Chapter 287: Subterfuge (1/2)

Zac didn’t stop running even if the wall was quickly filling up with somber-looking warriors, all of them looking ready to fight. However, a huge fireball ripped toward him, forcing him to a screeching halt as it slammed down in front of him, causing a large scorch mark.

“Help! I wish to join your great sect, but these crazy women want to stop me,” Zac shouted as he stood right between the Profound Yin cultivators and the wall.

The cultivators from the Profound Yin Sect had also stopped their pursuit by now, but they seemed unwilling to let things go as they were. They seemed more than ready for a fight even though quite a few of them were pretty spent from the ultra marathon. But the disciples still in F-Grade all ate some pill that seemed to perk them right up.

“Hand this man over to us and we will not take this issue further,” one of the elders said with a somber face.

There was only silence for a few seconds until the large gates suddenly rumbled as they opened, and a small group of cultivators walked out. They seemed to be roughly the same number as his pursuers, and Zac started to wonder if there were some unspoken rules between the two sects.

Perhaps they kept their clashes to a certain number to avoid too large losses. With their accumulated enmity it wouldn't be surprising if they would launch an all-out war, but it would at best result in a pyrrhic victory. These two sects weren’t the only forces in the area, and such an action would surely lead to the downfall of both sects.

“You will not take things further, you say?” a robust man with bulging muscles said with a teasing face. “I wonder what a couple of birds so far from home would do if we don’t comply.”

“Romi, are you truly planning on testing our patience in the middle of winter? We are taking this man back either alive or in pieces. He grievously wounded Gemoa. A price must be paid,” another of the Yin elders growled.

“It might be winter, but in this area the Yin is always suppressed,” the man called Romi scoffed before he turned to Zac. “Young man, you managed to hurt that bitch? Very impressive. Too bad you look a little girly.”

Zac quickly tried to find a good course of action, and his face started to change. It was no longer the slightly feminine youngster with long hair standing in front of them, but rather a man in his 40s with a masculine face.

Zaq tied up his hair as he forcibly stopped his face from grimacing from the pain from changing appearance. He had decided to utilize [Thousand Faces] once more to become less threatening to the Everlasting Yang Sect. A middle-aged man defeating an elder was much more believable compared to a youngster. Perhaps they would think he was part of some other force otherwise.

“I managed to ambush her, but she was unfortunately too strong so I couldn’t kill her,” Zac said with a gravelly voice. “I changed my face to sneak inside and get this.”

The next moment he held up the box, and he quickly opened it to show the orchid. He held the box so that both parties would see the orchid within, and their expressions proved he was on the right track.

“I wanted to present this to your great sect as proof of my sincerity,” Zac said as he threw a scathing glance at the profound yin elders. “Who would have known that these bitches couldn’t get enough of my handsome face and chased me for three straight days?”

The members of the Everlasting Yang Sect only gaped at Zac in surprise, whereas the Profound Yin sect members looked like they would explode in anger. Another of the Yang elders quickly noticed an opportunity to further piss off their enemies, and he looked over at the women with a sneer.

“A profound yin orchid! A fine offering indeed. It’s useless for us, but perhaps we could plant them and feed them to our cattle,” he laughed.

That comment was the last spark needed to start a conflagration, and one of the female disciples screamed in anger as she launched a blade of ice right at the elder. However, he was somewhere in the middle of the E-Grade and with a laugh easily melted it, causing a mist to rise around him.

The two sects needed very little encouragement as the next moment over ten attacks sailed through the air between the two sides. One of the elders even turned her eyes toward Zac in rage, and a crystalline bird appeared out of nowhere as it flew toward him with a screech.

Zac screamed in alarm, only half-faking it, and ran toward the members of the Everlasting Yang sect. But the bird was extraordinarily fast and its beak pierced him in his back. Zack fell over and spat out a mouthful blood that immediately froze into sanguine crystals.

“Protect that man!” Romi shouted as a lance of fire erupted from his hand, shooting straight toward the elder who attacked Zac from the other side.

Zac’s pathetic state wasn’t fully a ruse, as the peck from the bird had contained a massive amount of frigid energies that rampaged through his body. He desperately circled his Cosmic Energy along with the Dao of Trees to slowly grind away at it, but doing so left him almost unable to move.

Luckily two disciples quickly ran over and lifted him up, and one of them even infused him with some fiery energy that helped combat the cold. However, the second one did not seem to be as benevolent, and Zac noticed a pair of greedy eyes looking at his Cosmos Sack.

“What are you doing? Get him inside the gate!” Romi shouted as two more molten streams erupted from his hands to intercept the disciples who tried to approach Zac.

Seeing that Zac was being taken away caused the brawl to turn into an all-out conflict, and soon the whole area had turned into a haze from the mix of water vapors and smoke from fires. Constant explosions and screams could be heard though, and Zac couldn’t help but shake his head in bafflement. They had been all too ready to go to war with each other.

Zac heavily hung on the disciple’s arm as he pretended to be extremely weakened by the strike. In reality, his eyes were scanning the rampart in front of him, until he finally found who he was looking for. A man in his late twenties or early thirties stood on top of the wall not too far from the gate, sporting a large sword fashioned from reddish stone on his back.

This was the core disciple that Yrial had fought in the real world, and Zac’s theatrics was a bid to get closer to him. There was no way that he dared to infiltrate this sect as well with the commotion that he had caused, so he needed to take one of the rubies that had already been harvested.

The core disciple had taken the ruby out of his Cosmos Sack when taunted by Yrial in his memories, and he hadn’t needed to get it from anywhere. Since he was at peak F-Grade he was likely preparing to use it and then evolve to E-Grade, though Yrial threw a wrench in those plans.

“Just sit down and rest,” the man who helped him combat the frigid energies in his body said to Zac after they entered the sect. “The yin-energies can leave hidden wounds if not properly dispelled.”