John wanted to flare his divine sense out in all directions to detect the source of the killing intent, but he held back from doing so. Unleashing his Divine Sense would not only be considered incredibly rude in a dense city like this, as it would wash over thousands of other cultivators nearby, but would also alert the source of the killing intent that he could detect it.
'Could it be that woman, or one of the others in her group?'
That was the only thing John could think of. No one else in this world would have killing intent towards him, as no one else knew who he even was. Trying to act as natural as possible, John continued walking forward, appearing calm on the outside, but alert and ready on the inside.
He scanned for any movement in the shadowy alleyways nearby, any fluctuation in the auras surrounding him. Anything that would alert him to the source of the killing intent.
Cultivators walked by him in both directions. Meridian Forging. Heaven Tribulation. Dao Transformation. Even World Expansion experts moved about, although the latter was the rarest by far. While each cultivator withheld their auras, the sheer number of people around him made them mix into a mess of aura's, making it hard to discern which direction any singular aura came from.
After walking down the street for several minutes, John stopped, feeling the aura of the killing intent. His frown turned into surprised confusion as he felt something he had not expected to happen.
'The killing intent. It's growing weaker and weaker,' he thought, turning around towards the direction he had come from, peering down the busy street. 'Is the source masking their killing intent better, or…?'
He stopped and felt the aura, which remained faintly discernible but stable, neither growing stronger or weaker. After a moment of consideration, he continued on the way he was going, and the aura slowly became weaker and weaker, until he could hardly feel it at all.
After walking for another mile down the road, he could no longer feel the killing intent at all. John then moved back in the direction he came, retracing his steps. His suspicion became confirmation as he felt the killing intent appear again, and grow stronger as he moved towards his original location.
'The killing intent…it's coming from a fixed location,' John discerned. 'And I don't think it's for me. It's more like general killing intent. Bizarre.'
After realizing the killing intent was not directed at himself, John looked all around him, studying the cultivators going about their daily lives. None seemed to notice the killing intent, and if they did, they didn't give any signs that they had detected it.
'Could they be used to it? No, I don't think that's the case,' John shook his head lightly. 'This killing intent aura is so faint that even I hardly detected it, and thanks to my heaven-defying soulpower and instincts, my ability to detect killing intent is far beyond anyone else's. The reason they ignore it is because they cannot detect it.'
Unlike other aura's, killing intent was not an aura that could be detected by brute force of soul-power or divine sense alone. It required heightened instincts honed through countless life and death encounters, as well as a bevy of other factors. John's ability to detect killing intent was as heaven defying as his other qualities, and so the conclusion was one that made the most sense.
Now that he knew what was going on, a strange curiosity sparked within him. John wanted to find the source of this killing intent, and figure out what was going on. The killing intent wasn't at a level that he felt threatened, only that he felt its existence. If the source of the killing intent was from someone beyond him in power, his instincts would have screamed at him to flee, which it did not at the moment.
John moved through the city, moving from street to street, weaving between alleyways and over bridges. He moved in a circular fashion through the city, as the source of the killing intent was quite hard to pinpoint. By circling it, he was able to detect if he was traveling farther or closer to it, and slowly but surely took a spiraling route towards the source of the killing intent.
Hours later, John took at the entrance of a darkened alleyway. The alleyway was towards the northwest side of the city, relatively close to the opposite edge of the main entrance of the city. The street the alleyway branched off was smaller than most, and the number of people walking about was low.
After glancing both ways to ensure no one was paying attention to him, John stepped into the alleyway, blending into the shadows. He moved slowly through the alleyway, guard raised, eyes darting about. The alleyway was quite unmemorable, and seemed to be nothing more than a passageway towards a street a hundred yards away.
There were side doors to the buildings lining the alleyway, but nothing of note at all. He could see to the other side of the alleyway, where it reached the other street. There was nothing between him and that street, no person or visible source of the killing intent.
John frowned as he looked both ways down the narrow alleyway, and moved cautiously through it. He eventually stopped roughly half-way through the alleyway and stared at the wall to his right. It was an exterior wall of one of the buildings that lined the alley, but seemed unremarkable. There wasn't a door or anything of note, causing John to frown as he looked at the wall.
'The killing intent is on the opposite side of this wall.'
Even this close to it, the killing intent was still incredibly faint. Almost no one except another heaven defying genius, or perhaps a Holy Manifestation cultivator would be able to detect its aura if they were in the alleyway.
'Even this close to it, I still feel no danger,' John thought, studying the smooth wall before him. His eyes darted about it, and paused at a location about shoulder height. There, in the wall that was so smooth that it seemed to have no flaws, the thinnest of lines could be seen, lines forming a small square.
John inspected that part of the wall for a moment, and then pressed his hand against it. The wall suddenly moved, shifting to the side, revealing the source of the killing intent, the source illuminating John's surprised face with a reddened glow.
