Two seconds before Elder Blood-Claw smashed his poison smoke bomb down on the street, the second-floor corner room of the Sweet-Spring Inn next to the bathhouse was quiet and warm.
Sitting by the half-open wooden window, Ye Guhan had his patched white sleeves rolled neatly up to his elbows.
In front of him on the polished wooden table sat a giant blue-and-white porcelain basin that Old Guo had personally delivered ten minutes ago as a “Late-Night Canal Contractor Bonus.”
Inside that basin was Dry-Well Town’s newest culinary miracle: [Golden-Blood Hand-Pulled Noodles with Crispy Honey-Glazed Roast Iron-Duck]!
Over the past ten minutes, Ye Guhan had already eaten every strand of golden noodle, two whole golden-yolk spirit eggs, and nine slices of juicy roast duck meat.
However, like any true connoisseur of fine food, Ye Guhan had saved the very best bite for last.
Floating right in the center of the remaining spoonful of rich, amber-gold duck-bone broth was the crown jewel of the entire duck: a three-inch square of crispy, honey-glazed breast skin taken from the Duck General’s plumpest lieutenant, roasted over red jujube wood until it shone like translucent red ruby glass!
Ye Guhan’s dark eyes softened with a tender warmth that he had never shown to any fairy maiden in the Northern Sky.
Holding a pair of ordinary bamboo chopsticks with steady, reverent fingers, he gently lifted that last piece of glistening, crispy roast duck skin out of the soup.
He brought it two inches from his lips.
He could smell the sweet desert honey, the roasted duck fat, and the faint hint of plum sauce.
He opened his mouth—
BOOM—POOF!
Down on the street below, Elder Blood-Claw smashed the Rank 3 Corpse-Smoke Poison Bomb while slicing at the hardened cement around his boots!
A foul-smelling puff of purple-black poison smoke—mixed with three flying crumbs of dirty gray cement dust—shot straight up into the night air, drifted through the half-open second-story window of Room 201, and landed—
Plop. Sizzle.
—right on top of the glistening piece of honey-glazed roast duck skin between Ye Guhan’s chopsticks!
Within half a second, the stinky purple corpse-smoke turned the ruby-red crispy duck skin into a soggy, black, foul-smelling lump of charcoal, while the three crumbs of cement dust splashed straight into the last spoonful of golden broth in his bowl!
Inside Room 201, time froze completely.
Ye Guhan sat motionless in his wooden chair.
His mouth was still half-open. His bamboo chopsticks were still raised two inches from his chin, holding the blackened, stinky ruin of the crispy roast duck skin he had been saving for twenty minutes.
A cold breeze blew through the window, rustling a lock of black hair across Ye Guhan’s pale forehead.
Down on South Bathhouse Boulevard, Elder Blood-Claw and the four other Rank 3 Peak Shadow-Bat Sect Elders knew nothing about the tragedy that had just occurred upstairs.
Using the thick purple smoke screen to block the fifty bricklayers’ vision for two seconds, the five assassins swung their razor-sharp poison claws downward—shhk! shhk! shhk!—and sliced off the top leather of their own boots right above the ankle!
Pulling their bare, white-socked feet out of the cemented boot-soles, the five Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters leaped backward onto the dry wooden sidewalk and laughed wildly!
“Hahaha! A bunch of ignorant desert masons thought wet mud could trap five Peak Grandmasters of the Shadow-Bat Sect?!”
Elder Blood-Claw waved his iron claws, blowing away a patch of purple smoke as he glared viciously at Pei Xuan, General Tie Zhan, and One-Eyed Jack. “My compass says that crippled brat Ye Guhan is right upstairs in that inn! Wait until I jump through that window, chop off Ye Guhan’s head, and take his Rank 5 Spirit Sword—then I will come back down and skin every single one of you alive!”
Hearing Elder Blood-Claw shout about jumping upstairs to chop off Ye Guhan’s head, Pei Xuan—who had just read Ye Guhan’s 9,999 Rage tooltip—quietly took two big steps backward and pulled General Tie Zhan and One-Eyed Jack behind him.
