Windblown sand filled the sky over the nameless wasteland at the border between the Heavenly South and Great Jin. A winding dirt road linked the sole "legal" passage between north and south—Blackstone Pass. Though small, the pass town occupied a strategic position and saw an endless stream of merchants and Rogue Cultivators each day. Mulan herders clad in beast hides, their bodies steeped in Witch Power, also led exotic beasts laden with furs and ores here to trade with merchants from the Central Plains for salt, ironware, and low-grade talismans.
Disguised as an "old traveling merchant," Han Li hunched his back and carried a basket of seemingly ordinary fragments of falling star iron mother that actually concealed far more than met the eye, mingling with the crowd waiting to enter the pass. With a slight stir of his spiritual sense, the Thousand Faces Transformation Talisman perfectly disguised his aura, bone age, and even the fluctuations of his divine soul as those of an elderly late-stage Foundation Establishment cultivator scraping out a living on the border.
"Hey, old man! Stay in line! Don't block my way!" A brutish-looking guard whose aura was around the middle stage of Foundation Establishment roughly shoved aside a Mulan boy ahead of him, nearly knocking the bundle of medicinal herbs from the boy's arms.
Han Li's brows knitted almost imperceptibly, not because of the boy, but because he had sensed an extremely well-hidden Tracking Mark on the guard, one originating from the Mulan Shamanic Arts. Just as the Mystic Division's Shadow Sentinels had reported, Mulan shamans had infiltrated Blackstone Pass until it was riddled with holes like a sieve.
"Sorry, sorry..." The Mulan boy was about fifteen or sixteen, with dark skin and deep-set eyes. Speaking the common tongue with a heavy accent, he hastily steadied