Chapter 9
Alex did his best to become one with the shadows and gloom of the darkened chamber he glided across on his leather shoes, searching for the branching corridor that would lead to his destination.
Yet he found nothing of the sort. Only freshly lit lamps and the sound of rich laughter as he took a flight of stairs and raced along a corridor far wider than it had been before.
He froze just before turning a corner, sensing at least a dozen men and women engaging in licentious acts where hedonism was worshiped to the most extreme degree.
He frowned, spending a minute to take in his surroundings, pressing his hand against the finely polished hardwood, sensing the stone blocks, just beyond.
His eyes snapped open, immediately understanding.
The dimly lit corridor had effectively been a passageway between buildings, and if the exotic perfumes and other aromatics he was smelling, along with the silk tapestries of sybaritic delights and leather recliners he caught a glimpse of just a short distance away were anything to go by, this establishment was perhaps even more exclusive than the one he had left behind.
Perhaps this one was for truly exclusive clientele or those who simply preferred a slightly different atmosphere.
With a city population in the hundreds of thousands, he knew it shouldn’t be too surprising that the JiangHu sect would try to capitalize on them all, including different entrance and exit points, since discretion was probably sought after almost as much as the vice itself.
He gave a frustrated shake of his head.
He was missing something. He knew it! But suddenly the laughter picked up in volume, Alex catching sight of several sensually swaying shadows belonging to tipsy women singing drunkenly with their arms wrapped around a powerfully built man with jaded eyes and a basic cultivator’s strength and stature.
The client had the mien of a merchant celebrating a successful run in the split second Alex had to race back the way he had come, past the discreet sliding door panels leading to currently empty rooms that could only have one purpose, racing away as fast as his Quickness would allow with his growing Wind affinity ensuring that no stray rustle of air would mark his passage.
He stopped in the middle of the sunken passageway, cursing softly under his breath.
If Nili was holed up with Chaoxiang in the upper floors of a second brothel, there’s no way he could get past both staff and clientele without being painfully obvious in ways that would make it damned clear that he already had blood on his hands from tonight’s actions, or by taking his first grim steps along a path of slaughter from which there would be no turning back.
Alex scowled and rubbed his temples, fearing that a clever man’s tactics had gotten the best of him, and he’d have to wait like a good little pawn and pray that he could act in time if their foes revealed their claws in full and tried to strike Nili, then and there.
He sighed. Though it was galling to find himself waiting and praying to kind fortunes after talking such a tough game with a group of girls whose safety was now most definitely his burden, it seemed that the most prudent thing he could do now, raising the fewest flags of alarm, was wait.
He had left no trace of the pair of thugs he had taken out, after all.
For all the hostess knew, the pair had enticed the girls to run away with them and start their own operation.
Certainly no one had cause to think foul play at Alex’s hands.
At least, not this early in the game, and hopefully not until Alex had done whatever needed doing.
It was only then, when he accepted he needed to simply leave the complex entirely and see if he could triangulate the second purple establishment that had to be nearby from the outside, perhaps infiltrating as a prospective customer, that he heard it.
The soft whisper of what could have been nothing, yet the sense of Fate’s strings pulling so tightly made it clear that it was absolutely everything.
So much was suddenly on the cusp of being lost forever.
An unseen variable that could crumple foundations. A crack in Wanshi’s walls from which so much blood and tears would spill.
Alex did his best to shake the surge of meaningless anxiety away.
Surely it was no more than that. Because his time of being the protagonist of anything was long gone.
He was no longer some favored trump card thrown in play until the worn print of his soul faded to oblivion with such constant use.
No. This was a fresh start, a new chance to embrace a life where he dodged the madness of…
He stiffened with the chills racing up and down his spine, knowing what he’d heard.
Even though the air was completely silent, the wind whispered its endless secrets, nonetheless.
What he had heard had been a terrified cry.
The plea of a desperate soul hidden in Shadow.
Shadow a now hot-eyed Alex would allow to bar his way no longer. Slowly turning around, walking, then running to the middle of the shadowy corridor between buildings, where the lack of any foot traffic meant that there was no reason to waste lamp lights here.
Especially when the shadows could hide so many secrets.
