Xiao Peng furrowed his brow, studying the face in front of him longer than necessary."Th-that's impossible." His voice was lower than before, but inside it was genuine doubt, not rejection. "You must be a liar. You must be one of Wu Shengming's men trying to trick me."Kael raised an eyebrow. "So you don't believe this is me?""Of cours—""Then there's no point continuing this conversation." Kael turned and stepped toward the staircase. "I'm leaving.""W-wait!"Kael stopped."A-are you truly... the Grand Leader?"Kael looked back with the same expression. "Didn't I just tell you that?"A brief silence."S-so you really did reincarnate?""Yes." Kael turned back fully and stepped to stand in front of the bars again. "And now I want to take the Demon Sect back, and recover the last fragment of my soul." He looked at Xiao Peng directly. "Now tell me, how did you end up in here? What actually happened after my death?"Xiao Peng was quiet for a moment, his eyes studying the face in front o

Kael almost couldn't control his expression when he heard that. He hadn't expected this traitor to be sharp enough to figure it out.She managed to draw the right conclusion from just one incident? Impressive.But Kael held his composure. On the surface, he furrowed his brow in a way that looked genuinely confused, the expression of someone who had just heard a name they had never encountered before."No." His tone was easy, his hand still holding out grains of rice toward the small bird on the chair back. "My name is Gao Changgong. And who is Mo Tianjue?"Lou Bingxin stared at him hard. Her eyes ran across Kael's face, searching for a crack, searching for a small twitch in the jaw muscles, a blink that came too fast, a shift in the pupils, anything that showed a lie. She had done this to thousands of people over thousands of years, but there was nothing. The face in front of her was as clean as the surface of a lake that had never had a stone thrown into it."You visited the undergro

Throughout the day, Kael's room looked like it belonged to a physician working himself hard.In the perception of those watching from outside, Kael sat at the desk with several sheets of paper in front of him, occasionally holding his head, occasionally crossing something out, occasionally standing and pacing from one end of the room to the other like someone working through a difficult problem.The perfect image of a Divine Physician pushing his entire mind to find a cure for a rare illness.Of course, it was all an illusion.Behind the layer of the Unawakened Dream Illusion Technique he had set up carefully since morning, the real Kael was sitting cross-legged in the center of the room with his eyes closed, absorbing spiritual energy from the surrounding environment and storing it slowly into his dantian. He was using this time to rest completely, a far more productive use of it than pretending to think hard.---Night arrived slowly. The spiritual lanterns in the outer corridor dim

Kael didn't start right away.He walked to the desk, picked up two chairs, and set them facing each other in the middle of the room. He sat in one, then nodded toward the other.Xiao Peng sat down."First, I need you to understand something fundamental," said Kael. "Black energy is not your enemy. It's not a poison that needs to be fought. People who fail to tame it always fail for the same reason, they try to overpower it."Xiao Peng listened closely."Black energy is like a fire that has been left burning for too long with no direction. Wild, unstable, and its first instinct is always to push outward. If you face it head-on, it will push back twice as hard. If you suppress it, it will find another way out." Kael paused for a moment. "What you have to do is talk to it."Xiao Peng furrowed his brow slightly."What do you mean?""Go into your dantian. Find the black energy. Don't touch it, don't push it, don't do anything at all. Just look." Kael held his gaze. "Do it now."Xiao Peng c

Rong Danian was crouching near the well in the back courtyard, refilling two buckets with movements that had become entirely automatic, the way someone moves when they've done the same thing every day for years without ever thinking about it. His hands worked on their own, his mind somewhere else entirely.Nothing about the scene drew any attention. An ordinary servant filling buckets. Something that happened dozens of times a day in the same courtyard.Kael stood in the corner of the courtyard, one shoulder resting casually against the wall, watching the man with the expression of someone taking in a perfectly ordinary sight.On his shoulder, a mosquito perched in silence.Kael observed for a moment, mapping who was within roughly a hundred meters of the courtyard. A few servants in the corridor near the kitchen. One disciple standing guard at a junction. Three people inside a room on the left side whose voices came through faintly.He then raised two fingers, and the Unawakened Drea