The execution of Elder Qin Shou was clean.
Too clean.
No thunder descended from the skies. No strange visions appeared. The Dao itself did not tremble. His soul dispersed quietly beneath a suppression formation, reduced to nothing more than drifting motes of light that vanished before they could even scatter.
That silence unsettled everyone.
For three days afterward, the heavens remained unnaturally calm.
Clouds moved at a measured pace. Spiritual qi circulated evenly. Even the border beasts—normally restless after bloodshed—fell into an eerie stillness, as if something unseen had pressed a hand over the world and commanded it to behave.
Mo Yun stood at the edge of the encampment, gazing skyward.
"Too quiet," he muttered.
Beside him, Shen Yue nodded slowly. "After a century-long infiltrator is exposed… there should be ripples."
"There are," Han Zhi replied, his voice low. "Just not the kind we can see."
Across the encampment, Li Chen felt it as well.
It was not pressure.
Not hostility.
Not killing intent.
It was attention.
Like standing alone in an empty hall and suddenly realizing someone was watching from behind a screen—breathing quietly, patiently, without urgency.
Li Chen's spine chilled.
That night, he reinforced every formation around his temporary residence, adding three redundant escape arrays and sealing his sword intent beneath layered suppression seals. He did not cultivate. He did not circulate qi.
He slept lightly, one hand resting near a teleport talisman he had prepared long ago.
High above the lower realm, beyond clouds and stars, something subtle shifted.
A fluctuation passed through the Heavenly Records—an imperceptible deviation in a minor world's causal flow.
It was logged.
Not as a threat.
Not as an anomaly.
But as a point of interest.