Chapter 49: Confirmation

Bai Ling agreed immediately. She turned to the surrounding officers, her voice crisp with command. "First and Third squads, reinforce the barricades at the gorge entrance! Tie Shan, take your surviving brothers to the apothecary cave immediately to treat your wounds and eat a hot meal. If battle comes, every blade counts!"

"Yes, Leader!"

Tie Shan and his battered men slammed their fists over their chests in a crisp military salute, quickly dispersing into the cavern to carry out their duties.

With the perimeter secured, Bai Ling turned and gestured toward a stone corridor winding into the lower depths of the subterranean mountain. "Follow me. The extraction unit brought the captives to the medical chambers."

We walked side by side along the torchlit passage, the cavernous rock muffling the frantic sounds of packing echoing from the main basin. Along the way, Bai Ling casually pointed out the cavern’s natural water springs, the subterranean fungus farms, and introduced a few passing sentries with effortless familiarity.

I cast a sideways glance at her calm expression, chuckling softly. "You seem remarkably comfortable walking into a dark tunnel alongside two armed strangers, Leader Bai. Aren’t you worried I might take your head and deliver it to Governor Yan for an imperial bounty?"

Bai Ling smiled faintly, her amber eyes carrying an enigmatic, quiet confidence.

"I have always possessed a rather peculiar instinct for people, Senior," she replied smoothly, keeping her stride steady. "I can see the hidden weight in a person’s gaze. Well... with one disastrous exception in my past, my eyes have never failed me."

She paused, choosing not to dwell on whatever dark history lingered behind that statement, before glancing back at my pristine white robes. "Besides, even if my instincts were lying to me, logic dictates my actions. A man who can slaughter an advanced imperial cultivator without a speck of blood touching his hem possesses the power to wipe out this entire mountain before our sentries could even notch their arrows. If you truly desired our heads or our secrets, you wouldn’t bother playing such elaborate games with a band of starving outlaws."

I laughed heartily, thoroughly enjoying her pragmatic, razor-sharp wit. "You really do possess an extraordinary pair of eyes, Leader Bai."

"I will take that as high praise from an immortal master," she said, bowing her head slightly with an appreciative smile.

Turning a sharp bend at the end of the corridor, she pushed open a heavy wooden gate reinforced with iron rivets, leading us into a wide, subterranean infirmary. The air was thick with the scent of boiled vinegar, bitter mugwort, and dried herbal poultices.

Lying across dozens of straw cots were the twenty-four rescued captives from the imperial wagons.

The moment my eyes swept across the room, my brows furrowed slightly.

Nearly all of them were children.

Aside from three frail, elderly women who were desperately rocking crying infants, the rest of the cots were occupied by young boys and girls between the ages of six and twelve. Their ragged hemp clothes hung loosely over protruding ribcages, their ankles were chafed raw and bleeding from heavy iron shackles, and their hollow, bruised faces were stamped with the dead-eyed, paralyzed silence of the deeply traumatized.

They were prime merchandise for the slave markets, young enough to be broken, groomed, and molded into obedient household servants or expendable mine labor without remembering their origins.

I looked at the scrawny kids and let out a quiet, inward sigh. In my years traversing this ruthless cultivation world, I had seen entire mortal dynasties razed to ash by wandering demonic sects, human cruelty was an ugly, endless cycle that barely moved my seasoned heart beyond mild pity.

Beside me, however, Shen Qingxue was practically vibrating.

Her knuckles turned bone-white against the hilt of her sword, her jaw clenching so hard the muscles in her cheek twitched violently. Beneath her sheer veil, those obsidian pupils burned with a terrifying, suffocating fury, the cold, unbridled malice of the Asura Dao Heart roaring to life at the sight of slaughtered innocence.

I wasn’t surprised in the slightest to see Shen Qingxue practically vibrating with unbridled fury beside me.

In fact, if she had remained calm and detached after seeing these bruised, chained children, I would have found it downright unnatural. Back when I had first transmigrated into this brutal world in my youth, my younger self would have burned with the exact same righteous indignation, screaming at the heavens and drawing steel against every magistrate in sight.

It wasn’t that my heart had turned to stone, nor was it that I didn’t feel a pang of genuine sorrow for these miserable kids. They had suffered horrors no mortal child should ever endure.

However, long years of treading the immortal path had carved an unyielding, cold reality into my bones: in this boundless cultivation realm, cruelty of this caliber was simply far too common.

Warlords razed villages, corrupt dynasties sold their own peasants, and wandering demonic fiends harvested entire mortal cities to refine their blood banners.

If an immortal allowed his soul to bleed over every injustice and every tear shed under heaven, his sea of consciousness would drown in grief, his Dao Heart would shatter under the weight of mundane despair, and his cultivation would permanently stall.

As long as intelligent beings walked the earth, greed and cruelty would walk alongside them like an inseparable shadow.

Pushing the philosophical musings aside, I closed my eyes and quietly extended a thread of my divine sense across the subterranean infirmary.

The invisible energetic ripple swept gently through the chamber, passing through the cots, the straw mattresses, and into the fragile vessels of the sleeping children.

A few seconds later, my eyebrows knitted slightly, and I let out a low, weary sigh.

"Three of them," I said softly, opening my eyes and looking toward Bai Ling. "Three of the children lying in the corner have been marked. The slavers placed a microscopic Blood-Scent Powder inside the scabs along their ankles. The trace is faint, but to an imperial hound holding a resonant compass, it shines like a beacon in the night."

I paused, crossing my arms into my wide white sleeves. "It seems your worst nightmare is confirmed, Leader Bai. Governor Yan’s extermination vanguard is almost certainly marching toward this gorge right now."