The poisoned crossbow bolts hung suspended in the baking air of the Grand Market Square like black iron needles pinned against a canvas of yellow dust.
Thirty mercenary crossbowmen of the Iron Vulture Gang had fired all at once, their iron triggers slamming forward with enough torque to punch through the hide of a mountain boar. The barbed tips, dripping with the emerald film of corpse-rot venom, hissed as they carved through the heat shimmers directly toward Lin Xiao and Gu Qingfeng.
Gu Qingfeng didn’t even shift his feet from the sun-cracked paving stones.
The unkempt Sword Saint merely flicked the slender green willow branch in his right hand. It was a movement so languid it appeared lazy, akin to an angler swatting away a persistent river gnat. Yet the pale leaves brushed the midday breeze. Then, a nested ripple of formless sword intent blossomed outward from the tip of the twig.
The sound was not an explosion, but the soft chime of an antique bell.
The thirty screaming iron bolts met the expanding ripple ten paces out. Without a flash of blinding light, their violent moving driving force vanished into nothingness. The lethal iron tips snapped cleanly away from their feathered wooden shafts as if sliced by a master tailor’s scissors. Sixty neat fragments of wood and blunted iron tumbled out of the sky, clattering against the dry cobblestones with the harmless rattle of fallen acorns.
