Entry: Low-Grade Martial Arts Root Bone (Blue)

He glanced at his right arm, which was still bleeding heavily. Agonizing pain and blood loss made his head swim, but he forced himself to hold on, a vicious gleam flashing in his eyes.

"You little bastard! How dare you attack me from the shadows! I'll skin you alive today!"

He knew his injuries were serious. He had to finish this quickly!

With a furious roar, he threw caution to the wind, gripped his woodcutter's blade in his left hand, and drove off the ground, charging at Li Xuan like a maddened wild boar!

Though his right arm was injured, he had trained before. His charge was still ferocious, and his blade swept up a vicious gust as it cleaved straight toward Li Xuan's face!

He was clearly staking his life on this attack, hoping his experience and sheer ruthlessness would let him cut down this "greenhorn" in an instant!

But Li Xuan was no longer the ordinary mountain hunter Wang Kui thought he was.

Faced with Wang Kui's seemingly ferocious strike, which had actually lost all form to pain, shock, and fury,

Li Xuan remained unhurried, shifting his feet and nimbly sliding half a step backward and to the side.

Rather than meet the blow head-on, he followed the momentum of the descending blade and deftly flicked his own upward!

Clang!

The blades collided, scattering sparks! Li Xuan's arm dipped slightly. His opponent was indeed strong, but not beyond what he could withstand.

He borrowed the force to deflect it, turning his body and slipping behind Wang Kui's flank!

Wang Kui's blade struck empty air. His weight pitched forward, and the searing pain in his right arm made him falter.

Alarm surged through him, and he hurriedly swept his blade behind him!

But Li Xuan was faster!

Before Wang Kui could bring his blade around, Li Xuan's woodcutter's blade was already carrying the force of his entire body's twisting motion.

Like a venomous snake darting from its hole, it slashed viciously at the opening in Wang Kui's lower back as he turned!

Squelch!

The blade bit into flesh!

Into that strike, Li Xuan poured the precise control over his strength that his "proficient" archery had given him.

He also used the rudimentary power-generation techniques gained from reaching the beginner level of Thunderclap Fist Stance. His bladework was crude, but it was fast, accurate, and ruthless!

Wang Kui let out an utterly piercing scream. A bloody gash deep enough to expose bone split his lower back, damaging his kidney.

Agony and sudden weakness buckled his legs, sending him crashing to the ground. His woodcutter's blade flew from his hand.

He struggled to get up, but Li Xuan had already stepped forward.

Li Xuan stamped hard on his wounded right arm and pressed the tip of his woodcutter's blade against his throat.

The cold touch of steel, mingled with the terror of death, shattered all of Wang Kui's ferocity and arrogance in an instant, leaving only boundless fear and despair.

Staring into Li Xuan's utterly emotionless eyes in the rainy night, he finally realized he had kicked a real iron plate this time. He had provoked a killing fiend he should never have crossed!

"Spare... spare me... Li... Brother Li... the meat... I'll give it all back... I was wrong... I'll never do it again..."

Enduring the agony, Wang Kui begged in a trembling voice, losing control of his bowels and bladder. Their foul stench mingled with the smell of blood.

Li Xuan watched his disgraceful display without a shred of pity.

Had he not encountered his stroke of fortune and grown vastly stronger, he would have been the one killed today, and he and his family would have been robbed of everything.

Showing mercy to someone like this was cruelty to himself and his family.

"All right. Still, I trust dead men more."

The blade flashed, clean and decisive.

Wang Kui's pleas cut off abruptly. He fell utterly silent.

Li Xuan slowly straightened, wiped the flecks of blood from his face, and looked at Wang Kui's corpse on the ground.

Then he glanced downhill toward where the two accomplices had fallen dead and let out a long breath of pent-up tension.

Immediately afterward, an entry dropped.

[Low-Grade Martial Arts Root Bone (Blue)]

Entry effect: Slightly improves the body's natural aptitude for martial arts, increasing the efficiency and speed of practicing basic external fist and foot techniques and tempering the sinews and bones. Slightly lowers the threshold for sensing "force." This entry can be considered a minor enhancement and refinement of the user's original "root bone" attribute.

