Chapter 099: The Secret of the Shi Family (Please Subscribe)

Nie Renqiu?

The one who had been killed was Nie Renqiu?

Su Jingxing was genuinely surprised.

Nie Renqiu had vanished without a trace for more than a week. Su Jingxing had assumed he had already left Qinghe City, never expecting him to still be in the western district.

And apparently, he was still seeking out challengers.

Only this time, his luck had turned. During a challenge, he was besieged, forced to flee, and in the end never made it away alive. He was cut down on the south bank of Tianshui River.

Of course, Nie Renqiu’s death did not concern Su Jingxing.

What drew his attention was the treasure that had been in Ouyang Qianhu’s hands. It seemed to have fallen into Nie Renqiu’s possession.

Now that Nie Renqiu was dead, might that treasure be on his body?

At the thought, Su Jingxing used his light-footed movement art and glided over without a sound.

Even after drawing near, he remained concealed within the dense branches and leaves.

Yet three throwing knives suddenly flew from his palm.

Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.

The piercing whistles tore through the night and first shattered the streetlamps.

Then they shot toward the three swordsmen who had besieged Nie Renqiu and were still exhilarated from the kill.

Clap. Clap.

Because the sound of the streetlamps breaking came first, the three middle-grade martial artists each dodged the knives.

"Who is it? If you have the guts, come out!" one of the three, a burly man, barked warily. "Hiding in the shadows and refusing to show yourself—what kind of hero are you?"

"Shut up!"

Another, an elder with a long beard, changed expression. He glared at the burly man, then sheathed his weapon and cupped his fists toward the darkness above. "Friend, rest assured. We seek nothing else. We hunted Nie Renqiu because he meant to kill my third brother. Now that Nie Renqiu is dead, our purpose has been achieved. We will leave at once."

"No, Big Brother..."

"Shut up!"

The long-bearded elder angrily stared at the burly man who had tried to speak and growled, "If you do not want to die, keep your mouth shut!"

The burly man did not understand, but how could the long-bearded elder not?

The hidden hand controlling the throwing knives had no intention of killing them.

Otherwise, in that earlier ambush, the first things shattered would not have been the streetlamps, but their heads.

The long-bearded elder was not some low-tier martial artist. Among the three brothers, he was a fifth-tier expert, while the burly man and the heavily injured one were both sixth-tier.

He had seen no fewer than ten kinds of throwing-knife techniques in his life.

Yet he had never encountered knives like those just now, with not the slightest trace of aura or energy ripple leaking out.

Anyone with such skill was either very strong, perhaps at the fourth tier.

Or else they had cultivated an exceedingly advanced concealment art, one so refined that even the true energy they projected outward could mask all traces of themselves.

Whichever it was, none of the three could handle such an opponent.

The injured man aside, even the long-bearded elder and the burly man were already badly depleted.

If the lurking figure were only an eighth- or ninth-tier martial artist, they might still be able to deal with him.

But was the hidden one really only eighth or ninth tier?

The long-bearded elder did not dare gamble.

Compared with the treasure that might or might not still be on Nie Renqiu’s body, their lives were unquestionably more important.

So the long-bearded elder decisively gave up searching Nie Renqiu’s corpse.

After calling into the air, he forcibly restrained the burly man, who was always stubbornly impulsive, slung the injured man onto his back, and quickly left the scene.

"Quite sensible."

Up in the tree, Su Jingxing watched the three leave without causing any trouble, and nodded in satisfaction. His body swayed and drifted down to the ground.

First he picked up a card, then searched through Nie Renqiu’s corpse.

He found nothing valuable, apart from the weapon Nie Renqiu had been using.

A blood-colored longsword.

Slightly disappointed, Su Jingxing picked up the crimson blade and stored it in the space within his palm.

At a glance, this sword was clearly a treasured weapon. Whether for personal use or for sale, it would be excellent.

A gain was still better than nothing.

As for Nie Renqiu’s corpse...

Whoosh.

Su Jingxing raised the tip of his foot and flicked the body upward, then reached out and caught it.

Afterward, carrying the corpse, he flew across Tianshui River straight toward the crematorium.

