When they saw a sword suddenly coming out of the darkness and sticking into Lord Bo's neck, all of the bandits were shocked out of their wits. The fright they suffered from Xie Yang's fast-handed and sneaky action was visible on their faces. Their eyes were opened so wide that their eyeballs threatened to pop out of their sockets, and their gaping mouth made it seems like their jaws would almost drop to touch the ground anytime soon.
They found it hard to believe that someone had landed a killing strike on Lord Bo, who was known for his cruelty and invincibility. And they did so in front of their boss, who hated bloodshed in his place and would stop at nothing to kill a person who dares kill another in front of him. Was the person who landed a killing strike on Lord Bo unafraid of everything below the sky and on the land?! And who was it?
It was at this moment that the sound of footsteps echoed in the cave. Xie Yang and Leader Ye were walking at their pace, gracefulness and discipline vivid in their steps. They were doing nothing special to make the sound of their footsteps echo in the cave. But because no one was saying a thing and only standing speechlessly on their spot, the stillness and silence in the main hall amplified the sound of every step they took. Each time they took a step, the hearts of the bandits would speed up, becoming faster and faster.
They turned to look at the source of the sound of the footsteps and saw two refined gentlemen, one with a youthful face full of beauty that could sway the heart of both men and women and the other with a stern, ferocious face, stepping out of the depths of darkness and entering the light.
Like all the other bandits, Merchant Jin speechlessly looked at the two unfamiliar faces, and after Xie Yang's judgmental eyes set on him, causing him to snap out of his daze, did he say, "Who the heck are you two? And how did you bypass the barrier I set to block the entrance to my Paradise?"
"What do you think?"
Leader Ye tauntingly stared at Merchant Jin. Although the latter was both a spiritual cultivator and a formation master, in front of absolute strength, barriers and what-not mean nothing.
Obviously, he had shattered it with a single strike.
But he didn't feel the need to say it out loud.
Merchant Jin was deeply offended by his gaze.
However, what he heard next offended him to the next level.
"Who we are and how we bypassed the spiritual barrier, these are things a corpse doesn't need to know."
Of course, these words came out of the smart mouth of Xie Yang that not only had pearly-white teeth but a red tongue as sharp as a sword.
His words stabbed Merchant Jin in the heart, wounding the latter so badly that his eyes started twitching fiercely, and a deep frown line appeared in between his scrunched-up eyebrows.
"Said a soon-to-be-corpse."
Who said that?
Well, the voice of this person was familiar to Zhang Xiu. It belonged to Lord Bo. She looked up and saw that even though a sword was inside his neck, he was still not falling dead to the ground and standing on his spot as if it wasn't him who should be dead by now.
Naturally, everyone had heard his voice.
The bandits, Merchant Jin, Leader Ye, and Xie Yang, all turned to look at him; some were slightly dazed by what they saw next, some didn't have a single change of expression as they knew what was going to happen, some outright felt disgusted and offended.
Out of the eyes of Lord Bo, a foul-smelling black surged out and wrapped around the tip of Xie Yang's sword. Then, with a forward pull, it pulled the entire sword out of his neck, causing a disgusting amount of blood to gush out of the widened hole in his fat neck that was as thick as a person's thigh.
The blood splashed on the poor girl, Zhang Xiu, dirtying her even further.
As he turned around to glare at Xie Yang, the black mist flicked the sword away and poured into his neck, and then the wounds on his neck started closing at a rate visible to the eyes of all those present in the main hall.
Xie Yang used to be the king of the spirit world, and he had interacted with both mortals of the mortal realm and spirits of the spirit realm, so he knew what was going on and why Lord Bo not only survived his sure-kill attack but even recovered from it in a couple of seconds.
In the spirit world, there were many spirits, and as good and bad existed everywhere, some among them were evil and some good. Lord Bo was an evil spirit, and after seeing how fast he had healed his wounds, Xie Yang concluded that Lord Bo had killed many people and devoured their vitality to gain such unbelievable healing power.
He also found out what kind of evil spirit the latter was from looking at his furs, black gas, evil eyes, and rat-like nails and ears.
"You're quite persistent for a rat."
Whether Xie Yang was referring to Lord Bo's reality or his character, it was hard to tell as he didn't make it explicit, and Leader Ye thought that there was a high chance that his recently recovered young master didn't know that Lord Bo wasn't a human but something too nefarious.
Lord Bo's expression contorted even further after hearing what Xie Yang had said to him. He hated others calling him rat as that was his sore point. No doubt, he activated his footstep spiritual technique to close the distance between him, a level 18 cultivator, and Xie Yang, who he concluded to be in the first realm. A tremendous amount of evil foul-smelling energy burst out from beneath Lord Bo's feet, propelling him towards Xie Yang at an incredible speed. "How dare you ruin my fun and throw jokes at me?! You court death! I will kill you!"