"Father"

Xiao Fan was a little stunned. Usually, even if he stayed out all night, his father rarely scolded him—at most, he would nag him a few times.

What was even stranger was that, as far as he knew, his father should still have been on the road back from the imperial mausoleum. How had he appeared here?

"What are you standing around for? Come home with me!" Without another word, Xiao Wu grabbed his son by the scruff and tossed him straight into the carriage by the roadside.

Xiao Fan did not resist, allowing his father to drag him away.

The carriage slowly left Everpeace Street and entered a secluded, narrow alley.

Xiao Fan's face darkened. He spoke in a low voice to the "father" driving outside.

"Enough. There are only the two of us now. Tell me—who are you?"

The man paused in surprise. After a brief silence, he sneered. "What, you don't even recognize your own old man?"

"Hmph. My father is a seventh-rank Spirit Tempering Realm martial artist. You, a mere ninth-rank scrap, think you're worthy of impersonating him?"

Relying on a martial artist's senses, Xiao Fan judged from the man's aura that he was most likely a ninth-rank martial artist—far beneath his father's seventh rank!

"Hahahaha... Fine. I never expected a useless wretch who had only just entered the ninth rank to see through my disguise. But it doesn't matter. You're already a dead man!"

As he spoke, the bearded man pulled a short sword from beneath the carriage floor.

CRACK!

The carriage exploded, and two figures shot out through the shower of splintered wood.

"Huh? Ninth-rank perfection?! When did you...?"

The bearded man's eyes widened, unable to conceal his shock. The situation before him had far exceeded his expectations.

In his memory, this fair-faced young man had been a worthless good-for-nothing with dreadful talent, his martial cultivation stalled at the entry level of the ninth rank.

Yet now, not only had Xiao Fan blocked his killing blow, he had even shattered the carriage with his aura!

While the bearded man hesitated, a blurred figure swept toward him, too fast to evade.

SMACK!

Seizing the moment while his opponent was dazed, Xiao Fan struck first. A sweeping kick snapped the bearded man's right wrist cleanly, sending the short sword flying from his hand.

Another short sword slipped from the bearded man's left sleeve, stabbing straight at Xiao Fan's chest.

CLANG!!!

With a sharp ring, the blade shattered! The short sword had been stopped by something unimaginably hard...

Taking advantage of the opening, Xiao Fan moved like the wind, his shifting footwork ghostly as he narrowly slipped around the blade and seized the man's left arm.

CRACK!

That thick arm was twisted clean off by Xiao Fan!

Before his opponent had the slightest chance to catch his breath, Xiao Fan leapt up and kicked the bearded man beneath the jaw.

Another dull smack rang out. The kick sent the burly body spinning through the air before it crashed to the ground. It had come so fast that the bearded man nearly bit off his own tongue.

"You have a protective artifact?! Impossible... Absolutely impossible!"

The bearded man was shocked because that thrust had contained all his strength, carrying the force of a thousand pounds. Ordinary armor could never have blocked it—unless it was a protective artifact inscribed with special formations!

Such artifacts were strictly controlled by the Bureau of Celestial Observation and forbidden from circulating among the common people. Whoever was found with one would face execution. Even defective goods in the black market could fetch astronomical prices.

Naturally, he had no idea that what had truly blocked the short sword was not some protective artifact, but the golden scales that had grown over Xiao Fan's chest last night...

Xiao Fan himself was astonished as well. He had not expected those bizarre scales to be so hard that they could withstand the full-force thrust of a late ninth-rank martial artist!

Xiao Fan picked up the short sword from the ground. With one hand, he grabbed the man's short hair and hauled up his head; with the other, he thrust the blade forward. Ignoring the man's screams, he scraped the sword edge across his face, peeling away the skin!

He scraped so hard that he tore off part of the flesh from the man's face as well.

At a glance, Xiao Fan recognized him.

"Wu Xiong!"

Wu Xiong was a lackey of Qin Han, the son of Qin Hui, the Second Grand Secretary of the Inner Cabinet. He spent his days following his tyrannical master around, committing every kind of evil. His infamous name was known throughout the capital.

Zhang Bin, the rogue soldier Xiao Fan and the others had encountered when entering the city yesterday, was also one of Qin Han's men.

