Chương 189: Chapter 190: Who is this Leo Chen?

Who was this Leo Chen? The question spread faster than any cultivator could fly. Jade message talismans shot from the streets of Stonehaven. Dozens at first, then hundreds. They disappeared over the walls, over the mountains, streaking toward every corner of the continent. Every sect remnant, every merchant house, every family with a cracked vital slip in a drawer was sending the same report. The beast tide was manufactured. The Embroidered Uniform Guards gave the orders. Leo Chen has the proof.

On the roofs above, the chant had not stopped. Justice for the dead. Justice for the dead. Cultivation boats appeared on the horizon, their hulls glowing against the dark sky, heading straight for the city. At the mountains beyond the outer wall, the forest stirred, and spiritual beasts poked their heads out of the trees to watch. Hundreds of thousands of eyes settled on the young man standing alone before the doors of the Heavenstone Sect. And the young man did nothing. He simply stood there, looking at the doors.

Leo studied the doors. A few years ago, they would have looked impenetrable. Now, after intensive training at the International Formation Institute, he could figure out the general structure. The formations were T4, layered and interlocking, but Morimoto's lessons had taught him to look for stress points and mistakes. It took him about thirty minutes to find a weakness. There was a point three feet left of center he was pretty confident about. One strike from Sunshifter would bring the whole thing down.

Leo extended his divine sense past the doors, into the building beyond. The interior opened into a vaulted atrium, sixty feet across and ringed by columns. Four corridors branched off from the far end, disappearing deeper into the structure. Administrative offices on the left. Dormitories on the right. The central passage, wider than the others, led into the sect's territory. Two dozen Gold Cores stood in the atrium in defensive formation. Thirty Foundation Establishment disciples stood behind them.

Every one of them held T4 weapons. Every one of them pressed as far from the doors as possible. T4 weapons they couldn't lifebond with. It looked impressive. But Leo had spent years training to fight with a lifebonded flying sword. Every twitch of his divine sense translated instantly into movement. These disciples would be fighting with tools. He would be fighting with an extension of himself.

Leo stood there, looking at the doors he could open, at the defenders he could beat, with a hundred thousand people at his back chanting for justice. He had built something tonight. A movement. A narrative. The crowd believed they were witnessing justice, that Boss Leo had come to expose the wicked and defend the innocent. And he had encouraged that belief. He had stood before them and accused the Embroidered Uniform Guards of provoking a beast tide. But what happened after the doors fell?

Leo imagined Grayscroll standing before the crowd. They would demand answers. They would want to know why thousands of disciples had walked into the fog and never returned. And Grayscroll would answer. The Heavenstone Sect hadn't started farming soil out of greed. They had started because they had lost everything else. The war had taken their spirit veins. Without spiritual qi, elders who had cultivated for centuries would die. Disciples would regress. The sects would collapse. So they had found a new source.

The only one left. The T4 soil inside the fog. And that was the same story as everyone in the crowd behind him. Every refugee in the Savage Mountains had lost their spirit vein, their homes, their income. They needed spiritual qi to survive, and they had nowhere else to get it. The soil in that fog was the Sect's lifeline. Leo had marched up the street to make a moral argument. The sect kills people. Grayscroll lies. Justice for the dead.

It worked because the crowd believed Leo was the good one and Grayscroll was the monster. Right now the crowd was asking why their sons and daughters had to die so the elders of the sect could live. But Grayscroll didn't have to answer that question. He could offer them something better. A solution where no one had to die. Where everyone got to live. The biggest problem in the Savage Mountains was finding spiritual qi. And Grayscroll could point out that Leo had a way to earn enough spiritual qi for everyone.

Boss Leo could walk into the fog and cart out soil for them. He and his friends had done it before, cartload after cartload, no deaths, no selections. That was the whole reason the Heavenstone Sect believed the scheme could work at all. They were copying Leo. As soon as Grayscroll pointed it out, every cultivator in the crowd would do the math. One cartful of T4 soil traded for enough T2 spirit stones to sustain thousands.

A few trips into the fog, and no one in the Savage Mountains would ever need to gamble their life on a selection again. But Leo had plenty of reasons not to do it. Things were different now. Back then, dying in the field of wheat cost him fifteen hours. Now he respawned all the way out in Hidden Hideout, so every trip would take a week.

In addition, the Heavenstone Sect might have already infected the field with Slaughter Qi, which meant every cartful he sold could poison the buyer and cause bigger problems down the line. And most of all, Leo needed to get stronger. The Enlightened was still out there. The jiangshi were still sealed under the western ruins. Every hour he spent hauling dirt was an hour he wasn't preparing for what was coming. But those were just excuses.

