The Dojo Master

"Cough, cough... There really are some experts out there."

In the dead of night, he stood beside a building, bracing himself against a wall that felt like asbestos board to keep upright.

Tao Yu clutched his broken ribs. A vicious gunshot wound marked the shoulder outside his bulletproof vest. As he fed in Wish Power, his ribs quickly healed, and the wound forced the bullet straight out.

Earlier, he had spent over three thousand Wish Power replenishing his stamina, allowing him to maintain a high level of endurance for a long time.

He could slip into the shadows at any moment, and unleash his power at any moment.

Healing his injuries as they came had cost him another thousand or so. A serious loss!

He could have recovered by eating, but there was no time in a situation like this. Tao Yu had no choice but to grit his teeth and spend the Wish Power.

Then he looked at the huge bundle of odds and ends wrapped in a bedsheet before him. He had no idea how much he could get back from it.

He hadn't had time to search carefully.

He had cleared his way from the outskirts to the interior, and the Li Family probably didn't have a single survivor. He'd shaken the eggs until their insides were scrambled, then even set the place on fire with kerosene.

But he couldn't stay at the scene forever!

He could only hurriedly take the things that looked valuable, mainly Wish Power items.

"These count as stolen goods, right? Won't they be too conspicuous?"

Tao Yu picked up a small Wish Power knife. He could sense its sharpness and bleeding properties, but in the end, he simply absorbed its Wish Power.

They all seemed to have auxiliary uses. Though their value was indeed higher than the value of simply absorbing their Wish Power, Tao Yu clearly had no time to deal with them, so he absorbed them all in one go.

In total, he absorbed about eight thousand Wish Power...

"What a pity. If I sold everything, I'd get at least ten thousand, maybe more. I wonder if a family like theirs has some hidden stash somewhere..."

Tao Yu sighed. Out of everything in the bedsheet, he kept only two items.

One was an ordinary-looking handgun with the Wish Power property "Precise Trajectory." It was a fairly common but practical Wish Power item. Absorbing the Wish Power inside it would only yield four hundred, but it should be worth around two thousand.

Since it was a high-grade mass-market item, Tao Yu decided to keep it.

The other was a long dagger that could also be used as a short sword. It held only two hundred Wish Power, but had three good properties: "Armor-Piercing," "Wear-Resistant," and "Sharp." It was a small treasure.

He absorbed all the Wish Power from the rest, leaving them as ordinary items.

They could still fetch some money, but after hesitating for a moment, Tao Yu found somewhere to bury them.

He was short on Wish Power, but there was no need to take that kind of risk...

"Actually, I didn't want to take a risk at night in the first place. Given the situation earlier, a stray bullet could have hit me in the head. Even if I used Wish Power to heal in a fraction of a second, it might not have worked. I wasn't willing to test it."

Tao Yu finally returned to bed, sighing in frustration.

He had originally wanted to spread the news and the risks around, but the Li Family had pushed him too far...

"No, tomorrow I still have to give the dojo the information as well. Otherwise, after hearing the Li Family was wiped out, that shopkeeper might decide to keep everything to himself and not report it."

Tao Yu went over everything again and spotted a new problem.

This world was too dark. They'd come over in the middle of the night to kill him and cover their tracks. Just thinking about it made him break out in a cold sweat...

Early the next morning, Tao Yu ate breakfast as if nothing had happened.

On his way to Hound Stronghold to learn boxing at the dojo, he saw much the same scene as the day before.

A crowd of Outer City residents waited in line to enter the stronghold.

Since ordinary people in the Outer City spread news by shouting, the tragedy in the Security Team residential area wouldn't reach them so quickly.

But by the time it was Tao Yu's turn to enter, he spotted three figures in Security Team uniforms hurrying over.

The three headed straight for the stronghold gate. Their hurried pace drew many people's attention, and everyone wondered what had happened.

"Post these notices around your stronghold, and have someone read them aloud nearby for the first three days."

The three members of the Security Team went straight to the gate and tossed over a stack of notices that still smelled of ink, as if they had just been printed.

The guards, who usually acted all high and mighty around other Outer City residents, now forced smiles and nodded in agreement when they saw the three Security Team members.

The guard squad leader even offered them a few hand-rolled cigarettes.

"Gentlemen, has something happened?"

One of the guards hurried off to get them some water.

The Security Team member had rushed over in such a hurry that he was indeed thirsty. He tugged at his collar, lit a cigarette where he stood, and said grimly,

"Something big happened. The Li Family was wiped out."

"Wiped out?"

"The Li Family?"

The people entering the stronghold also perked up their ears to listen.

"Which Li Family?"

The guard squad leader looked bewildered.

"The South City Li Family."

The three Security Team members looked alarmed too. The scene of the crime was in the Security Team residential area, so close to the Inner City walls. And yet the family had been wiped out?

What kind of grudge was behind this? How powerful was the culprit?

Hiss...

Everyone nearby who heard this sucked in a sharp breath.

Something truly major had happened...

"Tao, junior brother? What's wrong? You look preoccupied."

When Smith saw Tao Yu arrive in his dojo training clothes, he smiled warmly.

"Hey, don't ask. I just heard the South City Li Family was wiped out while I was entering the stronghold."

"What? The South City Li Family?"

Smith had clearly heard of the South City Li Family.

"I heard their Knight's Breathing Technique was exceptional. And now... now they're wiped out?"

Smith looked shocked too.

The Outer City was never peaceful. Every Awakening Day, countless people died, and nameless corpses in the gutters were an everyday sight.

But it was still relatively rare for a powerful family to be wiped out.

"Yeah. I was in the same year as one of their young men. Senior brother, could I see the Dojo Master? There's something I want to say."

Tao Yu put on a worried expression.

Smith had just heard some shocking gossip, but it was only gossip to him. Hearing Tao Yu, he instead grinned.

"Funny you should ask. The Dojo Master heard about you and was just saying he wanted to meet you. Come with me. You might even get personal instruction from him."

The Li Family's destruction had nothing to do with him. The Dojo Master and this junior brother mattered more, so Smith led Tao Yu straight to a small, separate wooden house.

Though it didn't cover much ground, the house was quite elegant, much more attractive than the dojo's other buildings.

A plain-looking middle-aged man sat cross-legged on a cushion outside the house. Beside him was a cup of freshly brewed hot tea.

When he saw Smith bring Tao Yu over, the man, dressed in dojo training clothes and looking thoroughly ordinary, smiled and nodded at Tao Yu.

"So you're the talented student Smith told me about. You certainly look the part."

Liu Yi, the Dojo Master of Myriad Flow Dojo, truly looked utterly ordinary. There was no exaggerated mass of muscle on him.

Yet simply sitting there, he gave Tao Yu the impression that he had become one with nature.

And although he smiled warmly and spoke and acted casually,

Tao Yu still felt a subtle tension, the instinctive unease an ordinary person felt in the presence of a wild beast.

The Dojo Master really was powerful!

He felt a little stronger than Li Hui had the previous day.

Li Hui had put too much pressure on him, so Tao Yu had stacked all his skills at once. After killing him, Tao Yu had nearly failed to recover, even after replenishing his Wish Power...