Humanity's Great Sage

Chapter 525: The Tracking Disc

His voice barely fell when Lu Ye exposed himself, dashing forward with Glyph: Windwalk activated and Inviolable hacking down on Jiang Liuzi in a deadly arc. 

He had no idea what that compass was for, but one thing was certain—he was exposed and it was all because of it.

The Jiang brothers must have been using it to track him down. 

That would mean he needed to seize that compass!

Seeing the steel gleaming at just a mere hair’s breadth from him frightened Jiang Liuzi. The memory of his last defeat in Lu Ye’s hands remained vivid and fresh in his mind and because of that, he knew all too well the strength of Lu Ye. Instinctively he staggered backward to evade the blow. 

Tan Sheng beside him sprang into action, unleashing a huge burst of Spiritual Power barreling straight at Lu Ye. 

Such was the formidable strength of a Ninth-Order. The blast caught Lu Ye squarely, sending his figure hurtling away like a ragdoll. But Lu Ye was not defeated just yet; even as his internal energies churned violently deep inside, he groped as he was still in mid-air, conjuring a ward flag he had kept hidden and swung it vigorously.

Eight beams of light shot up from the ground and into the sky, interconnecting and resonating with each other as they formed a dome-like energy field that covered an area in excess of a hundred meters wide. 

Lu Ye effortlessly phased through the wall of light as he stumbled out, leaving Tan Sheng, who had bolted forward in pursuit, trapped inside. 

“A trap ward!” Tan Sheng gasped, astonished. He hadn’t expected that someone had set up a trap ward here in advance and for that, he was now confined inside.

[Swish, swish…] A pair of whistles sliced through the air. It was Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan breaking cover and soaring into the air.

Seeing Lu Ye using his trap ward was sign enough that they were up against someone more powerful than them. Immediately, they sped after Lu Ye, joining him in their flight away. 

Tan Sheng’s eyes flashed with a shade of regret as the trio bolted away in streaks of light and disappeared in the distance. He had almost managed to kill that all-elusive Lu Yi Ye, but alas, here he was, thwarted by a trap and there was little he could do.

He hurled spell after spell at the ward, pounding the wall of light so rapidly that ripples spread and intertwined with one another as the radiance of the wall of light began to dim at a noticeable pace. 

Jiang Liuzi helped to bring down the ward too. Having the compass might allow them to track down Lu Ye, but the last thing he wanted was to delay it in case more variables came into play. Especially if Lu Ye were to get himself caught and killed by another Thousand Demon Ridge elite who happened to be passing by. Then everything they had done would have been for naught. 

But the strength of Lu Ye’s trap wards could barely keep Wei Que inside for long, let alone an invincible Ninth-Order like Tan Sheng.

Barely twenty seconds elapsed and the dome of light diminished like twilight. As soon as the ward crumbled, Tan Sheng and Jiang Liuzi took off into the sky in hot pursuit. It did not take long for them to be joined by a third figure, the Ghost Cultivator Jiang Chengzi. 

Lucky enough to not have been caught inside the trap ward when it was activated gave him the chance to surreptitiously shadow Lu Ye and his companions when they were making their escape. But he did not dare to stay close; if he were discovered, he would have been outnumbered three to one. 

“There! I saw them landing somewhere around that spot!” Jiang Chengzi exclaimed, his finger pointing in the direction their quarry had vanished. 

Before he even finished, all three of them felt the earth and the trees beneath them shaking, followed swiftly by the blast of an explosion.

Jiang Chengzi was stunned as a sense of deja vu gripped him. He could have sworn that he had seen something like this before. But where he could not quite remember. 

But Tan Sheng did not spare a moment’s delay. He dove forward with the Jiang brother closely behind. 

They barely made more than a hundred meters when Jiang Liuzi yelped with disbelief, yanking himself back to an abrupt halt as he cried, “Wait, Brother Tan!”

Tan Sheng stopped at once. “What is it?” he asked irately. 

“The Disc’s pointer… It’s indicating that Lu Yi Ye’s in that direction,” said Jiang Liuzi, his hand pointing somewhere else as he could hardly pry his stare away from the compass in his hand. 

Somewhere else—a direction that was nowhere near where the flaming detonation happened. 