“Everyone step back and cover your ears,” Pei Xuan said calmly, pointing up at the second-floor window. “Someone just ruined our contractor’s last piece of roast duck skin.”
“Huh? Ruined his duck skin?” Elder Blood-Claw sneered, bending his knees to leap up toward the second floor. “That brat has a cracked chest meridian and an empty dantian! What can a dying cripple do—”
BOOOOOOOOM!!
The two wooden window shutters on the second floor of the Sweet-Spring Inn didn’t just open—they blew outward into sawdust under a terrifying wave of icy, mountain-crushing pressure!
Every single person on South Bathhouse Boulevard felt the air turn as heavy as solid lead!
The purple-black Corpse-Smoke cloud didn’t even need wind to blow it away; under the sheer weight of Rank 5 Mid Foundation Establishment Spirit Pressure, the poison smoke was flattened straight down onto the ground and crushed into nothingness!
Elder Blood-Claw and his four fellow Rank 3 Peak assassins froze mid-leap, their knees buckling with loud crack sounds as if an invisible ten-thousand-ton mountain had just been dropped onto their shoulders!
Slowly, all five assassins tilted their trembling heads up toward the second-story window.
Standing in the brightly lit window frame was Ye Guhan.
In his left hand, he held the blue-and-white porcelain bowl containing his ruined midnight soup.
In his right hand, he didn’t hold his Rank 5 Spirit Sword Frost-Star at all. Instead, he held five ordinary six-inch bamboo chopsticks that he had just pulled out of the wooden chopstick holder on his table!
And radiating from his body was not the weak, flickering aura of a dying cripple with a cracked chest meridian—it was the vast, booming, silver-gold ocean of a fully healed Rank 5 Mid Foundation Establishment Sword Immortal!
“Mid... Mid Foundation Establishment?!”
Elder Blood-Claw’s voice cracked into a high-pitched scream of pure terror, his eyeballs nearly popping out through the eyeholes of his iron bat-mask!
“Impossible!! Nine days ago in the Dead-Sand Quicksand Pit, your Foundation Qi was completely dry and my claw cracked your third left rib meridian! Even with a Rank 4 Healing Pill from a great sect, it takes a whole month to mend a cracked Sword-Heart meridian—how did you heal completely AND break through a minor realm in a mortal desert town?!”
Up at the window, Ye Guhan looked down at the five black-clad assassins with eyes colder than ten-thousand-year arctic ice.
“Nine days ago, I let two of you escape because my Sword Qi lacked the Heavy Virtue of the Great Earth,” Ye Guhan said, his icy voice echoing down the street like a judge reading a death sentence. “Today, I spent six days slicing a ten-mile granite mountain and half a day cutting two hundred farm ditches. I finally earned a bowl of Crispy Roast Iron-Duck Noodles... and you five filthy bats dared to drop poison dust on my last piece of crispy duck skin?!”
“RUN!! SCATTER IN FIVE DIRECTIONS!!”
Elder Blood-Claw didn’t care about the sect mission or the spirit sword anymore!
Facing a healthy Rank 5 Mid Foundation Sword Genius who had mastered Heavy-Earth Sword Intent, five Rank 3 Peak Martial Grandmasters were no different from five fat chickens on a chopping block!
All five assassins burned their blood essence at the same time, turning into five black streaks as they bolted toward the roof tiles in five different directions!
“Use my Frost-Star sword on soup-ruining rats?” Ye Guhan sneered coldly. “You aren’t worthy of dirtying my blade!”
He raised his right hand, holding the five ordinary bamboo chopsticks between his fingers.
HUMMMMMM!
Five threads of thick, heavy silver-gold Earth-Splitting Foundation Sword Qi wrapped around the five wooden chopsticks, turning the cheap bamboo sticks harder and heavier than black-iron spears!
“Go!”
Ye Guhan flicked his wrist once!
SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!
Five silver-gold beams of light shot out of the second-story window at ten times the speed of sound!
The five escaping Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters didn’t even make it ten feet across the rooftops before the five bamboo chopsticks caught them from behind!
