Chapter Ninety-Five: The Sleeping Butterfly

All right, he is gone. Let him go. We will go on with our business.

Zi Chenyu swallowed the pill and sat up. His complexion looked somewhat better, and his injuries did not seem severe anymore. He struggled to his feet, crawled to Lin Zhi’s feet, and knelt there with tears streaming from his eyes.

“Sir, it is not that I refused to speak. I have my own difficulties, but for the sake of not dragging my parents into this, I will tell you now.”

“Once before, Liu the Steward and I received an order from my father and two uncles. At the time, a disciple from the Forge Heaven Valley had built a house in Autumn Pool City, that very tall, completely transparent house.”

Zi Chenyu was still gesturing when Lin Zhi cut him off.

“What does that thing have to do with what I want? Stop wasting words. Tell me the result.”

Lin Zhi had long since grown impatient. If he had not run into that young man from the Black Dragon Clan, he would have already torn down the Zi Mansion.

“It was that boy. He planted something in me, something hidden in my divine sense. If I offend him, he can make my soul utterly vanish. That thing is in his hands; I never touched it.”

Zi Chenyu spoke carefully, glancing at Lin Zhi’s expression from time to time.

“Come here. Let me take a look. Don’t make me find out you lied.”

Lin Zhi sat cross-legged and beckoned Zi Chenyu over, signaling him to sit in front of him.

Zi Chenyu climbed up, then sat cross-legged before Lin Zhi. Lin Zhi rested one hand on his head and closed his eyes. Then a tiny figure that looked exactly like Lin Zhi appeared within Zi Chenyu’s sea of consciousness.

Within Zi Chenyu’s sea of consciousness, beneath the great tree at the center of the island where a figure exactly like Zi Chenyu stood, sat a strangely lovely little girl. A pair of wings fluttered behind her back. She wore a green dress, and her tightly shut eyes suddenly lifted toward the sky.

A stranger had appeared there: a young man was descending from high above, stepping down as though walking a staircase, calm and effortless with every step.

At that moment, Dao Sansheng, who had been resting on the grass, closed the soul disc within his sea of consciousness, yet he himself had not noticed anything amiss.

Lin Zhi watched as the little girl on the tree flew into the air and hovered above Zi Chenyu’s soul. She regarded him warily, her feet carving an elegant curve in the air before she landed beside Zi Chenyu.

“No wonder. So you are of the Greenborn tribe. I was wondering what sort of thing it was that even the Zi clan could not handle. So it is an artifact from a higher plane.”

The little girl pointed at the man in the air and spoke in a coy, childlike voice.

“Back away, or I will not be polite.”

Hands on her hips, she even hopped once in place.

“And what form would your rudeness take? Hahaha...”

“If you were a deeply cultivated Greenborn, I might feel a little wary. But you are only a yellow-haired little girl who has not even been weaned yet. I, Lin Zhi, am truly not afraid of you at all. Besides, you are not even the true body.”

“Dear friend, I welcome you into my dream. Listen as I hum a song of the jungle.”

The soul disc turned its body and rose into the air, chanting the Greenborn tribe’s incantation. Zi Chenyu, standing nearby, immediately fell into a deep sleep. A white shield of light lit up around Lin Zhi.

“Little girl, I told you that you are still too young. You should consider making me your master instead. Only then can you bring out the full advantage of your Greenborn bloodline, and I will make you grow quickly.”

Before Lin Zhi had even finished speaking, the soul disc turned into starlight and vanished from Zi Chenyu’s sea of consciousness. Immediately after that, the imprint in Liu the Steward’s sea of consciousness also dispersed, as though it had never existed at all.

Lin Zhi gave the still-sleeping soul of Zi Chenyu a kick, sending it straight into the water.

“Damn it. I just ran into someone from the Black Dragon Clan, and now I meet someone from the Greenborn tribe. They are all powerful races, so why have they all suddenly come to this godforsaken little world, even leaving their descendants behind here?”

After being kicked into the water, Zi Chenyu was still somewhat dazed. He had been put to sleep by spellcraft just now and had not yet understood what had happened. When he woke and opened his eyes, he had already fallen off the island and appeared in the lake of his own consciousness.

Seeing Zi Chenyu crawl ashore, Lin Zhi could not help but kick him down again. Terrified, Zi Chenyu froze in the water and did not dare move, only staring silently at Lin Zhi.

After a while, Lin Zhi finally calmed down. He had once been one of the family’s discarded members and was often bullied by his own kind. Now he had been sent to a lower plane to carry out a mission, yet he kept running into people he could not afford to provoke.

“You, come up here.”

Those mere three words made Zi Chenyu hesitate, but he still climbed up and sat carefully not far from Lin Zhi.

“What are you afraid of? This is your sea of consciousness. I am not going to hurt you. Tell me, what is going on with that Dao Sansheng? Who is his master? Where does he come from?”

“I only know that he is a disciple of Forge Heaven Valley. Since childhood he was an orphan, raised by his foster father and foster mother. He has an older sister who grew up with him, the woman taken away by the previous envoy. I heard they were engaged from childhood.”

Zi Chenyu deliberately lowered his voice for the last sentence.

“I am not asking about those things. I am asking how to find him now. Do you understand?”

Lin Zhi’s tone sharpened at the end, emphasizing that what he wanted was Dao Sansheng.

“I know his senior brother, the young valley master of Forge Heaven Valley. I can ask him and see where Dao Sansheng is now.”

“Then hurry up. I cannot wait any longer.”

With that, Lin Zhi disappeared from Zi Chenyu’s sea of consciousness.

“All enforcement squads of the Purple Gold Merchant Guild are to mobilize at once and go with Zi Chenyu to handle matters at Forge Heaven Valley. Every member of the enforcement squads is to obey Zi Chenyu’s command. Lin Na, go and deliver my order at once.”

As soon as Lin Zhi opened his eyes, he issued a series of orders, then took Lin Na and returned to the guild.

Dao Sansheng had just been resting on the grass, but now he was already sitting cross-legged within his sea of consciousness. The soul disc had only just said that it needed to sleep for three days, and then there had been no further news. Even Dao Sansheng himself did not understand what was going on.

Only after entering his sea of consciousness did Dao Sansheng realize the change. The surroundings were a boundless starry sky. His sea of consciousness had undergone a tremendous transformation. On that azure planet, the blue was water, the green mountains, the white snow and ice, the yellow plains. He could see the surrounding planets, though he could not approach them.

Dao Sansheng still stood upon the same stretch of land as before. The soul disc was already lying asleep in the grass, and Chen Xiaofeng beside it was also sleeping, looking no different from usual.

Yet Dao Sansheng had the strange feeling that something major had happened. He simply did not know what it was. Still, he decided to remain and wait for the soul disc to wake.

Inside the Zi residence, five men had arrived, all dressed in black robes and wearing masks so that their faces could not be seen. From the moment they entered, they had said nothing, and now they stood silently in the main hall.

At this moment, Zi Chenyu, Zi Fanchen, and a woman were seated in the small garden of the Zi residence. The three of them looked at one another without speaking. Half a day had already passed.

It was the woman who finally could not hold back and burst into tears as she spoke.

“Yu’er, if you have made up your mind, then go. But you must still take care of your own safety. If anything happens, hide yourself somewhere. Your father and I will find our own way.”

As she spoke, the woman kept wiping away her tears. Beside her, Zi Fanchen remained silent, staring blankly at the plants before him, his face devoid of any expression.