Chapter 302: Chapter 238: General Li’s Arrival, Ye Daoyuan’s Decision
The night wind carried a damp, salty scent as it swept through the ravaged street.
Under the streetlight, the severed head in its silver mask looked especially ghastly. The blood at the neck had long since congealed into dark red patches.
The silence was terrifying, so profound that even the hum of distant neon lights seemed audible.
The Garrison Army soldiers held their guns, but didn’t know where to aim.
The young man who had saved them from the deathly pressure was now crouching by the headless corpse, unceremoniously pulling the Storage Ring off the body’s hand and stuffing it into his own pocket.
His movements were so practiced it was almost painful to watch.
VMMMM—
A deep engine roar came from the sky. Three Array-Breaking Level heavy assault craft, painted pitch-black, pierced the night sky and hovered above the city block.
Massive searchlight beams shone down, illuminating this chaotic scene like daylight.
The cabin door opened, and a stalwart figure leaped directly from twenty meters up.
BOOM!
The concrete ground spiderwebbed with cracks from the impact. General Li Tiecheng, dressed in dark green combat fatigues, wore stars on his shoulders that gleamed brightly in the light.
He strode over, radiating an Evil Qi even more potent than that of the Evil Cult Grandmaster moments before.
The surrounding soldiers snapped to attention and saluted.
Li Tiecheng didn’t even glance at them. His gaze was locked firmly on Han Feng, then it shifted to the headless corpse.
Even this Iron-blooded General, a man who had seen it all, felt his eyelid twitch.
"Dead?"
It was a pointless question.
"As dead as it gets."
Han Feng patted the dust from his pant leg. His face was as pale as a sheet of paper, but he stood ramrod straight. "I was going to take him alive, but I couldn’t hold back."
Li Tiecheng’s mouth twitched.
’Couldn’t hold back?’
’That was a Tier Four in the Divine Containment Realm!’
’Even if he was a watered-down version pumped up with drugs by the Evil Cult, he was still a bona fide Grandmaster!’
’And you, a little punk at the Meridian Passage Realm, lopped his head off with one strike and you say you couldn’t hold back?’
"This is the Jinyuan Special Steel building."
Li Tiecheng pointed to the pitch-black building next to them, his voice tight. "Where are the people?"
"Probably long gone."
Han Feng pointed to the roof. "This guy was just a pawn left behind to cover their retreat. He was just here to be a nuisance."
Li Tiecheng waved his hand.
Two squads of fully armed special-ops soldiers behind him charged into the building like a pack of wolves.
Less than five minutes later, a report came through the communicator:
"Report, General. The building has been cleared.
All office equipment has been physically destroyed. The underground vault is empty. We found no valuable intelligence. It’s a shell company."
Li Tiecheng wasn’t surprised by this at all.
If those gutter rats from the Blood Feeding Sect were that easy to catch, they would’ve been wiped out ages ago.
He turned his head and looked at the barely-standing Han Feng, his expression complicated.
"You kid..."
Li Tiecheng wanted to say something, but he didn’t know where to start.
He had sensed the energy fluctuation from that last sword strike all the way from the command center.
That ultimate Sharpness... it wasn’t a power that should exist in the mortal world. It was more like... a fundamental rule.
"Talent."
Han Feng grinned, revealing a set of white teeth, but the smile was a bit weak.
"You know, General, my Divine Soul mutated. It just happens to counter him."
"Counter him my ass."
Li Tiecheng glared at him, pulled a pale-gold injector from his pocket, and tossed it over.
"Military-grade High-Energy Recovery Liquid. Don’t die here. It’s bad luck."
Han Feng caught it and, without a second thought, stabbed it into his neck.
A warm current instantly spread through his body. Although his depleted meridians still stung, the dizzy spell that threatened to make him pass out had faded considerably.
"Thanks, General."
"Don’t thank me. That thing costs fifty thousand Contribution Points a pop. I’m deducting it from your allowance next month."
Li Tiecheng snorted coldly. "Alright, leave this to me. Get your ass back to the university.
And stay put for a while. It’ll save me the trouble of collecting your corpse."
Han Feng nodded, not trying to act tough.
He didn’t have a single drop of Sword Essence left in his body, and his Spiritual Power was severely overdrawn.
Right now, any random auntie with a kitchen knife could take him down.
Surrounded by the worshipful gazes of Zhou Ming and the others, Han Feng slipped into the off-road vehicle.
The convoy slowly started up, heading for East Sea Martial Arts University.
Only after the taillights disappeared into the night did the hard expression on Li Tiecheng’s face crumble.
He walked over to the corpse, squatted down, and sucked in a sharp breath as he looked at the cut, which was as smooth as a mirror.
"Goddamn... what a monster."
...
Tonight, no one in East Sea City would be sleeping.
The news that Han Feng had slain a Tier Four Grandmaster in the street was simply impossible to suppress.
Even without an official announcement, hundreds, if not thousands, of pairs of eyes had seen it clearly.
Coupled with the speed of the modern internet, a blurry video of the beheading had already gone viral on various private forums in less than half an hour.
「Celestial Craft Group, No. 3 Research Institute.」
Although it was late at night, the lights were all on.
In the office of the Shadow project team, the atmosphere was suffocatingly tense.
Engineer Ma held his coffee cup, his hands trembling as if he had Parkinson’s. He didn’t even react when the scalding coffee spilled onto his lap.
Dr. Qian sat in his chair, his face ashen, staring blankly at the screen in front of him.
On the screen, the moment the black-robed man’s head flew into the air was playing on a loop.
"That was... a Tier Four, right?"
Engineer Ma’s voice was on the verge of tears. "Dr. Qian, you’re worldly, you’ve seen a lot... that’s special effects, right?"
