142 Bai Tianyi (1/2)

Xue Wei, who held Tianyi, Hei Gou, and the priestess hid behind a large and wide tree trunk and observed the villagers.

Groups appeared from all directions. Except, compared to earlier, the amount was much smaller.

In their last meeting, they had been more than a hundred experts, yet now they were less than forty.

The group continued to wait for more to arrive, but their faces turned pale after ten minutes.

”They cannot all have been killed, can they?” one of them asked with a stutter. Qing Li, who was fortunate to be still alive, also had an expression filled with horror.

”No,” he said hesitatingly, ”I am sure that they have a good reason for not being here... let us move in one large group and find them!”

They were visibly shocked by what they saw when they did, however. The first group that they found had been wiped out; it wasn't exactly that they didn't die with perceivable wounds, but at least one person in every group seems to have died of 'natural' causes, which caused considerable confusion.

They had tried to track their missing comrades in the forest, temporarily putting the thought of killing Xue Wei and Hei Gou on hold. In the end, what they found were the corpses of their fellow warriors stuffed under the bushes and the dense vegetation.

Despite the red-leaved forest acting as camouflage, the scent of blood was hard to hide alongside the stickiness of blood that had stained the surfaces of the leaves.

The truth was that Xue Wei was aware that they could not hide their tracks for long, so he had not done too great of a job at hiding their victims. He knew that one group being found meant that the others would be found soon after.

In fact, this was what he wanted. He wanted this group of experts to feel worried, scared, and unsure of what to do.

The more nervous they became, the easier they would be to deal with. Xue Wei wanted to deal with them all in one fell swoop.

Xue Wei was not willing to completely wipe out the village because the children and their mothers were a moral factor that deterred him, so he would rather get rid of whoever pursued them. Once they get rid of the men obstructing their way, they should be able to safely continue their journey.

The women were also cultivators, so it was possible for them to sustain their families, but they would not go hunting for Xue Wei, Tianyi, and the priestess because their priority was looking after their children and not regaining the sword.

At least, this was what Xue Wei was hoping for.

Although Xue Wei had no issues with killing these men who were hunting them down, going back to the village to kill the women and children left behind was something he wouldn't do.

Although they also had looked at him with hostility, they had not actively taken part in the chase, so he would not include them in the massacre. As long as they did not pursue him, he would leave them alone.

Xue Wei was no stranger to being pursued. He had been hunted for so long that it had become a part of who he was, but now the hunted had become the hunter.

Back in Heping Kingdom, it had been impossible for him to fight back because the pursuers were simply too powerful, but now it was a different story.

It was not possible for Xue Wei to turn the tables on the ones chasing him before, so he was taking out all his pent-up resentment and frustration on these villagers.

Killing so many apart from around forty experts had already made him feel much more tranquil.The rage that had been building up inside him for a long time had started to become smaller.

However, it was impossible for him to completely extinguish the flames of anger and rage that he felt. He still felt hatred towards the Kingdom of Heping after the death of Tie Haolong. He felt hatred towards them for chasing him as far as they had, and for not even listening to his explanations, just taking the words of the Ice Harpy for granted.

He felt anger whenever he thought about all the times his pursuers had almost caught him, and how they had chased him through the entire kingdom, and then they had sent a whole company to follow him into the Flowing Blood Prairie.

Now they were in the Vermilion Forest Kingdom. And although they were away from their original pursuers, they were once again targeted by others.

This alone had caused Xue Wei to fume with anger. Could he not go anywhere without being chased? Could he not enjoy just a bit of peace anywhere?

He channeled all these negative emotions towards the battle against the villagers, and felt no remorse after killing them one by one.

In his eyes, they had signed their death sentence when they had decided to chase him and his allies.

Xue Wei and Hei Gou did not immediately follow the large group of experts. Instead, they retreated and started discussing what options they had.

Earlier, they were up against ten-man groups, and they could tentatively handle two groups at once if the two groups only had one Sky Warrior each. But now the remaining four groups had banded together.

There were now twelve Sky Warriors and twenty-eight Earth Warriors. Even if they gave it their all, fighting that many might be too much for them.

”We can always try,” Hei Gou suggested. ”Take control of the strongest of them and have him cause a ruckus. We sneak up on them as always and kill them one after another. And then when they notice us, we go all out!”