Chapter 115: When the Snipe and Cm Duel*

  “Fuxie, when we first came across that store clerk the day before yesterday, how strong was she?”

  An Jing thought swiftly as he bent down to inspect the traces of the battle throughout the Little Ochre Mountain shop. At the same time, he asked the Sword Spirit for details he couldn’t personally observe: “Was she at the mid-stage of Qi Refining?”

  “Yes,” the Sword Spirit answered promptly. “She was a qi refiner at the fifth yer of Qi Refining, almost at the sixth. Her strength was a bit weaker than that of the female manager in the back. She had little combat experience and no murderous aura, so I didn’t pay too much attention to her specifics.”

  That was odd. After finishing his inspection, An Jing stood up, his thoughts growing ever more perplexed.

  The store clerk’s strength was not actually weak—being at the fifth yer of Qi Refining in the Tianyuan Realm put her solidly in the core ranks. She could operate all sorts of Magical Artifacts and spirit mechanisms, including rge-scale ones.

  Although the Tianyuan Realm encouraged universal cultivation, most people remained stuck at the Spirit Awakening stage, with Vital Essence Like Threads or Vital Essence Like Rivers, because of limited resources.

  Only a small portion—those with sturdy physiques, sufficient nutrition, and good talent—could reach Vital Essence Like Tides in their youth and attempt to step into Qi Refining.

  Though this female cultivator working as a store clerk was older and had clearly used time to steadily advance her cultivation, she had still reached the fifth yer of Qi Refining, stepping into the “condense spirit and nurture life” stage. That pced her squarely in the mid-tier—neither top nor bottom—and effectively at the threshold of the middle css. With that level of ability, why would she take a job as a simple cashier?

  She must have hidden her cultivation.

  Nor was that the only puzzling thing. With the fifth yer of Qi Refining at her disposal, why hadn’t she used the ‘剑匣’ or the ‘护体玉佩’ from behind the counter in the midst of the chaos?

  If nothing else, shouldn’t she at least have grabbed a Swiftstride Talisman? She even had time to use a Primordial Healing Talisman to save herself!

  On top of that, the clerk’s enthusiasm was quite strange… She had an eye technique capable of discerning his true age, so why had she been so unusually warm to him at the time? Had she misunderstood something?

  Moreover…

  “There are no signs of a struggle,” An Jing murmured. “She was shot by three people at once while totally unguarded. They didn’t even bother to finish her off; they just grabbed whatever they wanted and left.”

  “This is far too strange… Could it have been someone she knew? Or maybe…”

  Too many questions. He couldn’t sort them all out at the moment.

  If someone with deep bck-market experience or a long-time martial-world veteran had seen these scattered details, they might have uncovered a clue or two. But An Jing was ultimately an outsider to this world. Though he felt something was amiss, he couldn’t identify precisely what.

  He merely put on his drone goggles again and muttered, “I just left Hanging Fate Manor and already stepped into the Xuanye Bck Market—why do I feel like I’m always at the center of a crisis?”

  “All of this was foreshadowed long ago. We just stumbled into it without realizing.”

  The Subduing Evil Sword Spirit sighed quietly. “I never thought Celestial Fates would be so troublesome. Then again, if you were more cold-blooded, you really wouldn’t have become entangled.”

  “Character determines destiny, as the ancients said. They were right.”

  Indeed. Had An Jing not saved Huo Qing’s life, his entry into the city would have been postponed. He wouldn’t have met Iron Hand, wouldn’t have gotten his entry permit or bck market pass so promptly, and definitely wouldn’t have become involved in what followed.

  If he hadn’t been provoked by the Fengdu Guards and had chosen to lie low, waiting for a chance to escape, he wouldn’t have crossed paths with the suspect holding that Ancient Relic either.

  “Let’s keep looking.”

  Though he was full of doubts, An Jing wasn’t a detective and had little desire to investigate too deeply.

  Nonetheless, he did need to grasp the shape of the approaching storm. Only then could he use his still-limited strength to stir up more disruption and sabotage those lofty cultivation factions’ supposedly airtight pns.

  He started up the drone once again. The child unit, already tailing the blurry humanoid figure, continued its silent pursuit.

