53: Chapter 53 Jade Pendant

Jiang Yan crouched down.

He did not touch the corpse first. His gaze fell on the ground.

The stone chamber floor was engraved with Li Xuan's last testament, using a technique of carving with finger force.

The handwriting was sloppy, every stroke filled with impatience. Some characters were only half-written before the strokes drifted—not because of insufficient finger force, but because his Qi was running out.

The first few lines were relatively neat, but it became more chaotic as it went on. The final stroke of the word "Death" in the last line dragged out into a deep, long scratch, as if his fingernails had been forcibly plowed into the stone.

Jiang Yan read it from beginning to end.

What Zhou Tai repeated was basically accurate: Li Xuan described himself as a Cultivator from the Li family of Xuri Ridge under the Taixuan Sect. He had been pursuing an enemy deep into the Jin Kingdom, suffered heavy injuries, his Meridians ruptured, and he was poisoned. His cultivation level dropped from the Late Stage of Qi Refining, and finally, the poison flared up, untreatable, and he passed away here.

The end of the testament begged the fated person to return his remains to the Li family of Xuri Ridge, promising a generous reward.

These contents were carved on the ground. But that was not all the information.

Jiang Yan's gaze fell on the stroke direction of the last few lines of the testament.

Zhou Tai only recognized the characters, but Jiang Yan recognized the things behind the characters.

When Li Xuan carved the testament, he was in a state of exhaustion—his Meridians were seven or eight parts ruptured, the poison had seeped into his bone marrow, and every character carved required him to draw upon the remaining bit of spiritual Qi.

A normal person carving in this state should have increasingly lighter force, with strokes becoming shallower as they went on.

But the force of these last few lines was clearly heavier than the ones before—not out of anger, but determination, an obsession to nail something into the stone.

A dying person, writing a last testament, should become increasingly weak as they reach the end.

Unless he wrote something in the last few lines that he cared about more than death.

Jiang Yan looked at these few lines closely. The ending of every character slanted slightly to the right—this was not a normal calligraphic habit.

Normal strokes end with a downward tap, with the force sinking downwards. Slanting to the right was deliberate; it was hiding a direction within the characters.

He mentally extracted those few lines where the strokes ended to the right and rearranged them.

The right-slanting end of the first line, the right-slanting end of the second line, the third line—every stroke that deviated to the right connected, forming a pointer.

Pointing to the wall on the north side of the stone chamber.

The north wall of the stone chamber was covered with chisel marks. The traces of the chisel were side by side, with varying depths.

In the gaps between these chisel marks, where the space was more than half-filled with sand and dirt, there was an extremely fine engraving.

Jiang Yan walked over and wiped away the sand with his finger.

It was an arrow. It was carved very shallowly and very narrowly, hidden in the concave seam between two chisel marks. The direction of the arrow pointed to the corner of the north wall.

Jiang Yan crouched in front of the north wall corner.

A pile of rubble was stacked in the corner, with varying sizes—the largest was the size of a fist, the smallest the size of a knuckle, and their surfaces were all covered with a layer of hardened sand and dirt.

They looked no different from the rubble found everywhere on the stone chamber floor—debris that fell while chiseling the wall, piled up in the corner, and over the years, it had solidified with the sand and dirt on the ground.

He reached out and brushed away the surface rubble.

There was something different between the sand and the rubble.

It wasn't the color or the shape.

It was the weight—there was a certain powder in the sand between the rubble, and when his Divine Sense swept over it, a portion was scattered in confusion.

It wasn't metal, it wasn't gravel; it was something that had been specifically ground into a fine powder, mixed into the sand so that it was impossible to distinguish with the naked eye.

Mist Spirit Powder.

Used to conceal Divine Sense; it was of a low grade, but effective—especially against Cultivators with low cultivation.

Zhou Tai was at Qi Refining Stage 2, his Divine Sense was inherently weak, and once obscured by this stuff, it was impossible for him to discover that there was anything unusual in the corner.

After clearing away the sand and dirt handful by handful, he moved the rubble underneath piece by piece.

When he moved the thirteenth piece, his finger touched something with a different texture.

