[POV: Sun Jian]
I spat out a mouthful of blood, staining the patch of grass beneath me red.
A cut had opened across my forehead. It was not particularly deep, yet the blood gushed freely, running down the side of my face and dripping onto my sleeve when I tried to wipe it away. Several bruises throbbed across my body as well, reminders of the beating I had endured before finally breaking through their encirclement. I planted one hand against the tree and leaned against its trunk, forcing myself to catch my breath while circulating my qi properly through my meridians.
I had gotten rusty. Two years of running had done that to me. Two years of suppressing my spiritual pressure and disguising myself as an ordinary mortal had dulled the instincts I once possessed as a general. I could no longer afford to fight with the same recklessness I had in the past. I slowly slid down against the tree, conserving what little energy I had left. Running was no longer an option. They had already deployed a net around me. Even if I somehow managed to break through their encirclement again, fleeing now would only burn through the energy I desperately needed to survive.
Instead, I focused inward.
My qi converged around my core as I burned away the poison that had entered my system. It was not particularly potent, but after everything I had endured, even a small amount was troublesome.
"How the mighty have fallen."
The voice came from directly above me. When I raised my head, I saw a masked man standing upon one of the tree's branches, dressed entirely in dark clothing. A purple rope was tied around his waist, its color standing out against his otherwise muted attire.
"The young general of the Great Feng, reduced to this state and standing on the verge of death?" he continued, his eyes curving behind the mask. "What a pity. Still, I must applaud you. It was wise of you to suppress your cultivation and hide yourself among mortals for so long. Unfortunately, your time running has come to an end. We have finally caught you."
I narrowed my eyes. There was almost no spiritual pressure coming from him. That told me enough. The foundation of stealth techniques was the ability to completely suppress one's spiritual pressure and killing intent. At the highest levels, however, this suppression could interfere with the practitioner's ability to express qi with maximum potency. That hardly mattered to assassins. Their combat philosophy revolved around striking from a position their opponent could not detect and ending the fight with a single decisive blow. They did not need prolonged exchanges. If their own cultivation or qi output was insufficient to finish the opponent immediately, they simply compensated with equipment.
Poisoned weapons were one of the simplest solutions.
"You are a lousy assassin, you know that?" Despite my situation, I found myself smiling. "Who even are you?" I swung my hand, coating it in sword qi as I tried to gauge his cultivation.
The assassin blurred.
In the next instant, he appeared several steps away from me. I immediately withdrew my qi from my hand and redirected it toward my feet. My figure flashed. I appeared before him and thrust my hand forward like a sword, only to hit nothing. My fingers pierced only an afterimage. The assassin had already appeared behind me. I turned around slowly.
"I don't know about mighty or fallen," I said, "but my country certainly seems to have fallen low enough to hire assassins like you."
The man laughed.
"Ha ha ha ha~!"
His laughter echoed through the forest, then it stopped. A terrifying killing intent erupted from his body, indicating that he must've killed a lot. At the same time, he deliberately released his spiritual pressure. It was at the Sixth Tier.
My expression became serious.
"How about you tell me where the girl is?" asked the man.
I lowered my center of gravity and entered a proper stance. At the edge of my spiritual senses, I detected several hidden presences surrounding us. There were more assassins.
"How about no?" I answered.
The man's eyes narrowed into a smirk. "Just surrender. Give me the girl, and I'll let you live. Hell, I'll even invite you to join my organization for the sake of your skills. We can always use more muscle." He spread his arms as though extending a generous offer to an old friend. "You should know that the Great Feng has hired the three greatest assassin organizations on the continent to take you down. They won't be as merciful as I am. They won't give you an opportunity to walk away. Come on. You know you want to live. You want to survive. Join my Purple Rope Hall. Give me the girl, and we can become friends. Don't let my sincerity go to waste. There is a reason I went so far as to reveal my face to you and personally extend this offer."
His voice became colder.
"Don't die a dog's death, young general. You still have a future."
Purple Rope Hall? I had never heard of it before. That meant one of two things. Either the organization was new, or it operated far beyond this region. Considering every assassin I had exchanged blows with so far had been at the Fourth Tier, with not a single Fifth Tier practitioner among them, I leaned toward the former. A Fifth Tier cultivator was practically the baseline for an organization that wished to compete for influence, whether that organization was a sect, a kingdom, or some other faction.
Yet there was something that bothered me.
Their equipment.
