Unfilial!

"Yang Xiao, that dog bastard, led me in circles around the eastern city all day. If I hadn't tampered with him ahead of time, and if I weren't skilled in tracking, I really wouldn't have known the boy lived here."

In the darkness, the man landed without a sound. The look he cast toward the inner room instantly turned sinister.

This was, after all, the capital of the Great Yan Dynasty, and the inner city at that. If the disturbance grew too large, it would easily draw the night patrol soldiers.

The man could only suppress the killing intent in his heart and creep lightly toward the inner room.

Suddenly—

Crack!

Along with a faint sound, the man suddenly felt a sharp pain shoot up from beneath his foot.

The man lowered his head. By the weak moonlight, he finally saw that a mousetrap buried in the dirt had clamped onto his left foot, biting out a little blood.

"Interesting. Interesting."

"This kid actually took precautions long ago and buried traps in advance."

"But he doesn't know that I'm at the Iron Skin realm. The skin all over my body is as tough as iron..."

A disdainful sneer tugged at the corner of his mouth. After thinking it over, the man did not remove the mousetrap from his foot, lest he make a sound and wake Yang Xiao.

Limping to the window of the inner room, the man dipped a finger in saliva and gently poked a small hole through the paper-pasted wooden window. Then he took a bamboo tube from his sleeve and softly opened its bamboo cap.

At once, a wisp of faint black mist slowly drifted out of the bamboo tube and seeped continuously into the inner room.

The man was in no hurry. He waited patiently for a long while before walking to the wooden door, taking out a length of iron wire, and gently poking it in.

At once, the door bolt behind the door quietly dropped to the floor with a crisp sound.

The man was not worried Yang Xiao would wake up. After all, he had spent a full ten taels of broken silver on the knockout black smoke inside that bamboo tube!

"Yang Xiao, weren't you pretty clever? Pretty good at handling people? Now that you're unconscious, aren't you just meat on someone else's chopping block..."

The man swaggered over to the wooden couch and abruptly lifted the quilt. Just as he was smugly throwing out threats, a sense of crisis suddenly rose in his heart.

Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!

A dozen sharpened bamboo strips, bound with sharp iron pieces, actually sprang up from the wooden couch and instantly pierced through the man's clothes.

Even though he was at the Iron Skin realm, the man was still stabbed with a dozen tiny holes. Blood ran all over him, leaving him in an extremely wretched state.

"Yang! Xiao!"

The man was furious beyond restraint. Only now did he realize Yang Xiao had prepared long ago and played him like a fool.

But with just these little tricks, he wanted to deal with Iron Skin?

Ridiculous!

Suddenly—

"Hua!"

The man suddenly felt a gust of force burst out of thin air behind him!

"With that three-legged cat kung fu of yours, you dare ambush me? You think you're worthy?"

"Die!"

Clang!

The enraged man abruptly drew his blade, spun around, and slashed viciously.

The imagined spray of flesh and blood did not appear. Instead, a vast expanse of white filled the air, instantly blinding the man.

"Quicklime?"

The man instantly understood, and could no longer suppress the fury in his heart. "Yang Xiao, you dog bastard! I'll kill you! Kill you!"

"Ah!"

The man swung his broadsword like a madman, sealing off every inch around him.

All around him, it was deathly quiet. There was still no response at all.

Panting heavily, the man finally realized that Yang Xiao knew he could not beat him and had most likely already fled.

"Damn it!"

"If that kid gets away today, he'll be frightened and keep hiding in Vermilion Bird Tower without coming out."

"Then if I want to kill him again, take his human skin to make a mask, disguise my identity, and infiltrate the Princess Mansion step by step, it'll be impossible!"

The more the man thought about it, the angrier he became, yet for the moment there was nothing he could do.

Yang Xiao was far too sly. He had not shown his face the entire time, yet he had already played the man until he was spinning in circles.

At this point, how could the man still not understand? If it came to brains, even ten of him could not outmatch Yang Xiao!

"Yang Xiao, I'll spare your dog life for now tonight. If you've got the guts, hide in Vermilion Bird Tower for the rest of your life and never come out. Otherwise..."

The man cursed under his breath as he lifted his blade and prepared to leave the inner room, only to suddenly stagger. His whole body toppled to the floor.

"That heaven-cursed Yang Xiao—he actually poisoned the mousetrap. The more I sweat, the stronger the poison gets?"

