Chapter 105: Chapter 105
Dust swirled.
The dock lay in deathly silence.
The match between Shen Xiuhan and Tu Xiaotian had produced a shockwave that far exceeded everyone’s expectations.
The smile had vanished from Tang Jin’s face. At some point his hand had settled onto his saber’s hilt.
Pang Yi’s triangular eyes had narrowed to slits, boring into the dust-cloud, trying to pierce it.
Several dozen water bandits wore faces of undisguised shock, darting glances at each other. Not a trace remained of their brazen swagger from moments ago.
On the Ji clan’s side —
Li Han, Yan Chuan, Hu Zhi, and the others were rigid with tension, lips trembling.
Wang Jindao’s eyes were saucers, his face pure, naked astonishment. He rubbed his hands compulsively.
Luo Feng breathed hard, chest heaving. His unblinking stare was fixed on the scene ahead.
Every soul stood rooted in place, nerves wound to breaking, awaiting the outcome.
Then —
Tang Jin’s expression shifted. He surged to his feet, gaze blazing like twin torches toward the clearing.
“Fifth Brother…”
“Quiet!” Tang Jin raised a hand, cutting Pang Yi off mid-question. “Listen! Something’s moving.”
Pang Yi started, then strained his ears.
Beyond the moaning lake-wind and the slap of waves on the shallows —
A faint, rhythmic series of muffled impacts was drifting out from deep within the dust.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
“What’s that sound?”
On the other side, Wang Jindao and the rest heard it too, brows creasing in confusion.
Heads craned instinctively toward the source.
At last, the dust settled and thinned.
And they saw what lay within.
Several hundred paces away, beneath the old pagoda tree.
A bear-sized figure knelt half-collapsed against the trunk, head lolling, like a sack of skin with the bones removed.
He had clearly lost consciousness. His body was toppling forward, beyond his control.
But as he fell —
A tall, straight figure raised a leg. The instep rose like an upswinging iron hammer and cracked squarely into the man’s face.
BANG!
The massive impact kicked the limp body back against the tree trunk with a heavy thud.
Then the blue-robed figure, expression blank, withdrew his leg. Waited for the body to slump forward again.
And kicked.
Slumped.
Kicked.
Again —
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
Fifth kick. Sixth. Seventh…
Each one was steady, measured, forceful — like driving a pile. Not a wasted motion. A cold, mechanical precision that sent ice into every watching heart.
At last —
Tang Jin was the first to react. His eyes flooded crimson, and a roar like a maddened lion tore from his chest.
“STOP!!”
At his side, Pang Yi snapped back to his senses. His hideous face contorted, and he let out a shrill scream.
“Little bastard! Stop it NOW!”
The words were still leaving his mouth.
His rail-thin body blurred into a ghostly streak, hurtling toward the figure that was still — tirelessly, mechanically — raising its leg and kicking.
FWOOSH!
As though sensing the killing intent, Shen Xiuhan shifted his footing, body swaying like a leaf in a breeze, and glided lightly out of range.
And the kneeling Tu Xiaotian — who had been toppling forward and kicked upright, toppling and kicked, over and over — finally hit the ground face-first with a wet BANG, like a slab of rotten meat.
Pang Yi’s eye twitched violently. He dropped to his knees and turned the body over with shaking hands.
But when he saw the face, the hardened bandit wrenched his head away. He couldn’t bear to look a second time.
Tu Xiaotian looked like a deflated blood-sack. Thick, viscous blood was seeping from his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose in a steady, spring-like flow.
His face was an unrecognizable ruin of pulped flesh. No feature could be distinguished from any other.
One eye had been jarred clean from its socket and knocked to some unknown corner.
The other still dangled from a few pallid, blood-streaked sinews against the cheekbone — but it, too, had been stamped into a flat disc of meat-paste.
Inside, every organ was pulverized. Every bone was broken. Not a spark of life remained.
“Good… good… very good!”
