Before long, Wei Lu and his cohort followed the tracks and located the pair.
Little did they expect that in such a short span of time, their former prey had turned around and become the hunter.
After breaking through to the Foundation Establishment stage, Li Qing's combat strength surged several-fold. Moreover, his strikes were ruthless, dealing even more casualties than Sima Jing, who was in the late Foundation Establishment stage.
These bandits, after all, were merely hired hands working for coin. Seeing the situation turn against them, they immediately began to beat a retreat.
Wei Lu grew frantic, unable to stop himself from cutting them off.
During this brief moment of standoff, Li Qing seized the precise opportunity, striking directly at the shadows to knock Wei Lu into the open and exposing his true face.
Exposed, Wei Lu's expression twisted in shock.
Sima Jing trembled with rage, killing intent surging in her eyes for the first time.
Things having reached this point, there was no way this could end well.
Wei Lu hardened his heart. Promising them his entire fortune, he managed to sway the retreating bandits once more.
The two sides clashed again.
Once the bandits stopped holding back, Li Qing and Sima Jing were immediately driven into a disadvantage.
At the critical juncture, amidst the fierce battle, Li Qing appeared to undergo another breakthrough, inciting a violent upheaval of the extreme yin qi within Yin Wind Valley.
The pair seized the chance to flee.
Over the days that followed, Li Qing and Sima Jing fought as they retreated, retreating only to fight again.
They sustained the battle through battle itself.
Throughout this process, the tacit understanding between them deepened. As though sharing a telepathic link, their combined attacks nearly doubled their effective combat power yet again.
Ultimately, relying on the terrain of Yin Wind Valley, they turned the tables and wiped out their pursuers.
Watching Sima Jing's gaze filled with disgust, Wei Lu opened and closed his mouth, seemingly wanting to say something. Yet before he could make a sound, Li Qing had already ground his bones to dust and scattered his ashes.
With the crisis resolved, Sima Jing went on to complete her sect trial mission with Li Qing's assistance.
The two returned together to the sect.
As for what had transpired in Yin Wind Valley, although Wei Lu had harbored malicious designs first, the two of them had, in the end, killed him directly to vent their anger. To avoid punishment from the sect, under Li Qing's persuasion, Sima Jing ultimately refrained from mentioning the incident to anyone.
Nor did the disappearance of Wei Lu, a mere Foundation Establishment disciple, attract much notice; it was soon forgotten.
Though they were already inseparable, they still had to maintain some restraint in public.
Sima Jing returned to the inner sect to report back to her master. At the same time, she began pondering how to convince her master to accept Li Qing into the fold so they could see each other often.
Li Qing, meanwhile, concealed his identity and quietly visited the market, using the spirit stones looted from Wei Lu and the others to purchase pills that could conceal his cultivation.
It was not until half a month later that Sima Jing's master, Huo Jingtong, finally yielded to her relentless badgering and agreed to grant Li Qing an audience.
Evidently, Huo Jingtong still held some reservations about the fact that Li Qing had been castrated and transformed from a man into a woman. Yet those reservations vanished completely into thin air the moment she laid eyes on Li Qing in person.
Li Qing knelt below the hall, keeping his head lowered as he awaited Huo Jingtong's questioning.
To his surprise, a long time passed without any reaction from Huo Jingtong. Just as Li Qing began to wonder if his scheme had miscarried and couldn't resist looking up, he found her still staring blankly at him.
"Ahem." Huo Jingtong was, after all, a Soul Formation cultivator; she was far more composed and shrewd than a young girl like Sima Jing. "Jing'er has already told me everything. You may withdraw."
She gave Li Qing no direct answer on the spot, speaking only with cool indifference.
Li Qing offered a respectful bow and turned to leave. Yet judging by how her divine sense remained locked onto him the entire time, Li Qing knew the matter was settled.
Sure enough, seven days later, he received the sect's notice and formally entered Huo Jingtong's tutelage.
Though the female cultivators of the outer sect were deeply reluctant to see Li Qing go, they still offered their silent blessings. Li Qing likewise promised to return often to visit.
After a delicate farewell amidst the chattering crowd of women, Li Qing moved into the Yuehua Mountain Range.
Those outer sect female cultivators missed Li Qing so dearly that they applied themselves vigorously to their cultivation. Quite a few even broke through long-standing bottlenecks and managed to enter the inner sect as well, fulfilling their wish to visit Li Qing frequently.
That, however, is a story for later and need not be elaborated on now.
Huo Jingtong's branch resided on Liuyue Peak in Mount Yuehua, not far from Lengyue Peak, where Senior Sister Zhao resided.
Zhao Ruoxi, however, was still in secluded cultivation at the moment, so Li Qing naturally had no intention of dropping by Lengyue Peak.
Upon Liuyue Peak, there were over a hundred female disciples, the vast majority of whom were innocent maidens who had never known the ways of worldly intimacy.
Li Qing arriving here was no different from a rat falling into a rice vat.
Yet with immense willpower, he restrained himself from running amok. Instead, he began by cultivating the technique imparted by Huo Jingtong: the true legacy of the Yuehua Lineage, the Hundred Transformations of Yuehua.
It was truly worthy of being a top-tier manual of the Dadao Sect, vastly superior to the unorthodox methods Li Qing had previously scouted and gathered.
Li Qing pondered and studied it repeatedly, overjoyed. Moreover, when he attempted to cultivate it, pleasant surprises came one after another.
The pure yin constitution converted by the Scripture of Inverse Order seemed to grant him an unparalleled advantage in cultivating the Hundred Transformations of Yuehua.
After seven days of secluded cultivation, he had already mastered the technique to a level matching his realm—the early Golden Core stage.
Furthermore, Li Qing discovered that cultivating both arts concurrently placed no burden on him whatsoever. In fact, they complemented and reinforced each other. This gave his cultivation speed—already terrifyingly swift—even more room to surge.
Over the following period, he dealt with Sima Jing during his spare moments while pouring all the rest of his energy into cultivation. He did not stop until both the Scripture of Inverse Order and the Hundred Transformations of Yuehua reached the peak of the early Golden Core stage.
Counting the days, Li Qing made the shocking discovery that merely three months had elapsed.
One had to understand that once past the Golden Core stage, ordinary cultivators measured their progress in years, if not decades. A single seclusion lasting over a decade was commonplace. For someone like him to advance from the nascent Golden Core stage straight to the bottleneck in just three months, without relying on any external aids and having barely consumed any spirit stones along the way...
It was practically unheard of!
Fortunately, the bottleneck Li Qing sensed gave him a measure of relief.
"In its current state, my pure yin constitution doesn't seem sufficient to support the continued cultivation of the Scripture of Inverse Order. I need more—and far purer—yin qi."
Li Qing's eyes flickered.
The figures of the hundreds of beautiful female cultivators on Liuyue Peak—slender or voluptuous, each possessing her own distinct charm—could not help but surface in his mind.
Every single one of them was prime nourishment for his cultivation!
Yet, this was the inner sect of the Dadao Sect after all. His early Golden Core cultivation was not enough to let him act with reckless abandon. If his misconduct were discovered, he would surely have his cultivation crippled on the spot and be expelled from the sect.
Therefore, Li Qing decided...
To start directly from the very top of Liuyue Peak—his master, the Soul Formation cultivator Huo Jingtong!
Chapter 920