Eighth-Rank Martial Art: Xingyi Fist

"Hurry! The academy's just ahead. We have to hold on!"

Ye Wei gritted his teeth. His robes were stained red with blood, and several deep cuts crisscrossed his back, making for a horrifying sight.

Only three people remained at Ye Wei's side, all of them Inner Court disciples. The Outer Court disciples had been scattered at the very start. None of them had even reached the Skin Refining Realm, and they were almost certainly doomed.

"Junior Brother Ye, what good will it do to run back to the academy? Master's been captured. Wherever we go, death is the only road left to us!"

The other three were injured as well, and their voices were thick with tears.

Dead. They were all dead!

Of everyone in the vast Eight Trigrams Martial Arts Academy, only a handful were still alive. Their turn would come soon.

"Even if I die, I'll die at the academy!"

Ye Wei gave a bitter laugh. He had only recently broken through to the Skin Refining Realm. Was he going to die after just a few days as a Martial Artist?

He refused to accept it.

"Blame one of your Eight Trigrams Sect people for going against our Clearwind Stronghold! The boss said anyone who practices the Eight Trigrams Stake Skill is to be killed without mercy!"

A bare-chested brute grinned and swung the ring-pommel saber in his hand at Ye Wei's waist.

Among Clearwind Stronghold's tortures, this was called waist-chopping. The victim was split in two at the middle and tormented until their blood ran dry and they died.

Clang!

Just as the ring-pommel saber was about to fall, a butcher's knife appeared out of nowhere and stopped it cold in midair.

"What?!"

The brute was shocked.

He was at the perfected Skin Refining Realm, yet his opponent had blocked his heavy saber with a single slender knife. Didn't that mean his opponent was stronger than him?

"Youngest Junior Brother!"

Lu Liu froze on the spot at the sight.

How was this possible?

Qin Ming had blocked a head-on strike from a perfected Skin Refining Realm Martial Artist with one hand!

Ye Wei's eyes nearly popped out of their sockets.

Qin Ming had joined after him and was therefore his junior brother, but his strength was probably on par with Eldest Senior Brother's.

"Get lost!"

Qin Ming heaved upward, pouring Qi and blood into the butcher's knife. The brute felt a tremendous force strike him, nearly knocking the saber from his hand. He staggered back more than a dozen steps before finally managing to steady himself.

He jerked his head up, his face full of shock.

"What monstrous strength!"

"What on earth happened?"

Qin Ming looked at the severely injured group, a bad feeling stirring in his heart.

"Clearwind Stronghold! It was the bandits from Clearwind Stronghold. They bought off Eldest Senior Brother during the Twin Martial Arts Academies Tournament and ambushed Master! They're going to kill everyone in Qingshan Town!"

Lu Liu's voice was trembling.

The academy had been perfectly fine, yet in the space of a few moments, it had fallen apart.

"There's something wrong with this kid. Get him together!"

Having witnessed Qin Ming's strength, the brute promptly retreated, while the other bandits brought out their best tricks,

Poison powder, hidden weapons...

They stopped at nothing.

But Qin Ming had now entered the Late Skin-Refining Realm, and with his Savage Bull Strength at Minor Mastery, ordinary methods were useless against him. Moreover, he had a centipede Spirit Pearl protecting him, so poison powder was of no use against him at all.

"Kill!"

Qin Ming and the butcher's knife seemed to become one. As the blade flashed, bandits fell in droves, and in the blink of an eye, only the brute remained.

Scared out of his wits, the brute threw down his ring-pommel saber without hesitation, turned, and ran for his life.

Qin Ming covered three steps in two and made a great leap. The moment he landed, the brute's head tumbled from his shoulders.

In the space of a few breaths, more than a dozen bandits had been wiped out.

"Ugh!"

Ye Wei and the others turned away and threw up.

