Chapter 453: Zhi Tian

“No matter I guess, gotta leave this place quick.” He spoke then.

Moving quickly, Bai Yunfei first landed near where Xing Yuan’s body was to take his space ring and other stuff. Then collecting the other dropped items he had, Bai Yunfei carefully swept up the fragments of the Nephrite Throne and stored them.

Xiao Qi was about done with its levelling up when Bai Yunfei put away the last fragment. It chirped once to get Bai Yunfei’s attention, who then turned his head just in time to see something strange.

Xiao Qi was above the shadow vulture’s body, but rather than taking its soulgem into its mouth, Xiao Qi floated the soulgem into the mouth of the thunderfire wolf!

There was a swallowing sound when the thunderfire wolf swallowed the soulgem. Black mist started to exude out from the wolf’s body, healing the wounds it sustained over the battles almost so quickly that the wounds seemed to melt away from its body!

Since the soulgem was clearly of the darkness attribute, the thunderfire wolf would be unable to absorb the elemental darkness from it and only the pure energy.

“This....”

Tongue-tied by what was happening in front of him, Bai Yunfei watched what Xiao Qi was doing to the wolf in silence.

Now wasn’t the time to be gawking, though. He still needed to get out of here. Turning his eye towards a previously-missed white stone, Bai Yunfei busied himself picking up the missing fragments of the throne rather than watch the thunderfire wolf.

............

At the same time a good distance away from Bai Yunfei’s current position.

“Zhi Tian, where are we going?”

In the dense forest, a slightly tired voice called out to another. Two figures were walking slowly through the forest, with one tired young man in gray following listlessly behind the man in white ahead of him.

This young man was Na Lanyin!

The one in front of him was known as ‘Zhi Tian’, and was an old man with grizzly white-hair. Even his eyebrows were white from age, and his long white beard hung beneath his chin. Paired with his kindly expression, the man looked quite scholarly.

He turned back to Na Lanyin, a smile on his face, “We’re going south simply because we need to leave the forest. Do you wish to stay here for another year, then?”

“It’s fine that we’re leaving, but why are we walking?! Can’t we fly? And why don’t you just use some form of instantaneous movement to move?! And....and can you please not antagonize anyone else like you did with those Soul Kings you blocked a while back?!”

Na Lanyin pleaded almost angrily at him, “If you want to anger them, go for it! They’re afraid of you, but they’re not afraid of me, so anger them when I’m not around! Every single time you annoy someone, they always look at me like an insect....just....please....I’m only a mid-stage Soul Exalt, you know? Angering every Soul King and class seven soulbeast is only going to make my life harder, you know?”

He added another line after that, “Or are you starting to regret making an agreement with me and trying to kill me indirectly?”

Zhi Tian shot him a glance, a small smile on his face. “What uncouth words are coming out from your mouth? I’m merely letting you get used to the killing intent of a Soul King, it’ll help you in the long run.”

“.....”

What kind of reason was that?

Rather than pressing the issue, Na Lanyin asked instead, “Zhi Tian, why won’t you tell me what happened over there?” he pointed his head to the east, “why did you stop those two class seven soulbeasts and that Soul King? And why aren’t we going there too?”

Zhi Tian had actually stopped all of the Soul Kings he came across from heading towards the east!! It was no wonder no one else went after Bai Yunfei, they were all stopped by this man. If not for that, Bai Yunfei would’ve met several Soul Kings by now....

“There’s enough trouble in that direction, let’s not add to whatever’s left of it and stick to our own.” Zhi Tian shook his head, “It’s quite simple why I stopped those people. It was what I saw ‘fate’ wanted me to do.”

“What?!” Na Lanyin’s head snapped to attention, “Hold on! What are you saying, you can see ‘fate’?!”

“How would that be possible? Of course I can’t see it.”

“But didn’t you just say....”

“What I said was your fate.” Zhi Tian pointed to him, “Your ‘fate’ was telling me to stop them, and as per our agreement, I was helping you by having you meet those Soul Kings first.”

“.....”

Na Lanyin had a quirky frown on his face, his mind thinking,

“I’d have to be brain-dead in order to stop people like that. Zhi Tian has something else to his words, I bet.”

“What does my ‘fate’ have to do with anything? Is what’s happening over there related to me somehow?” Na Lanyin asked. Whatever it was that was happening over to the east, Na Lanyin knew none of it. Clearly, there was something Zhi Tian wasn’t telling him, and that made him all the more curious to find out.

‘It’s not related to you, but at the same time, it is.” Zhi Tian spoke cryptically. “I can just faintly see a ‘strand’ of your ‘fate’ intertwined with another, but whatever more is unknown to me. Me stopping those Soul Kings were merely whims of mine in respect to that strand. It is, after all, an important strand of fate.”

𝑓𝑟ℯ𝘦𝓌𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝑐ℴ𝓂

“A ‘strand’ of fate??” Na Lanyin asked, far more confused about what Zhi Tian was getting at. He knew he wouldn’t get an answer, so he said nothing about it. Though, if not for the fact that he knew who Zhi Tian was, Na Lanyin would’ve taken him for a swindler of some sort; he too, moonlighted as a ‘swindler’ like this to some degree, so this degree of mysteriousness wasn’t new to him.

“When you say this ‘strand’ of fate....” he began, “I’ve actually seen a person who had more strands of fate than others. In fact, I’ve never seen anyone with more strands than him. He had more the second time I met him than the first; it really was quite strange.”

“Ah? Is that so?” Zhi Tian spoke, his eyebrows raised upwards. “Those who are so heavily entwined with fate are special among their generation. They face more hardships than others, but their chances are many. Sadly, they often die well before their time.

“But if they can escape an untimely death, then they will become someone of glory....”

He looked up to the skies, “Forget it, let’s dispense with the walking. I’ll take you there now.”

“Eh?” Na Lanyin spoke, “Don’t you need to stop anyone else?”

“We’re all but done. I did say it was just a whim, so don’t mind your head about it. I was only stopping those from going in a certain direction, the other directions....I can’t do anything about it, like north where the class seven area is....

“I haven’t been out of the Soulbeast Forest for a millenia, I wonder how much the continent has changed since then.....”

Zhi Tian sighed at that, grabbing Na Lanyin’s arm before taking one step forward into the a distortion in space and disappearing away from sight.