Chapter 85: No Wonder...
“Yes!”
He answered in his heart, feet never pausing, shifting in a flash to stand beside Shi Yanfeng.
“No, no, you can’t kill me!”
Shi Yanfeng, still stunned, screamed in terror. “I am the Shi clan’s prodigy, the next head of the family! If you kill me, the Shi clan won’t let you go! The Shi clan will never let you go!!”
By the end, his voice had grown hoarse.
“I know,” Su Jingxing replied calmly. “You already said it before—there’s no way out for you.”
Shi Yanfeng was momentarily dazed by these words, then his whole body trembled as he pleaded desperately, “I was wrong, I was wrong! I was only joking before, brother—no, sir—no, grandfather! Grandfather, I was wrong! I never meant to kill you! It’s all a misunderstanding, a misunderstanding, grandfather!”
He struggled to climb up and kowtow.
“It doesn’t matter,” Su Jingxing replied indifferently. “Whether it’s a misunderstanding or not makes little difference.”
“Yes, yes, grandfather, you are absolutely right,” Shi Yanfeng forced a smile.
“But there was one thing you said earlier that was quite correct.” Su Jingxing’s voice was tranquil.
Shi Yanfeng froze, his voice trembling, “Gran—”
“That only the dead can keep secrets,” Su Jingxing raised the treasured weapon. “And with you dead, it saves effort for both of us.”
“No! No!”
Shi Yanfeng trembled violently, scrambling backwards on the ground, shrieking in terror, “No, no, I was only joking! You can’t kill me! You—”
Swish!
A wet, slicing sound.
The treasured weapon cut through the air, and a head soared from its shoulders.
[Corpse detected. Collect?]
“Yes!”
Su Jingxing responded internally, sheathing the weapon. He glanced at Du Liangjing, who stood rooted and stupefied, unable to react, and said nothing. With a light push of his toe, he darted toward the courtyard wall, his figure blurred, and vaulted over it, disappearing from sight.
Whoosh—
The night wind, tinged with the scent of blood, swirled through the yard.
Du Liangjing, his face frozen in shock, stood motionless for a moment, then shuddered violently, snapping out of his terror and awe.
“Aaah!”
His legs turned to jelly as he scuttled backward on the ground, scrambling to his feet in a frenzy.
Something terrible had happened—
A disaster beyond reckoning!
Just one glance at Shi Yanfeng’s severed head sent Du Liangjing’s heart pounding as if it would leap from his throat.
Shi Yanfeng, the Shi clan’s prodigy, had been killed in the martial hall. This was a catastrophe!
No one could cover it up, no one could escape responsibility.
Shi Yanfeng was dead, and the Shi clan would certainly go mad, unleashing a bloody storm.
Du Liangjing dared not think further; the very thought made his scalp go numb.
At this moment, only one idea filled his mind: run!
Escape through the night, flee from Qinghe City, out of Changyang Prefecture—the farther the better!
He staggered through the main doors of the martial hall, mind blank except for the urge to flee for his life.
He dived into a car parked by the roadside, started it, and shot off like a rocket toward the city outskirts.
The engine roared, echoing down the street.
On the rooftop of a building beside the martial hall, Su Jingxing watched Du Liangjing’s flight, eyes narrowing.
He had spared him for two reasons: first, Du Liangjing bore him no grudge; second, letting him go would bring trouble to the Shi clan.
Shi Yanfeng was not Shi Yankai; the former’s death would enrage the entire clan.
In their fury, they would investigate, first tracking down Du Liangjing.
Now that Du Liangjing was on the run, the clan would have to hunt him down—a process that could take three or five days, possibly even ten or fifteen if Du Liangjing was clever at hiding.
Su Jingxing didn’t ask for much; making the Shi clan run in circles for six or seven days, reaping nothing but frustration and fury, was enough.
As for whether Du Liangjing would betray him after being caught, Su Jingxing had no concerns.
He had never revealed his face, and even his voice had been deliberately lowered and roughened.
If the Shi clan hoped to trace him based on that, perhaps in their dreams!
...
He remained on the rooftop until nearly dawn, waiting until people entered the White River Martial Hall before leaving and returning to the small courtyard at the foot of the mountain.
He took out the nine cards he had collected and held them in his hand, reading their information.
Soon he understood their contents.
There was a skill card, a true energy card, a bloodline card, and the rest were inner force cards.
The skill card contained a martial art, “Eagle Rending Claw,” just like “Cold Smoke Technique”—both were Shi clan secrets, but only the first half. Su Jingxing glanced at it, then stored it in his palm space.
The true energy card came from Old Bamboo and contained eight years’ worth of cultivation—a decent haul.
The inner force cards, combined, totaled forty years of cultivation.
Su Jingxing stored these as well, waiting until he had accumulated a hundred years’ worth before unlocking and absorbing them all at once, converting them into Stepping Heaven True Energy.
The final bloodline card, unsurprisingly, came from Shi Yanfeng.
Like Shi Yankai’s, it contained the “Triple Yin Candle Blood.”
Yet this time, Su Jingxing sensed that the “Triple Yin Candle Blood” content seemed even greater.
To test this, he retrieved the previous bloodline card and unlocked it, producing a blood bead the size of a soybean, pale as death, lying in his palm.
He then unlocked the card from Shi Yanfeng, gaining a blood bead the size of a longan, equally pallid.
Comparing the two—
It was clear: the bloodline card extracted from Shi Yanfeng’s corpse contained far more “Triple Yin Candle Blood”!
“So this is what made Shi Yanfeng a prodigy?”
Su Jingxing pondered.
The more “Triple Yin Candle Blood” one possessed, the faster the cultivation—easy enough to understand.
He examined the two blood beads for a moment, then stored them in his palm space.
The flaws of the “Triple Yin Candle Blood” left him with no interest in it.
“Hm? Something’s happening?”
Suddenly, Su Jingxing’s senses tingled as he detected an anomaly within his palm storage space.
Focusing his mind within, he encountered a startling sight.
The little wooden sword!
The sword that could not be cut by blades, burned by fire, soaked by water, or rotted by earth—unchanged for decades—was at this moment radiating a faint blue-green light.
He’d seen the sword emit a blue glow before.
But this time, the light was thicker, its range much wider.
It stretched from the little wooden sword all the way to the two blood beads three meters away—and the blood beads...
The blood beads seemed to be subtly rolling toward it, as if drawn!
Su Jingxing was taken aback.
The next moment, he acted on instinct, directing the two blood beads to roll beside the wooden sword.
Then—
With a strange slurping sound, both beads formed from “Triple Yin Candle Blood” were sucked in by the little wooden sword!
Truly absorbed—vanished straight into the body of the sword.
This sword had a spirit!
Its self-awareness was astonishing, almost an instinctual intelligence, now fully revealed and confirmed.
“A spirit weapon?”
A certain concept sprang to Su Jingxing’s mind.
Earthstar had long been home to legendary supreme weapons—spirit weapons!
“I never imagined this little wooden sword was a spirit weapon. No wonder...”
No wonder blades could not cut it, fire could not burn it, water could not wet it, earth could not rot it; for decades, even centuries, it remained unchanged.
Because it was a spirit weapon!