Pang Yi rose slowly. His gaunt fingers dug into his own palms until the nails pierced flesh, and blood dripped steadily.
He lifted his head, inch by inch, and fixed his stare on Shen Xiuhan. His gaze was a blade dipped in venom.
“You little piece of shit…”
Pang Yi’s eyes were saturated with murderous intent, locked on Shen Xiuhan. His body dropped low, spine arching like a drawn bow. Through clenched teeth, every word fell like the slam of a gavel.
“Today…”
“I am going to carve the flesh from your bones — slice by slice. Three thousand cuts of the lingering death! I will flay you alive on the shores of this Yunshui Lake!”
BOOM!
The instant the words fell.
The ground beneath Pang Yi detonated. His body became a bolt of ground-hugging lightning, tearing through the air with a shockwave, closing on Shen Xiuhan to kill.
“Pay for the Ninth with your life!”
Pang Yi’s roar shook the air. His footwork was sharp, treacherous, blindingly fast — body feinting left, darting right, trajectory impossible to predict.
Five fingers pressed flat together, shaped into a blade-edge like a mantis hunting through grass. They drove straight for Shen Xiuhan’s heart.
Black Mantis Fist — Heart-Piercing Hand!
Finger-wind slashed cold. Killing intent bared.
But Shen Xiuhan stood as though deaf, hands hanging at his sides, body immovable as a mountain. He hadn’t so much as blinked — as though the death-blow inches from his chest simply didn’t exist.
Until Pang Yi closed to three zhang —
SWISH!
A figure crossed the distance as though space itself had folded, bursting from the bamboo grove at impossible speed. A faint afterimage trailed through the air, accompanied by a piercing crack of shattered wind.
BANG!
In the next heartbeat, an arm — not thick, almost lean — landed on Pang Yi’s chest with deceptive lightness.
The punch looked slow. But it weighed more than a thousand jin, harboring a force that could shatter stone and splinter wood — an invisible mountain crashing down from the sky.
CRACK!
Pang Yi’s pupils blew wide. His eye sockets nearly split.
Pain hit his chest like a flooding tide. Ribs snapped one after another. A great gush of black blood — laced with fragments of organ — burst from his mouth.
His body flew backward at several times the speed of his attack.
Like a stone flung from a trebuchet, he sailed dozens of zhang through the air and plunged into the shallows with a tremendous SPLASH, sending a column of water a full zhang high.
“Old Six!”
Tang Jin’s eyes nearly burst. Bloodshot veins webbed his sclera. His jaw clenched until his teeth ground and cracked.
The bandits around him erupted into chaos — shouting, shoving, scrambling into the water to pull their chief out. Spray flew everywhere.
Tang Jin whipped his head around. His stare locked onto the figure emerging from the bamboo grove.
The newcomer looked barely twenty, features refined, a trace of youthful softness still lingering between his brows.
He wore a beast-hide coat, its fur-edging rough-cut. A wrap of grey-white fur covered his shoulders. Deerskin boots rose to his calves, and his stride was unhurried, steady as bedrock.
Slung across his back was a black long sword. The scabbard was made of some unknown material — dark, dull, without a glimmer of light.
The sword’s design bore no resemblance to the ornate blades of the current dynasty.
The hilt was plain, unadorned — no intricate carvings, no inlaid gemstones.
The blade itself was long and slender, shaped like a willow leaf — roughly three feet and two inches — with clean, archaic lines, as though it had drifted down from some far more ancient age.
Tang Jin stared at him. His pupils trembled. His lips moved.
“Ji Ning… you’ve — you’ve opened the Taichong point? You’ve broken through to Hidden Strength?!”
In the distance, Ji Ning said nothing. He simply walked forward, step by unhurried step, steady as a mountain.
An aura of force rippled around him — like mist, like haze — clinging, never dispersing.
The qi-blood fluctuation had transcended the explosive outward projection of Manifest Strength, reaching a state that was restrained, contained — yet darkly, dangerously lethal beneath the surface.
The unmistakable presence of Hidden Strength.