The Strange Man

Bang—

A dull impact suddenly exploded.

Wu Dong had not even seen whether his attacker was man or ghost before his left ribs felt as though they had been struck solidly by a red-hot battering ram.

He was sent flying off the ground, tracing a bizarre arc through the air. His spine let out an overloaded, scalp-prickling crack before he slammed heavily into a pile of debris several meters away.

Rotten planks and shards of clay jars burst outward, burying him beneath them. He made no further sound.

"...What!?"

Liu San reacted a fraction too slowly. By the time he spun around, Wu Dong was already gone.

In his place stood a silent black shadow.

Under the bleak moonlight, Liu San could barely make out that the newcomer was wrapped head to toe in black cloth. Even his face and hands were tightly bound, with only two narrow slits left for his eyes.

"You... are you human or ghost!?"

Liu San's eyes nearly split open. His voice trembled beyond control, his calves turned weak, and the fingers gripping his sword hilt were stiff and ice-cold. Even the courage to draw his blade had crumbled away.

He knew full well that although the other party had seized the advantage of a sneak attack, being able to make an expert like Wu Dong unable to rise with a single blow, his life and death unknown...

The gap in their strength was plainly a chasm beyond measure!

To fight meant certain death.

To flee through these labyrinthine dark alleys, which the other party apparently knew even better, was an even more absurd fantasy.

"L-let's talk this out... What road are you from, sir? Perhaps... perhaps this is all a misunderstanding!"

Liu San forced out an expression uglier than tears and tried to negotiate.

Yet he seemed to have been frightened out of his wits, completely forgetting that before such an overwhelming disparity in strength, the chance to negotiate had never belonged to the weak.

The black-clothed strange man showed no reaction to his words. He merely slowly raised an arm...

His movement was sluggish and limp, as though stirring through a thick swamp, carrying an eerie sense of discord.

Liu San froze for a moment, utterly unable to understand what he was doing.

And in that instant of bewilderment, he completely buried even his final chance to draw his sword.

The slow black shadow suddenly accelerated at some impossible-to-grasp instant!

Utter stillness became utter motion without any transition. He was so fast he tore through Liu San's vision, leaving only a blurred afterimage on his retinas.

Bang—

Another muffled impact, identical to the previous one, rang out. Liu San's entire face twisted.

A clear crack of breaking bones erupted from his chest. At the same time, a tricky, bizarre force pierced through his body like countless searing iron skewers, boring and churning through his internal organs.

"Urgh..."

Liu San could not even produce a complete scream. Like a kite with its string cut, he was hurled backward, faster and farther than Wu Dong had been.

With a thunderous crash, he smashed through a ramshackle shed that had long been on the verge of collapse.

Rotten planks, felt sheets, and miscellaneous debris rained down over him.

Within the ruins, Liu San curled up as mouthful after mouthful of blood, mixed with fragments of organs, gushed wildly from his mouth and nose, instantly clogging his airway.

He was like a fish thrown onto land, opening and closing his mouth in vain. His eyes bulged, and his limbs twitched unconsciously.

In the end, he drowned bit by bit in his own warm blood, beneath despair and darkness.

The strange man wrapped in black cloth strolled unhurriedly to the ruins and bent down to pick up the locked wooden box.

He had long noticed that many eyes inside the surrounding shacks were secretly watching what had just happened through cracks and holes in doors and walls.

Yet he seemed not to care in the slightest. He slowly walked over to Wu Dong and Liu San.

His black-cloth-wrapped hands cleanly snapped both their necks, thoroughly extinguishing any possibility of survival.

Only then did the strange man calmly reach into their clothes and take a money pouch from each of them.

At last, he slowly straightened up and silently vanished into the deeper, denser darkness of the alley.

After some time.

Scar Bear arrived in a frantic rush with more than a dozen lackeys.

When he saw Wu Dong and Liu San's corpses, Scar Bear's heart first jolted. Then he slapped his thigh and roared hysterically.

"Search! Search the area! See if there's a locked wooden box! Find it for me, damn it!!!"

The lackeys hurriedly scattered. No matter how carefully they searched, however, it was all in vain.

The more Scar Bear thought about it, the more frantic he became. He kicked open the broken door of a nearby shack, dragged out a gaunt man, and viciously hurled him to the ground.

"What happened just now!? Don't tell me you didn't see it! Talk... talk!!!"

"It came... i-it came!"

The gaunt man suddenly raised a hand and pointed toward the shadow at the alley corner.

"...What?"

Scar Bear looked over. There was only darkness so thick it could not be dissolved.

But when one lackey approached with a lantern, everyone's pupils abruptly contracted.

In those pairs of black eyes, they clearly saw the reflection of a strange man wrapped in black cloth, rushing out from the darkness at astonishing speed and arriving before Scar Bear in the blink of an eye.

An arm wrapped thickly in black cloth suddenly slithered out, like a black python swimming through sticky mire. It appeared incredibly slow and stiff.

The cloth rustled against itself. Amid the deathly silence of that instant, everyone heard it clearly.

Yet in the next instant, that slow arm seemed like a bowstring snapping. In an incomparably brief moment, it erupted with speed too fast for the naked eye to discern.

Bang—

Before anyone could react, they heard a muffled impact that made their scalps crawl.

That hand, wrapped so thoroughly in black cloth that even the outline of its knuckles could not be seen, thrust forth like a demonic claw tearing through the void and struck Scar Bear squarely in the chest without a trace of flourish.

The sound did not resemble flesh being struck. It was more like a heavy hammer smashing into over a dozen layers of tightly packed leather.

The last traces of shock and ferocity on Scar Bear's face instantly froze. His eyes bulged, and his entire body rose from the ground as though every bone had been sucked out, flying backward.

His burly frame of nearly two hundred pounds was like a heavy sandbag flung by immense force, crashing into the crowd behind him.

The dull impacts of bone and flesh, the sudden cries of pain, and the chaos of toppled lackeys rolling into a heap instantly threw the place into an uproar.

The alley was simply too narrow. The lackeys were sprawled in every direction, unable even to climb back to their feet, much less give chase or form an encirclement.

And the strange man wrapped in black cloth did not spare the mess another glance. He turned calmly and slowly disappeared, as though he had never been there.

The night was black as ink.

Chen Cheng emerged from a deserted dead-end alley somewhere in the slums.

Within the alley, the last few sparks flickered weakly before fading into extinction.

Ashes from the burned black cloth and wooden box were swept up by the night wind passing through the alley. They spiraled away, leaving behind no trace that could be followed.

Tonight's operation had gone far more smoothly than expected.

Not only had he cut off Zhao Chuan's two claws, he had also reaped considerable gains. More importantly, he had thoroughly muddied the waters!

The black cloth wrapped around his entire body had merely been the first layer of smoke screen.

More importantly, ever since meeting Zhou Long, Chen Cheng had been constantly pondering how those real black-clothed strange men actually channeled their strength and unleashed their force?