Starting as the heir of a marquis's mansion, I gained access to a summoning system.

In the No. 1 VIP room, Grandma Blood Infant did not come out or speak.

But a thin layer of bloody mist silently seeped from under the door of the private room, spreading three feet along the stone bricks on the ground before stopping.

That was the deathly aura within her leaking out unintentionally—not because of anger, but because she was laughing.

She laughed, a very low and hoarse laugh, like bones rolling inside a wooden box:

"Interesting. A three-hundred-year-old rule has been unearthed by a Heavenly Profound Ascension Guest."

"Very well. You won the auction under the rules, I accept that. But after the auction ends, and after the restrictions on Iron Feather City are lifted—I'm taking your bones."

Wan Qifeng turned around abruptly, glared fiercely at Dongfang Weiwo, threw down a sentence, slammed the door, and returned to the private room:

"Outside the South Gate, the Bone-Eating Beasts of Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain haven't been fed tonight. Your skeleton should be quite a treat for them."

At this moment, all the attention of the cultivators in the room was focused on the young man leaning on a bamboo cane at the entrance of the No. 7 VIP room.

They knew he had two halves of the map—the upper half brought from the Lin family, and the lower half he had just acquired at auction for a staggering 55,000 spirit stones.

The complete route of Lu Moshen's hidden treasure is currently in the arms of this mid-stage Yin-Yang Realm cultivator.

Will he be able to leave Iron Feather City alive?

Everyone is asking this question. And everyone knows that the answer will be written in blood outside the black iron rock city wall in the south of Iron Feather City after the restrictions on Iron Feather City are lifted.

When the third and final item—the sleeping monster egg—was brought out, the atmosphere in the room had completely changed.

Everyone's attention was no longer on the auction.

The chief auctioneer routinely announced the starting price: a mid-grade spirit stone.

The note read "Possibly a useless egg," and then there was a long silence before a rogue cultivator casually added one, ultimately resulting in a hasty transaction for two spirit stones. The "right person" the seller was hoping for to activate it clearly didn't appear tonight.

The buyer of the alien beast egg was a person wrapped in a gray cloak sitting in a corner of the seating area; no one could see his face clearly.

He paid two spirit stones, and carrying the fist-sized, dull-looking egg, he disappeared silently into the dispersing crowd.

Nobody gave him a second glance.

Every day, there are rogue cultivators in Iron Feather City with this kind of bargain-hunting mentality. They spend two spirit stones to buy a useless egg and try their luck. Nine times out of ten, it will hatch into a ball of death energy.

But the moment he passed through the tunnel and disappeared into the night, a very faint sound came from under the gray cloak—the sound of the liquid inside the eggshell sloshing slightly.

After the auction, the dome-shaped restrictions in the underground hall began to be lifted layer by layer according to the predetermined procedure.

The brightness of the luminous stones was dimmed by 30%. The independent cultivators in the general seating area were the first to leave, followed by the major forces in the private rooms.

The Blackscale Merchant Guild's deacons maintained order in the passageway, ensuring that all parties kept a safe distance from each other.

Dongfang Wei did not rush to leave.

He stood in the No. 7 private room, took the lower half of the map out of the crystal box, and pieced it together with the upper half of the map given to him by his grandmother on the table.

The torn pieces fit together perfectly, and the two halves of the parchment began to slowly merge under the stimulation of the dark golden light—the two halves of the map that Lu Moshen had torn apart thirty years ago had finally reunited as a complete map after thirty years of separation.

The complete route emerged on the parchment: starting from Shattered Bone Ridge, passing through Iron Feather City, Blackwater Swamp, and White Bone Wasteland, and arriving at the Forgotten River Bridge outside the Temple of Immortality.

At the bottom of the inverted palace at the end of the bridge, the seventh bone pillar is marked with a position accurate to the number of steps.

Beside the location, Lu Moshen wrote a note in extremely small characters, the ink so faded it was almost illegible: "Hidden things are not things, but the beginning of the journey. Obtaining them reveals the way home."

My left arm is broken, and I am unable to return. I leave it to those who come after me. The signature is just one word: Lü.

Dongfang Weiwo tucked the complete map into his robes, leaned on his bamboo cane, and stood up. Bai Wuchen and Ya Jiu appeared at the door of the private room at the same time.

The auction is over.

The smile vanished from Bai Wuchen's face, and the sword energy beneath his white robe was slowly gathering.

"Grandma Blood Infant left a blood and bone mark at the exit, and the Bone-Eating Beasts of Wanqi Peak have already left the city."

Although the more than sixty independent cultivators in the city dared not make a move on the Black Scale Merchant Guild's territory, they had already laid an ambush outside the south gate.

What are your plans?

He paused, glancing at the hidden door leading to the guest room behind Dongfang Weiwo—when he passed by the guest room door on his way here, he felt a wisp of sword energy he had never encountered before through the door, so cold that it made his Sheng Gu Token feel slightly hot at his waist.

Dongfang Weiwo leaned on his bamboo cane and walked towards the guest rooms.

"I'll go pick up Lin Xiaoman first. You don't need to come out of the city with me. Once we're out of the city, it's all about the Blood Bone Sect and the Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain, and has nothing to do with the Valley of Life and Death and the Hall of Reincarnation."

"Unrelated?" Ya Jiu's withered voice drifted from under the hood, carrying a subtle emotional fluctuation.

The Reincarnation Seal is in your hands; if you die, it will be lost. The Reincarnation Palace has waited three hundred years for this matter; it cannot wait another three hundred years.

He extended his withered hand from beneath his black robe. The bone ring in his palm was gone, replaced by a small black bone talisman with an ancient single character engraved on it: Escape.

