718 - Assassinate, Assassinate, Assassinate
Chapter 718 - Assassinate, Assassinate, Assassinate
The teahouse was unusually quiet.
Everyone in the Black Demon Pool was accustomed to seeing people around them concealing their looks and cultivations, and so the other guests in the teahouse simply gave Ye Qingyu a casual glance when he entered.
The two waiters, one in blue and the other in red, did not walk away after serving his tea. With a warm smile on their faces, they stood at one side awaiting his order.
Having passed through so many zones, Ye Qingyu certainly did not think that the waiters were being this hospitable simply because there were few guests in the teahouse.
He ordered several common refreshments and handed over a small piece of top-level origin crystal.
The two waiters instantly laughed till they became two stalks of flowers and thanked him loudly. Subsequently, they cheered as they walked toward the backyard.
The shadow of the large hooded top covered Ye Qingyu's face.
He felt somewhat out of sorts after the waiters left.
It had not been easy for him to get to the 12th zone.
Shuang Wuyan had not returned ever since he pursued the killers from [Bloodthorn Hall]. Ye Qingyu had no choice but to proceed alone, and just a short while ago, he encountered a surprise attack.
Although the attackers apparently consisted of only a dozen-odd people, they were clearly a formidable and extremely highly-coordinated group.
During the fight, Ye Qingyu killed seven or eight of them, while the rest gave up and fled.
However, he suffered a small injury.
He had come to the teahouse to rest for a while and heal using his qi.
The open areas of the Black Demon Pool were fraught with danger. If one daringly tried to heal or cultivate in some random corner, a fatal attack or robbery would probably await them. Even Ye Qingyu dared not be negligent in this underground world which seemed peaceful but was actually fraught with killings and danger.
The waiters quickly brought on the refreshments.
As he drank his tea, Ye Qingyu secretly operated the nameless breathing technique to heal himself.
A wisp of faint silver mist curled around his entire body.
Silence in the teahouse.
A beam of cold light abruptly shot up.
Sitting behind Ye Qingyu, an elder, who had kept his head down drinking his tea all this while, suddenly leaped up as quick as lightning without making a sound. With a strangely shaped longsword with a blade that carried a strange dull blue color, he stabbed toward Ye Qingyu's heart from the back.
Quick!
Sudden!
More importantly, this soundless, waveless, and ripple-less strike was utterly impossible to detect.
The longsword pierced completely dead-on into Ye Qingyu's heart position from the back.
Due to his one-hit success, the elder revealed a hint of joy on his creasy face. The next instant, however, this joy turned into astonishment. This was because Ye Qingyu's figure suddenly and rapidly dimmed and disappeared. The sword that stabbed into his back had, in reality, stabbed nothing but air.
At the same time, the elder felt a chill at his waist.
The old killer lowered his head in astonishment, only to discover that a pale silver ice sword had slashed across his waist and divided his body into two.
Ye Qingyu's hand was grasping the hilt of this ice sword.
In the old killer's final moments of sight, he saw that, unbelievably, Ye Qingyu remained seated where he had been as if he had never moved. The elder would never know how the latter had evaded the strike.
White clothes, black hair, and a dark hooded top.
Without turning his head back, Ye Qingyu grasped the ice sword behind him in a casual and elegant posture.
Bam!
The old killer crashed heavily onto a table across the way.
"Dammit..." Sitting at that table, a middle-aged man was drinking tea when he was caught off guard. After tea splattered all over his body, he bellowed, "How dare you affect this elder in your fight, do you know..."
While his words were still lingering in the air.
Ye Qingyu's figure flashed.
Sword light suffused.
The middle-aged man's head had already soared into the air.
A smattering of ice sealed his body such that not a drop of blood spurted.
A young man, who had been drinking together with the middle-aged man, turned pale and revealed a horrified look. While continually drawing back, he said, "Why... you..."
Responding to him was a wisp of sword light.
After a tinge of icy dark red appeared between his brows, the young man collapsed.
Ye Qingyu sheathed his sword.
The ice sword turned into silver mist and dissipated into the void.
Without saying anything, he turned his body and left the teahouse.
No further changes appeared as his figure slowly disappeared from sight.
A long time later.
"Why didn't you act?"
"Bad idea. Third and Fourth Brother were killed right after they revealed a hint of killing intent and before they could act... [Cold Light Sword] Elder Zheng was dead too. They were each killed within a stroke. This young man was long prepared, and his actions are powerful, swift, and unstoppable. I wasn't confident in succeeding."
"Why didn't he have any reaction after drinking the tea?"
"I don't know. He could have taken an antidote in advance, or his body..."
"What should we do?"
"Let's find another opportunity. The huge bounty is enticing to everyone, and many forces in the Black Demon Pool will be eyeing it up. This son of a bitch may be ruthless and uncommonly strong, but he certainly won't live another three days. We just have to find an opportunity."
