Lin Feng crouched and searched Zhao Wannian's corpse.
On his left hand was a white jade ring, its surface engraved with delicate storage spirit patterns.
A high-grade Storage Ring.
Worth a fortune!
Lin Feng yanked it off and slipped it onto his finger.
He probed inside with his Psychic Power. The space was sizable, and there was quite a bit in it.
Three bottles of Foundation Establishment Pills, a B-Rank Short Sword, a stack of bank drafts, and a palm-sized token.
He turned the token over. The back was engraved with the character "Zhao," while the front bore a complex array of spirit patterns.
It was probably the Zhao Family's Clan Head Token or something like that.
Useless. Toss it.
Lin Feng casually threw it to the ground and gathered all the valuable things into the ring.
Then he swept his gaze over the rest of the treasury again.
He'd taken most of it just now, but hadn't opened the cabinets tucked away in the corners.
He split them open one by one with Mountain Splitter.
The first cabinet held two boxes of premium Energy Recovery Pills, labeled "Special Supply from the Qing Prefecture Pill Workshop."
The second held a stack of loan contracts from the Zhao Clan Bank. Lin Feng leafed through them. The borrowers' names were packed tightly across every page.
Eight hundred thousand.
Six hundred thousand.
One million two hundred thousand.
Next to every sum was a terrifying monthly interest rate.
"What a bunch of fucking bloodsuckers."
Lin Feng stuffed all the contracts into the ring.
He'd burn them later. That would free the people who'd been squeezed dry by the Zhao Clan Bank.
In the third cabinet lay a piece of black ore. It felt heavy in his hand and gave off a faint energy fluctuation.
The system displayed a prompt.
[Detected rare material: Abyssal Refined Iron (A-Rank forging material)]
[Can be used to upgrade an A-Rank weapon to S-Rank]
Lin Feng gripped the ore in his palm and weighed it.
Could it upgrade Mountain Splitter?
This thing might be worth more than the entire treasury put together.
He put it away.
Finally, he checked the safe one last time.
Bank certificates, deeds, shop contracts, and an inventory of Zhao family holdings.
The sheer scale of the Zhao Family's businesses in Qing Prefecture was clear from the figures on those pages alone.
There were more than twenty bearer drafts, with amounts ranging from one million to twenty million.
Lin Feng made a rough calculation. Their total value exceeded a billion.
He put every paper document into the Storage Ring.
Not a single scrap of paper left behind.
Once he was done, Lin Feng stood and glanced around the empty treasury.
The weapon racks on the walls were bare, every cabinet had been split open, and the only things left on the floor were Zhao Wannian's two corpse halves and the shattered remnants of his Red Copper Inner Armor.
Time to clean up the scene.
Lin Feng channeled his blood energy into his palm and punched each of the treasury's four walls.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!
The load-bearing walls collapsed, bringing down the building above them.
He didn't rush. He climbed out through the treasury's ventilation shaft and emerged aboveground.
There were no survivors left in Zhao Family Manor.
Lin Feng found a barrel of lamp oil in the kitchen at the rear of the compound and splashed it along the covered walkways.
He doused the front courtyard, the central courtyard, and the back courtyard.
Then he set the fire at the main gate.
The flames leapt up fast.
The old manor's wooden structures caught at once. In less than a few minutes, fire had swallowed the entire Zhao Family Manor.
The night sky above eastern Qing Prefecture turned a deep red.
The sirens of the fire brigade sounded in the distance.
Lin Feng wrapped himself in a black cloak he'd found in the Zhao family's storehouses and walked down the alley toward the city gates.
No one noticed him.
Everyone was watching the fire.
After leaving Qing Prefecture, Lin Feng brought up the System Panel.
[Host: Lin Feng] [Spirit: First-Rank Psychokinetic Master (260/1000)] [Realm: Martial Ancestor, Second Stage (0/20000)] [Cultivation Method: Heavenly Gale Body-Forging Art (4400/10000)] [Martial Techniques: Mountain-Breaking Slash (Mastered), Lost Trace Step (Mastered)] [Talent: Steel of the Blade (500/500, max level)] [Martial Path Points: 4500]
He slung Mountain Splitter back over his shoulder and headed north.
Back to the Northern Territory.
He'd take the high-risk Wilderness route.
That route had plenty of Exotic Beasts—perfect for farming points.
On the first day of the journey, three Iron-Armored Poison Rhinos blocked his way.
C-Rank Exotic Beasts. The three stood side by side, blocking the middle of the canyon passage.
Lin Feng didn't even slow his pace.
Mountain Splitter swept out three times.
Every strike was a critical hit.
The three Iron-Armored Poison Rhinos turned into bloody mist as his blade passed. They didn't even have time to scream.
[Slain C-Rank Exotic Beast: Iron-Armored Poison Rhino ×3, earned Martial Path Points ×1500] [Prompt: Steel of the Blade has reached its limit. Kills will no longer increase its level]
"Hmm."
Lin Feng stepped over the scattered remains and kept walking.
Deep in the Wilderness.
A hidden mountain cave.
Lin Feng dumped everything from the Storage Ring.
Bottles and jars of all sizes, a pile of Magic Cores, stacks of paper documents and bank drafts—they covered the cave floor in an instant.
He sat cross-legged and sorted through everything one item at a time.
Magic Cores.
Three B-Rank Magic Cores, each worth more than two million at market price; forty-seven C-Rank Magic Cores; and one hundred twenty-three D-Rank Magic Cores.
The Magic Cores alone were worth more than twenty million at market price.
Elixirs.
Thirty-two premium Body Tempering Pills, twenty-six premium Energy Recovery Pills, and nearly a hundred Foundation Establishment Pills.
