate cinnabar runes on its paper glowed an eerie red in the sunlight.
This was the message Venerable Golden Light had sent earlier, saying that Elder Jin Ruogu of the Yellow Maple Valley had left the Market and returned to his sect for secluded cultivation.
"Jin Ruogu..." Jing Wen's thin lips parted as he turned the name over and over on his tongue, his brows unconsciously knitting.
Read backward, the name became "Gu Ruo Jin"-the past was like the present-as though it concealed some meaning of reincarnation, stirring an inexplicable unease within him.
A faint pulse of spiritual power flowed from his fingertips. The Sound Transmission Talisman ignited without a breeze, dissolving into motes of golden light that scattered in the wind.
Jing Wen took another pale-blue Sound Transmission Talisman from his Storage Bag. This one contained the more detailed intelligence Chen Qiaoqian had sent.
The elegant handwriting on the talisman described Jin Ruogu's astonishing talent in detail-born with a light spiritual root and possessing some mysterious sacred body, he had achieved core formation in a mere thirty years, making him a genius the Yellow Maple Valley might not see once in a millennium.
"A light spiritual root... a sacred body..." A cold gleam flickered in Jing Wen's eyes.
Stranger still, this man happened to be the Golden Core cultivator who had hunted him back then.
He suddenly recalled something he had read in an ancient fragmentary scroll: when certain mighty cultivators approached