Earlier, the two men had sat cross-legged underground, without the slightest trace of an aura, like a pair of corpses.
Yet each had a bronze ring ornament resting on his knees. Only the size of a copper coin, they resembled sections of clasps from bronze armor plates.
At that moment, faint light flickered over the two bronze rings, then quickly vanished altogether.
A little while later, a faint ripple of aura finally stirred from one of the men.
"They've gone!"
The speaker had a handsome, youthful face. He was none other than Kong Qianqiu.
The other was a cultivator who looked to be in his fifties: Min Bufu, another of Zhao Haiyang's trusted subordinates.
They had arrived ahead of time along a route that anyone traveling west from the east toward Ghostsound City would have to take, then used concealment techniques to descend deep underground.
They reckoned that Li Yan and Mu Guyue would almost certainly pass through here rather than detour north or south, which would only increase their chances of being exposed.
But since the two were heading out on a mission, they would probably disguise their appearances again. That was standard practice for scouts.
As such, finding them would be difficult.
They did, however, have other methods. The identity tokens issued by the Moji Dao Sect actually contained a hidden safeguard.
That was confidential information, known only to cultivators at the Void Refinement Realm or above.
As long as someone carried the identity token, even inside a storage space, there was a chance it could be detected by activating a particular magical treasure through a secret art.
The maximum detection range, however, was only a little over a thousand li.
The Moji Dao Sect had originally devised this method out of concern that its scouts or important