A piece of fabric.

Dark brown burlap, with charred edges, scorched by high heat, already brittle; the moment his finger touched it, fiber debris fell off with a rustle.

Jiang Yan pulled it out from the pile of rubble and unfolded it.

It was a sleeve. It had been torn from the cuff, the break was jagged, not like it had been cut by a Sharp Weapon—it had been forcibly torn off by brute force.

The owner of the sleeve had a larger build than Li Xuan, and the sleeve was more than a circle wider.

More importantly, the entire sleeve was soaked in blood.

It wasn't bloodstains splattered on it, but soaked through—the blood had seeped in from both sides of the fabric, and after drying, it had congealed the fabric into a hard board.

Black, dried, old blood; in the dim stone chamber, it was almost impossible to distinguish its original color.

But that lingering aura would not lie.

Devilish Qi.

Extremely faint. Almost dissipated. Having been in the well-ventilated stone chamber for so many years, the remaining Devilish Qi was already so thin that it was difficult for Divine Sense to capture.

But Jiang Yan cultivated the "Bloodthirsty Demon Scripture"—his perception of Devilish Qi was carved into his instincts.

Just like a hound smelling the scent left by its own kind, it was faint, but he would never mistake it.

A demon Cultivator. Injured at the hands of Li Xuan. Or perhaps Li Xuan had been heavily injured by him.

He turned the sleeve over. On the inside of the cuff was a line of extremely small characters, the strokes so thin that they were almost unrecognizable on the rough burlap.

Jiang Yan brought the sleeve closer to the daylight leaking in from the stone chamber entrance, reading it character by character.

"Cangwu Ridge—"

The subsequent characters were interrupted by charred marks.

Further on were a few unrecognizable scratches, and then another fragment of a place name.

"—Deep Valley."

Jiang Yan set the sleeve aside and continued moving the stones.

At the very bottom were three things.

The three items lay on the grayish-white sandstone floor, buried by rubble and sand for years, and their surface luster had been worn away.

The first was a broken flying needle.

An inch long, no thicker than a sewing needle, its entire body dark and lusterless.

When Divine Sense swept over it, the Restriction on the needle's surface would gently deflect the probe—it wasn't the spiritual power fluctuation of the Magical Artifact itself, but an isolation layer specifically targeting Divine Sense.

A sneak-attack Magical Artifact specifically for breaking a Cultivator's Divine Sense defense; it was not of a high grade, but it was extremely insidious.

After piercing into an acupuncture point, it would continuously damage the Divine Soul, making the victim unable to concentrate their Divine Sense to control Magical Artifacts, or even unable to cast Spells.

There were still dried bloodstains on the tip of the needle, brownish-black, mixed with a trace of extremely faint, cold aura, vaguely echoing the spiritual power fluctuation left on Li Xuan's corpse after being poisoned.

The poison Li Xuan was afflicted with was most likely carried by this needle.

The second was a shattered jade pendant, broken into three pieces.

The edges of the crack had been pulverized by spiritual power, and gray-white jade powder was still embedded in the gaps of the fracture.

Jiang Yan pieced the three fragments together—the front was engraved with the seal script character "Cang", the engravings were deep, and the knife work was decisive.

He turned the jade pendant over. The back retained Restriction patterns, the patterns radiating outward from the center of the jade pendant, breaking off at the edges.

Looking at this style, it was 30% similar to the Restriction on the purple copper token—both were tokens, both were extremely simple structures, both purely used to verify identity.

The third was a tattered piece of Yao Beast skin map.

Tanned Yao Beast skin, which had hardened and curled over the years.

There were a few natural wrinkles on the skin surface, the ink had seeped deep into the wrinkles and faded significantly, but one could vaguely make out that it depicted the orientation of a certain mountain range.

The mountain range started from the top left corner of the beast skin and slanted across to the bottom right—running vertically north to south, with a river winding through the valley, the river shaped like a horseshoe.

A cinnabar circle was marked in the middle section of the mountain range, and three dots were made with cinnabar next to the circle, the force very heavy; the three red dots penetrated the surface fiber layer of the beast skin, and a faint crimson color still remained to this day.