“Urgh!”
The hoarse voice grunted with a maddened pain as the hooded man backpedaled from the impact, his countenance behind the protection of the cloak’s hood warping with a rush of emotions.
Shame, self-resentment, and regret raced through his heart, but a clear and underlying shock triumphed before all.
“How… you were capable of unleashing such a powerful blow despite your weakened state…”
An Fei didn’t respond, and merely directed a lazy glance towards the hooded man’s confusion as her body slid down the wall to rest against the dark but clean ground.
The young girl’s breathing paled as she fought to maintain consciousness, but her fingers remained latched onto the qama’s handle.
Immersing himself into his thoughts, the hooded assassin abruptly harrumphed in a nonchalant demeanor. His hands carelessly tossed away the hilt of the severed jian, he permitted himself to direct a glance towards the young girl’s slumped body.
“That was an interesting try, little girl,” the hoarse voice could only suffuse itself with respect.
“Even I wouldn’t be able of such determination if I were to be mired in those circumstances. As a sign of respect, the correspondent’s eagle emblem is embroidered in reverse.”
The hooded man’s figure diffused into a pool of shadows, and his presence departed from Dong Lin City.
Relieving themselves of the killer’s disappearance, the passerby of the streets scratched their heads with a wry grin of an unknown source, before continuing their activities with a lightened heart.
“Hah…”
An Fei allowed a long breath of air depart from her lungs, her body amidst a haze of exhaustion. Fierce trails of numbness and gravity assaulted her limbs and torso from within, savagely tormenting the vessels who had already been deprived of much required blood.
Coughing up several mouthfuls of blood and rendering herself into a severe anemic, only to fight against five highly skilled assassins out of the blue in her room assigned by the inn.
Furthermore, for the next few hours, she had traced the assassins’ footsteps throughout the entire Dong Lin City and fought their senior at the break of midnight.
The young girl… had enough of exertion for quite a long period of time.
“…urgh!”
A sudden surge of a painful heat penetrated her liver, and An Fei lurched forward from the spasms of her muscles. Remembering the vague words she had read on the letter, the young girl blocked her lips with her left sleeve.
Pu!
A spray of blood departed from her throat, dying the sleeve with a rich blessing of crimson. Her arm falling loosely towards her side, An Fei’s vision sank into darkness as the fatigue swept in to capture the last strategic checkpoint.
Yip!
A faint cry belonging to that of a fox seemed to graze past her ears, the agitated and concerned shriek piercing through the midnight sky. Wondering what could have caused it, the young girl closed her eyes and promptly fell unconscious.
–
Pu!
At the same time in which the young girl had spat out blood, the senior assassin could not restrain his body’s urges and vomited several mouthfuls of crimson blood.
The blood scattered across the neatly constructed bricks of the stone wall, splattering against the bulwark of Dong Lin City in a glorious sacrifice.
The hooded man had not departed from Dong Lin City after concluding his conflict with the young girl, and was standing outside of the city walls to admire the shine of the cold moon of midnight. Unfortunately, he had been ambushed by the surprise surge of heat racing through his body, rending through his cultivation as though it were nothing but a thin sheet of paper.
At the final exchange, An Fei had decided to wield the qama as a decoy.
Whilst the mysterious man’s attention was fixated onto the steel dagger’s blade and its trajectory reflected by the cold moon, the young girl had mobilized her fatigued body to relinquish a few strands of the spiritual essence at her heart to suffuse her left palm.
The spiritual essence of the Sanctum was the ultimate venom to the practitioners of the mortal world, and the opposite was equivalent.
Following the palm strike, An Fei had suffered the repercussions of utilizing spiritual essence despite the unusual injuries inflicted onto her meridians.
However, the hooded man’s consequences had turned out to be much, much worse.
“Odd… my cultivation!”
The lips behind the hood quivered with fear and cold terror as the realization towards his circumstances manifested in his mind. The hooded man’s body sank onto the ground as he stared at the visage of the silver moon, his soul nearly falling into disarray.
