In This Frightened World, Only You and I (VIII)

Run?

Qin Yi pondered that word.

Gripping her short blade tight, Ruan Su charged without hesitation alongside the Immortal Guest House retainers toward the middle-aged man in green robes, who stood there calmly with a trace of boredom on his face.

At the very forefront of the battlefield,

Mr. Wei, clad in black, saw his pupils suddenly contract, the shock in his eyes not yet fading.

He could not understand what had happened. He had clearly seen nothing, yet his hand had simply been severed out of thin air...

However,

Mr. Wei did see Fu Ming's next sword, icy and chilling. Though it was still incredibly fast, he could clearly make out the blade's path.

But with his sword arm suddenly cut off and his center of gravity thrown off balance, he no longer had any room to twist away. Before death could kiss his throat, a sharp whistle through the air came first—a spinning short blade streaked in like a meteor.

Clang!

A crisp explosive crack rang out, scattering sparks in every direction.

The spinning short blade carried immense force as it smashed against Fu Ming's sword edge, forcibly delaying and shifting the sweeping blade by an inch. It grazed past Mr. Wei's neck by the narrowest margin, shearing off a lock of black hair and creating a perilously brief opening for him to twist away.

Bang!

As Mr. Wei shot backward, he raised two fingers of his left hand like a gust of wind and jabbed several times at his right chest, stopping the blood that gushed from his severed arm like a spring.

The deflected short blade spun wildly through the air. A slender afterimage darted up from behind, and the girl seized its hilt midair, dragging its cold gleam down in a direct slash at Fu Ming!

Duang—

The dull impact of blade against sword shook leaves down in rustling showers. Fu Ming's eyes, which had remained calm and unruffled throughout, lifted slightly despite himself.

Hmm?

Why had this Calamity Seed suddenly grown stronger?

Fu Ming was dragged askew for an instant by the force carried on that blade, but the foundation of a superior showed itself at once. Unhurriedly, he turned his sword to shed the force. As his green robes swirled elegantly in the wind, he caught the short blade against his sword guard and gave it a fierce tug.

Ruan Su instantly lost her balance, leaving herself wide open. Countless fatal flaws lay exposed beneath Fu Ming's sword.

And at that critical moment of life and death,

Peng Jun and Luo Liuyi had already arrived like ghosts. They gave him no opening to kill Ruan Su.

"You two..."

Fu Ming's slightly helpless voice reached her ears. Luo Liuyi pressed her red lips together. Though she had argued with that girl before, it had merely been an embarrassing misunderstanding. Now that their employer had ordered this man killed, she naturally would not hold anything back.

Yet just as her body spun and her sword flashed into motion, her vision suddenly rotated strangely and rose from the ground.

Then,

She saw a familiar headless female body.

What was that?

Luo Liuyi's head flew soundlessly into the air.

Peng Jun's broad ring-pommel saber, which had swept horizontally toward Fu Ming, was also firmly blocked by Fu Ming's casual backhand grip on his sword.

At the same time, Fu Ming had already completed his turn. Not only did he use the momentum to knock aside the ring-pommel saber behind him, but in that same instant, he raised his leg and drove a devastating backward kick into Ruan Su's suspended lower abdomen.

Bang!

Accompanied by the sound of bones breaking, the girl's slender body instantly became an afterimage as she flew backward. Only after smashing through a tree thick enough to require an armspan to encircle did she tumble to the ground and finally stop!

In a single breath,

One was dead and two were wounded—and soon, it would become two dead and two wounded.

Blood spurted high from the neck of the headless female corpse, refracting a bewitching red glow beneath the evening sun, as though a thick rain of blood had fallen over the silent mountain forest.

Warm blood splashed across Fu Ming's face and slowly slid down from the corner of his eye. He looked at Peng Jun with a slightly disappointed gaze and asked:

"...Are you really in such a hurry to die for that girl?"

"..."

Peng Jun's muscular body abruptly stiffened, as though he had fallen into an ice pit. He had not understood at all how Luo Liuyi had died. His sword had clearly been held down by Peng Jun, yet her head had still fallen.

