Wang Yutian does not run to the sect gates, that would be unseemly. Instead, he flies over to the only entrance to the inner pavilion. Hiring outer sect disciples with low rank beast cores to deliver rumors had once again borne fruit, and he was in position to intercept any indication of what had occurred beneath the rift. Landing atop the guardhouse, he walks quietly to the outer sect member assigned to prevent the weak from interrupting the training of those Rank Three and higher.

“Here, a plant type beast core to help you with your wood development.”

In this case, that was not an innuendo; unlike most of the insecure disciples Wang Yutian supplied with these cores, the one who gave him the information on the current visitor utilized the wood element. That basically guaranteed that he would be sent out to oversee crop development in some part of the sect’s territory should he manage to reach Rank Three, and being surrounded constantly by plant life would help him unify with his core element until making it a part of his very being. Regardless, assisting the cultivator did not harm Wang Yutian at all, nor did it cost him very much in terms of resources. As soon as one reached the inner sect, the cultivator was given access to a near unlimited supply of resources that were completely useless to anyone who reached the required level of power. For someone with a little bit of ingenuity though, the supply of low-rank cores and pills could be very useful indeed.

Bowing to his supplier, the guard beats a hasty retreat to allow Wang Yutian the leeway to do whatever it was that he was here to do. It wasn’t his business what the inner sect disciple was doing, only that he had reported an occurance and gotten rewarded for it.

Looking down over the balustrade at the dusty man on the ground, he recognized Yue Feihua. It was fortunate that his territory was the one containing the rift, considering how incredibly lazy and incompetent he was about keeping a firm control on everything under his command. If Shi Yuheng had been the supervisor of the edible cropland, the ritual site would have been discovered months ago. Wang Yutian had cleaned up his co-conspirators quite readily, but no one could eliminate all traces of a successful ritual. The fact that the cracks in space had completely closed might have drawn attention as well, but nothing that remained would be enough to link Wang Yutian to the area.

“Yue, what a surprise,” he said to the man meters below him, “You’re normally so busy ensuring that the food supply for the entire continent is being produced in a safe and efficient manner. Anything that draws your attention away from the vital task you are responsible for must be quite important.”

“Yeah,” agrees Yue Feihua, “I’ve got a big problem.”

“Would this perhaps be an issue that can be resolved by an intelligent person looking over what the problem is, and doing a simple task?”

“I don’t think so this time. This isn’t something easy like a dry well or unexploded ordnance.”

Wang Yutian sighs theatrically.

“Very well, I’ll take some time out of my busy schedule to help you with your issues.”

“I don’t think that’s going to be enough this time. I need to call in some of the high rank guys for help.”

That wasn’t part of the plan.

“Yue, you wound me. Haven’t I always been able to help you in the past? I’m sure that whatever problem you have, I’ll be able to fix it for you.”

“You’re a good friend Wang, but this is bigger than both of us. The big guys need to know about this, or losing one village is the least of our concerns.”

What.

“Losing a village? What exactly is going on?”

Nothing in that ritual should have had an impact on the commoners nearby. The demon lord was summoned, summerally dismembered and absorbed, and then spread across the land to feed the wandering monsters. Even that would be a negligible impact, as without any of the energy within, the parts would only be meat, and not the special nutritious kind either. Maybe some chitin.

Looking very serious, Yue Feihua says in a quiet tone, “I think it would be best if I spoke to you in private.”

“Come up,” Wang Yutian responds, looking to the sides, “I’ve sent the guard away already.”

A glow surrounds the man’s feet as he channels the Rank One power through his legs. He launches himself up into the air, landing heavily on the wooden palisade. He immediately falls over, grabbing his knees.

“You moron, this is made of wood. You aren’t going to have a soft landing on it with your earthen elemental affinity,” Wang Yutian berates the suffering disciple, before tapping into his command over gravity to lift him from his prone position. “What is happening in your territory that is going to destroy an entire village as its starting point?”

“A beast, far more powerful than the likes of you and I could defeat, has managed to crawl out of the Shajia Forest, and is obliterating the village as we speak.”

Oh, well. That was less interesting. With his new power, a beast would be well within his capabilities.

“So how did you manage to escape?”

Jumping vast distances in a single bound was a nice trick, but your path through the sky becomes determined the moment you push off the ground. Any beast this moron couldn’t just punch to death would be fast enough to keep up with a mere fifty meters per second, and Yue Feihua wasn’t a paragon of longevity. As such, Wang Yutain counted him as a regular client for the refined pills he made out of the wood elemental cores.

“I just ran, and it didn’t chase me. The village is probably already dead, but if we get a subjugation squad together quickly, we can probably save most of the others.”

And back to not making sense. Why would it not go after the stronger morsel? After advancing in rank, the lower quality feed was less effective. That was just how it worked. A Rank Five wouldn’t get the benefit from a Rank Three core, which was an unfortunate repercussion of Wang Yutain hiding his rank increase. At the very least it gave him more resources with which to bribe others.

“Look, if it was a high rank beast, it would have gone after you rather than the commoners, because you would be more delicious. If a high rank beast went after you, it would have caught you easily. That leaves two options. Either it let you go so you would send a subjugation squad for it to easily defeat and devour, or it wasn’t a high rank beast. Why are you sure it was too powerful for either of us?”

The lumox stops rolling around on the ground and just sits up straight.

“First, it ambushed me in the fields, circling around while speaking in a demonic tongue, emerging from the shadows with a slavering maw full of predatory teeth. After yeeting it before it could strike, a girl in one of the houses pointed out it was human shaped, and a beast has to be rank six to humanize. I can’t fight a rank six, they don’t get hurt from punching and can vomit unlimited lava.”

“That’s human cultivators you lumox, beasts just get bigger and stronger with each sub-rank. They turn back before fighting because otherwise they can’t use their mass advantage, and don’t have improved defenses at all. Even if it was a humanized beast, you’d have beaten it eventually as long as you didn’t give it a chance to turn back.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh. Since you are still breathing, it probably wasn’t even that. Look, I’ll take care of this, and you rest a bit. You’ve been away from the sect for a while, and we’ve gotten new members to meet.”

Wang Yutain grabs Yue Feihua by the arm and lifts him up to his feet.

“Just relax and enjoy yourself for a day or so,” Wang Yutain tells him, “and this will all blow over.”

Patting him on the back, Wang Yutain stands on top of the gate as Yue Feihua makes his way down the slow way. Mentally berating him for idiocy again, since jumping down from the wooden structure would allow Yue to have a soft landing on his own element, Wang thinks through the events once again. Yue had encountered a beast in human form, which was only possible if the beast was Rank Six, yet he was alive. Conclusion, Yue did not encounter a beast in human form, and is an idiot. Fact; Wang had summoned a demon king and drained it of all its power. It was possible that it had a special technique that enabled it to survive the loss of its body, and would appear beastial. Conclusion, Yue had encountered a creature which appeared to be phenomenally powerful, yet was currently weaker than a single Rank One cultivator.

Still, the remnants of a Demon King was still that of a Demon King. There was a built-in immune system in the world for this kind of thing anyway. The Chosen of Heavens had a compulsion of some sort to hunt down powerful creatures, and one had just come in from one of the noble houses. He would be the perfect mix of expendable and effective to send out of the sect to investigate what happened, with nothing but the promise of some of the resources he had stockpiled over the years.