A lot happened in the span of the next dozen seconds.
Shen Mi, the quickest to recover from the shock, lashed out with a side kick aimed at the man's chest. She was the closest to this unforeseen opponent, and engaging in a battle fueled by qi was simply not possible when the distance between the opponents was as short as six feet.
The disciple who had been assaulted by the backlash while trying to send a signal to their Elders jumped to his feet.
Qi Jingchun staggered on all fours while trying to recover from his own backlash. The injury he had suffered wasn't as light as the other fellow. His brain was in disarray. Even though he had recognized the danger they were in, he failed to respond to the situation.
There were six more disciples inside the room. Half of them immediately sank their consciousness inside their meridians, their qi rolling through their body to form cycle after cycle. The other three rushed towards the physical altercation taking place a dozen feet away.
As Shen Mi's powerful kick crashed into the man's chest with a resounding 'THUMP', she felt like she had kicked a rubber dummy. As she was a cultivator whose focus in cultivation was in the mysticism field, the power carried within that kick couldn't perhaps be considered impressive at the peak of the Physique Transformation Realm. However, it was still a kick that could break the ribcage of somebody at the eighth or seventh layer if they took it head-on. Yet, Shen Mi realized that her kick had barely been an annoyance to the man. His body bent backward a little as if neutralizing the force behind her kick. But he straightened up immediately and grabbed her ankle before she could retract her foot. The speed of his movement, reflexes, and the sturdiness of his body provided two sets of data to Shen Mi at that moment.
One: this opponent was at or above the peak of the Physique Transformation Realm himself, and he had some skill in close-quarters combat.
Two: the opponent wasn't in the ninth layer, but he was close to it, and the sturdiness of his physique was a result of focusing on body cultivation.
Neither of the two possible situations boded well for Shen Mi as his opponent. And she got the proof of that first hand as the man's vice-like grip tugged her off balance, forcing her upper body to lean to a side. As fast as lightning, his second move, a kick just as fierce as hers hit her chest.
Shen Mi crashed into her three teammates who had just appeared behind her to assist her in taking the man down. Two of them couldn't avoid her body, while the third disciple was only slowed down by a fraction of a second.
In that fraction of a second, the man followed up his first kick with a second flying kick which the disciple had no way of avoiding.
However, this disciple hadn't come rushing without a reason. He was a well-rounded combatant whose focus lay in martial arts. His body had already gathered a strange momentum during his short sprint, which he channeled into his right hand.
A hand chopping down met a foot spearing forward. The resulting clash forced the stranger to wince, but the power behind his kick wasn't so easily mitigated. The foot still crashed into the disciple's chest, sending him staggering back a couple of steps.
From start to finish, this exchange took less than three seconds, and half of this timespan had been spent on reacting to moves and planning to move.
The man didn't follow up with a third attack. Instead, just as Shen Mi had feared from the start, he grabbed the unconscious Leng Qing's face.
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"One of my fingers is all it would take to take this young man's life," he spoke in a cold tone. "And I'm sure I don't need to explain what might make me move my finger."
The two disciples who were about to take their martial brother's place as combatants froze.
Shen Mi, having just gotten up from the floor, glanced at her other three teammates who had been channeling their qi to make use of their cultivation techniques.
However, all three of them opened their eyes, face pale. From four feet away Qi Jingchun answered the unasked question in her heart.
"All qi inside this cabin has become subject to a foreign control. Nobody can resort to cultivation techniques here right now."
From the front room, two figures rushed in, only to freeze at the entrance of the room as they took in the shocking picture inside the room. Almost simultaneously, the scene repeated itself at the opposite end of the room where the disciples who had gone to examine the kitchen stood in stunned silence.
At one end of the room, one man stood beside an unconscious boy on a recliner, his hand covering the boy's skull in a threatening manner. In front of them was a recently overturned table. The wooden floor around the table had been burnt pitch-black by acidic poison. This damaged area seemed to be the line separating the two from the rest of the room which held thirteen cultivators, none below the impressive eighth layer of the Physique Transformation Realm. Yet at the moment, they looked as helpless as doormats.