The scene was far too bloody. Qin Ming's butcher's knife had been too fast and ruthless: he had either chopped off heads or ripped open bellies, leaving entrails strewn across the ground. Some had only their last breath left and were still struggling to crawl along the ground until their blood ran dry.

Embroiderer's face turned deathly pale, but she fought back the urge to vomit. To the others' astonishment, she stepped forward of her own accord and began searching the corpses. Before long, she had several taels of silver in her hands.

She knew full well.

They couldn't stay in Qingshan Town for the time being. They had to find somewhere else to go, and any extra silver they gathered now could be used for travel expenses.

"Senior Sister, Senior Brother, please look after Embroiderer for me. I'm going to save Master."

Before the words had finished leaving his mouth, Qin Ming had already run off.

"Junior Brother! Several of those bandits are in the Flesh Refining Realm. Don't go over there, Junior Brother!"

Lu Liu shouted urgently, but Qin Ming had already vanished from sight.

"This is bad! Isn't Junior Brother Qin courting death by going over there now?"

Lu Liu hurried after him. "Senior Sister, I'll leave Embroiderer to you. I'm going to bring Junior Brother back!"

The two of them soon disappeared from sight, one chasing after the other.

"Ye Wei, you and the others go back to the academy and pack up everything valuable!"

Li Shengnan spoke quickly. "I'm going to help Qin Ming save Master!"

Although Qin Ming had cultivated Savage Bull Strength to Minor Mastery, she didn't believe he had the strength to fight someone in the Flesh Refining Realm.

"Embroiderer, come with me. If there's danger, I'll get you out first."

"No. If I leave, I'll wait and leave with Brother Qin."

"All right." Li Shengnan didn't refuse. She understood that in these troubled times, for a woman with beauty but no strength, living was often more frightening than dying.

Meanwhile, Qin Ming had reached the arena.

Along the way, bandits had repeatedly leaped out to stop him, only to die beneath his butcher's knife.

Qin Ming no longer knew how many he had killed. His butcher's knife and sleeves had long since been soaked through with blood.

At the center of the arena, Huo Zheng and Pei Heng stood back to back, their faces pale as they gasped for breath. After holding out for so long, they were nearly at their limit.

Around them, four Early Flesh-Refining Realm fighters watched them like tigers eyeing prey.

"Huo Zheng, stop struggling. I can give you a quick death in a moment. How about it?"

Yuan Lie idly toyed with the armor-piercing saber in his hand. While the four Early Flesh-Refining Realm fighters had been attacking the pair, he had merely stood to one side and watched the show.

"Why haven't the yamen's people come yet?! Those damned bastards!"

Huo Zheng growled.

The gates of the town yamen still hadn't opened, and they hadn't seen a single constable.

If the yamen helped them, with Liao Jun at the Early Flesh-Refining Realm, they would at least have a sliver of a chance to turn defeat into victory.

"The yamen? Liao Jun wants nothing more than to see me die here. Why would he possibly help?"

Pei Heng gave a self-mocking smile.

Come to think of it, Liao Jun had been demoted because of that junior brother of his, and had come to resent Pei Heng as well.

Junior Brother, oh, Junior Brother, you've really landed your senior brother in a miserable mess this time.

Seeing no response from the two, Yuan Lie's gaze turned cold. He put away his saber with a backhanded motion. "All of you, move aside! I'll take them on!"

As he spoke, Yuan Lie moved like a cunning rabbit, so fast that afterimages appeared one after another in his wake. In the blink of an eye, he was only three feet from the pair!

As a minor leader of Clearwind Stronghold, Yuan Lie had plundered countless martial arts and cultivation methods. Others worried that practicing another family's or sect's ancestral techniques would get them hunted down, but he had no need to consider such things.

He learned whatever martial art was quick to cultivate and whatever martial art was powerful.

Pei Heng and Huo Zheng exchanged a glance and struck together.

At this juncture between life and death, neither hesitated to unleash his best technique.

Eight Trigrams Palm, Tiger Fist!

One yielding, one forceful!