  “Most likely,” he remarked, “someone will intercept them at Little Ochre Mountain’s exit.”

  Sure enough, events pyed out just as An Jing predicted.

  When that vague, mist-shrouded figure—using some illusory haze art to hide himself—arrived at a ventition duct’s exit, he abruptly stopped.

  Blood streamed like a river before him, with heaps of corpses piled everywhere, covering the path underfoot. No matter how well he hid himself, setting foot in that bloody pool would inevitably leave ripples.

  Seeing this, he directly dispelled his art of illusory concealment, scanned the area, and ughed aloud. “My friend, since you’re waiting for me, why keep lurking? Come out.”

  He was a tall, nky man cd in a martial robe so faded from washing that it was nearly white. His face bore scars and weathered creases, with disheveled gray-white hair hanging behind him. He looked as though he had been forged by frontier winds and rugged terrain—his entire presence was like stubborn stone, brimming with unyielding fortitude.

  As though in response, a figure wearing a gold-iron rain cloak, entirely bck from head to toe, stepped out from the dim, blood-stained haze. His face was concealed under an iron trigram mask, making his features unrecognizable.

  If the tall man was a sb of stubborn stone, then this newcomer resembled a vicious specter spawned by the bloodstained, icy wind: eerie, fierce, and bone-chilling.

  Strangely, despite his striking appearance, his spiritual energy was faint and hard to grasp, almost as if he didn’t exist—merely a single reflection with no true substance.

  The tall man’s brow arched, his eyelids twitching. The moment that masked phantom appeared, he felt a powerful killing intent closing in on him, making his joints stiffen and sending a chill into his marrow.

  He ran his cultivation technique through a full cycle in his body to drive out the bone-deep cold. “A trigram ghost? An inquiry spirit? No… neither. So, you really are just here to cut me off and grab my haul.”

  He spoke, yet wasted no time. Just as his right leg stepped forward, his left hand swept back, spping a small case at his waist and sending it flying. In an instant, it vanished without a trace.

  Whoosh—right then, the ghostly figure turned his head sharply, his gaze locking onto the case as it flew. In that very moment, the tall man stomped down, hurtling forward with explosive speed, his attack surging like a raging storm!

  Boom! The floor burst beneath him, debris scattering in all directions. The tall man’s body disappeared in a swirl of dust.

  Wherever he moved, the concrete fractured, the blood-tinged mist billowed, and his seasoned, callused fist ripped through the air and dust, aiming straight at the trigram mask worn by the bck-cd figure!

  A martial artist! So this tall man was actually a Martial Path practitioner—a rarity in the cultivation world of the Tianyuan Realm!

  Confronted by that powerful punch, the bck-clothed man darted backward at once. His body fluttered like a dead leaf in a gale or driftwood on a stormy sea, rising and falling with the shockwave from the martial artist’s blow. Only when he was backed against a wall did he finally raise his arms, bracing them as a shield.

  A muffled boom echoed. The bck-clothed man’s body, pressed against the wall, was driven a full inch into it—he’d been punched right into the wall by a single blow from the martial artist.

  Yet as soon as his power poured into the bck-clothed man, the tall man’s expression shifted. It was like mud sinking into the ocean, all of his strength redirected into the wall. Worse, he felt a piercing, frigid chill ride the receding force of his punch and flow backward into his own body—like an undertow after a wave.

  He instantly gave up on pressing the attack, stepping backward as he retracted his fist in a broad sweep, leaving a trail of chill in the air.

  He circuted his cultivation technique through his entire body, expelling the cold. Immediately, white mist curled around him, and lines of gray frost formed across the veins on his arms.

  “A genuine ghost cultivator!” he said gravely, locking his eyes on the bck-clothed man. “Which side are you on?”

  The other man did not respond. He slid out of the wall’s indentation like a phantom. At some point, he’d produced a serpent-tailed longsword, its bde dancing with pale-blue spiritual energy, reminiscent of a snake’s flicking tongue.

  A crimson spark of spiritual light flickered behind the trigram mask, fixing on the tall man before him.

  (End of Chapter)

  *The full idiom (often rendered as 鹬蚌相争，渔翁得利) transtes to “When the snipe and the cm struggle, the fisherman profits.”