Chapter 97: Chapter 97: What Did You Do?!
Shen Yuan stepped out of the shadows at the mouth of the alley, hands tucked lazily into his sleeves as if he’d simply wandered in to admire the architecture.
"You know," he said, tilting his head at the swaying man, "I’ve heard some pathetic pickup lines in my life, but ’I bathed in your sewage’ might genuinely be a first. You should be proud. Bards will write songs about you. Terrible, terrible songs."
The man’s head snapped toward him, bloodshot eyes struggling to focus. "Who—who the hell are you? This doesn’t concern you, servant!"
"Doesn’t concern me?" Shen Yuan raised an eyebrow, strolling further into the alley with the unhurried gait of a man taking an evening walk rather than approaching an unstable cultivator.
"Ah, you might not know this but..." Shen Yuan paused before him, and with a disgusted look, he continued, "That nasty bath water you drank—the black one—it was mine. I took a bath to wash away my impurities."
"No. No. NO. You are lying! This is impossible!" The man shouted, pointing at Shen Yuan; his hands were trembling, and he dropped the vine gourd in his hand on the ground while looking at it in despair. "I know for a fact that that pipeline came from her room."
Candy let out a shaky breath at the sound of Shen Yuan’s voice; some of the tension left her shoulders.
The moment the man’s attention wavered, drawn fully toward Shen Yuan’s truth, she moved—slipping along the alley wall in a wide arc, putting distance between herself and the swaying wreck of a man.
She ran past him like a blur and hid behind Shen Yuan, one hand gripping the back of his robe like an anchor.
The man’s bloodshot eyes tracked her movements, and something in his expression cracked entirely.
His face was twisted in rage.
"Yeah... as much as I hate to admit it, that was mine. I was in her room all the time." Shen Yuan saw the anger in his eyes and decided to prey on it.
He could not help it.
The man had presented himself on a silver platter before him.
"You—" His voice dropped to a low, trembling snarl; his face shook with anger as he cursed Candy. "You two adulterous couple! I was so blind to have ever fallen for you."
"Do you know who I am? Do you know what I’ve sacrificed—"
"I know you’re about to have a very bad night," Shen Yuan said pleasantly.
The man lunged.
Woosh!
Despite his intoxicated appearance, the man was quick. How could he not? After all, he was a third-stage Qi condensation cultivator.
"Watch out!" Candy screamed in panic when she saw the man only a step away from smashing Shen Yuan’s skull.
But the next moment her eyes widened. The punch landed on the black-haired boy, but it passed right through his body.
Shen Yuan’s body blurred before it dissipated from the man’s sight.
Shen Yuan was simply gone from where he’d been standing, the afterimage of his robe still settling in the air a half-second behind him.
The Vanishing Step carried him past the man’s shoulder without a whisper of sound, without so much as displacing the dust on the ground.
By the time the man’s fist finished its arc through empty air, Shen Yuan was already behind him.
A thin, near-invisible line of steel wire had unspooled from his sleeve in that same instant, catching the dim alley light for only a flicker before it found its mark.
The man went rigid.
Shen Yuan looked at the man with a smile before turning to Candy. "Wait here; I will be right back."
Candy raised her hand as if she had realized what he was about to do, but before she could say anything, Shen Yuan disappeared with the middle-aged man.
The two of them appeared in an alley far away from the Fallen Blossom Pavilion so as not to implicate Candy’s name.
"Wh—" The man looked around with a confused expression, but Shen Yuan tightened the wire around his neck and leaned in from behind.
"You should’ve just paid for a room," Shen Yuan murmured near his ear, his voice utterly calm, almost gentle. "Cheaper. Less humiliating. And you’d still be alive."
While running, he had covered his face with a dark mask in case someone saw his face. He climbed the roof of the shop behind him and clenched his hand into a fist, tightening the wires around his fingers.
Splash!
He did not even look back into the alley. His back was facing towards it while his arms were crossed before his chest.
When he heard the sickening sound of flesh being torn, Shen Yuan closed his eyes to savor the feeling.
And the next second he vanished from the space.
"Hmm?" On the road before the alley, someone stopped and raised their heads. "Was someone standing there just now? I feel like I saw a shadow..."
Right as he was contemplating whether he had been mistaken or not, the man felt something touching his shoes and looked down.
It was blood!
There was a trail of it coming from inside the alley.
"Blood?" The man did not seem scared, just confused. He had seen blood too many times in the demonic sect, so he was not surprised.
Out of curiosity, he went inside the alley, his figure disappearing into the darkness, and what came out was—
"Ahhh!!!!"
A shrill cry of fear and despair.
Followed by a broken man who came stumbling out of the alley and ran away like he was being chased by ghosts, leaving behind bloody footprints.
...
Shen Yuan returned to the alley behind the Fallen Blossom Pavilion like he had never left and saw a panicked black-haired woman pacing around the road.
She was biting the nail of her thumb while looking all panicked.
"What happened?"
Shen Yuan dropped down from the roof behind her and asked casually.
Candy froze before she snapped back and threw herself at Shen Yuan. When the boy thought she was coming in for a hug, she grabbed his collar and shook it.
"What did you do to that man?! D-did you..." She let her voice trail away, leaving empty silence to fill in her question.
Shen Yuan tilted his head and said, "Don’t ask something you don’t want the answer to."
Candy’s face paled when she heard his response. Her hands around his collar loosened as she hoarsely said, "Do you think I care if you killed someone? Do you know who that man was?"
"He was the son of an elder from the outer sect. Elder Feng!" Beads of sweat covered his face as she revealed the horrifying information to Shen Yuan.
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