With an unnecessarily formal bow, Gao Long backed away from Ren and Shao. He began walking down the road back toward the Lesser Treasure Hall, and the black cloth of his hakama disappeared after a few seconds.

Xiahou Ren sighed deeply, and he returned his knife to a hidden sheath under his sleeve once Gao Long was gone. Seeing Ren’s concern, Shao looked at him out of the corner of his eye and asked, “What are you thinking, Ren? Do you think we’ll have to kill him?”

Ren laughed before responding. “That’s what I like about you, Yang Shao. You always cut right to the heart of the issue. Though I appreciate your enthusiasm, our first order of business is to get rid of the evidence.”

“What do you mean?” Shao asked.

“Dong Bai sent these goons after us. If someone finds them dead on the side of the street, he’ll know we did it. We need to bury them.”

“Oh, I see,” Shao said as Ren leaned over one of the corpses and retrieved a short-handle shovel from the man’s hip.

Shao spotted another shovel being carried by a nearby corpse, so he grabbed it and tried to unfasten the knotted leather strap attaching the shovel to the belt. After more than ten seconds of effort, he couldn’t untie the knot, so he bit into the leather with his teeth and tore the leather in half.

“It’s funny, don’t you think?” Ren asked.

“What?”

“They planned to kill and bury us, and now we’re doing the same to them.”

“That’s how it is,” Shao said. His voice took on a serious tone as Shao remembered the massacre that took place at his home village.

Shao and Ren began digging a shallow grave on the side of the road. Once the hole was at their knees, Ren began transporting the corpses of the lower-realm Lianqi that were killed by him and Gao Long. When they were done, ten bodies laid in a pile at the bottom of a shallow grave, and Xiahou Ren began looting their pockets. He came away with a few small objects that Shao couldn’t see before he gestured for Shao to begin piling dirt on the corpses.

From start to end, the half-assed funeral took less than thirty minutes for them to complete. Shao thought back to the demonic cultivators and angrily recalled that this small effort was more respect than those villains paid to his friends and family.

“What now?” Shao asked as he looked down at the uneven dirt patch that served as the only evidence that ten people ever existed. Ren had insisted that they bury the shovels as well, so they had to use their hands to refill the grave.

“Now we go to the North Gate and pretend that we didn’t just kill ten people.”

“Easy enough,” Shao said, shrugging.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

Back at Bluecrest Village, the blood on his hands would have weighed on him heavily. If the people resting in that shallow grave had been his neighbors, he wouldn’t have been able to sleep well for a month. Eventually, the guilt would have driven him to confess his sins.

Here, in Shigong Temple, Shao felt no guilt for killing the lower-realm cultivators. They attacked him first, and very few people would care if they knew Shao killed those people. Murder was a fact of life in the world of cultivation, after all.

As they walked to the North Gate, Shao examined his own left hand. The pinky and ring finger had been severed where Shen Guanzhong cut him. Those lost fingers wouldn’t affect his ability to grip a sword or form a fist, so Shao wasn’t particularly bothered by that minor maiming. In Shao’s mind, it only made sense. A wolf didn’t complain when it lost its tail.

When the North Gate came into view, the two cultivators could see that only a handful of people were gathered by the gate. Shao began to worry that something had gone wrong in that lesser trial, so he quickened his pace to reach the gate faster.

Shao quickly looked around, though he did not see anyone he recognized. He approached a young man dressed in the robes of the Shen Clan and asked, “What happened? There was a group of three, a foreigner and two women. What happened to them?”

“Greetings, honored disciple,” the cultivator said, bowing deeply. Shao had to stop himself from kicking the Shen man in anger. “I am Shen…”

“I don’t care who you are,” Shao growled. “Foreigner, two women. What happened to them?”

“Excuse me,” the Shen man said automatically, muttering to buy himself a second to think. “If I remember correctly, a foreigner was traveling with Xu Fei’s group.”

Shao was shocked to hear that the Shen man knew Xu Fei’s name. Something significant must have happened during the test.

“What happened to Xu Fei’s group?”

“They should be here soon. They were slowed down since there are so many of them. The smaller groups reached the gate first.”

“Right, thanks,” Shao said tersely before moving closer to the gate.

Unlike the South Gate, the North Gate actually had a way to block people from entering. Two gargantuan iron doors stood open, creating a thirty-cun opening through which people could enter. Those iron doors were so large that Shao doubted even he could move them alone.

Ren appeared at Shao’s side. Due to the casual pace he took when approaching the North Gate, he missed Shao’s conversation with the Shen man. Ren held his hand out, revealing four pills. Two were white, and two were red.

“Here’s your cut from the last fight. The white pills are Bone Strengthening Pills, and the red pills are Body Cultivation Pills. Make sure you take one of each at the same time, otherwise your body will develop unevenly,” Xiahou Ren explained.

“I think I understand the concept,” Shao said. “One pill enhances your bones, and the other enhances the rest of your body.”

Shao took the pills and dropped them in his bag. Strangely, he felt like he had seen those white and red pills millions of times before. It was the same sensation he felt when he had picked up a sword for the first time. In his last life, he must have consumed many of those pills.

A nervous smile appeared on Xiahou Ren’s face, and his hand brushed against his sword as if he wanted to confirm it was still there. “Hey, Shao? How many lower-realm Lianqi do you think you could take in a fight?”

“I don’t know,” Shao said, frowning at the strange question. “At least fifteen, probably. Twenty would be pushing it.”

Shao followed Ren’s gaze and saw the source of his anxiety. Several hundred cun away, there stood a group of about thirty cultivators. Walking with this group, surrounded by a tight circle of lower-realm Lianqi, was Xu Fei.