I looked at Qian.
The cultivator’s face didn't change.
That told me more than anything he could have said.
After all, someone being told they were going to be killed, and that they shouldn’t exist would have some reaction, whether it be confusion at what was going on or anger at being threatened, yet Qian didn’t have any reaction.
"What do you mean?" I asked Ke Jun, not understanding what he meant by that.
Ke Jun's blood-red eyes finally moved from Qian's face to mine.
"The Masked One talked," he said. "He had a habit of it, and he let things slip, small things, usually, but sometimes larger ones." He paused. "Like how Qian was an avatar."
For a moment, no one spoke.
An avatar at the Stellar Realm?
That was difficult to digest.
An avatar was not a simple thing to construct.
Unlike spiritual manifestations that could split from the main will temporarily, avatars were completely autonomous, had their own lifespan and their own cultivation, but that also meant that they required their own resources.
Cultivating to the Stellar Realm wasn’t easy, it required lots of talent and even more resources.
Whoever was able to afford that must be a powerful and rich cultivator.
Before I could ask, Ke Jun explained what he knew.
Someone, a Life Realm cultivator whose identity the Masked One had discovered, had been watching the Masked One's collection from a distance for some time, and at some point, they had done something that few would suspect.
They had sent the avatar to be caught.
They had constructed Qian carefully enough to pass inspection, placed him somewhere the Masked One would find him, and allowed him to be collected.
The reason behind it was pretty straightforward.
If the avatar successfully infiltrated the Masked One's inner world, its main body would have access to everything inside it, whether it be information, resources, the other souls in the collection, whatever techniques or assets the Masked One had accumulated, and more.
It was actually a clever but very risky plan.
The Masked One had apparently thought so too, because when he figured it out, he decided to use the avatar against the Life Realm cultivator.
The idea, as far as Ke Jun understood it from the Masked One's occasional careless speech, was to let the avatar continue its mission just long enough to establish a stable connection back to its main body, and then use that connection to drag the Life Realm cultivator into his own trap.
I floated there and processed that for a moment.
The Masked One had found out that a Life Realm cultivator was using an avatar to infiltrate his collection, and his response had been to think, good, I'll use that as an opportunity to enslave them.
I genuinely didn’t know whether to be impressed or exhausted by that kind of thinking.
Obviously, the Masked One understood exactly what a Life Realm cultivator represented but he simply believed that his own cleverness was greater than the risk. That was a level of arrogance that was hard for even arrogant young masters to compete with.
"Is it true?" I asked Qian.
Qian looked at me for a long moment, the calculation behind his eyes running.
"Normally," he said, "I would find something to say back. Redirect. Throw a few things in the air and see what you reached for." He smiled, and it was a different smile from the one I had seen earlier. It was more real, and also more unpleasant. "But I got what I came for. My main body will find you very interesting, Ke Yin. You and that tree of yours."
And then he began to fade.
That surprised me.
It wasn’t easy to leave an inner world without the owner’s permission.
This must be a withdrawal method specific to avatars, but I couldn’t let him just leave like that.
Qian had just announced that he intended to bring information about my inner world back to whoever his main body was.
That was not something I could allow.
The jade beauty seemed to reach the same conclusion faster than I did, or maybe she just had less patience for watching it happen. She moved before I had fully finished the thought, crossing the distance to Qian in a single motion with her fist already pulled back.
The punch landed directly in the center of his chest.
And went straight through him.
She stumbled slightly at the follow-through, catching herself, and looked at her own hand with an expression that was more offended than surprised.
Qian's laugh was faint, already losing substance the way his form was.
"Did you really think that would work?"
The thing was, it should have worked.
They were both souls, which meant that interactions between them operated on spiritual principles rather than physical ones. A punch from a Stellar Realm cultivator in soul form to another cultivator in soul form was more than a physical punch, it was a concentrated expression of spiritual force.
That was how soul combat worked when two souls fought.
For Qian's technique to make him immune to it while the withdrawal was in progress told me just how unique and overpowered it was, but this only made it even more important that Qian not leave.
The good news was that I didn’t have to act.
There was no confusion about Qian’s intentions, and if there was one thing that I had learned about the Genesis Seed, it was just how protective it was, and how aggressive it could be when something threatened its world.
The root came out of the ground and impaled Qian's fading soul before he had finished his taunt.
Whatever technique he was using was disrupted, and his form began to return to normal.
Qian stopped laughing as his eyes went wide in pain and disbelief.
"How?” he managed to cry out.
I didn't answer.
The truth was I was not entirely sure of the technical mechanism.
What I knew was that the Genesis Seed existed outside the rules that governed normal cultivation techniques.
Qian's withdrawal method had been designed to resist the spiritual force that other souls could produce and was probably even capable of escaping the Masked One’s control, but the Masked One couldn’t be compared to the Genesis Seed.
I had watched the Genesis Seed tear five souls out of the Masked One with the same effort it would take me to brush dust off a shelf.
Qian had watched all of that happen.
And he had still looked at me and smiled and said my main body is going to be very interested in your tree. I still didn’t understand cultivators and their arrogance. I had been in this world long enough to have seen it kill people repeatedly and it still caught me off guard every time.
“Who is your main body?” I asked him.
I needed to know which Life Realm elder to look out for.
Unfortunately, Qian didn’t get the chance to respond.
The Genesis Seed was still furious about being sealed by the Heavens and was apparently in no mood for conversation, it ripped him apart, and when it was done, there was nothing left, no trace of the spiritual form that had been taunting us a moment ago.
With its job complete, the Genesis Seed's root withdrew back into the earth.
It was moments like this that reminded me that as overpowered the Genesis Seed was, if I couldn’t tame it, then it would one day tame me. That wasn’t a problem now, and I could only hope it never developed into a problem.
As for finding out the identity of Qian’s main body, I wasn’t too worried.
The Genesis Seed had devoured Qian’s soul and spiritual signature, and while there were methods to hide or distort your spiritual signature, it was almost impossible to hide your soul. If I ever came in the presence of the Life Realm elder, the Genesis Seed would stir in recognition.
Right now, I had to deal with the aftermath.
"Thank you," I said, giving Ke Jun a slight bow.
If he hadn’t warned me, I would have ended up being stalked by a Life Realm elder.
That was not an experience I would enjoy.
"I did it for myself," he said. "I'm a mortal. If something happens to you, I have no options. Don't mistake it for anything else."
I smiled despite myself. I wasn’t offended. That was exactly the kind of ‘you’re welcome’ that I had expected from him. It came wrapped in self-interest so you couldn't accuse him of sentiment.
I turned to look at the jade beauty.
Her story was the only story left.