~BOOM~

Within the temple of the vermilion bird, the sound of an explosion could be heard. The people who were all watching it from the start were startled. At first they had heard the screams of agony coming from inside and now this explosion.

"What is happening in there?" A commoner asked.

"Will the city mayor be alright?" A cultivator, who was a subordinate of the mayor questioned.

All of the people currently watching had the same, if not similar questions. Their survival depended on Jiao Fan and Old Man Tiandi as of now. This was because the temple was not the only problem in front of them, Lin Wu and the Silver Beak Sky Soar Eagle were equal if not bigger problems.

The two were beasts and nothing could be said surely about them. If they felt like it, they may eat them all in the blink of an eye. And that was the reason why Jiao Fan and Old Man Tiandi might be the only ones being able to protect themselves from it.

Behind a collapsed building, a woman was standing. She was wearing the robes of a cultivator and had a good bearing. Her looks were many times better than any average woman and so were her body proportions.

She was currently hiding behind the collapsed building and gazing at the scene in front of her. Since the start of the quake, she had seen one unbelievable scene after the other and they only kept on getting more absurd.

The temple rising up from the ground, the destruction of the city, the battle of the cultivators and then finally the arrival of the platform with the two beasts.

"What fools they are! Listening to the words of a beast! Do they really think they are trustful?" The woman scoffed.

She continued watching and heard the painful screams coming from inside. This time she could recognize the voices to belong to the Mayor, Jiao Fan and Old Man Tandi along with the two other Nascent Soul realm cultivators.

"I knew it! They were only walking to their deaths. Did they really think the beast was letting them walk in there without a reason? The beast should have definitely known about it. A beast that can speak… there is no way it's weak…" The Woman said to herself.

While she was looking at the temple, she was also holding a square bangle in her hand. She kept on rubbing it as if trying to do something, but it was not working.

'Why is this not working? How do I contact the mistress like this?' The woman thought.

She wanted to escape the city but knew that this kind of information was best reported first hand.

'Thankfully the mistress gave me the Teleportation talisman… or I may have had to escape at the first sight of danger. At least now the mistress will be able to get some information beforehand.' She thought.

But while she was doing this, she did not know a certain someone was listening.

"Interesting… very interesting… so we have a third party wanting to fish in the troubled waters…" Lin Wu muttered to himself after listing to the woman.

While the woman thought that she had been hidden from the start and that no one had noticed her, in reality Lin Wu had spotted her before he had even landed here on the platform. Or rather, it was the system that had detected her in the scan.

Lin Wu had not spent as much attention on her at the start as there were simply more important matters to deal with. But after seeing the movement on the map, he noticed that one of the Nascent Soul realm cultivators was still hidden in the city and had not revealed itself.

When Lin Wu had scanned the area with his spirit sense, he had still not seen anything which intrigued him. If something could hide from his spirit sense but was still visible to the system, it meant that they were using some kind of a special concealment technique.

While Lin Wu may have been able to figure out that she was hidden in a certain area after doing a detailed check with his spirit sense, his attention was occupied by the people in the temple currently.

The only reason why Lin Wu looked at the cultivator was that the system notified him of a communication signal arising from a communication jade. Someone had been trying to contact someone outside the city.

The appearance of the temple had come with the Interference field that was far weaker than that of the Dread Coil Marsh. This had allowed Lin Wu to confirm that it was truly the temples that created the interference fields and not the Dread Coil Marsh itself.

'The number of temples should probably determine the strength of the interference field. Right now there is only one temple, so it is only able to interrupt the communications from the jade slips, but if there is more it can even affect the system.

Hmm… I'll need to let the system analyze this temple in detail once I'm done here. There are bound to be a lot of hidden gains in this that I don't know of.' Lin Wu thought.

But seeing that the woman had tried to use a communication jade slip, Lin Wu became curious and wanted to know what was it that she was exactly doing. And when he finally eavesdropped on her mutterings, he heard all these interesting things.

"The only question that now stands is… who is this mistress this woman is talking about? She should definitely be her superior, seeing the respectful tone she uses to talk about her.

Her leader, perhaps? Or a sect elder?" Lin Wu wondered.

While the woman was in the robes of a cultivator, she did not have any specifics that could point out the sect that she belonged to. Thus, it was left to Lin Wu to guess it or hear it.

"I'll just keep on watching for now…"