For the past few days, Tian Boguang had felt that his luck was rotten. He hadn't even had the energy to look at the sword manual and decide whether he should castrate himself to practice its techniques.
The reason he hadn't had time to think about it was that he'd discovered he had two groups of martial artists—each several hundred strong—madly hunting him down.
One small group had been chasing him ever since he'd stolen the sword manual. They included people from the Mount Song Sect, the disgraceful Qingcheng Sect, and a few assorted stragglers. There were around a hundred of them, and they were after the cassock with the manual in his possession.
He wasn't afraid of them, but they had numbers on their side, and some of them were skilled fighters. He didn't dare take them on headfirst.
The other group had joined the pursuit after getting their hands on the printed edition of the Evil-Warding Sword Manual, which that little vixen from the Mount Hua Sect had been selling. They, too, wanted the cassock.
There was one difference, though: the other group kept insisting that they wouldn't hurt him or take his manual. They claimed they just wanted to compare the two copies and promised to return his after they'd finished reading it.
As a grown man and an old hand in the martial world, Tian Boguang would never believe such a ridiculous claim.
In fact, after hearing them say it, he hadn't just refused to believe them—he'd run even faster.
He'd roamed the martial world for years, committed countless crimes, and made more enemies than he could count. If he'd been foolish enough to trust a bunch of strangers that easily, he'd have died countless times over for all the things he'd done.
So even though