And Leo knew that every angry cultivator behind him wouldn't listen to his excuses. Even the brothers of the Guano Gang. They were desperate. Desperate people didn't listen to excuses. They only saw a man who could save them, and asked him why he chose not too. Leo wasn't the one who had brought a trap to Grayscroll. He was the one who was trapped. If he didn't want to spend the next few years slaving in the dirt, he needed to be very careful about what he said tonight.

He couldn't just tell the crowd that he valued his own time more than he valued their lives. Leo's hands were shaking. He had built this momentum because he thought it was a good idea. Rally the people. Expose the conspiracy. But momentum cut both ways. The crowd behind him didn't feel like a force pushing him forward anymore. It felt like a glass house he'd built around himself, and now he was about to throw stones. If he smashed down these doors and dragged Grayscroll before the masses, the questions would start.

Questions that would expose him as a hypocrite who demanded justice from others while hoarding resources himself. Behind him, the chanting faltered. He could feel the crowd's attention sharpening, their patience thinning. He needed to decide. Now. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He needed someone to pin the beast tide on. Grayscroll was too risky.

All he had to do was say a few words and the crowd would wonder why Boss Leo didn't go in to harvest the soil himself. Monarch Cloudpiercer was too distant, too powerful. The Deity Transformation Monarch who had started the war was a convenient villain, but naming him was the same as blaming the heavens. The refugees had already made their peace with what was untouchable. An accusation aimed there would slide off without leaving a mark.

Leo needed an enemy who was real, who was connected to the events of tonight, and who was far enough away that the crowd couldn't demand Leo produce him on the spot. It would be great if he could pin everything on The Enlightened. Wait. That would actually work. The Enlightened probably wasn't behind this specific beast tide, but Leo could certainly lay the blame on him. The Enlightened was playing both sides of the war.

He was feeding Cloudpiercer's conquest in the west while corrupting the Imperial Secret Police in the east. And most importantly, he had started it first. The Enlightened had tried to kill Leo at Ashviel. Had tried to corrupt him with Sariya's medallion and tempt him with the Follower's pitch. Leo had been waiting for a chance to answer. Tonight, the chance had arrived. The plan came together in his head. Rescue Tianyi. Take Envoy Sparrow. Tell the crowd The Enlightened was the man behind the beast tide.

And most importantly, keep Grayscroll away from the crowd, behind his own walls, where no one could hear him talk about soil. It was time for Leo to start fighting back.

"All Gold Cores, line up behind me." Leo's voice carried across the plaza.

"Foundation Establishment cultivators stay back. Don't set a single foot inside." The brothers of the Guano Gang looked at each other. Some moved immediately. Others hesitated, glancing at Zhang Wei for confirmation. Zhang Wei gave a sharp nod. The Gold Cores fell into formation.

"What's he doing?" someone whispered on a nearby rooftop.

"He's going to negotiate. Has to be."

"Against a Nascent Soul sect? With just a handful of Gold Cores? Does this boy not understand the immensity of heaven and earth?" Leo drew Sunshifter from his dantian and activated the T4 qi reserves inside. The blade ignited. Crimson light blazed outward, so bright that cultivators on nearby rooftops threw their arms over their eyes. Spiritual pressure washed across the plaza and forced Qi Refiners to take a step back. Leo drew the blade back with his divine sense, then drove it forward like a spear.

The blade moved faster than sight, faster than sound, a line of crimson fire that struck the doors exactly where he had identified the weak spot. First strike. The sound was like thunder, so loud it rattled teeth and set ears ringing across the plaza. A crack appeared in the spiritual iron, hairline thin. The formation blazed in response, arrays working to seal the damage. The crowd went silent. Leo didn't wait. Second strike. Same point. The crack widened before the formation could close it. The light stuttered.

Deep in the iron, something groaned. Someone on the rooftops drew a sharp breath. Third strike. Fourth. Fifth. Leo sent Sunshifter at the crack again and again. Each impact hit before the formations could recover. The spiritual treasure tried to regenerate, tried to redistribute the force, but Leo was faster. Sixth strike. Seventh. The blade moved like lightning, widening the fracture over and over. The formations on the door flickered wildly, struggling to close the gap.

The groaning became a shriek of stressed metal. Leo pulled back. Cracks raced across the spiritual iron. They branched from the impact point, splitting, multiplying, reaching the edges of each door in the space of a breath. Formation light flickered in the gaps. Sputtered. Went dark. Section by section, the wards died, leaving black fracture lines across dead metal. Silence. Then the doors swung open. Leo was already moving. He shot through the gap before the doors settled.

The atrium blurred past, columns and lanterns streaking by on either side. Gold Cores in defensive formation, Foundation Establishment disciples behind them, all of them gripping their T4 weapons. None of them were ready. The first saber spun out of its owner's grip before he registered that Leo had arrived. The second followed. The third. Leo wove through the disciples like water through rocks, zippling between the columns. They couldn't track him. They couldn't react.