These Elixirs were all hot commodities on the Black Market. Their total value was at least twenty or thirty million.
Weapons.
One B-Rank Short Sword, two C-Rank spears, and more than a dozen assorted D-Rank weapons.
The only valuable one was the B-Rank Short Sword, which could fetch five or six million.
Paper assets: twenty-three bearer bank drafts, totaling one billion one hundred forty million.
There were also deeds to Zhao family properties, shop contracts, Ore Vein mining rights, and more. Their actual value was even higher, but they couldn't be turned into cash.
The Zhao family's seal had been burned. Who could he even take these contracts to for redemption?
Lin Feng thought it over, then put away the deeds and Ore Vein certificates.
They might come in handy someday.
If not, he could just throw them away. They didn't take up space, anyway.
The most valuable item was actually that piece of Abyssal Refined Iron.
A-Rank forging material. It could upgrade Mountain Splitter from A-Rank to S-Rank.
An S-Rank weapon.
You could count all the S-Rank weapons in the entire Northern Territory on one hand.
But upgrading a weapon wasn't something he could rush. He'd need to find a master-level blacksmith.
He'd save it for later.
After finishing his inventory, Lin Feng put everything back into the Storage Ring.
Then he closed his eyes and brought up the System Panel.
[Current Martial Path Points: 6000]
He'd killed a few Exotic Beasts along the way and accumulated some more points.
Without hesitation, he poured all his points into the Heavenly Gale Body-Forging Art.
[Consumed Martial Path Points ×5600] [Cultivation Method Heavenly Gale Body-Forging Art advanced to Mastery! (10000/10000)] [Physical strength increased tenfold! Side effects from realm breakthroughs greatly reduced!]
A domineering aura exploded from his dantian and flooded every bone and cell in his body.
A faint golden sheen surfaced across his bones.
His muscle fibers began to restructure.
His skin grew taut, and a barely perceptible golden light shimmered across its surface.
Lin Feng clenched his fist.
The force of the wind pressed a half-foot-deep dent into the ground.
He hadn't even thrown a punch.
It was purely the pressure of his blood energy leaking out as he clenched his fist.
"The cultivation method has reached mastery."
Lin Feng stood and stretched his arms and legs.
Every joint in his body gave a faint crack.
The density, resilience, and hardness of his bones had all increased. Combined with his Martial Ancestor, Second Stage realm, he now had the confidence to take a full-force blow from an early-stage Martial King head-on, even without a blade.
[Remaining Martial Path Points: 400]
Not many, but it didn't matter.
Once he was back on his own turf in the Northern Territory, he'd have plenty of Rifts to farm.
Lin Feng cleared away the traces he'd left in the cave, slung Mountain Splitter over his back, and continued on his way.
The next morning.
The walls of the Sixth Defense Line appeared in the distance.
Lin Feng quickened his pace and reached the camp gate ten minutes later.
Something was off about the atmosphere in the Base Camp.
Everyone was fully armed.
Sentinels lined the walls, all heavy-weapons positions were open, and ammunition crates were piled across the ground.
There were more than three times as many patrols as usual.
A soldier recognized him and snapped to attention.
"Sergeant Major Lin!"
"What happened?"
The soldier's face was full of anxiety.
"A new Rift has been found on the front line! B-Rank!"
Lin Feng's steps paused.
A B-Rank Rift.
A lair of Martial King-level Exotic Beasts.
He didn't ask anything else. He strode toward the Command Center.
He pushed the door open and slapped his leave slip onto the desk.
"Commander Li, I'm back from leave."
More than a dozen people sat inside the Command Center, all senior officers.
Every one of them turned toward him in unison.
Li Zhenguo sat in the seat of honor, his one eye fixed on Lin Feng.
His expression changed.
Not surprise, but shock.
The aura around Lin Feng was completely different from what it had been a few days ago.
Martial Ancestor.
He'd still been a Martial Master a few days ago. He'd gone out to ask for leave, and come back a Martial Ancestor?
Captain Zhao's hand froze in midair, still holding his water cup. Water spilled all over the table.
"You..."
Li Zhenguo opened his mouth, then held back for two seconds.
"What did you go do on your leave?"
"Recover."
"You recovered and became a Martial Ancestor?"
"What else?"
Li Zhenguo slapped the table.
Hurried footsteps sounded outside the door.
Zhang Qian burst into the conference room, his face frighteningly pale, a classified intelligence report clutched in his hand.
"Commander Li! Something terrible has happened!"
Everyone turned to look at him.
Zhang Qian drew a couple of ragged breaths.
"The Zhao Family in Qing Prefecture was wiped out last night! Its head, Zhao Wannian, died a horrible death at the Martial King realm! Their treasury was looted clean, and the entire Manor was burned to ash!"
The air in the conference room froze.
More than a dozen officers exchanged looks, cold sweat trickling down their backs.
The Zhao Family? The Zhao Family in Qing Prefecture?
The head of the family, a Martial King, had been killed?
That was a Martial King!
Across the entire Northern Territory, there were only a few hundred experts at the Martial King level!
Who had done it?
What kind of monster could wipe out a family guarded by a Martial King?
Li Zhenguo's single eye slowly shifted to Lin Feng.
The Zhao Family had come looking for trouble with Lin Feng before.
Lin Feng had taken seven days' leave.
The Zhao Family had been wiped out last night.
Lin Feng had returned today.
And his aura had gone from Martial Master to Martial Ancestor.
The more Li Zhenguo thought about it, the more stunned he became.
But he didn't ask.
Some things were better left unasked.
Before you continue