Stranger Danger

Chapter 857: The Mastermind Behind The Curtain

“Who is it?!”

It was at this moment Chen Cang suddenly glimpsed a face hidden in the shadows of the ceiling. Caught off guard, he immediately channeled his sword qi and got ready for battle immediately.

The next moment, he relaxed. It was because he realized that he was looking at a bat, not a human.

The bat was about as big as a baby’s palm, and it had a pair of jet black wings covered in dark red lines that joined into an image that vaguely resembled a baby’s face. That was the face Chen Cang had seen earlier.

“Can’t believe a Baby Bat almost gave me a heart attack.” Chen Cang chuckled to himself and shook his head. He was high strung even after two days of rest, but that was understandable. He had been hunted like a rat for the past week. It would be stranger if he wasn’t as tense as a bowstring.

However, Chen Cang’s relief didn’t even last a second before he lifted his head and stared at the Baby Bat with alarm. “Wait! Why’s there a Baby Bat in this cave?!”

A Baby Bat was a Hatred-class Stranger. Unlike your usual bat, it was fond of sunlight and disliked dark places. It only appeared during the day and enjoyed feeding on baby blood. Combined with the fact that the pattern on its wings were shaped like a baby’s face, people came to call it a Baby Bat.

The reason Chen Cang was alarmed was because Baby Bats were only ever found on the surface where sunlight was plentiful. Barring exceptional circumstances, one could never find a Baby Bat in dark, damp places such as this underground river. And yet, there was no doubt that the bat hanging on the ceiling was a Baby Bat.

Was this normal? Of course not.

“Fuck! The Bat Spellcaster!”

Chen Cang recalled something and fired a sword beam from his eyes. Unable to dodge in time, the Baby Bat was split in half just like that.

Chen Cang did not look happy though. If anything, his expression was uglier than ever before.

He was certain that the Baby Bat wasn’t a wild Baby Bat. To be specific, it was the Bat Spellcaster’s familiar.

The Bat Spellcaster was one of the elders serving the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance. A Trueman elite, he cultivated the martial art known as the “Bat King Canon”. He was well known for his exceptional movement art, he specialized in taming and raising bats. Although he was a poor fighter, he was an expert at tracking and near impossible to shake off. The jianghu knew him as the Bat Spellcaster.

Since the Baby Bat was here, it was only a matter of time before the Bat Spellcaster and the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance showed up.

“Fuck! How the hell did they find me?!” Chen Cang swore at the top of his lungs.

Before he entered the underground river, he had made sure to wipe clean his tracks and even lure the majority of their forces elsewhere. He was certain that the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance would not be able to find the entrance to the underground river as the lake was extremely deep, and most people wouldn’t think that an underground river existed at the bottom of a lake.

Even if they did manage to find it, the underground river was split into countless branches. Even considering the manpower and resources the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance possessed, it would have taken them between ten days to half a month to finally identify his location.

In reality, that wasn’t the case at all. His pursuers hadn’t just located the entrance to the underground river, they even found his hiding spot in just two days. Just how was this possible?

“What is going on? How do they keep finding me?!” Chen Cang growled furiously. His expression was filled with anger, frustration, and traces of uncontrollable fear.

Why did he say, “How do they keep finding me?” It was because this wasn’t the first time the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance had found him, of course.

With the amount of preparation he made, it wasn’t difficult for him to shake off the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance’s pursuit. In fact, he had shaken them off, hidden himself in a safe spot, and saw them leave with his own two eyes multiple times for the past few days. However, not long after they were gone, they would always return and move straight toward his hideout almost as if someone had informed them of his exact location. It was unbelievable. It was impossible.

This time, it happened again. He felt as if an unseen hand was manipulating him and everyone else like a chess piece. He felt as if his life and his destiny were no longer in his hands. This feeling angered him, discouraged him, and terrified him.

“Dammit! Who is it!?”

However hopeless and angry he felt, Chen Cang did not hesitate to escape deeper into the river. Since the Baby Bat had found him, the Bat Spellcaster and the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance could not be far behind. If he did not escape now, he would never escape again.

An incense stick after Chen Cang had taken off, a strange fluttering noise that sounded like many flapping wings appeared from one end of the river. A few seconds later, a cloud of bats flew out into the open and landed where Chen Cang was resting a moment ago. They then transformed into a thin old man with a pale, clean-shaven face.

That wasn’t all. The underground river stirred unnaturally for a moment before a tidal wave rolled over from the same end the bats had emerged from. It delivered a beautiful, comely woman wearing a palace dress to the old man’s side.

“So? Did you find something, Spellcaster?” The woman spoke up, her voice mellow and charming.

“Chen Cang was definitely here. In fact, he just left a short while ago.”

The old man a.k.a Bat Spellcaster answered, “He must have taken off in a hurry after discovering by Baby Bat. Look at the carcass. You can tell that there are lingering traces of his Innate Body Breaking Intangible Sword qi.”

“They say that a crafty rabbit has three burrows, and this Swordsgrave swordsman is the living model of that saying. I can’t believe he almost managed to escape us again,” the woman said softly.

The woman’s moniker was Water Fairy. Just like Bat Spellcaster, she was a Trueman and one of the elders of the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance.

It had been a whole week since they started pursuing Chen Cang. Of course they had figured out his background and origin.

“Have you figured out who’s the one who’s spreading the news, Spellcaster? I mean the real ones, of course,” Water Fairy asked.

Every time they lost track of Chen Cang and couldn’t find him, a rumor regarding his whereabouts would pop up in the jianghu.

At first, they regarded the rumors with suspicion as a matter of course. When one of their search parties actually found Chen Cang at the location specified in the rumor though, they had no choice but to take it seriously.

Of course, the reason a rumor was called a rumor was because one, they had no idea who was the one who leaked them, and two, not all of the rumors were genuine or accurate.

If the rumor they received was genuine, then finding Chen Cang was just a matter of traveling to that exact location. Each time, they were a hair’s breadth away from capturing or killing the swordsman. If not for Chen Cang’s sheer ingenuity and tenacity, they would have caught him on the second or third genuine rumor.

The problem was that not all of the rumors were accurate. At first, after confirming that the first rumor was accurate, they decided to treat all rumors as if they were real and pounce at every location like a hound. After all, their orders were to capture Chen Cang as quickly as possible, and the sooner they succeeded, the faster they would be able to save the alliance’s face. Of course, they quickly found out that they were wrong and just wasting time and resources. It was strange to say the least.

Did they try to look into the origin of the rumors or who and where the rumors spread from? Of course they did. It was useless though. Some of the rumors were spread by the Mud Association, some were spread by Bird Gathering; some came from random beggars from the street, and some came from customers in a gambling den or a brothel.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the factions that were hostile or held a grudge with the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance were also spreading false rumors. People who disliked the way the Seventy Two Water Land Alliance conducted themselves or greedy bastards who were falsifying intel to make a quick buck were among the disruptors as well. It all made it impossible to trace the origin of the genuine rumors.

Long story short, the investigation was a dead end.

Right now, rumors regarding Chen Cang were absolutely all over the place. The effort required to confirm if a rumor was genuine or not was herculean to put it mildly. And yet, they couldn’t ignore it because they knew that some of the rumors were true. They had no choice but to swallow their frustration, filter the rumors as best they could, and dispatch search parties to confirm the rumors.

They were lucky they were as big and powerful as they were. Literally no other faction could have sustained such a massive operation without going insane.

Even then, they were all physically and mentally exhausted.