"Hm? Who would've thought Wang Kui had a martial arts root bone? Only a low-grade one, though."

"Not bad... no wonder his attributes were higher than those other two men's."

Li Xuan picked it up.

This entry was quite useful. He could equip it later when he went to the martial arts hall to train.

The rain seemed to have eased a little.

Silence returned to the mountain forest, broken only by the rustle of rain striking leaves.

He walked over to the lean-to and picked up Wang Kui's leather sack of meat, then retrieved his two Iron Arrows, wiped them clean, and put them away.

With Wang Kui dealt with, the murderous anger in Li Xuan's heart eased somewhat. But a more practical problem immediately followed: how was he to dispose of three corpses?

Burying them in this remote wilderness was certainly an option, but it would be difficult to conceal everything flawlessly in a hurry. If wild animals dug them up, or another hunter happened upon them later, they could still pose a risk.

Throw them into a mountain stream? There did not seem to be a ravine nearby deep enough, or with a swift enough current.

Just as he frowned in thought, a faint, long, mournful howl pierced the easing curtain of rain, drifting over from a distant mountain ridge.

A wolf's howl!

Something stirred in Li Xuan's mind, and his eyes lit up.

Right, why go to all the trouble myself?

These mountains had no shortage of "helpers" to clean away the traces.

Corpses gnawed by wild beasts would leave almost no useful clues, especially after a rainy night like this.

The authorities? In times like these, nobody would look closely into the deaths of a few lowly hunters in the mountains near a remote village. They would probably blame a beast attack or a fall from a cliff.

He hesitated no longer.

First, he quickly searched the crude lean-to. Apart from the dying campfire and the charred pig liver, there was nothing of value.

Then he went over to Wang Kui's corpse, crouched down, and endured the smell of blood as he searched through the man's clothes.

There were a few pieces of silver totaling roughly three or four taels, along with several dozen copper coins.

Li Xuan pocketed them without hesitation. They were spoils of battle, and he urgently needed them.

Just as he was about to stand, he caught sight of an unusual patch of yellow in the wet mud behind and to the side of Wang Kui's corpse, close to the rock wall.

He brushed aside the sodden leaves and mud and picked it up.

It was a thin booklet bound from coarse yellow paper. Its cover bore no writing, and its corners were badly worn.

Most of it had been soaked by the rain, but the pages inside seemed to have undergone some basic moisture-proofing. Though the ink had bled in places, it was still legible.

Li Xuan's heart gave a jolt. By the flickering light of the nearly extinguished fire in the lean-to, he carefully opened it.

The first few pages contained some crooked

human figures posed in various strange positions, with dense annotations in tiny, fly-head-sized script beside them.

Most were terms such as "sink qi into the dantian," "focus the mind on the Purple Mansion," and "circulate through the heavenly circuit."

As he turned the pages, the diagrams and writing became increasingly profound and obscure. But when he reached the latter half of the booklet,

the contents abruptly stopped. The next dozen or so pages were blank, and the final few had been deliberately torn out, leaving ragged edges.

This... this looks like a method for cultivating internal power! Even if it's incomplete!

Li Xuan's heart jolted violently, and his breathing quickened. A martial arts manual!

His last few days at the martial arts hall had given him a deep understanding of just how precious such a thing was.

The fist techniques taught by the Thunderbolt Martial Arts Hall were merely basic external arts for tempering the sinews and bones. Who knew what price he would have to pay to learn its more essential techniques?

As for the so-called "secret manuals" circulating on the market, ninety-nine percent were fakes meant to swindle money, or exceedingly crude fighting routines.

But the one in his hands... though incomplete, its diagrams, terminology, and glimpses of descriptions tracing the circulation of qi,

were highly technical, with a rough yet authentic feel.

Wang Kui had spent several years at a martial arts hall. Perhaps he had acquired this incomplete manual then.

But precisely because it was incomplete, he had failed to achieve anything with it and eventually returned home to scrape by.

"An incomplete internal cultivation method..."