Chapter 283: Shameless

Anyone could hear the confusion and melancholy in the Sword Saint’s voice.

Four Great States.

Four Great Swordsmen.

And now, among the four, he alone had lost both his state and his home.

No matter how glorious the path of the sword might be, it still felt a little lonely.

Baili Xianglan had not come here to chat with the Sword Saint.

Her gaze passed over the Sword Saint and the Blind Man, lingering briefly on the carriage before she said, “Lord Sword Saint, please hand that child over to me. I will take him back.”

The Sword Saint turned sideways, one leg dangling from the carriage.

“You know I won’t agree.”

He had gone to all the trouble of carrying this brat so far.

And now he was supposed to hand the child over halfway through the journey?

“He is a child of the State of Qian.”

The Sword Saint laughed when he heard that.

“Heh. Then you must have taken your mother’s surname?”

Baili Xianglan nodded.

“My elder brother and I do indeed bear our mother’s surname.”

“...”

The Sword Saint.

For a clan as enormous as the Baili Clan, taking in a live-in son-in-law was hardly anything unusual.

The Sword Saint shook his head.

That answer had genuinely left him at a loss for words.

In the end, he could only point behind himself and say, “Fine.

“Go find the child’s father and ask him.

“If his father has no objection, I’ll hand the child over to you immediately.”

Go on.

Go ask Tian Wujing.

And while you are at it, ask the Jingnan Army whether they agree.

Baili Xianglan drew her sword.

“You intend to draw your sword against me?” the Sword Saint asked, amused.

If her elder brother were here, the two of them would at least be qualified to exchange moves.

But Baili Xianglan was not the Hundred-Li Sword.

“Yes.”

“If your brother were here, that would be another matter.

“If I beat you up now and word spreads, won’t people laugh at me?”

He and her elder brother were equals in fame.

If he turned around and dealt with the man’s younger sister instead, it really would look like a senior bullying a junior.

“You are escorting the child of your enemy.

“You are a man of Jin, yet willingly serve as a Yan hound.

“Lord Sword Saint, you are already a joke.”

Beside him, the Blind Man silently formed a heart with his fingers in his mind.

This girl’s talent for stabbing people with words truly deserved admiration.

Fortunately, she was the Hundred-Li Sword’s younger sister and a daughter of the Baili Clan.

Otherwise, with a mouth like that, she would never have survived this long.

Someone would have beaten her to death when she was still little.

The Sword Saint did not become angry.

He merely nodded.

“Yes.

“I’m already a joke.”

Baili Xianglan began walking forward.

The Sword Saint continued speaking to himself.

“Since I’m already a joke anyway, I suppose it doesn’t matter if people laugh a little more.”

As Baili Xianglan drew close, the Sword Saint’s gaze abruptly sharpened.

Three phantom blades of sword qi immediately appeared before him and shot straight toward her.

Baili Xianglan’s sword danced.

Three strikes shattered all three arcs of sword qi.

She still had strength to spare.

Continuing forward, she thrust her own sword toward the Sword Saint seated on the carriage.

Faced with that vicious thrust, the Sword Saint advanced instead of retreating.

His body surged forward.

Two fingers of his right hand reached out.

Seeing this, Baili Xianglan tapped one foot against the ground and instantly retreated.

At the place where she had just been standing, three streams of sword qi erupted from beneath the earth, tearing through the muddy ground and shooting upward.

Had she failed to notice them, or reacted even half a step later, she would already have been cut into three pieces.

“Lord Sword Saint even uses methods like this against me?”

The Sword Saint scratched his head.

His figure drifted backward, and he sat down on the carriage again.

“Ai.

“I learned bad habits from Tian Wujing.”

Before that battle, a fight had simply been a fight.

A swordsman compared whose sword was faster.

Whose sword was sharper.

But ever since he lost to Tian Wujing, the Sword Saint had begun pondering things beyond the sword itself.

It was not that he had wanted to change.

But as a swordsman who had been defeated in single combat by a Martial Artist, he simply could not stop himself from brooding over it.

The more he thought, the more he actually began to understand certain principles.

He had even started to feel that Tian Wujing’s method—integrating calculation, traps, and battlefield deployment into martial combat—was genuinely rather ingenious.

Baili Xianglan did not advance again.

Instead, she turned her sword sideways.

The blade gave a trembling hum.

At once, more than thirty figures rose from the surrounding mud.

No one knew how long they had been hiding there.

Every one of them clearly possessed techniques for suppressing breath and concealing presence.

Even the Blind Man had failed to detect them beforehand.

Of course, part of that was because his “radar” could not possibly remain active at full power at all times.

That thing consumed far too much electricity.

If he kept it running constantly, he would not last long before drying into a human husk.

And with the Sword Saint sitting right beside him, the Blind Man had quite naturally started slacking off.

More than thirty experts of the Silver-Armored Guard revealed themselves.

From a distance, they completely surrounded the carriage.

The moment they appeared, each released the unmistakable qi-and-blood fluctuations of a powerful cultivator.

The weakest were Sixth Grade.

Among them were even several Fourth Grade experts.

Without exaggeration, the Silver-Armored Guard had truly gone all in this time.

More than half of its elite experts had gathered here.

And unfortunately, this was Jin territory.

Great Yan’s Secret Intelligence Department had never established especially tight control over the region.

Worse, the Department’s local commander had died only recently.

So a group of elite Silver-Armored Guards traveling more than a thousand li to reach this place without triggering an effective response was not actually that difficult to understand.