“Didn’t you say you saw them landing there?” Tan Sheng glowered at Jiang Chengzi. 

“I did,” Jiang Chengzi replied, “Saw it with my own eyes.”

“Unless something’s wrong with the Disc?” he added, even though he has full confidence in his brother’s control of the magical compass. Yet bafflingly enough, the Disc’s pointer was aimed in another direction as if in pure sardonic mockery. 

“We’ll go and have a look,” Tan Sheng made his call decisively, choosing to ignore the compass first. After all, the source of the detonation was not more than just a few miles away. Checking it first won’t take too long.

The Jiang brothers naturally had no objections. The trio quickly made their way together and found a cave still filled with dancing swirls of dust and disarrayed clutter of debris fresh after an explosion. 

Jiang Chengzi studied the environs inside the cave. Something about it felt awfully familiar to him…

In the meantime, a newly-appearing Lu Ye who had just escaped here using his Teleportation Ward wasn’t amused or pleased. He was being followed—by a Ninth-Order, no less!

What that compass was that Jiang Liuzi held in his grasp, he did not know. But he was even more bothered by how he could feel some inexplicable and yet peculiar sort of mental connection between him and that mysterious compass. Sensing the confusion now boggling Lu Ye, Li Baxian broke his silence, “That’s a Tracking Disc, brother!”

“A Tracking Disc?” A baffled Lu Ye frowned. Hearing the name of the compass was enough for him to know what its function was. 

“A magical item that can be used to track down individuals. Extremely rare, it works by using a drop of blood—the user’s—to write down the target’s name on it. The Disc’s pointer points in the direction of the individual’s location. I’ve only heard about it; this is the first time seeing one up close.”

“Extremely rare, eh? And they’re willing to use it on me… That’s great.”

And it was held by Jiang Liuzi, indicating that he was the owner of the Disc. Regret now gnawed at his heart, reflecting on his earlier failure to wrest the Tracking Disc from Jiang Liuzi’s grasp. How he wished he could have seized it and rid himself of this crisis!

“Does that mean that they will be able to locate me wherever I go, as long as they have the Tracking Disc in their possession?”

“Yes,” Li Baxian answered solemnly. 

“What the heck is this… Since when do we even have such a vendetta!” Lu Ye grumbled in frustration. 

Lu Ye and the Jiang brothers shared no significant personal enmity; their prior clashes merely sprung from disputes over territorial claims of Arcane Glades. Yet, inexplicably, the Jiangs seemed to have clung on to a tenacious obsession—to the extent of enlisting the aid of a Ninth-Order in their bid for vengeance—a clear declaration of their resolute wish for his head.

From their point of view, the handsome bounty on Lu Ye’s head was reason enough for them to want to kill him—an immense reward that had burdened him since his humble days when he was still a Cultivator of the Fifth-Order of the Spirit Creek Realm. 

Be that as it might, that did not prevent Lu Ye from having a pang of resentment simmering like a hidden ember beneath the surface of his contemplative heart.

“And that Ninth-Order just now, that’s Tan Sheng, a gifted Cultivator of the revered New Moon Sect—he’s good,” Li Baxian allowed with measured gravity.

“Huh?! T-That’s Tan Sheng?” Lu Ye stammered in astonishment.

Despite now occupying the first and second positions of the Carnage Roster, Lu Ye had never seen Tan Sheng before and he did not know what he looked like. What a twist of fate it was that the very person Jiang Liuzi had enlisted for help would turn out to be none other than Tan Sheng himself.

With the revelation now unraveled, Tan Sheng was obviously not driven solely by the allure of the bounty but also by an insatiable ambition to claim the top spot of the Carnage Roster. Succeed in vanquishing Lu Ye and all glory and riches would be his. 

The endless cycle of seeing Cultivators leaving the Spirit Creek Realm during Li Baxian’s time in the Spirit Creek Battlefield had etched their visages like indelible marks upon the annals of his memory. That was how he recognized Tan Sheng. 

And since Li Baxian described him as “good” and “gifted”, then he must be a Cultivator who had once had his name celebrated upon the Spirit Creek Battlefield’s Roll of Supremacy.

