"All right..." Xiao Hua said with a bitter smile, flicking Little Silver's tiny backside with his middle finger. "Go look, then. This old man will follow behind you..."
Before Xiao Hua had even finished speaking, Little Silver's nose suddenly twitched, and its body transformed into a streak of silver light as it flew off in one direction.
"Good!" Xiao Hua was overjoyed. He hurriedly activated the Wind Escape Technique to pursue Little Silver, while extending his soul sense in that direction.
They flew for the time it took to drink a cup of tea, encountering two Golden Core cultivators along the way. The two were in a sorry state, apparently having just escaped from some defensive formation. When they saw Xiao Hua and Little Silver, delight appeared in their eyes. How could Xiao Hua fail to understand what that delight meant? He snorted coldly and stopped concealing his cultivation. The pressure of a Nascent Soul cultivator surged forth at once, frightening the two men until their faces turned deathly pale, nearly making them collapse in midair. Xiao Hua could not be bothered with them and simply continued after Little Silver. The two Golden Core cultivators slunk away in the opposite direction.
Yet as it flew, Little Silver stopped again, looking about in all directions as though it had lost the trail. Smiling, Xiao Hua scooped it up and set it on his shoulder, then continued flying forward. Before long, the once-warm sunlight had turned cold. Ahead lay two undulating mountain ranges. They appeared extremely abrupt, grayish-white in color, emerging amid the cover of forest like two enormous pythons with their heads locked together, enclosing a mountain ravine roughly a dozen miles wide. There were no ancient trees within the ravine, only jagged boulders of varying sizes—some dozens of zhang across,