Killing Dao Fruit

The sky, which had been gloomy for several days, finally cleared up.

The golden sunlight poured down, making the normally somber Beimang Mountain seem a bit more bright and beautiful.

But Old Man Liu, with a face filled with exhaustion, felt like his heart had fallen into the depths of the winter solstice, cold to the point of nearly suffocating, as he looked at the group of mountain bandits on the mountain road, their faces covered by black cloths, holding steel knives.

Although he was extremely frightened, he was the elder of many families of old and young, women, and children behind him, and at this moment, he could only muster up the courage to step forward and plead,

"Kind sirs, please, show mercy! If you take all our food, several families here won't survive!

Please, have pity on us."

In these hundreds of miles of Beimang Mountain, the section north of Luoyang City was the most crowded with tombs and burial mounds, but other areas, while rugged, were not devoid of people or livestock.

This windy pass was one of the main routes connecting the northern and southern parts of Beimang Mountain.

Although it was very dangerous to pass through Beimang at night, if one only traveled during the day, there wasn't much to worry about from the Wild Ghosts.

This large family from Liu's Village outside Luoyang City couldn't bear the excessive levying by the great lord Luoyang King, so they packed a donkey cart, took their wives and children, and prepared to flee their homeland for a new life in the north of the mountains.

Little did they know, while they were lucky to avoid those "human-shaped ghosts," they could not escape these even more terrifying "ghost-shaped people."

"Bah, you old fool, dare to bargain with us with your sweet talk?

Leave all your belongings, kindly roll back to your old home, and perhaps we'll mercifully spare your miserable lives."

The leader of the mountain bandits shook his steel knife and harshly refused Old Man Liu's plea.

Waving his hand, the second-in-command behind him immediately led the hoodlums to swarm up, attempting to forcibly take the donkey cart that carried all the family's savings.

"Kind sirs, everyone wants fortune when they go out, can we talk this over?

This year the Luoshui River has flooded, the fields are inundated, and the harvest failed. Please leave us something. The adults can bear it, but the children really can't endure this."

A man with a naive and honest face desperately clung to a mountain bandit's clothes and pleaded bitterly.

Behind him, a child, too lean and malnourished to distinguish whether they were a boy or a girl, clung terrified to his leg.

This still did not elicit any mercy from the mountain bandits.

They pushed both the man and the child to the ground.

"Get lost! Do you think I care if you die?"

However, in his panic, the man accidentally pulled off the mountain bandits' black cloth mask.

Seeing the face with a large mole the size of a bean on the nose, the naive man paused slightly, then let out a gasp in surprise,

"You're... Ma San, a house servant of the Luoyang Royal Mansion?!

I recognize you; that day I was building a house for your overseer with fellow villagers, and after the work was done, not only did you not pay us, but you also beat us.

That was money for emergency! My wife did not have money for treatment and died just days later. Wuu wuu wuu..."

Perhaps truly touching a painful sorrow, a grown man actually forgot to get up, with tears dripping down relentlessly.

However,

these villagers, who couldn't read and had never ventured far from home, had no idea that one must never look directly at the true faces of bandits,

let alone directly acknowledge their identity.

Old Man Liu, older and more experienced, immediately felt a dreadful chill in his heart upon seeing this,

"This is bad!"

Indeed, he then saw the bandit leader's expression turn fierce as he coldly commanded,

"These people can't be spared, kill them all!"

The royal mansion's servant, who had his mask pulled off and was somewhat flustered, upon hearing the order, immediately sneered, thrust his knife into the honest man's chest.

Blood immediately splattered the face of the child beside him.

The small, lean child only had time to cry out in agony, "Dad!"

Before the burly servant grabbed him and flung him to the ground like swinging a dry branch, smashing him into a bloody heap.

"Dazhu! Shuanzi!"

This entire family, all closely related within the five degrees of mourning, saw the father and son meet their grisly deaths before they could even mourn; calamity had already befallen them.

The second-in-command moved the fastest, clearly skilled in martial arts and military tactics, far stronger than the mere brute strength of the hoodlums.

He reached out and pulled a girl, just of marriageable age, from behind Old Man Liu.

Ignoring her terrified cries, the second littered her onto the donkey cart, undoing his belt and leering as he appraised her,

"This girl is quite ordinary, but she's young, barely passable for a bite."

In his eyes, these villagers were already as good as dead, and the possessions of the dead were free for the taking.