Dr. Qian swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing with difficulty.
"I wish it were special effects, too. But that was a live feed... Besides, that was a Blood Feeding Sect Grandmaster. You can’t fake that kind of pressure."
The two looked at each other, both seeing the terror in the other’s eyes.
They had previously followed Professor Wu Zhen in tripping up Han Feng, playing games of ’death by a thousand cuts,’ wanting to see the young advisor make a fool of himself.
Now, it seemed the only reason he hadn’t split them in two with a single strike was that he didn’t want to get his hands dirty.
"From now on..."
Dr. Qian tremblingly organized the documents on his desk, even using a ruler to align them perfectly. "From now on, if Advisor Han says a lump of coal is white, then it’s white."
In the corner, Li Mo, the project team’s new administrative supervisor, sat quietly at his workstation.
He wore gold-rimmed glasses and looked gentle and refined as he focused on the documents before him.
No one noticed that the knuckles of the hand holding his pen had turned white.
’Tier Four...’
Li Mo chewed on those two words in his mind until they were dust.
He was a high-level pawn planted by the Observer. He thought his assessment of Han Feng was already high enough, but he had still underestimated this variable.
’That was a Tier Four Grandmaster!’
’Even if he was created with an Evil Technique and had an unstable Divine Soul, he was still a genuine high-dimensional life form.’
’On what grounds could a kid who had just reached the Meridian Passage Realm pull that off?’
’Unless... he has something of an even higher dimension on him.’
Li Mo felt a chill shoot up from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.
He thought about the ’elimination plan’ he had previously formulated. Looking back at it now, it was like trying to provoke a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a water pistol.
’Thankfully, thankfully that idiot made his move early.’
Li Mo took a deep breath and adjusted his glasses.
He picked up a stack of blueprints beside him—the engine improvement plan for the X-01 Prototype.
He picked up a pen and began to make notes on them with extreme earnestness, even thoughtfully adding a few suggestions for optimization.
’From this day forward, he, Li Mo, would be Han Feng’s most loyal subordinate, his most diligent employee.’
’As for his mission, his infiltration...’
’To hell with all that. Isn’t it good to be alive?’
...
「East Sea Fortress City, Central Council Building.」
In front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the top-floor office, Speaker Ye Daoyuan stood with his hands behind his back.
Outside the window were the brilliant lights of the entire city, while on the holographic screen behind him, a slightly blurry photo was frozen.
In the photo, a head wearing a silver mask was suspended in mid-air, the cut at its neck so smooth it seemed unreal.
Below it was a line of top-secret text in red:
[TARGET CONFIRMED: BLOOD FEEDING SECT TIER FOUR GUARDIAN ’GHOST FACE’. KILL CONFIRMED BY: EAST SEA MARTIAL ARTS UNIVERSITY A LEVEL STUDENT, HAN FENG.]
"Old Ye, are you sure we don’t need to revise this kid’s file again?"
On the sofa, Councilman Lin Guodong took off his glasses and rubbed his throbbing temples.
"Even though that Ghost Face was a watered-down Grandmaster created by devouring Divine Souls, with a foundation rotten to the core, he was still a Tier Four."
"Faced with the pressure of a Tier Four’s Divine Soul, forget a Meridian Passage Realm—even a Martial Artist who has just reached Enlightenment should have been on his knees pissing his pants."
Lin Guodong pointed at the screen, his tone filled with disbelief. "And the result? Han Feng withstood the pressure and one-shotted the guy. Is he even human?"
Ye Daoyuan turned around. His face, usually an unreadable mask, now held a faint, enigmatic smile.
"What does the data analysis department say?"
"What can they say? Those analysts are still arguing about it."
Lin Guodong spread his hands. "One faction believes Han Feng has some kind of High Tier Secret Treasure that specifically targets the Divine Soul.
The other faction thinks the kid himself is a monster in human skin, that his Spiritual Power has mutated to an absurd degree."
"But they are unified on the conclusion."
Lin Guodong paused, his expression turning serious. "Han Feng’s strike didn’t involve any large-scale thermal weapons.
It was a pure, rule-level kill.
In other words, while still in the Meridian Passage Realm, he has already mastered a core method capable of threatening the life of a Grandmaster."
A brief silence fell over the office.
In this High Martial World, where great power resides within the individual, fighting above one’s level is common. But killing someone two entire major realms higher is practically a fairy tale.
"This is a good thing."
Ye Daoyuan walked to his desk, his fingers tapping lightly on the surface.
"Since the launch of Project Torch, those old geezers in the Inner City have been cooperating on the surface, but their little games behind the scenes have never stopped.
Withholding supplies, delaying personnel transfers... they’re all testing our bottom line."
"Now, things are different." Ye Daoyuan pointed to the photo on the screen. "This one strike from Han Feng is a hundred times more effective than us pounding the table and cursing them out in meetings."
Lin Guodong said thoughtfully, "You mean, leverage the situation?"
"We don’t need to do the leveraging."
Ye Daoyuan smiled. "That kid is smart. Why do you think he put that beheading on public display? You really think he’s some homicidal maniac?"
"He’s establishing his dominance.
He’s telling everyone that it doesn’t matter which financial group is backing you, nor how strong your connections are.
If you dare to stand in his way, what happened to that Tier Four Grandmaster will be your fate."
Ye Daoyuan picked up the red phone on his desk and dialed a number.
"Pass down my order. The details regarding Han Feng’s kill on the Grandmaster are to be classified as SSS Level top secret. No leaks will be tolerated.
However, as for the result—that he killed a Grandmaster... we will not deny it, nor will we dispel the rumors."
Hanging up the phone, the smile in Ye Daoyuan’s eyes deepened.
"Sometimes, the fear of the unknown is the best security system."
...
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