There was no time to think about why. Driven by the instinct to survive, his body tried to retreat, but it should have been too late. A chill bearing the scent of death had already seeped into his neck, slicing open his skin. Yet unexpectedly, the coolness pressed against his throat suddenly vanished, replaced by a sound beside his ear.

Snap!

A needle of light shot toward Fu Ming's blind spot from a vicious angle, only to be abruptly shattered by an invisible force in his eyes the instant it reached him, dispersing into countless motes of light.

Then,

A childish voice, weak yet calm, pierced through the entire battlefield:

"There's an invisible flying blade around him. It's knocking up the fallen leaves. Don't get close to him."

"..."

Upon hearing that, an intrigued curve immediately appeared at Fu Ming's lips. He turned to look at Qin Yi in the distance.

The boy stood far away in a fur cloak, his face pale and bloodless, yet there was not the slightest fear in those pitch-black eyes.

He had identified the method of hiding the sword in an instant and responded accordingly.

Interesting.

Was it any wonder he was the descendant of that terrifying existence?

After retreating more than ten feet away in a sorry state, Peng Jun did not hesitate. He roared, raised his hand, and smashed it into the ancient tree beside him, so thick that three people would need to link arms to encircle it. His inner force erupted violently.

Hummm—

With a violent shudder, the remaining yellow leaves in the canopy came raining down, but that was only the beginning.

Mr. Wei, who had lost an arm, also moved. His bloodstained black robes fluttered in the wind as he suddenly lifted his leg and stomped heavily onto the ground. Inner force from the Heavenly Realm spread out like an ocean tide, rolling in waves and directly blasting every pile of rotten leaves and dead branches within several yards into the air.

The swirling leaves filled the sky and blocked out the light, making the already dim forest even hazier. Yet through the gaps between the tumbling leaves, everyone finally saw the horrifying truth behind their comrade's death: the chaotic leaves around Fu Ming were being sliced apart by an invisible sharp edge that the naked eye could not catch.

More than a dozen inner-force experts moved at once like a pack of wolves. The whisper of robes cutting through the air and the crunch of dead leaves beneath their feet brewed the unease of death within the silent forest.

Qin Yi watched everything before him indifferently, rapidly deducing ways to respond in his mind.

Path cultivators were still flesh and blood. Destroy their vital points, and they would die. Even if one merely injured them, the backlash from the flesh to their spirit channels could prevent them from circulating their power as usual.

At its root, though the inner-force system appeared crude, it could still be counted as a kind of cultivation path. It simply focused on the body itself and lacked those strange, transcendent abilities.

Ruan Su's speed and strength could keep up with Fu Ming; she was merely somewhat lacking in technique. Mr. Wei's speed and technique even slightly surpassed Fu Ming's. Now that Fu Ming's path techniques had been exposed, with more than a dozen inner-force experts supporting the fight, although they would inevitably have to fill the gap with human lives, killing Fu Ming here should not be a problem.

And if he disregarded severe injury,

he should also be able to use Wisdom Seal Soulburst once and deal Fu Ming a fatal blow.

As Qin Yi was thinking, he suddenly felt a small hand covered in dirt and blood lightly settle upon the shoulder beneath his heavy fur cloak.

It was Ruan Su.

With the remnants of the setting sun behind her, the girl's long hair hung loose. A bright red smile rested on her blood-stained lips. The foolish dependence that usually showed in her crescent-shaped eyes was gone. Her body trembled as she gave the boy a smile uglier than crying, yet one willing to give everything for him.

"Xiao Yi... stop thinking. It's useless. Just run."

Silence reigned.

On a level no one could notice, the entire mountain forest seemed to tremble for an instant.

If someone could look down from the heavens at that moment, they would see a terrifying scene that made the heart shudder. The Spirit Realm of heaven and earth seemed to have come alive. Vast spirit-channel patterns, with mountains and rivers as their strokes, pulsed like breathing living creatures, their tangled roots spreading in every direction. A Ritual Compass Disc that blotted out the sky and covered the earth had already descended like a cage, enveloping the entire Compassion Mountain Range!