"The Reincarnation Talisman, once crushed, can instantly teleport you a hundred miles away. It can only be used once. Take it."

Dongfang Weiwo accepted the bone talisman without hesitation.

He knew that someone like Ya Jiu wouldn't easily give away something that could save his life, and once given away, it wouldn't be taken back.

He carefully put away the bone talisman, pushed open the hidden door of the guest room, walked through the corridor, and arrived at the secluded courtyard deep in the backyard of the Black Scale Merchant Guild.

Lin Xiaoman was already waiting at the gate of the courtyard.

She carried a medicine pouch that was even more bulging than when she arrived, and held a newly carved bamboo cane in her hand—shorter than the one Dongfang Weiwo had, with coarse hemp cloth wrapped around the handle, the knots tied crookedly, just like the first one handed to her outside the bamboo forest in Qingzhu Town.

The two female deacons from the Black Scale Merchant Guild behind her were still advising her to stay hidden, saying that the city gate was already surrounded by people and going out now would be tantamount to suicide.

As if she hadn't heard, she saw Dongfang Weiwo walking towards her with his bamboo cane and only said one sentence:

"I've bought the ironwood powder, and I've boiled six jars of the new bone-protecting ointment. That's enough."

Then she looked toward the guest room behind Dongfang Weiwo—there was a tightly closed window, and behind the window, something was waking up at an extremely fast speed.

Yan Fei sat cross-legged by the window for three whole days.

From the guest rooms of the Black Scale Merchant Guild to the secluded courtyard in the backyard of the underground auction house, he treated every room where Dongfang Weiwo had stayed as a temporary retreat.

The laws of the Tianwu Continent were harder than he had imagined.

In the desolate borderlands, his sword energy could tear through the void at will, and when the sword domain of the three elements was unleashed, the spatial laws within a radius of a hundred feet were reshaped by him.

But here, every inch of space is filled with the dense spiritual energy of the Tianwu Continent, making it as solid as iron. If his sword intent tries to penetrate it, it's like trying to pierce an entire block of black iron rock with a needle.

But he is Yan Fei.

The number one expert in the frontier, a peerless swordsman who can open the Heavenly Gate by combining the three elements.

He spent three days doing one thing—not fighting against the Heavenly Martial Law, but "understanding" it.

The highest level of swordsmanship is never about destroying the rules, but about seeing through the essence of the rules and then finding the sharpest breakthrough point within the scope allowed by the rules.

The laws of the Tianwu Continent are indeed denser and more robust than those of the Borderlands, but as with any rule, there are always gaps.

He spent three days finding the first gap.

The guest room door opened.

Yan Fei, wearing a faded blue cloth robe and with a worn-out old sword hanging at his waist, stepped out of the room.

His face was still that of a handsome young man, but his aura was completely different—not stronger, but more profound.

In the desolate frontier, he was a sword drawn from its sheath, its sharpness fully revealed; now, he is a sword that has just been sharpened, still carrying the warmth of the whetstone, its sharpness restrained to the extreme, making it even more unsettling than when it was drawn.

This was the first time Lin Xiaoman had met Yan Fei.

She paused for a moment, then subconsciously took half a step back behind Dongfang Weiwo, her right hand resting on the medicine-cutting dagger at her waist.

It wasn't fear, but rather her instinctive reaction as a descendant of the Guardian of the Symbols—the sword energy emanating from this person was so pure that even the residual aura of the Bone-Guarding Fragrance within her body trembled.

"One of our own."

Dongfang Weiwo, leaning on his bamboo cane, walked out of the courtyard. "His name is Yan Fei. He's the number one swordsman in the borderlands, at the early stage of the Reincarnation Realm. His combat strength is probably enough to defeat someone at the peak of the Reincarnation Realm."

Lin Xiaoman blinked and followed, glancing sideways at Yan Fei as she did so.

Yan Fei glanced at her, his gaze lingering for a moment on the dark green medicinal mist in the medicine pouch at her waist, before naturally walking to her side, separating her from the direction outside the courtyard gate.

The movement was so subtle that even Dongfang Weiwo didn't notice it, but Lin Xiaoman did. Her grip on the short dagger loosened.

The three left through the back door of the Black Scale Merchant Guild. Third Master Mo saw them to the door, uttering only four words:

"Come back alive."

Then, he personally placed a black iron token from the Black Scale Merchant Guild into Dongfang Weiwo's hand, saying, "This is a VIP token from the Iron Feather City branch, valid indefinitely. Next time you come, the tea will still be of the three types, in the same order."

The restrictions on Ironfeather City will be automatically lifted one hour after the auction ends.

This is the rule of Ironfeather City—a one-hour buffer period to allow all forces to leave the city in an orderly manner and avoid large-scale conflicts within the city.

The buffer period also serves as a window for various forces to deploy their forces in the surrounding area.

The Blood Bone Cult members had already dispersed outside the South Gate. The Bone-Eating Beast from Ten Thousand Beasts Mountain was chained to the ancient road outside the South Gate. The beast's panting could be heard even through the city wall—deep, heavy, and carrying a corrosive aura that made one's bones ache.

More than sixty independent cultivators were scattered in the dense forest, dilapidated temple, and abandoned post road outside the South Gate. Some were traveling alone, while others were in groups of three or five. Their cultivation levels ranged from the early stage of the Yin-Yang Realm to the peak of the Yin-Yang Realm.

They shared the same goal, but they didn't cooperate with each other at all. Since the bounty notice said "dead or alive," everyone wanted to be the first to get the skeleton in exchange for the 50,000 spirit stones.