"Juan'er!"

Old Man Liu, stunned by the brutal deaths of his nephew and grand-nephew, desperately tried to rush forward to save his only daughter but was knocked to the ground by the second-in-command's kick.

Aged and frail, he could no longer muster the strength to rise from the ground but could only cover his chest, weeping and cursing:

"Beasts! Don't you beasts have parents, wives, children, brothers, or sisters? Beasts!"

His outburst was met only with a burst of mocking laughter from the bandits.

The second-in-command, oblivious to the cries, impatiently ripped off the girl's sleeve, revealing her pale, slender arm, and was about to forcefully throw himself on her.

Suddenly, a sharp whooshing sound pierced everyone's ears.

Whoosh—!

Just as a flash of brilliant golden chill appeared in their eyes, the body of the second-in-command suddenly jerked and fell over.

It was a bright steel dart about the length of a palm, with two golden threads running through its ends, that pierced from the back of his head to his forehead, cleanly ending the life of this beast.

Before the villagers and the mountain bandits could regain their senses,

the air seemed to tremble slightly.

The golden ring at the end of the steel dart moved slightly, and it transformed into a golden bee or a silver butterfly, turning into a streak of light that quickly disappeared into the forest beside the mountain path.

"Who is it?!"

"Clever thief!"

"Who dares to meddle in our business?"

The bandits no longer cared about the unarmed, silent villagers and gathered around their leader, facing the forest as if confronting a great enemy.

"It seems a dog cannot change its habit of eating shit; the Yi King lineage of the Great Yan Dynasty is rotten to its core. Let me, 'Thief Cat' Cui Tong, help you all cut it out entirely."

A middle-aged man in mystical black clothing, tall and thin, with a strand of hair hanging over his forehead, strode forward.

It was Wang Yuan, who had replaced Cui Tong's identity with the "Deceit Object: Human Face Painting."

The lineage of the Yi King of Luoyang City seemed to carry venomous blood in its veins from the start.

Starting with the original Yi King, Zhou Yi, he had been the biggest scourge within Luoyang City, with no decent man appearing across generations.

Their wrongdoings were well known, even to a fool in Daling Village.

It was said that even the residences of the Prince of Square City, Princess Tongcheng, Luoyang Prison, and the Confucian temple had been forcibly demolished by the current Yi King to expand the Prince Mansion.

He even outrageously claimed: "Women, whether they bore me or I bore them, and all others are fair game."

Such a villain perpetrating the act of disguising men as bandits to rob people was nothing out of the ordinary.

Before his voice died away,

Wang Yuan's toes touched the ground, and his body shot toward the house servants like an arrow.

The newly established "Thief Cat" Cui Tong, in his prime with substantial experience and higher cultivation in military dao, had nearly reached the second realm.

With his expertise in the Butterfly Soldier Skill, adept at leaping and dodging, he had closed in on them in the blink of an eye.

The bandit leader shouted:

"Form up!"

A dozen men extended their long sabers, instantly forming a hedgehog-like formation.

Two others rolled out from the formation with the Earth Traversing Saber technique, swinging their long-handled sabers like bright wheels of blades, viciously aiming for Wang Yuan's legs.

These bandits were trained under the Luoyang Royal Mansion, naturally skilled in martial arts and military tactics.

Although they practiced the widely spread Martial Guard Tactics of the Great Yan Field, which even a cook in the army could learn, mastering it to a deep level was also formidable.

Moreover, these men, aiding and abetting evil without hesitation, could pose a real challenge even to regular official soldiers.

But, to the current Wang Yuan, they were merely passable.

His body leapt up, spun to avoid the sabers, and with legs whipping out like steel flails, he broke the necks of the two "Earth Traversing Saber" wielders.

With the power circulating inside his body, he flicked his wrist.

A streak of brilliant golden chill shot from his palm, directly targeting the bandit leader within the formation.

It was like a flash of lightning.

Swift to the extreme.

Before the steel dart arrived, the bone-chilling murderous intent in Wang Yuan's eyes had already terrified the bandits into utter despair.

But in the eyes of the villagers behind him, this heaven-sent savior seemed like a peerless war general, stepping right out of a grand drama.

With a lance and a steed, armor-clad and razor-sharp, unstoppable!

In this world as cruel as a ghost's, such a figure probably only exists in dramas, right?