Faced with their combined attack, Yuan Lie's lips curled into a cold sneer. "You dare make fools of yourselves by showing off mere Ninth-Rank Martial Arts?"

Both men's hearts sank.

Did Yuan Lie's words mean he had mastered a technique of a rank higher than ninth?

Even eighth-rank techniques were scarce throughout Qingyang County.

The techniques circulating among the common people were almost all ninth-rank.

Eighth-rank ones existed, but they were rare, and most were incomplete, one-of-a-kind copies.

Further up, only lineages and sects with centuries of heritage possessed eighth-rank techniques. Apart from them, the authorities held the greatest number of eighth-rank martial arts and cultivation methods.

Between Martial Artists of the same realm, one who had mastered an eighth-rank martial art and one who had mastered a ninth-rank martial art would be vastly different in strength!

What the two men feared most had finally come to pass.

Yuan Lie's fist technique shifted. Like a fierce tiger descending a mountain, he carried an air of kingly dominance, and his fists instantly tore through the pair's attacks. Then Yuan Lie changed his fists to palms, his eyes turning cold and sinister as he made a strange hissing sound.

"This is the eighth-rank martial art, Xingyi Fist!"

Pei Heng recognized the technique Yuan Lie was using.

"What? The Xingyi Fist actually fell into your hands!"

Huo Zheng was stunned.

Twenty years ago, an eighth-rank martial art had appeared out of nowhere, sending Martial Artists throughout Qingyang County into a frenzy as they fought over it. Countless Martial Artists died in the struggle, until the eighth-rank martial art suddenly vanished without a trace and was never seen again.

What Yuan Lie was using now was Xingyi Fist, the eighth-rank martial art that had stirred up a storm of blood and slaughter!

This technique had appeared in the martial world for the first time and was not an inherited technique of any lineage or sect. That meant whoever obtained it could use it to establish a lineage and pass the manual down as an inherited technique.

Creating a martial arts technique was extremely difficult. Any reasonably powerful technique in the martial world had its origins, and without a powerful inherited technique, one could not establish a lineage.

An ordinary Ninth-Rank Martial Art was enough to establish a small martial arts academy at most.

Even after twenty years, some of the Martial Artists who had taken part in that battle still couldn't forget it.

Pei Heng was one of them.

"During the battle on Setting Sun Mountain, the Xingyi Fist Manual was knocked into a bottomless abyss. I thought the technique had been lost forever, but I never imagined it was a smokescreen by your Clearwind Stronghold!"

Realization dawned on Pei Heng.

Yuan Lie burst out laughing. "It really was lost in the abyss, but our Clearwind Stronghold had made a handwritten copy long before that, you pack of fools!"

As his words fell, Yuan Lie closed in with Snake Fist, each punch faster than the last, leaving the two men utterly unable to defend themselves. Then his arms abruptly twisted and extended several times their length, coiling up their arms like pythons. With a single palm strike, he sent both men flying backward, coughing up blood.

Xingyi Fist possessed true intent and was beyond comparison with a Ninth-Rank Martial Art. Even together, Pei Heng and Huo Zheng were no match for him.

A single palm strike had thoroughly crippled them both, leaving them unable to stand again.

"Dad!"

Huo Lin and Huo Lan had their hands and feet bound. In the end, they had failed to escape and had been captured again.

Everyone from the Eight Trigrams Martial Arts Academy and Tiger Martial Arts Academy had been subdued. Their faces ashen, they knelt in a row below the arena, each with a saber-wielding executioner standing behind them, waiting for Yuan Lie's order to send their heads rolling.

"Watching the disciples you worked so hard to teach die right in front of you must be a terrible feeling."

Yuan Lie leaned close to Pei Heng's ear, sneering.

"I'm going to make you watch them die! Kill them!"

Just as the executioners swung their sabers—

"Stop!"

A figure had appeared at the end of the street without anyone knowing when.

"Qin... Qin Ming?"