Every assassin was well-equipped, and none of their movements suggested they lacked resources. Whoever stood behind this Purple Rope Hall possessed genuine wealth. That meant the organization itself could not be underestimated. While it was lacking in some areas, there was no reason for me to let my guard down. Still, if I looked at the situation objectively, there was only one person here who truly threatened my chances of escape. If I could kill the man standing before me, the encirclement would lose its head. The remaining assassins were troublesome, but they were not impossible to deal with.
I slowly tightened my fist. My body hurt. My qi was almost depleted. I was surrounded, yet none of that changed who I was. I had once stood upon battlefields beneath banners soaked in blood. I had faced armies that outnumbered my own and drawn my sword for the sake of the country I had sworn to serve.
"Remember this name well."
My sword qi surged around my arm as I took a step forward.
"I am Sun Jian, General of the Great Feng. So long as this breath remains within my lungs and this blood still flows through my veins, I shall wield my sword until the very end. For as long as the princess I serve still walks beneath these heavens, I shall slay every enemy who dares raise a blade against her, even if I must crawl through hell itself to do it."
“Fancy words,” the assassin sneered. “But since you’ve given me your name, it is only good manners that I tell you mine.”
The moment he finished speaking, he blurred into motion. His speed was even greater than before. He appeared directly in front of me and planted his foot toward my torso. I barely managed to cross both arms in front of my body.
“I am Feng Ping of Calm Winds.”
His kick slammed into my guard. The impact sent a tremor through my entire body. I gritted my teeth and drove one foot into the ground, absorbing the force instead of allowing myself to be thrown backward. Still, Feng? Did he really just say Feng? My thoughts raced for an instant. There were many people in the Great Feng who carried that surname, but hearing it from an assassin was enough to make me suspicious. I could not afford to dwell on it, however.
I drew back one arm, coating it in sword qi, and slashed toward his leg.
Feng Ping vanished and appeared at my side instead, his leg whipping toward me once more. This time, sword qi covered his foot, compressed so densely that I could feel its sharpness before it even reached me.
“The old general would have liked you by his side,” Feng Ping said, almost disappointedly.
I barely blocked the kick. The force sent me flying. I twisted my body in midair, forcing my lower half to respond despite the pain. My soles scraped violently against the ground as I forcibly dragged myself back into balance.
Feng Ping was masterfully embodying the essence of wind.
Sixth Tier—Essence Gathering.
Once a cultivator reached this realm, comprehending and embodying an elemental essence was one of the fundamental paths toward greater strength. Feng Ping had clearly walked that path far enough to make the wind itself seem like an extension of his body.
The Fourth Tier assassins around us immediately prepared to pounce, but Feng Ping's shout stopped them. “He’s mine!” He said. "Don't touch him! The Sword General's head is mine!"
I flickered to the left.
A blade of wind qi tore through the space where my head had been an instant ago. Feng Ping had somehow appeared above me, his leg extended as another crescent of wind descended from his kick. I was not confident in taking the battle into the air, since that was Feng Ping's territory. My warrior's instincts screamed at me to stay on the ground. I zigzagged through the forest. Invisible projectiles flew past me, guided by nothing more than Feng Ping's gaze. I could not see them, but I could feel the disturbances they created in the surrounding air. When I twisted, one passed beside my cheek. When I ducked beneath another, a third came from my blind spot.
I threw myself into a roll, feeling the attack tear through the air above me. I needed something, or anything. My fingers suddenly snapped around a blade of grass. I coated it in sword qi. The next barrage came. I flicked my wrist. The blade of grass moved like a sword. One projectile was deflected, then another, and another. I continued parrying the invisible wind blades, redirecting their trajectories toward the surrounding assassins. The attacks did not kill them, but that was not my intention. Chaos erupted. The carefully constructed encirclement was disrupted for a single moment.
That was enough.
I ran. I poured what little qi I could spare into my legs and broke through the opening, but Feng Ping was already there. He swept one leg through the air. A massive scythe of wind manifested before me. It carved through the trees and tore open the earth, leaving destruction in its wake. I stopped, expecting this. I had finally found my opening. Feng Ping was beginning to exert himself, clearly reluctant to let the chance to 'duel' me go away. He would not unleash something like this unless he believed I was genuinely about to escape.
“You present yourself like an assassin, but you are not one," I criticized him, holding nothing back. "This is a flaw I shall gladly take advantage of." I suddenly rushed toward one of the nearby assassins. He was caught off guard. My palm struck his chest.
“Guh!” cried the assassin.