Seeing his whole body turning black, his limbs ice-cold, all his strength draining away, the man was seized by shock and fury, and could not help letting out one final roar:

"Yang Xiao, even if I become a ghost, I won't let you off! I'll—"

Thud!

As the man spoke, his legs kicked out, and he went completely still.

A moment later.

The door to the woodshed in the small courtyard opened softly, and Yang Xiao slowly walked out.

Looking at the inner room strewn with wreckage, Yang Xiao felt no joy. Instead, his expression was extremely ugly.

This masked man was actually proficient in lightness skills, and he was even at the Iron Skin realm. Naturally, this had far exceeded Yang Xiao's expectations.

Fortunately, everything had gone fairly smoothly!

"Good thing I was clever enough, willing to spend money, knew how to make poison, and had enough patience. I didn't get smug just because I advanced to Bronze Skin, but chose to be cautious and careful instead."

"Otherwise, even if I were a First Blood expert, if someone snuck in at midnight to hit my crystal and steal my base while I was unconscious, I'd probably die without even a burial place."

The more Yang Xiao thought about it, the more lingering fear he felt; the more he thought, the more secretly lucky he felt.

This matter also sounded an alarm for Yang Xiao, making him realize that he had to raise his realm as quickly as possible and strive to undergo blood replacement soon.

Otherwise, if a truly powerful expert really descended, Yang Xiao's little tricks tonight would be utterly meaningless!

Yang Xiao did not rush forward. Instead, he patiently waited for a while, found a bamboo pole in the courtyard, and without entering the inner room, stood outside the door and used the pole from a great distance to gently lift the black cloth covering the man's face.

A sudden change erupted!

Clang!

The man, who should have been dead through and through, abruptly opened his eyes, which were filled with venomous hatred.

"Die!"

Using every last bit of strength in his body, the man wildly stabbed his blade into the air, only to suddenly freeze.

The surroundings were completely empty. Where was Yang Xiao's figure?

"That fucking little bastard, I've been 'dead' for the time it takes an incense stick to burn, and he still didn't dare come in, standing so far away and using a bamboo pole...?"

Pfft!

The man had already been gravely wounded and was on the verge of death. He had only been unable to swallow that breath of resentment, waiting all this time to counter-kill Yang Xiao, yet what greeted him was such a cruel truth.

The man was instantly overwhelmed with grief and rage. So furious that he spat a mouthful of black blood into the air, his head tilted, his legs splayed outward, and he died completely.

Even in death, the man's eyes remained wide open, his gaze venomous.

He had actually died with his eyes unclosed!

Even after confirming that the man was already cold, Yang Xiao still did not hurry into the inner room. Instead, he used the bamboo pole to hook that great saber out of the room.

He went to find a grass rope, tied the great saber to the bamboo pole like a bayonet, and from far away, stabbed the man back and forth more than a hundred times.

Only when Yang Xiao was panting heavily and could no longer even swing the blade did he finally toss the bamboo pole aside and stride into the inner room.

The ground reeked of blood, and the scene was terrifying to the extreme.

Even though Yang Xiao had lived two lives, this was still his first time killing someone.

He immediately vomited violently from nausea, and only after a long while did his heart gradually regain its calm.

"This is a chaotic age where people devour people. If I want to survive, I have to be more enduring than others, more ruthless, and more absolute!"

Wiping the sweat from his forehead, Yang Xiao felt more and more that choosing to keep a low profile and develop while laying low had been an incredibly wise decision.

Although the man on the ground was dead through and through, his whole body full of bloody holes, Yang Xiao had never stabbed his face, leaving the man's face perfectly intact.

"Let me see exactly who you are!"

Forcing down the nausea in his heart, Yang Xiao bent down and began observing carefully.

The man's face was utterly ordinary, without the slightest distinguishing feature.

Placed among a crowd on the street, he would be the sort of existence one forgot after a single glance, leaving no impression in the heart at all.

But combining it with what he had overheard earlier, Yang Xiao understood that this face was not the man's face, only a layer of disguise.

"For a human-skin mask to be made so lifelike and vivid, who exactly is this person?"

Yang Xiao carefully felt around the man's face, and sure enough, at the place where the man's face met his hair, he touched something that felt wrong.

Yang Xiao tore hard, and sure enough, an intact human-skin mask was ripped off by him.

"It's actually him!"

After clearly seeing the man's true face, Yang Xiao's pupils shrank, and a bone-deep chill instantly rose in his heart.