Tian Lu awoke with a start. Thankfully, he did not wake with a finish. He hadn’t done that since he was in school. It was university, but at the time, he was a growing boy! As he looked around the wagon, he saw that only Mei Ahn was beside him. She looked focused on what was happening outside. He couldn't really hear anything. Whenever he woke up after a long nap, his senses took a while to recover. He felt something wasn’t right.

His eye did recover and he noticed with the one eye that recovered, they were being attacked by highwaymen. He suspected he couldn’t technically call them highwaymen because they were in the mountains, and he didn’t think highways were a thing. Bandits, that’s what they were called.

He couldn’t believe it and by that he meant, he could believe they would be attacked. What he couldn’t believe was that they would be attacked. Tian Lu felt his senses were not being completely in sync yet. He knew there were bandits in the area. It was part of his plan to try to eradicate them and increase his junior siblings’ worldly experience. He had hoped that they would run into them. However, he thought he would have to find them because there was no way someone would be stupid enough to attack cultivators from the Plum Tree Sect.

And yet there they were, he couldn’t believe it. He had to see them now that his senses had fully recovered. And he regretted it. All he could hear was screaming. And the sounds of bodies being cut and falling to the ground. The splurts of blood. He could see his sect members easily clearing away the bandits and the difference was alarming.

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He wasn’t worried that his fellow sect members would have a problem. There was a clear difference between cultivators from sects and wherever these bandits came from. He heard a man yelling retreat and the remaining few bandits dispersed in completely different directions. But not just the four main cardinal directions, the other ones too.

Two of them actually came his way. One was short and his hair covered his eyes, and the other was average, like a background character. The short one saw the book in Mei Ahn’s hands and his eyes lit up. However, none of them could see it. Because his hair covered his eyes. The average looking one tried to go in a different direction but somehow he felt like he was frozen. He couldn’t move. And neither could the short bandit.

They both felt incredible fear, fear they had never felt. Even from their elder brother. And they froze.

Tian Lu was startled. He questioned why these two would try to retreat through the space in the wagon. In his panic, he activated his heaven-grade treasure. Something he trained for. A pressure emanated around him, the pressure of a Unity Realm expert. The two bandits started sweating. They knew they messed up. The short one’s greed got him into trouble and the average one was in the wrong place at the wrong time.