Behind him, the Guano Gang's Gold Cores charged through the open doors. They stopped three steps in. The atrium was already quiet. Heavenstone disciples lay scattered across the flagstone, groaning, clutching wrists and arms. Their weapons littered the ground around them. Lanterns swayed overhead, casting shifting shadows across the scene. No one dared to pick their weapons back up. Leo stood in the center of it all, Sunshifter resting across his shoulders. Beyond him, the four corridors stretched into darkness.

The Gold Cores stared.

"Boss Leo..." one of them managed.

"What are you waiting for?" Leo put away his sword.

"Drag them out." They moved. Quickly. Without questions. As they hauled Heavenstone disciples to their feet and bound their wrists, the same thought passed through every mind in the atrium. What kind of cultivator was Boss Leo? What manner of organization had they joined? Everyone was in a state of shock. The Heavenstone disciples lay where they had fallen, staring at nothing. These were inner disciples. The chosen.

They had walked into some mysterious trial and emerged alive while thousands of their peers had died. They had been given T4 weapons, T4 armor, the resources of a Nascent Soul sect. They had lasted less than a single breath. The brothers of the Guano Gang were no better. They were just going through the motions, trying to figure out what had just happened. This went against everything they knew about cultivation. Leo was a loose cultivator. Young. He had no backing, no lineage, no sect.

Loose cultivators scraped by on scraps. They took the jobs no one else wanted. They didn't shatter Nascent Soul formations or disarm squads of Gold Cores like they were children playing with sticks. Yet here they stood, in an atrium full of groaning inner disciples, watching a nineteen-year-old Foundation Establishment junior wipe down his sword. The only person who seemed to have a handle on what to do was Zhang Wei. He pushed through the frozen Gold Cores, barking orders.

His one good eye swept through the room, cataloging every fallen weapon, every spatial ring. He grabbed the nearest gang member by the collar and shoved him toward a pile of sabers. He pointed at another and then at a disciple who still wore three storage rings. His voice cut through the shock, and slowly the gang members began to wake up. Leo let Zhang Wei work. He extended his divine sense outward, past the atrium, down the central corridor and into the rooms beyond. Three signatures approached.

The first was massive. Heavy. The spiritual pressure of a Nascent Soul Lord, restrained but unmistakable. The second was Gold Core. Familiar. Leo had long since memorized that particular pattern of divine sense. Shen Tianyi. The third was Foundation Establishment. Weak. Wounded. They came from the central corridor. Fifty yards out, footsteps echoing off the stone walls. It must be Grayscroll. Coming with Tianyi. And the wounded one... Envoy Sparrow? Leo frowned. He had expected to fight for Sparrow.

The envoy was evidence, a possible link between the beast tide and the Imperial Secret Police. Grayscroll should have hidden him, denied his existence, forced Leo to tear through the sect layer by layer to find him. Instead, he was walking Sparrow right to the front door. The more Leo thought about it, the more it made sense. Grayscroll was experienced.

He had run this sect for years, had navigated the merger of thirty-seven smaller organizations, had built an extraction operation under the noses of the Imperial Court. He hadn't survived this long by fighting battles he couldn't win. The doors were down. His inner disciples were disarmed. A Foundation Establishment cultivator had just done the impossible in front of hundreds of thousands of witnesses. Grayscroll knew what he was doing. He knew when to cut his losses. Leo looked back at the ruined doors.

Beyond them, the plaza. The rooftops. The crowd. The first half of the plan had worked. Tianyi was fifty yards away and walking toward him. Envoy Sparrow was with him. Now came the most important part. Keeping Grayscroll away from the crowd. Grayscroll was walking toward the atrium. Toward the ruined doors, and past them, a hundred thousand listening ears. Every step closer was a step toward a stage. Leo needed to meet him first.

Deep in the corridor, behind stone walls, where the soil could be discussed in private.

"Zhang Wei. Get everyone outside. I'm going in alone."

"Boss Leo..."

"That's an order." Leo took a step toward the hallway. The corridor stretched ahead of him. Then the voice came. It rolled out of the corridor, amplified by spiritual qi until it filled the atrium and spilled through the ruined gates into the plaza beyond. Every cultivator in Stonehaven heard it at the same moment.

"Leo Chen." Leo stopped.

"This Lord does not ask for mercy. Only understanding." On the rooftops, the chanting died. The crowd went silent. Hundreds of thousands of cultivators leaned forward, straining to hear.

"You know what it means to stand at the edge of the fog and make a choice." Leo's hands clenched at his sides.

"You have stood where this Lord stands. You have taken what lies within." Silence. Then the whispers started.

"What does he mean, 'taken what lies within'?"

"The fog? Boss Leo went into the profundity? And survived?