About half a cup of tea's time later, the trio found the hiding place inside a cavern at the bottom of a deep valley.
A formation concealed the entrance, and a secret technique masked all aura. Under normal circumstances, ordinary cultivators would have found the entrance difficult to detect even if they searched deliberately.
Yet before Li Fan—equipped with the Terminal Dissociation Disc—and Lin Ling, for whom every tree in the mountains served as ears and eyes, it was riddled with flaws.
However, to Li Fan's surprise once more, there was still no one inside the cavern!
Just as before, they had fled not long ago, their residual aura not yet dispersed.
Li Fan narrowed his eyes.
"What is this...?"
"Are they avoiding me?"
"Can they foreknow that I'm coming for them?"
"Is it prophecy, or..."
Li Fan suddenly recalled the collapse and mysterious reappearance of Fuxing Mountain.
"Time reversal?"
The moment that speculation crossed his mind, Li Fan's heart pounded violently.
Still, having weathered so much, he soon regained his composure.
"It's merely a guess; it might not be true."
"The answer will become clear once I capture father and son."
Spurred by a long-absent surge of excitement, Li Fan looked at Lin Ling once more.
Lin Ling looked around for a moment before shaking her head. "They didn't leave this cavern."
Hearing this, Li Fan examined the area closely again. "There are no signs of spatial teleportation either. Could it be..."
Li Fan and Lin Ling looked down at the ground at the same time.
A faint smile appeared at the corners of Li Fan's lips, and he instructed languidly, "We pursue."
Lin Ling nodded. Enveloped in green radiance, she burrowed underground.
Logically speaking, the subterranean world was pitch-black, making it difficult to distinguish cardinal directions. Throwing off pursuers down there was usually easy.
Unfortunately for them, Li Fan's entourage included Lin Ling, who had established a connection with the Earth Vein Ancient Tree!
Vast though the underground was, it was entirely the Earth Vein Ancient Tree's domain.
Every move was impossible to hide from its sight!
Guided by her senses, Li Fan and the others soon found traces of their quarry's movements.
At the same time, Li Fan noticed they had traveled underground for only a short while before hurriedly returning to the surface.
"Did they notice we were pursuing them again?"
"Quite slippery indeed."
With that thought, he returned to the surface as well.
This time, Lin Ling sensed that Ou Daozi and his son had taken to the skies in flight.
Flight techniques inevitably left ripples of spiritual energy in their wake. Before long, Lin Ling identified the direction of their escape.
Guiding Li Fan, she followed in hot pursuit.
No matter how Ou Daozi and his son shifted course or laid down misdirection, they could not evade Lin Ling's tracking.
Finally, they seemed to give up struggling and ceased fleeing.
They hovered motionless amidst the clouds ahead, waiting.
*This little Lin Ling truly is useful,* Li Fan mused secretly as they caught up, looking at the two figures ahead—one tall, one short.
"May I ask what business Senior has to pursue us so relentlessly?" Ou Daozi cupped his hands respectfully yet without subservience as he faced Li Fan's trio surrounding him.
"Originally, ground had just been broken for some construction back home, and I merely wanted to invite you to lend a hand. I never expected to find an unexpected bonus." Li Fan narrowed his eyes slightly, his gaze sweeping back and forth between the two.
Ou Daozi's son was merely eight or nine years old. While not particularly handsome, he displayed no fear whatsoever when facing Li Fan, who subtly exuded a sinister chill. The boy possessed an unmistakable poise of his own.
Most striking was his gaze, glaring fiercely at Li Fan as though harboring some blood-deep vendetta.
The two had clearly never met before, yet the boy showed such hostility...
It seemed only to further validate the suspicion in Li Fan's heart.
Noticing his son's peculiar behavior, Ou Daozi's expression shifted. Stepping in front to shield the boy, he said, "I don't understand what you mean!"
Li Fan sneered. "Fuxing Mountain collapsed, only to reappear intact. That was your son's handiwork, wasn't it?"
"What exactly is his ability? Could it be the legendary art of reversing time?"
Although Li Fan appeared to be merely a Golden Core cultivator, Lin Ling was at Dao Integration and Tianyang was at Soul Formation, yet both deferred to him as their leader.
Unable to fathom Li Fan's true cultivation, Ou Daozi merely replied, "Senior, please do not joke. How could the flow of time ever be reversed in this world...?"
"As for my son's divine ability..."
As Ou Daozi spoke, he lowered his voice, then abruptly went silent on purpose.
As if waiting for something!
Alarm bells immediately rang in Li Fan's mind. "Insect Binding!"
His target was not Ou Daozi, but the son!
The child lost control of his body in an instant, yet no panic appeared in his eyes.
It was as though everything was within his expectations.
Instead, he looked at Li Fan with a faint trace of mockery.
Simultaneously, Tianyang's form suddenly expanded, morphing into a sphere of intermingled black and red that completely enveloped Li Fan at its center.
*Boom!*
A tremendous roar instantly erupted as something collided with it.
Li Fan felt a sudden bout of dizziness, while crack lines spread across Tianyang's puppet body.
Fortunately, Lin Ling intervened just in time, sparing the puppet from shattering into pieces.
*What the hell was that!*
Li Fan cursed under his breath and glanced at the True Reversion panel. The charge progress of his protective shield had not decreased.
His heart settled immediately.
Inside his mind, the Dao Transformation Stone flashed with blue light, replaying the recorded scene slowed down countless times.
Only then did he clearly see the culprit behind the sudden shock, along with everything that had unfolded in that spark of a moment.
The attacker that had been so swift that neither Lin Ling nor Tianyang could react in time was surprisingly an arrow.
Ou Daozi and his son had seemingly anticipated its flight trajectory long beforehand.
They had lingered ahead on purpose,
luring Li Fan and the others directly into the arrow's path.
While stalling for time, they waited for the exact instant the arrow struck Li Fan.
A burst of yellow radiance erupted from Ou Daozi's son.
Seeming to disregard the arrow's terrifying speed, the light locked onto it with flawless precision.
Then, in a fraction of an instant, without turning its orientation around at all,
the arrow bizarrely shot back toward the direction it had come from!
Enveloped in yellow light, Ou Daozi and his son harnessed the arrow's unfathomable speed and broke through Li Fan's encirclement in the blink of an eye!
"Master, they're gone. They've fled too far; I can't sense their aura anymore," Lin Ling said, sounding somewhat self-reproachful.
Tianyang also shook his head, looking slightly guilty.
Li Fan merely waved a hand, unconcerned.
Replaying what had just transpired in his mind, Li Fan gained a faint understanding of what the child's divine ability truly was.
It was not the complete reversal of time he had envisioned...
Or rather, it bore a certain relation to it.
It reversed the state of an object to a certain point in the past!
Having suffered a momentary setback at the hands of a seven- or eight-year-old child, Li Fan felt not dismay, but delight.
Because ever since starting his reincarnations, this was the only cultivator he had ever encountered who was connected to the Dao of Time.
*Run? Think you can run?*
*You can escape for a moment, but not forever!*
*Once targeted by me, escape is impossible!*
Li Fan's eyes flickered, and dozens of counterstrategies flashed through his mind in a single instant.
Chapter 831