Chapter 28: A Wrong Move Costs A Life
The night air grew suffocatingly heavy as Lu Feng silently took lazy steps through the dense brush, his boots making absolutely no sound against the damp, decaying earth.
In his left hand, he held the dripping, severed head of the last assassin by its tangled, blood-matted hair, dark crimson droplets pattering rhythmically against the fallen leaves beneath his feet. In his right hand, his stolen broadsword caught the faint, silver glint of the moonlight, the edge still gleaming with a ruthless, unblinking sharpness.
He was pushing his physical and mental limits now, and he knew it. Every single muscle in his body felt tightly coiled, humming with the restrained, cosmic fury of the Primordial Chaos Bead resting quietly in his core.
Arriving at the edge of the central clearing where the ambush had first begun hours ago, Lu Feng scanned the shadowed perimeter with his hyper-attuned eyes.
He found the bandit leader standing on the lower branch of an ancient, weeping willow, his face twisted in a hideous mask of anxious fury as he frantically paced back and forth on the thick wood, muttering furious curses under his breath.
Without breaking his stride, Lu Feng reeled back his arm and tossed the heavy, bloody head he was holding straight at the man.
The severed head spun through the air with a sickening, whistling arc, wet hair whipping around the pale, terrified face before it crashed heavily against the tree trunk right beside the leader’s boots, splattering dark, warm blood across his polished leather greaves.
The leader frowned, his eyes snapping down to the grisly object with a violent twitch before lifting to glare at the newcomer standing at the edge of the clearing. He demanded to know who the hell he was, his voice trembling with a mixture of shock and incandescent rage, and whether he had any bloody idea what he’d just done to his men.
Lu Feng stepped out fully from the shadows, his mismatched eyes gleaming with an icy, intimidating calm that completely unnerved the seasoned mercenary. He returned the frown, his deep voice carrying an effortless, bone-chilling authority that defied his youthful appearance.
"Who sent you after me?"
That simple, direct question caused the frown on the leader’s face to deepen into a profound, unsettling expression of sudden realization.
That was because the leader knew they’d been sent by their mysterious, high-paying contractor to eliminate a certain young man and then slaughter everyone else on the transport convoy as a clean cover-up. But they were explicitly told by their broker that their target was a frail, useless weakling who couldn’t hold a single wisp of Qi, let alone fight back. The person standing before him now was clearly not frail or weak.
In truth, they weren’t really elite, disciplined assassins; they were just a ruthless group of mercenary cutthroats who took on all sorts of dirty, back-alley jobs for the right pile of gold coins.
They had been extraordinarily successful up until this very mission, slaughtering countless merchant caravans and travelers across these border roads without ever hitting a single snag, and now, thirty-nine of his best men had been completely wiped out in minutes by a single teenager.
The leader kept muttering under his breath, his teeth grinding so hard they nearly cracked as he promised he would make his contractor’s life an absolute misery after he finished dealing with this arrogant brat standing before him.
Lu Feng asked him again who had sent him, his tone sharp, unyielding, and devoid of fear.
The leader sneered, a venomous, twisted expression contorting his scarred features as his hands tightened around the hilt of his broadsword. "You expect me to talk? A dead man has no use for such information."
Lu Feng stared at him, his face a complete mask of stone, and flatly told him to answer his question so his death would come easy. In truth, despite his cool exterior and unbothered posture, Lu Feng was feeling deeply tense about facing this man because of the immense, suffocating pressure he could feel rolling off the mercenary’s frame in terrifying waves.
The man wasn’t a mundane thug like the others; he was at the very peak of the Qi Condensation stage too, a seasoned warrior who had spent years cultivating every drop of energy in his veins, mastering martial arts through countless bloody battles.
With a ferocious, earth-shattering roar, the leader kicked off the tree branch with enough force to splinter the wood. As he attacked, he blurred. Even Lu Feng was stunned by the man’s terrifying speed, his eyes barely able to track the dark, violent streak tearing across the clearing like a bolt of lightning.
Clang!
Their weapons clashed with a deafening, metallic ring that sent a shower of bright orange sparks flying into the dark air, and a furious, life-or-death battle began between them.
Right away, the man had a massive, insurmountable edge over Lu Feng due to his decades of combat experience, superior technique, and absolute mastery over his internal Qi.
He easily anticipated Lu Feng’s crude, unrefined swings, carrying all of Lu Feng’s heavy, clumsy attacks with practiced, effortless ease before instantly counterattacking. The sheer weight, velocity, and overwhelming pressure of the mercenary’s onslaught pushed Lu Feng backward step by step, forcing him into a tight, desperate posture until he couldn’t do anything but defend.
The leader kept pressing forward like a relentless, howling storm, his broadsword moving in a blinding web of silver light.
He slashed, parried, and drove his advantage home with sadistic pleasure, carving through Lu Feng’s desperate blocks until he finally landed a clean, sweeping strike that left a shallow, bleeding cut across Lu Feng’s shoulder.
Without giving Lu Feng a single second of space or time to recover his balance, the mercenary pressed even more, turning one cut into a dozen in the blink of an eye. Slash after slash rained down in a relentless flurry, tearing through Lu Feng’s dark traveling robe and carving shallow crimson lines across his chest and arms until Lu Feng was left entirely defenseless, his breathing ragged and heavy as he stumbled back against a thick tree trunk, trapped.
The mercenary leader stood towering directly over him, his chest heaving slightly from exertion, a cruel, triumphant smirk twisting his scarred face into something demonic.
Then, instead of finishing Lu Feng off with a quick, merciful strike to the throat, he decided to start a sadistic interrogation.
"You sliced my men like Tofu. You do not deserve an easy death." He wanted to torture Lu Feng as much as possible, to break the boy’s unbreakable spirit and find out how a supposed weakling had slaughtered thirty-nine men in mere minutes.
He reached out with a heavy, gauntleted hand, grabbing Lu Feng roughly by the collar, and channeled a tendril of his peak-stage Qi directly into the boy’s body to lock his movements completely.
As the mercenary’s internal energy probed deeper into Lu Feng’s frame, searching for weak points to shatter, the man suddenly froze mid-smile. His eyes widened to the size of saucers in absolute shock as he discovered an energy center sitting deep in Lu Feng’s abdomen.
A Dantian.
"No wonder you’d gone all bonkers on my men. You crazed lunatic!" The mercenary had no idea what kind of peculiar or monstrous Dantian it actually was; to him, it simply felt like a foreign, active core belonging to someone who had no business having one.
Disgust and malice twisted his features further. Realizing that ordinary blades might not permanently stop someone who had somehow unlocked a cultivation core behind his back, the leader decided to destroy it entirely.
There were various ways to destroy a Dantian in the brutal cultivation world, but given his current resources and his desire for maximum cruelty, the man could only use one sure, devastating method: overflow the Dantian with rampant, violent Qi until it expanded past its absolute limits and exploded from the inside out, turning the boy’s organs to mush.
The mercenary began channeling a massive, blinding surge of his peak-stage Qi directly into Lu Feng’s lower abdomen, his eyes gleaming with sadistic glee as he watched the boy’s core begin to strain under the toxic, overbearing pressure.
He decided to do it right then and there.
"You shouldn’t have done that." Lu Feng warned with a weak sigh.