In the manner of a few seconds, the heat surging through his body had purged the majority of the meridians in his body, incinerating the critical components with an unknown flame.
Though his life remained intact and wasn’t permitted death, the purged meridians were no longer capable of absorbing the atmospheric spiritual qi, or conveying the refined spiritual essence.
His cultivation of that of a Core Formation Realm practitioner remained, but his attainments at the Foundation Establishment Realm had been annulled.
“No!”
The hooded man roared as he urged the core at his dantian to release a copious sea of spiritual essence to inundate his body. The black-colored light swept through his meridians and vessels, patching up the holes that were the remains of the ravaging of his physique.
The threads of black light substituting his broken meridians could simulate the circulation of spiritual essence similar to that of the original, but at a significantly lower rate. As the hooded man clutched at his head in fear and relief, a eviscerated sigh exiled itself from his lips.
“Crippled…”
His cultivation had been thoroughly crippled.
Though his attainments until the Core Formation Realm’s peak remained untouched, the accomplishments of the Foundation Establishment Realm were annulled by the unknown surge of heat without a shred of mercy.
With his meridians removed, the spiritual essence stored in his dantian could not be utilized.
Hence, he had applied the emergency aid of spiritual essence to simulate a set of meridians and blood vessels to preserve his cultivation from disintegrating any further. The threads of black light could serve as supplementary channels to divert his spiritual essence, but its usefulness halted at that point.
Unable to develop any further through the path of cultivation, and he was crippled to the limits of an entry Core Formation Realm practitioner. Even then…
“As an assassin, this is unacceptable! Intolerable!”
The hooded man howled with grief as he gazed at the night sky, his mind allowing itself to surrender to the inviting embrace of turmoil. As he sat against the wall of which his blood had besmirched, the mysterious man’s thoughts hinted at a certain young girl.
“That’s right, the palm strike…” the lips underneath the hood moved in a frenzied manner devoid of order.
“That girl, that girl, that girl… capable… capable of a palm strike to cripple one’s cultivation… capable, capable, capab – that girl was a culti –“
Shua!
The cold and silent moon suddenly screamed a warning of terror, but the world did not oblige. The sun raced from its nest from underneath the horizon to glare towards the skies, its heart racing with an unexplainable terror.
The senior assassin’s words were abruptly halted by a gust of wind, and a wizened head dropped onto the ground in silence.
Blood seeped from the decapitated body, offering its vitality to the malnourished plants underneath.
“That’s not right, saosao mustn’t have any external enemies beyond her reach.”
The playful voice of a youngster caused the world to sigh with submission and remittance, and the plants drooped onto the ground.
The moon hastily returned to its position as the cold and indifferent observer and scorekeeper, whilst the sun shrank behind the horizon to secure some resemblance of its safety.
Nonetheless, neither of them could resist the temptation of one last peek towards the owner of the voice.
Amidst the large plains that concluded their conquest at the feet of Dong Lin City, stood a youth dressed in a set of golden robes. The youth stood in the sea of grass, yet not a single strand dared to grace his feet or approach them in the slightest, even if such a sentiment warranted that they uproot themselves.
The robes were constructed of fine threads of golden silk, devoid of any inscriptions save for a large sun on the back. Its wearer was of a heavenly countenance, with fine skin and features capable of dazzling even the impartial heavens themselves.
Golden hair and irises lustrous as the finest treasures, rigid cheekbones, and a tantalizing smirk on his lips.
A longsword was grasped in his right hand, and its tip was stained with blood.
“Ah, to think that I would have to act for a woman whom I won’t even hold…”
The youth sighed, his long golden hair flowing in tune with the gentle breeze’s caress. The sword vanished into a sea of silver particles of light, and Jun Mo turned around to face the expansive plains that dared to conquer the world.
“Elder Brother, this should suffice, no?”
Caw!
As the youth immersed himself into a multitude of silent thoughts, the distorted cry of a raven struck the night skies of Dong Lin City.