From a distance, he hurled the body through the air. It landed at the entrance with a dull thud, startling the guards on duty.

The corpse had been dealt with.

Su Jingxing turned around and, amid the cries of alarm from the crematorium guards behind him, flew back across Tianshui River to the small courtyard at the foot of the mountain.

Once inside, he took out the card he had picked up, held it in his palm, and read the information.

Memory card.

It was not the skill card or true energy card he had most hoped for, but a memory card.

Su Jingxing was somewhat disappointed.

But very soon, he was stunned.

The memory card picked up from Nie Renqiu’s corpse contained the memories of Nie Renqiu’s entire life.

A Stone Family death warrior.

Many had been curious about Nie Renqiu’s identity and origins. Through this memory card, Su Jingxing now knew.

Not only did he learn that Nie Renqiu had been a death warrior raised since childhood by the Stone Family, he also learned many of the Stone Family’s secrets.

For example, the one that interested Su Jingxing most: Three Yin Candle Blood.

The bloodline card had clearly stated that those possessing Three Yin Candle Blood would not live beyond the age of forty-nine. Yet the members of the Stone Family were not affected.

This question was now answered.

It turned out the Stone Family had long since discovered the flaw in Three Yin Candle Blood. In order to live longer, their ancestors, after extensive and complicated research, had found a method.

They drew the heart’s blood of women born in a yin year, yin month, yin day, and yin hour, before their virginity had been broken.

Shi Yanfeng’s intention toward Yu Miaotong’s heart was precisely to extract that heart’s blood.

At the time, Su Jingxing had not noticed that the short dagger Shi Yanfeng used, with its peculiar shape, was actually a blood extraction tool.

If Su Jingxing had taken the dagger then, he would later have discovered a strand of blood hidden inside the blade.

That blood was Yu Miaotong’s heart’s blood.

By drinking the heart’s blood of a virgin born in a yin year, yin month, yin day, and yin hour every three years, the fatal weakness of Three Yin Candle Blood was no longer a problem.

Over all these years, the Stone Family had not only abducted young women and underage children born in yin years, yin months, yin days, and yin hours from Qinghe City, but had also gathered them from other cities, and even from other countries.

Because heart’s blood had to be taken while the person was alive, and once obtained it had to be consumed and refined within half an hour.

So people like Gu Duoduo and the others were simply abducted and imprisoned.

And the personnel sent out to collect them elsewhere were death warriors just like Nie Renqiu.

The Stone Family had trained more than a hundred death warriors.

Most of them were low-tier martial artists, with nine in the middle tier.

Nie Renqiu was one of them, and one of the finest among them.

In order to seize the treasure in Ouyang Qianhu’s hands, a pearl whose function was to purify true energy and cleanse bloodlines, the Stone Family had dispatched him.

First, he had led others to wipe out one branch of the Black Tiger Gang, but they found no pearl.

So Nie Renqiu had personally stepped forward, pretending to be a sword fanatic, killed Ouyang Qianhu, taken the pearl, and at the same time drawn Ouyang Qianhu’s essence blood.

To remove the drawback of Three Yin Candle Blood, they needed the heart’s blood of a virgin born in a yin year, yin month, yin day, and yin hour.

To strengthen the abilities of Three Yin Candle Blood, they used a substance called Blood Essence Marrow, refined mainly from the essence blood of middle-tier martial artists.

Although the Stone Family could also strengthen bloodline power through the Three Yin Candle source blood recovered after death, that was only a temporary measure.

For that reason, Nie Renqiu had killed Ouyang Qianhu, Single Sword Tong, and Ma Zhengyang.

The blood-colored longsword in his hand could draw a target’s essence blood while killing them.

As for killing Shi Jidong, that was because Shi Jidong had betrayed the Stone Family and thrown in with the Li Family.

The essence blood they extracted from all these people was taken by the Stone Family to the underground chambers beneath Yunhai Plaza, where it served as a primary ingredient in refining Blood Essence Marrow.

That’s right.

The true mastermind behind the bloodshed at Yunhai Plaza was not Ke Wenji, nor Shi Yanyi, but the upper ranks of the Stone Family led by Shi Jinnian.

...