With no communication the entire crowd, who had been shopping peacefully just moments ago, devolved into a stampede. No one on Ji Kang and Yu Shuren’s street knew what was happening, but they knew that if there was any kind of fighting then they were in danger.

When cultivator’s fought, mortals could be snuffed out like so many candles. If it was the army being called in to put down a riot, they could still be killed, it just wouldn’t be as quick.

At first Ji Kang and Yu Shuren wanted to stay still and not give in to the crowd’s panicked rush, but the sheer press of bodies was impossible to resist. Ji Kang witnessed children torn from their parent’s arms by the crowd, saw a wagon full of ore overturned, and watched as an elderly woman fell and disappeared. The only sign that she had ever been there was a gut wrenching ripple effect in the crowd as people passed over the area she had fallen.

In that moment the crowd was a herd of prey animals, desperate to escape a predator.

Ji Kang and Yu Shuren were forced to allow themselves to be swept along by the momentum of the crowd until they could make it to the side of the street and shelter in an alley.

Yu Shuren by virtue of his size and raw strength did the lion’s share of the work of forcing their way out of the crowd, shepherding Ji Kang to safety.

“We need to meet up with Lu Wu and Jin Xun!” Ji Kang shouted into Yu Shuren’s ear to make himself heard.

“Wait for the bulk of the crowd to pass! There’s no way we can fight our way through going against the flow!”

Yu Shuren made a good point, but Ji Kang had a bad feeling. For a while now he had been hearing the bell-like clash of steel on steel.

Soon the street cleared. The stampeding crowd flowed away and Ji Kang and Yu Shuren were able to leave the alley they had taken shelter in.

Stepping out into the street they were treated to a grim sight. No fewer than three forms were lying scattered around the street, victims of the crowd’s blind panic. Listening closely, it seemed at least two of them were still alive enough to be groaning in pain. One of the forms was silent.

Ji Kang silently thanked the heavens that none of them was a child and specifically not the child he had seen be separated from their parents. No matter how much he liked to imagine himself as a jaded and indifferent person, seeing a child’s corpse would have been a hard blow to his equilibrium.

If his gut feeling that the fighting they could still hear, and occasionally feel the tremors of, was occurring in the cultivation materials section of the market, then he needed to be at his best right now.

Ji Kang and Yu Shuren set out running in the direction the noises were coming from. Although they hadn’t discussed it in detail, Ji Kang felt confident that they were on the same page. Cultivators who could cause this kind of disturbance were far beyond their ability to handle, but they needed to get close enough to get more information.

Their secret mission was to fund an intelligence gathering network in the capital and return to the sect with an initial report after all. Ji Kang also had a more personal motive. If Lu Wu was in the middle of this commotion, then it was the perfect time to get rid of him. A chaotic fight between powerful cultivators in a crowded area that Lu Wu had good reason to be in… there would never be a better time for Lu Wu to have an unfortunate ‘accident’.

In the aftermath of a fight that was literally shaking the ground, one more body would be entirely unremarkable.

With the noises of the crowd growing distant and no longer muddying the soundscape, it became possible to glean some detail about the fight even while they were still out of sight. For instance, from the potency of whatever spells were causing the tremors and rumbling he thought it likely there was at least one Core Formation level cultivator throwing their weight around. That was a useful thing to keep in mind as the two of them sprinted towards the source of the commotion.

Ji Kang and Yu Shuren slowed to a walk before reaching the last corner blocking their line of sight to the ongoing confrontation. Ji Kang motioned Yu Shuren to wait and peeked around the rubble of what was once a restaurant.

Stolen story; please report.

Before him stretched a gruesome tableau, an entire block of the city had been dismantled.

Stones and planks formed piles that used to be buildings, which then spilled out into the road. It was impossible to tell just by looking what percentage of the people who had been inside the buildings when the fighting started had made it out, but he could clearly see at least two corpses half buried in rubble, so obviously not all of them.

The terrain was further complicated by pools of cooling lava and clusters of stone spikes large enough to impale someone from bottom to top dotted around.

There was an odd moment where Ji Kang’s mind misfired, when he attempted to think about how to describe this area now. It used to be a city block, but it was no longer that. This wasn’t really a battle, so it wasn’t a battlefield. He found he had no word to describe the absolute carnage two cultivators could wreak on what used to be a market.

In this newly created, as yet unnamed, terrain there were two cultivators fighting each other and a team of city guards standing off to the side doing nothing.

The city guards had obviously been drawn here by the fighting and Ji Kang was expecting them to be trying to stop it. City guards rarely worried about capturing belligerent cultivators.

Every city beyond a certain size had a large number of low level cultivators working as city guards in addition to the much more numerous mortal guards. They were trained in group tactics that focused on overwhelming superior enemies with enormous quantities of attacks and they were employed by the lord of the city to keep the peace and deal with unruly cultivators.

One of the unspoken but well understood rules that underpinned cultivator society was that if they were found fighting in a city, they would be killed without trial. Society couldn’t exist if there weren’t harsh and immediate consequences when the people who could level city blocks did so on a whim.

Obviously these rules didn’t apply to the rich and powerful. If it was made clear to the captain of the guards that your family could make things difficult for a city governor and as long as you paid some money to the guards and gave some benefits to the right officials, no one would care that you killed a family or two of peasants.

Ji Kang suspected one or both of these two must be very well connected indeed, because the city guards were standing to the side and showing absolutely no sign they were going to do anything.

The two cultivators fighting were powerful. They must have been at least Core Formation stage, because they were throwing around intense amounts of firepower, and the guards were unable to do more than inconvenience them.

One of them was a heroic looking young man, with eyebrows like swords and short dark hair. He was wearing red with gold dragon patterns embroidered around his chest. He rampaged around the area, like a dauntless general, charging at his opponent with unstoppable force.

The other was a middle aged woman in green. She wouldn’t be considered a famous beauty, but she had an air of elegance that elevated her features so the whole was more than the sum of its parts. She fluttered through the fight gracefully, usually avoiding close quarters with her opponent but when he drew near she skillfully redirected his attacks and used his own momentum against him before drawing away to resume her long range bombardment.

Ji Kang noticed that spaced around the outer perimeter of the destruction were small groups of cultivators, watching the fight and commenting to each other. It was an odd sight, seeing so many casual attitudes next to so much destruction. Not every cultivator watching looked entirely unconcerned with the collateral damage, but most did.

He saw Lu Wu and Jin Xun at almost the exact opposite side of the fight and pointed them out to Yu Shuren.

Ji Kang inwardly cursed. This situation wasn’t going to be any help to his plans at all, Lu Wu was too far from him and the fight seemed to be almost finished anyway. There wasn’t enough chaos here to give him cover for making a move.

The fighters were losing energy and power like arrows at the end of their flights. It was only at this moment that Ji Kang realized that he was seeing a different kind of cultivator fighting for the very first time. These two were Gu masters.

His first hint had been the tight fitting martial outfits the two main combatants were wearing, with headbands and wide belts, which were a stark contrast from the daoist robes the sect issued him. The second hint was the way the intensity of the fight was dropping so quickly.

Ji Kang wasn’t clear on the specifics, but he had been told that Gu masters had potent abilities but relatively little staying power in fights. They usually ran out of their version of qi much faster than imperial system cultivators. He was seeing an example of that drop off in combat power right now.

When he had first arrived the man in red had been throwing around pillars of molten rock and wielding whips made of fire while the woman in green had been sweeping entire piles of masonry into the air in whirlwinds before throwing them at her opponent. Now he watched as one of them executed a flying kick that, while performed with excellent technique, didn’t seem at all supernatural.