"Now that you mention it, who exactly is it that has offered such a huge bounty for this little-known son of a bitch?"
"Who knows, he must've offended someone he shouldn't have."
A low-voiced conversation could be heard in the teahouse.
The remaining ten-odd customers got up and left.
These people carefully followed in the direction that Ye Qingyu had gone.
When the blue and red waiters walked in from the backyard and saw the corpses and shattered tea tables on the floor, they did not appear at all shocked, as if they were used to seeing this kind of thing. They lifted the three corpses and threw them under a tea bush in the backyard, then repaired the tables and continued to do business as usual.
In the furthest and most obscure corner of the teahouse.
Two figures had not moved all this time.
"This is how you account to my master? By offering a bounty to kill Ye Qingyu? The fifty kilograms of divine-level origin crystals you offered are but a false promise. If my master doesn't agree to your terms, where are you gonna get them from? When the time comes, the villains of the Black Demon Pool will be hunting you down." There was a chill in Jiang Xiaohan's voice.
However, within this chill was a bone-melting charm.
Huang Tayun thought to himself that this woman was a little strange. She looked as if changes were happening within her body at all times, and these changes were not limited to her strength but also encompassed her physique. Could she be cultivating some sort of strange technique?
Without asking more, he laughed as he spoke in a muffled voice, "There are two reception elders protecting that son of a bitch. These Black Demon Pool people shouldn't be able to kill him. What's more, this son of a bitch is very powerful on his own. This method was intended to test his strength and waste some of his energy. When he's exhausted, it'd naturally be time for us to act. At that time, you can do anything you want to him."
Of course, there was an even deeper idea in Huang Tayun's mind.
But he would not tell Jiang Xiaohan about it.
"No matter what, remember, I want him alive, not dead... Destroy his cultivation, chop off his limbs or whatever, but in any case, make sure he's breathing when you bring him to me."
As soon as she finished speaking, Jiang Xiaohan turned into Black Demon qi and vanished on the spot.
A shocked look appeared on Huang Tayun's face.
"Black Demon Nothingness Technique? This woman... how could she know... the magical ability of the Black Demon Race?"
...
...
Ye Qingyu leaned on his sword as blood trickled down the blade drop by drop.
Surrounding him were twenty to thirty corpses.
He had finally seen the terror of the Black Demon Pool. He felt as if he was a wounded sheep which entered a place where packs of wolves dwelled, the smell of blood from his body attracting their frenzied and relentless assaults.
"Something doesn't seem right. These people are most likely not assassins or killers, why are they so persistent?"
He looked at the corpses with some doubts.
Fifteen minutes ago, these people were mere passersby, but they suddenly attacked once they saw him.
He figured out that this was not a long-premeditated assassination but an impromptu surprise attack. The problem was that he could not quite understand why he suddenly became so obnoxious that people would charge at and try to kill him as soon as they caught sight of him.
He had expended considerable yuan qi in the fight that just passed.
This was already the 13th zone of the Black Demon Pool. Beings which could appear here were all ruthless experts who enjoyed skating on thin ice and trying their luck in Asura's battlefield, and who had been through countless life-and-death fights and thus had incomparably rich fighting experience. Ye Qingyu had to kill thirty-one of them in succession and display unprecedented ferocity and ruthlessness before the experts who surrounded him were scared off.
But Ye Qingyu knew full well that those behind the scenes did not really go far away.
Like jackals hiding in the dark, they were constantly waiting for their prey to show weakness before they opportunistically charged upon it.
"I have to first figure out what exactly is going on."
He felt that the atmosphere was not quite right.
It was as if he had become a target for everyone to hunt down and kill.
After the ice sword in his hand turned into silver mist and dissipated, Ye Qingyu adjusted his breath and continued on his way.
The deeper he ventured, the denser the Black Demon qi in the void was.
The pressure all around him, too, became more and more intense.
Beings below the Heaven Ascension realm would be completely unable to survive here.
As he walked on, Ye Qingyu operated the nameless breathing technique to regulate his breathing and inner yuan, such that he was continuously recovering. If he was doing so in the past, it would take him only several breaths' worth of time to recover from such a condition.
After the time it took for an incense stick to burn off.
He once again encountered a surprise attack.
This time, it took him a full hour to get off the battlefield.
Behind him were several dozen corpses.
"The 14th zone is just ahead. According to the golden pentagonal token, from this zone on it would be the real land of death and chaos..." Puffing heavily, he stopped advancing for a short while.
He tried to find a mountain cave in which he could set up a formation seal and, while hiding in the cave, begin to regulate his inner yuan and adjust his condition.
The situation was way more difficult than he imagined at the start.