A Pawn's Passage

To be fair, Qi Xuansu was not particularly skilled in killing. He was not an assassin trained from childhood, so he did not know the most efficient or quickest methods to kill. His strength lay in keeping calm in the face of danger, which was forged through life-and-death experiences. He also had a flexible fighting style that adapted to changing situations.

Adaptability was not just about ingraining techniques until they became instinct. It also required thinking and being good at utilizing external conditions.

Under such circumstances, Qi Xuansu rarely displayed the overwhelming dominance that Li Changge did, partly because Qi Xuansu was born with lesser innate advantages and partly because external conditions varied from battle to battle.

The assassins of The Inn were different. They had been trained since childhood to know every weakness of the human body. They were masters of various killing techniques and were adept at using external conditions. However, their strengths lay in ambush, concealment, and assassination.

Simply put, assassins specialized in attacking unprepared enemies with a single fatal strike. If the first strike failed, the assassins had to flee.

In truth, if assassins lost the advantage of surprise and lacked superiority over their opponent in cultivation level, they were unlikely to win in direct combat.

If it came down to a fair, one-on-one duel, the Cook from The Inn might not have been a match for the Qingping Society’s Drenched Green Robes. But the Cook never fought fair. He relied on ambush and outnumbered the enemy, exploiting the fact that Drenched Green Robes always traveled alone. Drenched Green Robes was also overconfident in his cultivation, so he fell into the Cook’s trap.

In this regard, the three Deputy Grand Masters of the Daoist Order never put themselves at risk. Though their cultivation was already unmatched, they still secluded themselves in Daoist strongholds like the Jade Capital or their own fortified nests, protected by numerous followers and layered formations. Even an Ancient Immortal would find it hard to assassinate them.

Thus, despite the death of Drenched Green Robes, Qi Xuansu did not hold a pessimistic view toward the Qingping Society’s coming war against The Inn. He believed that if the Qingping Society seized the initiative, The Inn might suffer a disastrous defeat because assassins were skilled at offense, not defense.

Whether they could strike first depended on intelligence. In this regard, aside from the Ziguang Society, no other secret organization could match the Qingping Society, whose members all had dual identities and communicated mostly through single-line contacts, making infiltration into other organizations easy but penetration into their own ranks extremely difficult.

During this meeting with Madam Qi, aside from discussing matters concerning The Inn, she had also replaced Qi Xuansu’s fish talisman. His silver-crimson fish talisman was now upgraded to a golden-purple one, signifying that he was now officially a B-rank member.