Chapter 73 — Assassination in Flower Lane
The Herdsman of the Wasteland · Page 2 of 4
An adept with a green dragon coiled around his body lunged at him.
When the adept was still sixty or seventy feet away, the green dragon was already threading through the crowd, about to pounce on Shen Mu. Shen Mu was about to dodge when, at that very moment, a strip of white silk dropped from a building beside the street, whipped around the adept's neck, lifted him out of the crowd, and dragged him up into a room above.
Several young women flew forward, daggers hidden in their sleeves, and stabbed into the adept's chest. Shen Mu looked up and recognized them—the young ladies who had called him up to play when he entered the city.
He continued on, past an alley. Inside the alley, an adept in a conical hat saw him pass and gave his body a shake. A monstrous wave rose out of nowhere from the alley, like a great serpent opening its jaws to bite down at Shen Mu; silver fish lurked within the wave, presumably essence soldiers.
At that same moment, the shop next to the alley happened to be a blacksmith's forge. The blacksmith was a giant sixteen or seventeen feet tall, forging a long blade of refined iron—its handle fifteen feet long and its blade sixteen. The giant seized the blade and, with a single squelch, thrust it through the wall into the alley, piercing the conical-hatted adept through the chest and pinning him to the wall.
Then he pulled the blade back, wiped off the blood, and went on forging, the furnace blazing behind him. Shen Mu stood stunned for a moment, then went on.
The gongs and drums in Flower Street were shaking the heavens, and figures on the rooftops on either side were leaping and bounding like flying birds—adepts from the city lord's mansion, closing in on Shen Mu at great speed.
One adept leaped down.
Before he had even landed, the snake in a snake charmer's cage below suddenly thrust out its head, swelling to monstrous size, opened its jaws, swallowed the falling adept whole, then shrank back into its cage. Several other adepts landed and pushed through the crowd. One passed a wine shop, where the clerk had been grinning at the parade floats; he suddenly seized a huge wine jar and, without a word, clapped it over the adept's head. The adept dropped into the jar, and in an instant his flesh and bones dissolved, turning him into nothing but a jar of wine.
The clerk set the jar back in place and sealed its mouth. Of the remaining adepts from the city lord's mansion, one met a drunkard in the crowd and was burned to ashes by a stream of fire spat straight into his face; one met an assassin and had his throat cut amid the crowd; one was drawn into a float by one of the women inside and made no sound at all. Seeing all this along his way, Shen Mu's heart churned with suspicion and alarm. The city lord's mansion had sent no small number of adepts to hunt him down, and yet all of them were dying silently in the crowd.
"Who is helping me?
Could it be the Nether Demon Sect? Does the Nether Demon Sect truly have so much power in this city?
" He reached the inn and was about to enter when, all at once, he saw the blind old man. Beside the inn was a gambling house, and two men in black were just dragging the blind old man out and flinging him to the ground. One of the men kicked him hard in the backside and spat, "You're blind, and you still dare to cheat right in front of us?
Do you take us for blind men too? " Shen Mu hurried over, but the blind old man had already picked himself up. He brushed off his backside and called into the gambling house, "My bamboo staff! " The door creaked open, and a bamboo staff was tossed out, smacking him on the forehead.
The blind old man picked it up and laughed.
"I had bad luck this time, but next time I'll make sure you can't even tell I'm cheating. I'll win it all back, principal and interest! Shen'er, is that you?