When Chen Ming woke in the inn, rain was pattering outside his window.
He lay in bed, staring at the mottled water stains on the ceiling, his eyes clear, without a trace of the confusion of someone just roused from sleep. He simply lay there quietly for a while, letting the rain tap against the window lattice as he silently sorted through his next steps.
He had never told anyone about what had happened twenty years ago. Even Wan Yao'er knew nothing of it. It had been the darkest, bloodiest stretch of his cultivation journey, a thorn buried deep in his heart.
Back then, he had only recently established his foundation and was wandering the Tiannan Continent alone. He had no background, no patron, no cultivation methods, no pills-nothing. To earn resources for his cultivation, he had joined an assassin organization called the Heavenly South Soul Chasers, taking assassination jobs that could never see the light of day in exchange for Spirit Stones and pills.
It was a trade that walked a knife's edge. Every mission was a gamble with his life. If he won, he collected his payment and bought cultivation resources; if he lost, only death awaited, with no one even to collect his corpse.
Once, he had accepted a mission targeting an Inner Sect disciple of the Ten Thousand Monsters Sect-Zhou Yan.
Zhou Yan was the personal disciple of Zhao Qian, a Golden Core steward of the Ten Thousand Monsters Sect. With his late Foundation Establishment cultivation, he had made quite a name for himself around the Wangshui Kingdom. Brutal by nature, he had relied on his master's power to commit every imaginable evil. Rumor had it that he had once exterminated an entire minor clan to seize a treasure. The employer had offered five hundred Spirit