The silence that descended on the small cottage after Zhang Wei's death was heavier and more profound than any sound.
Gu Xuan stood motionless for a full minute, his chest rising and falling in a calm, steady rhythm.
He looked at the three bodies bleeding out on his floor. Three problems. He looked at his shattered door. One opportunity. He looked at the simple alchemical cauldron in his hidden stash. One solution.
His mind, now buzzing with the echoes of Bai Xiaofei's keen, alchemical instincts, assessed the situation.
He needed to dispose of the bodies. Completely.
Burying them was amateurish; it left traces for spiritual beasts or, worse, Disciplinary Hall hounds to find. Incineration was too flashy and left the smell of burnt flesh.
He needed a chemical solution.
He pulled out his hidden supplies: a few stalks of "Green-tail" grass, a bag of "Caustic Lime" powder, and a single, dried "Iron-skin Lizard" hide. Before, this was a random assortment of low-grade junk.
Now, his mind instantly saw a formula. It was a low-grade, Rank 1 recipe for "Bone-Rotting Ash."
It was a weak, slow-acting agent, but it had one singular advantage: it was designed to be chemically neutral, to dissolve flesh and bone and leave behind only a sterile, odorless grey dust, indistinguishable from common ash.
Before, a successful refinement would have been a 50/50 gamble. Now... it was a certainty.
His fingers moved with an inhuman precision. He didn't just crush the herbs; he separated the fibers at their cellular junctions.
He didn't just activate the flame; he tuned it, his new, balanced Qi providing a perfectly stable, low-temperature burn.
He fed the ingredients into the cauldron, not by rote, but by feel, sensing the exact moment the Caustic Lime's properties were at their peak.
It was not the clumsy work of a student; it was the flawless, intuitive art of a master.
In ten minutes, a small, fist-sized pouch of perfectly refined, potent Bone-Rotting Ash sat in his palm.
The next three hours were a grisly, methodical, and emotionless affair. He was not a man desecrating bodies; he was a craftsman cleaning his workshop.
He stripped them of their robes, storage pouches, and swords, hiding the items in a loose floorboard in the archive, a place no one would ever look. Then, he applied the ash.
The process was slow, but absolute. The powerful flesh of cultivators, even that of a Foundation Establishment expert, dissolved under the perfect alchemical reaction, melting into a harmless, grey slurry that he washed away with water, leaving not even a stain on his wooden floor.
He scrubbed every drop of blood, every speck of brain matter. By the time the first, faint hint of dawn painted the sky, the cottage was spotless.
All that remained was the violently shattered door.
Gu Xuan took a deep, steadying breath. He allowed the mask of the terrified, Level 5 archivist to slide back into place.
He disheveled his own hair, tore his sleeping robes at the shoulder, and took a small, sharp knife, making a shallow, clean cut on his arm—a "graze" from a sword.
Then, as the sect's morning bell rang, Gu Xuan, son of the Gu Clan, schemer, and triple-murderer, burst from his cottage and ran screaming toward the Outer Sect Deacon's office.
"He tried to kill me! He tried to kill me!"
The Outer Sect was in chaos. Disciples, still rubbing sleep from their eyes, gathered as Gu Xuan, the quiet archivist, half-collapsed in front of Deacon Chen's office, his face a mask of pure terror.
"Someone broke into my cottage! They shattered the door! They... they said they were going to 'teach me a lesson'!" he cried, his voice breaking with sobs.
"I... I hid under my bed, I was so scared! I think... I think they thought I'd fled. They cursed, and then they left! Oh, heavens, they tried to kill me!"
Deacon Chen, annoyed at being woken, saw the shattered door and the cut on Gu Xuan's arm.
His annoyance turned to shock. An attack. Inside the sect. On a registered disciple. This was a grave breach of sect law.
"Who was it?" the Deacon demanded.
"I don't know!" Gu Xuan wailed. "It was too dark! Their voices... they sounded like Inner Sect disciples! They were angry about... about Senior Sister Su! They called me a 'rat' and 'filth'!"
The story was perfect. It provided a motive (jealousy over Su Linyue), it identified the culprits (unknown Inner Sect disciples), and it painted him as the weak, terrified victim who had survived only by a stroke of blind luck. His shattered door was his primary piece of evidence.
The Disciplinary Hall was called in.
By noon, the news had ripped through the entire Unyielding Sword Sect. But it was no longer about a frightened archivist.
It was about the silence.
Zhang Wei, Hu Long, and Hu Feng had not reported back to their quarters. They had not been seen at the training grounds.
They had not answered their communication talismans. They had, by all accounts, vanished.
In the Disciplinary Hall, the atmosphere was a pressurized bomb.
"VANISHED?!" Elder Zhang's roar shook the very foundations of the hall.
His hair was unbound, his eyes bloodshot, his powerful Foundation Establishment aura raging like an uncontrolled fire. "My grandson, a Foundation Establishment expert, does not just vanish from inside the sect walls! Find him! FIND HIM NOW!"
The assembled Disciplinary disciples flinched, all except one. At the head of the room, sitting calmly behind a black-ironwood desk, was the Head of the Disciplinary Hall, Elder Jin.
He was a man who looked more like a scholar than a warrior, with long, slender fingers and a calm, placid face. He was the true puppet master. The spider.
"Patience, Brother Zhang," Elder Jin said, his voice soft and smooth, yet it cut through the Elder's rage like a razor.
"This is... a delicate matter. We have the testimony of the archivist, Gu Xuan. His cottage was attacked last night by disciples fitting the description of your grandson's attendants."
"Are you accusing my Wei?!" Elder Zhang bellowed.
"I am accusing no one," Elder Jin said, his eyes cold and devoid of light. "I am merely stating the facts. One, a lowly disciple is attacked. Two, at the exact same time, your grandson and his two companions disappear without a trace. This... is a puzzle."
He raised his hand. "Search the entire sect. Every room. Every cave. Every forest. I want to know where they are. And I want to know who is responsible for this... 'breach' in our security."
The investigation was swift and absolute. And it found nothing.
No bodies. No bloodstains, other than the few drops in Gu Xuan's cottage (which proved his story). No storage pouches. No weapons. No witnesses.
Three disciples, one of them the grandson of a powerful elder, had been erased from the world inside the Unyielding Sword Sect.
The news hit the disciples like a tidal wave of terror. This was not a public duel gone wrong. This was an assassination. A silent, flawless, and brutal one.
A "ghost" was loose in the sect. A "demon" was hunting disciples from the shadows. Paranoia became a plague. Disciples began walking in groups. No one dared to go out after dark.
The vibrant, competitive sect had become a prison, its inhabitants terrified, looking over their shoulders, wondering who had the power to make a Foundation Establishment expert disappear.
In the Disciplinary Hall, Elder Zhang was slowly going mad with rage and grief.
And in the Disciplinary Hall Head's private office, Elder Jin sat alone, his fingers steepled.
He was not angry. He was... intrigued. Someone had just removed a loud, clumsy, and increasingly useless pawn from his chessboard.
And they had done it with a terrifying, beautiful precision.
In the Disciplinary Records, he pulled up the file on the "victim."
"Gu Xuan," he whispered, testing the name. "Level 5. No background. No talent. Survivor."
He smiled, a cold, thin, reptilian smile. "How... very interesting."