“We must not linger in this place, brother. With the Tracking Disc, it will be a matter of time before they come to find us. We need to leave this place quickly,” Li Baxian warned, his words resounding like an urgent clarion call in the face of impending danger.

Any Ninth-Order could easily range a two-hundred-mile distance in a short time, especially with the impetus now driving Tan Sheng. 

With a nod of determination, Lu Ye softly called out, addressing his comrades, “Brother Baxian, Sister Yuechan.”

They turned their attentive gazes toward him, their expressions mirroring their curiosity.

Amidst the tension, an earth-shattering eruption ensued. A brilliant display of power and prowess as Inviolable slid out of its sheath, releasing a resplendent crimson crescent of light slicing through the air—a lethal arc of morbid elegance screaming towards them.

In a reflexive surge of survival instinct, Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan deftly evaded the deadly trajectory. Li Baxian’s features contorted with concern as he realized that they were already outside the magical circle of the Teleportation Ward. He called out to Lu Ye, both fervently and urgently, “Lu Ye!”

The Teleportation Ward, a mechanism of both wonder and magic, bathed in radiant luminescence, whisking away Lu Ye’s figure as if he was swallowed by a vortex of light. 

Li Baxian rushed to the Teleportation Ward and tried to channel his Spiritual Power into it. 

But it was no use; the Teleportation Ward refused to respond. 

When Lu Ye constructed the magical ward, he included a few additions so that the wards could not be misused, meaning, the Teleportation Wards only responded to his Spiritual Power and no one else’s. 

Under the solemn guise of the mask of a boy, Li Baxian wore a pensive look.

Feng Yuechan too discerned Lu Ye’s intentions, her voice laden with understanding, “He doesn’t want to endanger us, does he?”

With the Tracking Disc now detecting his every movement, Lu Ye’s position would no longer be safe—even with the Teleportation Wards. The odds were stacked against him with little chance of Luck smiling upon him—unless he possessed an extensive network of Wards that would allow him to outmaneuver his pursuers.

However, should Tan Sheng catch up to him, the vast disparity in their cultivation ranks would render him as helpless as a lamb ready for slaughter—whether Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan were with him or not. 

That was why he chose to force Li Baxian and Feng Yuechan out of the Teleportation Ward so that he could slip away alone. That imminent perils waiting for him in the forthcoming was evident and he did not want to drag them into his grave with him. 

And if he could choose, he would have left even Amber with them too.

Yet, since he had forged the bond of Life Energy Art with Amber, their life and death had become inseparably linked. Should he perish, Amber would also meet its doom, and Yi Yi would too share the same fate.

Therefore, there was no reason to not bring Amber with him, especially since Beast Mode might come in handy, to say nothing of the fact that Yi Yi had proven herself vigilant and reliable in her ability to scope out nearby environs.

“Dammit!” An exasperated Li Baxian lamented, feeling the weight wrenching at his heart. As a senior brother, he could not bear seeing Lu Ye confronting such perils alone. Yet, Lu Ye’s decisive action had left them no time for contemplation.

Li Baxian could only marvel at his junior’s resolute nature; even in the face of dire adversity, Lu Ye was able to make swift and firm decisions, acting with alacrity as soon as he comprehended the gravity of his predicament.

An alert from his Battlefield Imprint prompted Li Baxian to examine it at once. It really was, as he expected, a message from Lu Ye. 

“What did he say?” asked Feng Yuechan.

“That we’re too slow; we’d just be dragging him down!” a vexed Li Baxian yelped with frustration. 

Feng Yuechan fell silent, well aware that this was not truly Lu Ye’s sentiment; it was just his ploy to alleviate the burden of guilt in their minds.

“But Lu Ye has a set of plans, it seems…” Li Baxian murmured as he read the rest of the message’s contents. He proceeded to share the details with Feng Yuechan.

Feng Yuechan nodded pensively, “So, it appears that Lu Ye’s actions weren’t just reckless impulses after all; they were the result of careful deliberation. If everything goes as he planned, he might just succeed in surviving this relentless pursuit.”

And for that to happen, the plan hinged on the timing of the Colosseum’s ending.

But who could possibly predict when the Carnage Colosseum would close?