Path of the Sect Leader

Chapter 62: Fortune Conceals Disaster

Everything clicked the instant Chu Duo spoke the words.

Why had a Golden Core ancestor crossed half the realm just to hand-deliver gifts?

Why had Chu Hongshang’s killing intent melted into fascination the moment her soul-search failed?

Because Qi Xiu was the perfect knife: sharp, disposable, and impossible to trace back to the hand that swung it.

The Great Zhou Academy’s sect laws were ironclad. Within a sect’s territory, any mortal child born with a cultivable spirit root belonged—body and future—to that sect alone. No poaching. No exceptions. The penalty for theft was annihilation of the offending sect and execution of its leaders. Even a titan like the Southern Chu Sect would be unmade if caught.

Normally, children were tested at three, paraded through the Ascension Ceremonies, and gently funneled into their fated sect. Clean. Legal. Untouchable.

What Chu Duo demanded was the opposite: snatch the best seedlings before they ever reached a ceremony. Smuggle them through Chu Qin Sect just long enough to stamp legitimate papers, then spirit them away to Southern Chu’s core peaks. A perfect laundering of heaven-blessed geniuses.

And the linchpin? Qi Xiu himself.

His Scarlet-Tailed Horse Monkey root rendered soul-searching useless. No evidence could ever be pulled from his mind. If the crime ever surfaced, Southern Chu would weep crocodile tears, sacrifice Chu Qin Sect as the “sole perpetrator,” and walk away spotless.

Qi Xiu would die. His disciples would die. The entire mountain would be razed to bedrock.

Refusal? The moment Chu Duo finished speaking, refusal ceased to exist. One wrong word and the old monster would bury the whole sect out of sheer tidiness.

A perfect dead-end.

“Five years? Ten? Fifty?” Qi Xiu laughed inside, the sound hollow as a cracked bell. “Sooner or later someone notices a pattern. When that day comes, Chu Qin vanishes from the maps forever.”

Rebel? Against a sect with Nascent Soul patriarchs? Laughable.

Confess? To whom? His disciples? Wang Fang? Kan Lin? That would only paint targets on their backs.

The only theoretical escape—Chu Qin producing its own Nascent Soul—was so absurd he crushed the thought the instant it formed. If such a future were possible, Southern Chu would never have needed a crippled pawn in the first place.

Very well. A pawn accepts its role. A useful pawn might survive longer than a dead one.

Qi Xiu pushed the cottage door open, face schooled into calm, and walked straight into Zhang Shishi’s chest.

“Sect Leader! Where have you been? We’ve been looking everywhere—I thought something happened!”

“What’s the rush?”

“Monks from Southern Chu just dropped off a married couple. Servants, they said. Compensation for the ‘misunderstanding’ that wrecked half the mountain.”

Already? Qi Xiu’s stomach turned to ice. They weren’t wasting a single day.

He kept his voice flat. “Put them in the rear mountain. Have them tend the ancestral shrine where the past sect leaders’ tablets are kept.”

Zhang Shishi hesitated. “But… they’re deaf and mute. The wife is heavy with child—due any day. The shrine is remote and cold. Is that really suitable?”

Qi Xiu let irritation creep into his tone. “They were sent by the Chu Clan. We don’t work them, we don’t question. Just feed them and leave them be. Understood?”

“…Yes, Sect Leader.” Zhang Shishi bowed, puzzled and a little hurt, then hurried off.

Less than half a month later the mute woman “gave birth” to dragon-phoenix twins.

By pure coincidence, a female cultivator from Southern Chu happened to be passing Black River Peak. She kindly assisted with the delivery, then—again by pure coincidence—escorted the infants to be raised by the parents’ “relatives” back in Southern Chu territory.

A ripple no wider than a teacup. No one noticed. No one asked.

Only Qi Xiu tasted the poison in every breath.

The rewards, of course, flowed at once.

His path to cultivation cracked open for the first time in two decades. Zhan Yuan and the others were quietly told the ban on Black River Market had been “lifted.” Business boomed.

Bai Xiaosheng remained nailed to the crossroads pillar, a living advertisement of Southern Chu’s wrath. Cultivators now detoured through the market just to spit on him or watch Chu Youguang invent new torments. Black River Market had never been busier.

Irony sharp enough to draw blood.

While the world laughed at the broken loose cultivator chained like a dog, Chu Qin’s grand new halls rose clean and Daoist—gray tiles, sweeping eaves, no trace of the old Buddhist gaudiness.

In the heart of the gathering-spirit formation, Qi Xiu sat cross-legged.

Before him hovered the tiny Exquisite Pagoda, colors shifting like oil on water.

He no longer contemplated the Scarlet-Tailed Horse Monkey that had betrayed him at birth.

Instead, breath by deliberate breath, he painted the counterfeit heart—Seven Apertures, flawless crystal—letting the pagoda’s resonance guide every stroke.

The technique crawled through his meridians, slow as winter sap, yet the barrier that had mocked him for twenty years began to crack.

In his sea of consciousness, something pulsed—once, twice—like a newborn heart tasting its first beat.

Qi Xiu’s eyes snapped open. Joy surged so violently his qi nearly deviated on the spot. He slapped a Calming Talisman to his chest just in time, lungs heaving.

“Sect Leader?” Zhang Shishi, meditating nearby, looked over in alarm.

“It’s… nothing.” Qi Xiu fought to keep his voice level, but a grin kept tugging at the corners of his mouth. “The new reference object agrees with me more than I hoped. A sliver of progress. That’s all.”

The disciples around him lit up.

“Congratulations, Sect Leader!”

“Break through soon!”

Qi Xiu laughed, warmth genuine for the first time in weeks. “Still a long way to go. Until I cross the first threshold of Qi Refining, it’s all smoke.”

He turned to Zhang Shishi. “You? Any movement on the sixth layer?”

The young man’s shoulders sagged. After his fight with the Black River Lizard, the stone meditation cushion had shattered. He’d switched to a first-tier Heavy Earth Shield hoping for better synergy, but the gate still refused to budge.

“This shield… feels even less attuned than the old cushion,” Zhang Shishi muttered, frustration thick.

“Then change it,” Qi Xiu said lightly. “The market’s coffers are fuller than ever. Buy a second-tier artifact if you need.”

Zhang Shishi scratched his cheek. “Let’s wait. Winter’s almost here. When the first snow falls, the Fragrant Cattail Pig-Fish will be ready for harvest. I’ll decide after we cash in.”

Qi Xiu nodded and said nothing more.

Outside, snowflakes began to drift from a pewter sky.

Inside, a false heart beat steadily in the dark, drawing nearer to truth with every pulse.

And somewhere far south, two infants with heaven-defying roots opened their eyes for the first time—under a different banner, in a different cradle, with a different future already written in blood Qi Xiu had yet to spill.

Fortune and disaster, disaster and fortune.

The blade had fallen.

Now it was only a question of whose throat it found first.