"So it really was someone from the Demon Alliance." Su Tingxue was panting hard, relieved to have escaped with her life.
Ji Sen felt the same.
"What is the Demon Alliance?" Zhou You was puzzled. The Demon Alliance sounded like a famous organization—both Su Tingxue and Ji Sen had heard of it.
Now it was Ji Sen's turn to be surprised. How could an immortal cultivator not even know of the Demon Alliance? What deep, remote mountain had this fellow Daoist crawled out of?
Never mind anything else—the Immortal Cultivation Forum alone was full of accounts written by victims of the Demon Alliance.
Had fellow Daoist Zhou only just learned to use the internet?
"The Demon Alliance is a sect that requires Foundation Establishment as a minimum to join. No—it's less a sect than a loose organization."
"They don't cultivate their cultivators from the ground up the way a sect does. They just keep absorbing members from all over."
"The members come from everywhere and nowhere. Traitors to other sects, reclusive rogue cultivators, remnant species from the primordial era. The only thing they have in common is a taste for negative emotions."
"They have no limits whatsoever. For the sake of negative emotions they'll pay any price, and they enjoy doing it. Their victims are beyond counting, and a fair number have been killed by them."
"We call them demons because their way of thinking has broken away from normal logic. You absolutely cannot make sense of them by ordinary reasoning."
"The Demon Alliance is an extremely dangerous organization. Before I left the mountain, my master warned me to be extremely careful if I ever ran into them."
Zhou You nodded. That was true enough. A proper Foundation Establishment cultivator like Lian Yi had been willing to spend a whole year playing a dog at someone's side, all for the sake of seeing the twisted look on Ji Sen's face today. No ordinary cultivator could have pulled that off.
"A mere Demon Alliance. I could destroy it with a flick of my fingers." Chu Xiaoyao had nothing but contempt for them. A pack of nobodies who liked to scheme from the shadows was all—and yet they put on such a mysterious front.
"Back on the Hongmeng Continent, the demonic sects I wiped out numbered far more than a thousand. Every old demon among them bowed his head and swore fealty to me. Not one dared step out of line."
Su Tingxue shot her a sideways look. What was Chu Xiaoyao talking about? The Hongmeng Continent, demonic sects—these were words she couldn't make sense of at all.
Thinking it over, though, they seemed to let slip something utterly terrifying?!
Who exactly was this person?
"Whatever. Never mind her. Let's get the television open." Chu Xiaoyao was far more curious about how a television could work without being plugged into a power outlet.
After Lian Yi left, the television had kept hissing away with a piercing white noise that left anyone who heard it badly unsettled.
With Ji Sen's permission, Chu Xiaoyao got her way and took the television apart.
She lifted off the empty back casing, revealing a circuit board she couldn't make sense of, a mess of wiring, a heavy screen, and a small generator.
"Huh? Why is there a generator in here?"
Chu Xiaoyao didn't recognize the generator, but she could read. The generator's casing said Some Company Portable Generator.
Nothing about it looked like something that belonged in this old twenty-one-inch television.
Zhou You switched off the generator, and the noisy television immediately shut down and went quiet.
"So... someone modified the television?" Zhou You's expression turned strange. He'd thought there was something magical about this television, but it turned out a generator had been built into it.
"You said this television was broken, right?" Zhou You asked Ji Sen.
Ji Sen nodded. "Right. When I rented the place, the landlord said the television was broken—it wouldn't even turn on no matter how much you hit it, and told me I could just throw it out. I couldn't be bothered, so it's been sitting here ever since."
He always watched shows on a tablet. The television sitting there was purely for decoration.
"Which means Lian Yi fixed the television and built a generator into it, just to scare you?"
"She taught herself how to repair televisions, too," Su Tingxue reminded Zhou You. At most an immortal cultivator could use modern technology as skillfully as any ordinary person, but very few truly understood the principles behind it—few could repair a television, much less rewire it and connect a new power source.
All of that had to be learned from scratch.