The stranger, an adult man who was definitely not a disciple of their generation, surveyed all thirteen of his opponents without a trace of fear on his face.
"Not quite how I was expecting this to go. You can't trust anybody these days...not even those left with no choice but to obey orders, tsk tsk tsk..."
Invigorated by the barely repressed fury in his voice, Shen Mi chose to backtrack her thoughts a bit and asked, "Senior...why are you attacking us juniors? Is this a feud between your sect and ours? Surely, an Elder like you would not dishonor himself by involving himself in a scuffle with junior disciples such as us?"
A gaze devoid of emotions fell on Shen Mi's face. The man replied after a second of silent contemplation.
"A scuffle? This is not a scuffle. This is...a wipeout."
Shen Mi's eyes widened in disbelief. She had seen her fair share of bullies. She had met more than a few shameless opponents. But she had never faced an Elder who would beat up some rookie disciples and call it a wipeout so proudly!
The man seemed to have gleaned her outrage. With a mocking smile, he added, "Not the kind of wipeout you're familiar with, though. It is a shame that your defensive maneuver is so meticulous. If you hadn't stripped me of my ability to control qi, I would have made this painless for you in order to not leave a trace. Now...you're just forcing me to hurt you."
Alarm bells went off inside Shen Mi's brain. Several factors jumped out, forming clues that trapped her inside a maze of confusion.
They had no idea why everyone inside the cabin had been forcibly dispossessed of their qi! Until now, she had assumed this stranger was behind the obstacle! But if even he was a mere victim...who was in control?
Then again, why did this strange Elder sneak into their sect in the first place? What was inside Leng Qing's cabin that he wanted? Judging by his actions...could his target be Leng Qing himself?
And the person who had practically set the stage for this entire confrontation...what relationship did that Han Xuhan have with this Elder? Could he be from the Crimson Snow Sect too?
Yet she was not given the time to contemplate the possible conclusions to these clues, because the man holding Leng Qing hostage suddenly dragged out a set of long needles from his sleeve which he threw at them indiscriminately.
Four disciples were not fortunate or agile enough to dodge in time. Three of them had comparatively weak physical constitutions. The needles that struck them sank into their flesh by an inch or more. The other disciple, the one who had already exchanged blows with the Elder, had used the familiar chopping technique to slap the needle away just as it was about to plunge into his eyeball.
Shen Mi and the other eight disciples were relatively further away. Their enhanced reflexes allowed them to move away or use something to deflect the needles hurled at them.
To their horror, barely had the needles they had avoided fallen on the floor when another set mysteriously appeared in the man's palm.
Another barrage later, the number of disciples untouched by the needles was reduced to six.
At this moment, the first disciple to have been hit by a needle, the dizzy Qi Jingchun, showed them why they needed to avoid being hit.
Just like Leng Qing, his body went limp, falling face first on the floor. Following him, more bodies fell, but those standing had little opportunity to care. Because the number of needles this man had hidden inside his sleeves was turning out to be impossibly high.
Three of the four walls of the room were completely riddled with needles. It was a testament to how powerful and fast this man's skillfulness was in this type of combat. Barely a dozen seconds had passed and he had used nothing but his own hands and feet to suppress thirteen top-grade disciples of a sect into cowering behind furniture.
It wasn't that these disciples didn't know how to use weapons themselves. But locked inside a room with a man whose physical constitution was certainly better than any of them, they hadn't even had the chance to draw their weapons. If Leng Qing's body wasn't in the way, perhaps they could have retaliated with powerful martial skills. But this entire time, the man hadn't slackened his grip over the boy's face.
Once the man realized that none of them would come out from the safe covers they had chosen to take using the sturdy furniture of the room, he began to shoot lengthier, heavier needles.
Shen Mi had been 'hiding' behind the door to the front room. A needle smashed through that three-inch-thick slab of rockshard wood and stapled her shoulder to the door.
The last thing she heard before losing track of her body and mind was a victorious, snide laugh, followed by a surprised yelp.