The room grew heavier as Lin Mu contemplated the task ahead. The strike team celebrated their flawless success, the monks and disciples sorted treasures, and even his companions enjoyed raiding vaults. Yet Lin Mu now bore a new weight of knowledge.

The Hidden Cave Sect was not finished. Not yet.

He stood slowly, sweeping his hand to store the patriarch’s corpse once again.

The work of dissecting wealth and knowledge was not over, but for tonight this discovery was enough. Later he would move on to the elders’ rings, uncovering their secrets as well. For now, the ancestor’s shadow lingered in his mind like a storm on the horizon.

The silence of the Central Hall pressed around him, but Lin Mu was not disturbed. He had faced storms before, and he would face this one too.

A day later...

Lin Mu sat cross-legged in the empty room long after he had finished examining the patriarch’s corpse.

He had already gone through every other elder he had collected in his spatial ring, stripping them of their treasures, decrypting the protections, and extracting all that was hidden inside. The process had taken time, but he had not allowed even a shred of impatience to cloud his work.

If anything, he was thorough to the point of meticulousness, unwilling to miss even the smallest clue.

The results were staggering.

Beyond the expected mountains of immortal stones, herbs, and weapons, he had uncovered hundreds of jade slips, scrolls, and letters. Each one revealed another thread in the sprawling web the Hidden Cave Sect had spun across the continent.

Merchant guilds, minor sects, rogue cultivators, and even ordinary commoners had all been touched by their influence. The deeper Lin Mu read, the more he realized that eliminating the sect’s core was only the beginning. Their roots burrowed into far more places than the surface could show.

Among these findings, one detail weighed heavier on his mind than all others. The patriarch had mentioned his ancestor. Not only mentioned, but spoken to him. The ancestor was alive.

That revelation had shifted everything. The patriarch himself had been powerful, a man capable of leading one of the most dangerous sects in the region. Yet he had still been answering to someone else, someone who had remained unseen.

What made matters worse was that even the patriarch did not know where the ancestor was residing. Lin Mu had searched the man’s communication logs and found carefully worded responses, all pointing to a deliberate effort by the ancestor to obscure his location.

It was possible the ancestor was with the Ephemera Sect, perhaps even guiding their hand directly.

That would explain much of their recent silence and strange behavior. But it was equally possible that the ancestor lived in another hidden stronghold, one yet undiscovered. The continent was vast, and men of that caliber were adept at erasing their traces.

"This is gonna take a while..." Lin Mu exhaled slowly, standing from the mat.

There was little they could do now but wait. No matter what, the absence of communication would eventually alert the ancestor. When that happened, he would know his sect had been destroyed.

Lin Mu could only wonder what kind of response such a figure would have.

Would he retreat further into the shadows, severing ties with the world to rebuild in secret, or would he emerge with fury, seeking to avenge what had been taken from him?

The uncertainty lingered like a shadow over Lin Mu’s thoughts, but he did not allow it to weigh him down. He had gained too much to let worry spoil it. The wealth he had reaped alone was monumental.

"They might be keeping more things in the Spatial Storage treasures than their vaults." Lin Mu reckoned.

Entire vaults worth of treasures, the combined hoard of dozens of elders, and the personal collection of the patriarch now belonged to him. His own storage section shelves in his ring were beginning to strain with the sheer volume of riches.

A faint smile crossed his lips as he considered it.

’I’ll need to reorganize the shelves and add more of them. There’s far too much to even put in them.’ Lin Mu chuckled.

He would need to do a full inventory soon.

There were so many herbs, ores, spirit materials, and immortal stones that he had lost track of half of them. Some would be used for cultivation, others for refining, and a fair portion might be distributed to allies or used to strengthen the sects of their alliance.

But that was a task for another time. For now, there were more immediate matters.

Lin Mu left the Central Hall and stepped back into the wider complex of the Hidden Cave Sect. The strike team was still hard at work. A full day had already passed since the larger group had entered through the portal, and they had nearly finished stripping the sect of everything of value.

Libraries had been emptied of their texts. Vaults had been cracked open and looted. Offices and meditation chambers had been searched from top to bottom. Even secret passages and hidden rooms had been discovered and cleared.

The prisoners had been secured as well.

Those who were not killed outright had been interrogated, though most knew little of true importance. The elders had hoarded all the critical information for themselves. Still, the disciples of the Xian Sword Sect were patient, and every scrap of knowledge, no matter how small, was being gathered.

Lin Mu eventually found Grand Elder Huo near what had once been the administrative wing.

The old man was seated calmly with several other elders around him, all going over a mountain of scrolls and jade slips. Despite the piles of information, Grand Elder Huo looked relaxed, as though he had expected nothing less than complete success from the mission.

Lin Mu bowed slightly in greeting, then stepped closer. "Grand Elder, I have gone through the patriarch’s treasures as well as those of the other elders. I found more than just wealth. There were documents, and among them, one detail stood out above all others."