"Putting that much effort into scaring people... that really is dedication." Zhou You's mouth twitched. The things the Demon Alliance did truly were beyond his comprehension.
"There's another advantage to using a television to scare people." Su Tingxue analyzed the situation. She watched a lot of horror movies, and she understood immortal cultivators, too.
"When an ordinary person sees a broken television suddenly switch on, they panic. But an immortal cultivator knows more, so their first reaction is that someone has cast a spell to frighten them. And then, when they find no trace of any spell being cast, the unknown frightens them even more."
Zhou You laid out Lian Yi's scare plan step by step:
First, a year spent playing the little black dog to win Ji Sen's trust. Then barking at empty air to terrify him. Then, while Ji Sen was out, fixing the television so it could hiss and build a horror atmosphere. Then opening the windows to make it look like something had come in. Then taking Ji Sen's own appearance so that the fake was indistinguishable from the real. And finally, revealing everything and shattering him.
From start to finish, the only spell she had used was the shapeshifting art.
What a masterful method.
...
"What a terrifying being."
Lian Yi had turned into a small dragon the length of her forearm, tearing open space to flee from Red King at the cost of grievous injury. Thinking back over the battle that had just ended, her heart still quaked.
"Who exactly is that Chu Xiaoyao? How does she have such a terrifying Dao-protector!"
Lian Yi felt that throughout the battle Red King had been completely in control. She guessed that he wanted to take her alive, but couldn't gauge his own strength well enough, and was afraid of misjudging how much force to use—so from beginning to end he had never gone all out, which was the only reason she'd gotten a chance to run.
An expert like that was a Dao-protector.
"How interesting..."
Lian Yi gradually began to laugh. She was gravely injured, laughing and coughing at the same time.
She'd already picked out her next victim. Now she thought the Chu Xiaoyao side of things was more interesting.
If she could make Chu Xiaoyao show panic, even despair, how delicious the negative emotions produced would be.
The ones who feared nothing on ordinary days were the ones whose expressions of panic at the critical moment produced the sweetest contrast.
Lian Yi couldn't help licking the corner of her mouth. "What method should I use..."
Lian Yi was someone with standards. Driving a person to despair with cultivation attainment and spells was a method only the incompetent used.
That was why, during that whole year as a dog, she had never once cast a spell.
"First, let's gather intelligence on the Carefree Sect."
Two days later, in an apartment building.
Wearing loungewear and sitting cross-legged in a gaming chair, Lian Yi sat before her computer, fretting for once.
Her desk was crowded with bottles and jars, all medicinal pills for healing injuries. Her injuries were still far from healed; these two days she had been gathering intelligence while recovering.
"Strange. Why can't I find anything about the Carefree Sect on the Immortal Cultivation Forum?"
There was very little the Immortal Cultivation Forum couldn't dig up. Only for truly sensitive questions—like how the Sect Master of Mount Kunlun became the Number One Under Heaven—would the moderators lock such threads down tight.
Otherwise, even a small, insignificant sect like the Green Bamboo Sect that Ji Sen belonged to would have a few threads up, just to prove it existed.
"Could it be a newly founded minor sect?"
Lian Yi shot that suspicion down almost at once. Chu Xiaoyao's bearing was extraordinary, and she gave people a sense of unfathomable depth. On top of that, she had a great master like Red King as her Dao-protector. How could she possibly belong to a minor sect?
"So it's a reclusive sect even the Immortal Cultivation Forum knows nothing about. Their foundation must be terrifyingly deep." Lian Yi found the problem a little tricky.
To be able to hide away from the world that thoroughly, you needed strict discipline throughout the sect—only a clan of a thousand years could manage that.
The harder it was, though, the more excited she got.
"A phone call?"
Lian Yi picked up. The delivery man's voice was less than friendly, and what he said nearly made Lian Yi choke.
"What? I bought twenty stone lions and fifty stone blocks, and they're on the way to my place right now?!"
Chapter 40