I sent him flying directly toward Feng Ping with that palm strike, using the assassin to block the wind projectile that Feng Ping launched at that exact moment. However, the assassin managed to get a lick in. His blade flashed. Pain exploded across my throat. The cut was shallow, but blood immediately spilled down my neck. I ignored it. My fingers flicked. The blade of grass shot toward the assassin I had just tossed, angled in a way that it would pierce and fly directly at Feng Ping.
At that exact moment, Feng Ping's wind projectile arrived. The assassin's body exploded. Blood and flesh were scattered through the air. I ran toward the gore. My dynamic vision tracked every fragment of the perished assassin, from every drop of blood to the chunks of meat. My blade of grass was still on play, covered by the blood and gore.
My body was exhausted, and my qi was nearly depleted.
I had no business attempting something this reckless, but I had been a soldier long before I became a cultivator. The battlefield had taught me that the most dangerous moments were often the ones where everyone believed the outcome had already been decided, so I leaped. My feet landed upon the scattered remains mid-air for the briefest instant before I pushed myself upward again, then again. I ascended through the veil of gore like a dragon climbing toward the heavens, using the blood, flesh, and debris to conceal my movements.
At the same time, I sent a sound transmission directly toward Feng Ping to rattle him.
“You fight like a warrior. Someone who has seen the battlefield, just as I have. Someone who understands that unexpected situations are the norm rather than the exception. Even your mindset is that of a warrior. I don't know what brought you here, nor why you possess the Feng name.”
I grabbed a fragment of bone from the gore as I surged beyond the bloody veil.
“But I will destroy you.”
A cultivator's physical abilities improved with every rise in tier, yet the results were never identical. Everything depended on the foundation established during the First and Second Tiers. Since childhood, I had possessed a strong body and a firm mind. Those traits had become the foundation upon which I walked the path of a warrior. I rushed beyond the veil of gore. Feng Ping's eyes widened. He had apparently expected me to remain on the ground. Instead, I was coming straight at him in the air, his territory. He drew a bladed fan. The weapon snapped open with a metallic sound. The blade of grass I threw earlier finally struck.
Feng Ping parried it, surprised by its sudden appearance.
“AAAAAAGH~!”
I unleashed my war cry through the sound transmission, earning a surprised and pained gasp as blood leaked from his ears. It was the cry of the warrior I had always wanted to become. It was the ideal I had chased since my youth and tried to embody every time I stepped onto a battlefield.
“I AM THE SWORD!”
My right hand tightened around the bone fragment, expressing the essence I mastered through it.
“AND YOU ARE THE FLESH!”
Feng Ping moved. His bladed fan flashed. Pain erupted through my body. My left arm fell away. He had severed it cleanly, yet my right hand continued forward. I drove the femur into his skull with everything I had.
"I AM THE ESSENCE OF THE SWORD!"
The impact connected. Feng Ping was sent tumbling away. I, meanwhile, fell. There was no elegance to my landing. I slammed into the ground and rolled several times before finally coming to a stop. My qi was exhausted. My body was broken. Blood poured from the stump of my arm.
My vision blurred, yet I laughed.
“Ha ha ha ha ha~!”
I could still fight. I was still alive. That was enough. I had to live. No matter how short that life might be, I had to remain by the princess's side. I could not abandon her, especially not now and not after everything. The remaining assassins converged upon me. Their weapons were drawn, and their killing intent filled the forest. I looked at them through my blurred vision. My hand slowly moved toward my core. There was one final option. I could forcibly activate my core and sacrifice my cultivation, my foundation, and even my remaining life force.
If I did that, I might be able to escape.
I was just about to make the decision when a gigantic shadow passed over me. I froze. When I looked upward, I saw a massive winged beast descend from the heavens. It possessed the head of an eagle, the body of a lion, and enormous wings that seemed capable of blotting out the sky.
What kind of monster was this?
Before I could even wonder why such a creature had appeared here, its enormous talons seized my body. I was lifted from the ground. The forest rapidly shrank beneath me.
“WAIT—”
My voice barely escaped my throat. The beast beat its wings, then it shot toward the heavens. A majestic cry erupted from its throat, reverberating through the entire forest.
“SKRAAAAAAAAH!”
The cry carried an indescribable majesty. It was the cry of a sovereign beast proclaiming its dominion over the skies. The assassins below became distant figures. Feng Ping's corpse became nothing more than a blur. The ground disappeared beneath the clouds. I struggled to keep my eyes open. It seemed I had pushed myself too far. In fact, far beyond my limits. My body finally refused to obey me. My vision darkened. The last thought that crossed my mind was surprisingly simple.
'I hope the princess is safe.'
Finally, I lost consciousness.