His face covered in blood, Wu Xiong howled in agony. "Ow, my face! You little bastard, may you be cut into a thousand pieces!"

"Dog filth, you dare curse your grandpa? Talk! Who sent you?" As he spoke, the blade was already pressed against Wu Xiong's throat.

Wu Xiong, who had been so overbearing a moment ago, immediately cowered. "Qin Han! It was all him! He told me to impersonate your father and come... come... come kill you!"

"So it really was him! Then where is my father?! And where did you get this human-skin mask?"

"I... I don't... I don't know!"

"Hmm?" As Xiao Fan spoke, he pushed the blade forward, cutting open Wu Xiong's neck.

Terrified beyond measure, Wu Xiong cried out again and again, "Stop! Don't! Hidden Valley! A few days ago, he sent men to Hidden Valley to ambush your father! I wasn't involved—I don't know whether they succeeded!"

"As for this human-skin mask... Qin Han gave it to me! I really don't fucking know anything else!"

Seeing that Wu Xiong had been frightened badly enough to wet his pants, Xiao Fan figured he probably would not dare lie.

"Damn! Filthy thing."

With that, he struck Wu Xiong unconscious with the sword hilt, then used Wu Xiong's blood to write a bloody letter on his clothes...

Extorting merchants, bullying the market, forcibly taking innocent women, driving decent women into prostitution, hiring murderers... every heinous crime was listed, with none omitted and none invented.

He then used a short sword to sever the tendons in Wu Xiong's hands and feet, tore strips from his clothes to bind him, and tossed him outside the Capital Affairs Office yamen.

After finishing all this, Xiao Fan mounted his horse and galloped toward the north of the city.

What worried him most at this moment was his father's safety!

Before long, at the northern district's city gate.

Because of Night Erosion, the city gates were closed after sunset, and passage was forbidden.

The gate guards focused mainly on watching outside the city, preventing evil entities or outsiders from entering. Their surveillance of the inner side of the city was clearly far more lax.

Under cover of night, Xiao Fan took advantage of the gate guards' inattention. He ran up the wall, leapt fifty feet into the air, flipped onto the battlements, then made his way to the middle section of the wall and climbed over to the outside.

Hidden Valley was a stretch of ravines located between the capital and the former emperor's imperial mausoleum in Great Azure Mountain. It was also the only route in and out of Great Azure Mountain.

Xiao Fan had learned from his mother that his father's mission this time was to escort the coffin of an imperial consort dowager to the former emperor's mausoleum for burial.

The matter itself reeked of something strange. Xiao Fan's father, Xiao Wu, was a gold-ranked chief instructor of Great Liang's Armament Hall. By all rights, an assignment to escort a coffin should have had nothing to do with him...

Yet the Armament Hall's reasoning was also quite sound. At present, the war on Great Liang's northern border was fierce, while the situation in the east was growing increasingly tense.

Should Great Liang's war against the Great Wasteland Demon Race take a turn for the worse, Eastern Yue, which had been eyeing them like a tiger, would very likely pounce in like a vicious beast snatching food!

Most of Great Liang's ranked martial artists had either been transferred to the northern front to support the war effort or deployed to the eastern border to guard against Eastern Yue. There truly was a shortage of manpower.

It was said that Xiao Wu's assignment of escorting the coffin was extremely important. Not only had the Armament Hall dispatched ranked martial artists for the escort, but the Bureau of Celestial Observation and the Shadow Pivot Court had also sent quite a few experts along.

Such a grand display, all to escort the coffin of a former emperor's imperial consort dowager... If there was no hidden scheme behind it, not even ghosts would believe it.

Xiao Fan guessed that escorting the coffin was likely only a facade. The true purpose was certainly far from simple.

What could it be? There was too little information for him to guess for now...

A curtain of faint, pearly-white light divided the inside and outside of the city walls into two separate worlds.

The afterglow of the Sacred Flame protected the capital. Within the curtain, the years were tranquil; beyond it, danger lurked on every side!

Xiao Fan gritted his teeth. No longer hesitating, he leapt from the city wall and plunged headlong into the endless night, racing toward Hidden Valley.