Because Pei Xuan had shouted earlier “Don’t kill them, keep their legs intact so they can pull the ten-ton stone road-rollers tomorrow!”, Ye Guhan controlled the heavy force of his chopsticks with the same millimeter precision he used to slice three-foot granite cubes!
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
Each bamboo chopstick pierced straight through the back of an assassin’s heavy iron belt buckle—sending a shockwave of heavy Sword Qi straight into their lower spine acupoints to seal their Rank 3 Internal Qi without breaking their leg bones!
Carried by the terrifying momentum of the five chopsticks, all five Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters were lifted straight off the roofs, dragged thirty feet across the street through the air like five black kites on strings, and slammed in a neat horizontal row directly against the giant six-inch-thick oak “Municipal Highway Paving Debtor Board” standing outside Abacus Su’s office!
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
The five bamboo chopsticks sank four inches deep into the solid oak board, pinning Elder Blood-Claw and his four fellow Elders side by side by their waist belts, three feet off the ground, dangling helplessly like five dried bats nailed to a barn door!
Dead silence fell over South Bathhouse Boulevard for the second time that night.
Fifty Rank 2 bricklayers in white bath towels stared at the five terrifying Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters hanging from five soup chopsticks on the oak board, and then turned to stare up at the second-floor window in total worship.
“Five... five Rank 3 Peak Grandmasters...” Captain Hu swallowed his saliva with a loud gulp. “Each one of them is a boss who could wipe out my old Black-Arrow Mercenary Company single-handedly... and Brother Ye pinned all five of them to the debtor board with five wooden chopsticks without even walking downstairs?!”
“Hmph. Barely a warm-up,” Ye Guhan said coolly from the window, though his eyes drifted mournfully back down to the ruined bowl of noodles in his left hand.
Right at that moment, heavy footsteps thudded rapidly up the wooden stairs of the inn!
“Brother Ye! Don’t look at that dirty bowl anymore!”
Old Guo burst through the door of Room 201 carrying a steaming wooden tray! On the tray sat a brand-new, extra-large porcelain basin of Golden-Blood Noodles, topped with HALF A ROAST IRON-DUCK covered in glistening, crackling honey-glazed skin and three golden-yolk eggs!
“When I saw that nasty purple smoke drift toward your window, I immediately pulled our backup roast duck out of the clay oven!” Old Guo beamed, setting the fragrant tray down on the clean table. “Lord Pei said that since you caught five high-level road vandals for the town tonight, this half-duck is your official Public Security Bounty Reward—completely free!”
Looking at the steaming half-duck with its huge sheet of unbroken, crackling golden-red skin, Ye Guhan’s icy eyes shimmered with unmistakable emotion.
Down on the street below, Pei Xuan stared nervously at the floating blue window above the second-floor window, holding his breath:
Up at the window, Ye Guhan picked up a fresh pair of chopsticks with his right hand, while casually reaching his left hand out the window and resting two fingers on the baked clay eaves-tile of the inn roof.
CRACK!
With a tiny, deliberate flick of his pinky finger, the clay roof tile split cleanly into two pieces and slid down into the street hedge!
Keeping his face as cold and serious as an ancient statue, Ye Guhan leaned his head half an inch out the window and called down to Abacus Su:
“Bookkeeper Su! Just now, when I threw those five chopsticks to arrest those road vandals, the recoil of my Sword Qi accidentally cracked one of the Sweet-Spring Inn’s historical roof tiles! Put it on my tab—I will stay another thirty days to pay it off!”
BANG!
Ye Guhan pulled his head back inside, slammed the window frame shut, and dove face-first into his half-duck noodle bowl!
Down on the street, Pei Xuan looked at the cracked roof tile in the hedge, looked at the 59 / 100 Loyalty bar stubbornly refusing to tick over to 60 because of the kid’s “I’m only paying off a roof tile!” excuse, and burst out laughing.
“Fine! Stay as long as you want, Brother Ye!” Pei Xuan laughed, turning toward the five terrified Rank 3 Peak assassins dangling from the oak board in their white socks. “Master Su! Foreman Jack! Bring out five Rank 3 Heavy-Duty Yellow Debtor Vests and chain these five new Grandmaster volunteers to our ten-ton stone road-rollers!”