The Sword Saint regretfully touched his waist.

Longyuan was not with him.

If a real battle broke out, he would be missing that final measure of ease.

No matter how powerful a single person became, before the machinery of an entire state, he still seemed rather small.

The jianghu was still only the jianghu.

No wonder Tian Wujing had always looked down on it.

Baili Xianglan cupped her hands again.

“Lord Sword Saint, please show mercy and step aside.”

This was the final polite phrase.

If the Sword Saint still refused to retreat, then the Silver-Armored Guard experts gathered here today would test whether they could leave this Sword Saint behind forever.

The Sword Saint helplessly rubbed the back of one hand and sighed.

“Tell me something.

“Isn’t this territory supposed to belong to you Yan people now?”

The Yan people had conquered the land.

The child belonged to a Yan Marquis.

Yet now a group of Qian people had come to seize him, while the person protecting the child was himself a man of Jin.

So what exactly had the Yan people been doing this whole time?

The Blind Man reached inside his robes and pulled out a smoke-signal tube.

The Sword Saint’s eyes lit up.

“Now that’s useful.”

The Blind Man shook his head.

“Too far away.”

“Then why the hell did you take it out?”

“To make you happy for a moment.”

“I really am starting to like you.”

“I...”

The Blind Man.

“Hahahahaha!”

The Sword Saint burst into loud laughter and stood atop the carriage.

Blood began dripping from his fingertips.

“Come on, then.

“Let me see who dares step forward!”

The falling blood was itself a declaration.

A resolve even more absolute than standing there with Longyuan in his hand.

Blood essence became the sword.

His own foundation became the edge.

From the very beginning, he had adopted a posture of fighting to the death.

For a brief moment, the Qian experts of the Silver-Armored Guard surrounding them actually froze.

They knew exactly who stood before them.

Naturally, they also understood just how terrifying that man could be.

They had numbers on their side.

If everyone attacked together, they probably could kill him here.

But that assumed a chaotic melee.

A battle of give and take.

Perhaps a third of their experts would die before the Sword Saint finally fell.

Death, in that situation, was a matter of probability.

To kill a Sword Saint, people would inevitably die.

Everyone could gamble and see whose luck ran out.

But now, the situation was different.

To the Blind Man, an expert in human psychology, the game had changed from Russian roulette to a revolver where everyone knew the first few chambers held live rounds.

The first people to step forward would definitely die.

That created a completely different kind of psychological pressure.

Who wanted to volunteer as one of the first guaranteed “expendables”?

The carriage slowly began rolling forward.

The Silver-Armored Guards on both sides followed.

Strangely, not one of them dared be the first to attack.

Directly ahead of the carriage stood Baili Xianglan.

She noticed the Silver-Armored Guards’ hesitation.

And she understood why.

These people were all important figures within the Silver-Armored Guard itself.

At the end of the day, they had enjoyed comfortable lives for too long.

They had become somewhat reluctant to die.

Climbing to such positions had not been easy.

Cultivating to this level had not been easy either.

None of them were men with worthless lives.

It was not that they were cowards.

They simply did not especially want to be the first bodies thrown into the pit.

Baili Xianglan did not retreat.

Instead, she actively advanced with sword in hand.

She understood perfectly well.

If even her side stepped back now, this entire ambush would become a joke.

Her sword began to howl.

Baili Xianglan pointed the blade at the Sword Saint standing atop the carriage.

Sword qi began gathering.

“Do not assume I will hold back because of Baili Feng.

“When a swordsman draws a sword, he must already be prepared to break together with it.

“Your brother should have taught you that much.”

The sword of the Baili Clan emphasized a single instant of lightning speed.

Once unleashed for real, it became an even more extreme contest of life and death.

What came next would be completely different from the probing exchange earlier.

Before, Baili Xianglan had not gone all out.

And the Sword Saint had possessed no killing intent.

But now, one side had decided there could be no retreat.

Seeing Baili Xianglan prepare to attack first, the surrounding Silver-Armored Guard experts finally stopped hesitating.

All of them surged toward the carriage together.

At the Sword Saint’s fingertips, blood essence began condensing into blades.

Overwhelming sword qi poured outward.

Faintly, deep rolls of muffled thunder began echoing through the air around them.

Sword qi hid within wind and thunder.

Once released, every strike would fall like a thunderbolt.

This terrifying field had been built from the Sword Saint’s own foundation.

It was a killing formation belonging to the Sword Saint alone.

And then, at that exact moment, the Blind Man—who had been driving the carriage—suddenly lifted the curtain.

Under Ding Heng’s stunned gaze, he reached inside and took the child from his arms.

In the Blind Man’s other hand was a dagger.

The blade pointed directly at the infant.

A faint blue sheen coated its edge.

Clearly, it had been smeared with deadly poison.

The dagger had naturally come from the “dwarf” craftsmen of Shengle City.

The Blind Man did not want to die.

More precisely, he did not want to die in this particular bloodbath.

Like his Master Zheng Fan, the Blind Man had always cherished his own life.

But more importantly, the Blind Man had finally seen the logic behind the entire affair.

There was a crucial point he had overlooked.

This was not another version of *The Orphan of Zhao.*

Nor was this some simple blood feud.

The thing his side was desperate to protect the people opposite them were even more terrified of seeing harmed.

So what was there left to panic about?

Without the slightest hesitation, the Blind Man roared, “Nobody move!

“Take one more step and I’ll kill him!”

“...”

The Sword Saint.

“...”

Baili Xianglan.

[End of Chapter 283]