And that was when he spotted it… before it vanished like the flickering revelations of a dream he was on the cusp of recalling when…
He frowned, at first failing to catch sight of the stone steps leading to the bowels of what was effectively a grand manor, so perfectly flush it was with the adjoining wall and corner.
Yet now the breeze circulating fresh air through numerous cleverly placed air vents and ducts gave away so many secrets.
For not even shadow could hide completely from wind’s teasing caress.
Nor the desperate plea it contained.
“Please let me go! I took a wrong turn. I’m not supposed to be here!”
Wind-enhanced Qi Perception check made! You sense the peril before you!
Alex froze before he had taken more than three steps along the perfectly empty chamber he had descended into.
The room was bare, save for a few rice paper etchings hanging on the walls, an oil lamp that hardly broke up the gloom, a pair of hard-eyed men slipping through perfectly empty and innocuous shadows, and a slatted bamboo divider decorated with a pair of graceful cranes painted so vividly with just a few strokes of dark ink.
Alex frowned, wondering why he was so distressed by an empty room, struck by the sudden desperate compulsion to head toward better lit hallways. Which was strange, because with his Qi Perception, he shouldn’t be affected by normal darkness at—DUCK!
The whistle of the wind’s passage was the only evidence that a pair of darts had been fired from compact blow pipes, streaking through the air where Alex had been standing to pierce the bamboo slats of the room divider, which began to smoke and sizzle on contact.
Soft sounds that were drowned out by the snarls and grunts of men lashing out in earnest, a pair of vicious-looking bladed staves slashing and thrusting at the coldly smiling Ruidian whose features were no longer hidden at all.
Yet their weapons failed to penetrate the guard of what should have been a far slower, more cumbersome fangtian ji, twisting to catch and trap the poison-tipped blades between crescent axe heads and razor-sharp spear point.
Alex then roared and lunged, not holding back his strength when he plunged his fangtian ji right through his foe’s heart with such speed and ferocity that the weapon tore right through his target in a shower of blood and steely scale tiles tinkling upon the fine hardwood slats.
The second would-be assassin desperately slashed at Alex’s wrists in the heartbeat he was fully extended from his devastating lunge.
Quickness check successful! Your foe is effectively moving in slow motion!
The thug’s look of contempt quickly became one of dismay when a coolly smiling Alex slipped past the man’s furious thrust right before the air rang with the crack of broken bones and a desperate cry.
The bladed staff slipped free of broken limbs, and the would-be killer was suddenly wheezing for breath as his blue-eyed opponent raised him effortlessly in the air.
“Where is Chaoxiang?”
The wild-eyed man choked out an unintelligible answer.
Alex eased his steely grip the tiniest iota. “No games. Answer or I tear out your throat.”
“Please! He’s down the stairs. There’s no need for you to kill me! Clearly there’s been a—” The man’s only tell was the curl of a panicked lip that would have been a vindictive snarl as his punch dagger rammed under Alex’s ribs.
Or would have, had superhuman Quickness not allowed Alex to catch the man’s wrist. He sensed an odd brace of shadow somehow supporting the man’s limb just enough to allow for one final killing blow. A tiny part of Alex was impressed by the Qi manipulation and would have loved to study it.
But there was just no time.
Strength check: Rank 2 Silver versus Rank 1 Bronze Vitality and Rank 3 Bronze Shadow Arts.
Piercing Strike effortlessly cleaves Shadow Arts!
You have successfully ruptured Shadow Splint.
You have shattered your opponent’s wrist! Wrist and forearm are now crippled.
The air thrummed with the sickening crunch of pulverized bone.
Yet before the killer could do more than jerk an inhaled breath for an agonized scream, all he could exhale was a gout of hot blood as Alex tore out his throat.
The would-be killer’s final moments were spent in a dying daze as he fell to the ground.
The glossy sheen of his crimson blood spraying everywhere soon became a midnight-black pool of hideously chilly waters that he found himself plunging helplessly through, thoughts slowing to a crawl.
Yet he was denied any hope of peaceful oblivion, his spiritual skull ringing with the final dying wails of every man, woman, and child he had once happily butchered for coin.