Chapter 22: Ming Daiyu v Yi Ren

"Well, it is a shame, but I have to kill you."

His expression remained unchanged as he said those words.

He then moved the hand in which he held the sword at an imperceptible speed, aiming its end at her heart.

Just as Ming Daiyu was about to be pierced by her own weapon, her figure blurred, disappearing from its place.

"I don't know the reason for you to want to kill me, Yi Ren, but you can be sure it won't be easy."

Ming Daiyu said as she prepared herself, now standing a few meters away. She didn't have anything in her hands besides a golden scroll, which she threw to the sky and turned into a stream of light that flew away instantly.

Yi Ren only followed the golden light with his gaze for a moment, before returning his focus to the black haired girl in front of him.

'A royal pigeon. I was right.' He confirmed in his mind.

'Pigeon' was the name for a type of communication device of that world; it wasn't an actual bird. The item was created using spiritual energy and other secret techniques, so a pigeon from an organization wouldn't look the same as one from another.

The thing that Ming Daiyu had just thrown: the color, the sparks and the shape; Yi Ren recognized it all, he had seen them many times before.

The boy wasn't in any rush as he held the black sword, so he stayed fixed in his place, watching Ming Daiyu's every move.

The pink-eyed girl was now completely unarmed, so she took another step backwards, but a body on the ground made her stumble, almost making her fall. She, however, noticed something strange.

The thing that almost made her trip over, the body of a boy with a shaved head, felt wrong. He was supposed to be unconscious; she had moderated her strikes so that no one would die. However, with her superior senses she could be sure, the boy was now a corpse.

Had she killed him by accident? Did he decide to end his life when he realized he might be taken as a captive? But he was just a teenager, was it really plausible?

Many questions surged within her mind as her gaze scanned the rest of the people on the ground. She didn't need much time to realize that none were moving, or even breathing at all.

"No need to be surprised, they were going to die either way if you left them here."

Yi Ren took her out of her confused state, his words flowing through her brain like an icy river of reality.

"W-What? When!?"

Ming Daiyu had been dazed and conflicted ever since Yi Ren expressed his real intentions, however, she wasn't anxious. She had just fought a group of coordinated cultivators and was injured, but she still had many methods that could, at least in her mind, easily beat and restrain the green-eyed boy in front of her, who was only in the 7th level of the First Realm.

Now that she knew that said boy had killed a group of people right under her nose without herself noticing anything, it was a different story.

She was sure, the things that Yi Ren had done earlier weren't coincidences. His calm tone, the way he took away her sword, the speed of the previous attack… It was real.

Given those things, she had to be serious now.

"I have been wondering for a long time, are you really a good person… or are you also acting?"

Yi Ren started getting closer once again. His steps were slow, but that allowed him to continue speaking.

"Don't take it in a bad way… It's just that I've only met a good person before, and compared to him, your acts of kindness seem fake, parodic even."

Those words striked Ming Daiyu's psyche harder than anything he had said before: her arms and legs trembled as her eyebrows furrowed.

"Did I hit the nail? I mean, you always say weird things like 'you have to help others!' or 'the strong protect the weak!', you know, the typical phrases the heroes of the books of the Grass Library usually say.

I'm not criticizing but, it looked more like the words you spoke were directed at yourself rather than at others…"

Ming Daiyu took her eyes off Yi Ren and moved them to the floor, her breathing had become many times rougher.

"In my experience, there's no one who is truly selfless; every behavior looks for some kind of reward, even if it's emotional or psychological. Therefore, when the opposite of the expected result happens, there is some kind of adverse reaction.

But you… you didn't care about these people you went into so much trouble to spare, much less about all those who died while you were wasting your efforts here, do you?

You don't act based on a greater good, or a moral belief like justice or a selfish goal, but more like you were trying to choose the most 'good' course of action in every situation.

But I can't shake off the feeling that it's just an imitation-"

"SHUT UP!"

Ming Daiyu finally broke her silence and tramped the ground to rush forward, discarding any trace of her refined demeanor to attack; dark-golden streams of brilliantine-like lights spun around her torn silver robes.

Her small and delicate fist now appeared to be a massive boulder that was about to crush a mountain; the raw force of the punch split the air into solid two-dimensional figures as it approached its target.

Yi Ren stood still, holding the sword he had stolen a moment ago, but in just an instant, he too disappeared from his place.

What came next was a black and golden shockwave of light along with many white and sharp lines that cut the surrounding fog as they traveled through the air.

In an instant, Ming Daiyu and Yi Ren had exchanged many moves; phantom-like afterimages appeared clashing around the area, as if a video had been portrayed in an image. The latter, however, seemed to be losing.

Yi Ren nimbly handled the thin and black sword, deflecting the rays of golden light that were being emitted out of Ming Daiyu's body at the same time her arms swung. His green eyes reflected the rapidly changing scenery while he slipped through the ground as if it was butter, leaving a trail where his feet split apart the rocks by the sheer force of the girl's strikes pushing him back.

"Where did you learn that sword style!?" Ming Daiyu violently asked in-between her unstopping attacks.

"Someone taught me, of course." The boy answered nonchalantly.

It hadn't been a minute since the fight started, but the pair had already reached a corner of the sect, which meant that people from the Flaming Swamp Sect were already in the way to stop them.

The spectacle caught a lot of attention from the disciples of both sects –many Gray Grass Sect's disciples had come to try and escape, but got blocked and had to fight–, some even had stopped killing each other in confusion, it appeared that the elders' fight had caught up to them.

One of Ming Daiyu's punches finally broke through Yi Ren's defense, connecting to his chest. It sent him flying towards a group of cultivators nearby with the speed of a rocket.

A pair of unfortunate disciples got in the way of his trajectory and got torn apart when they collided with Yi Ren, blooding his already torn and crimson robes a little more. He rolled dozens of meters on the ground until friction stopped him.

Ming Daiyu landed twenty meters away from him, scanning each of the people that had seen it all with her now yellow and shining eyes.

A transparent dark-yellow flame enveloped her. It was dim; so much that, although was made of light, didn't illuminate the surroundings a bit.

After a short moment of hesitation, she extinguished the flame with a strange hand movement. It went out as a candle that had been blown out: softly. A moment after, several rays that seemed to be made of the previous flame set out in different directions, their destination, every person breathing in a five hundred meter radius.

These dim phantoms of different sizes reached their targets one by one, every time it happened someone was blown into colorful pieces of flesh. The biggest one was going into Yi Ren's direction, aiming to finish him off.

Ming Daiyuo watched with an indifferent expression that had tiny hints of annoyment; she had been forced to break her character because of an emotional outburst and was very displeased.

'It doesn't matter, nothing can be done here anymore. No one who knows me will survive.'

After a relatively long sigh, when silence had already invaded the area after a barrage of explosions for a few seconds, she was about to turn away and leave.

However, just before her feet could even rotate a 20 degree angle, a voice that came from the biggest crater in the ground startled her.

"Such a terrifying technique… So this is what spiritual energy really is capable of?"

In between the dense clouds of fog, the figure of a boy with tattered clothes rose up.