There are certain things that the enemy does to tip their hand or an ambush. One of those is to send someone experienced as a scouter lookout so that they can let the people inside of the conspiracy know what was going on. When a blue robed officer took the time to escort us to a secondary location that sent my spider senses tingling. Like of course they were going to try to get us out of there. And of course, they still thought it was fourth round. Because that's how I was the last time I was the capital. And how could they imagine in any situation that I would have advanced to the fifth realm in that time. Get into the fifth realm wasn't just a matter of being more powerful. It was also a matter of me establishing a domain around myself. The specifics of this are hard to imagine, but just think of it this way. In the three feet circle around me in every direction, I can make reality. Basically, whatever I wanted. And the only thing that can cancel that would be a more powerful domain. So not only could I fuck a mother fucker up with another mother fucker by grabbing them with my tactile telekinesis but once they were inside of my grasp if I was stronger than them, they were toast. Now I prefer my toast buttered but some of you might prefer Jam or some heretics might want to put peanut butter, so I'll end that discussion there. Just understand that with the Advent of my new domain power, I was all ready to kick some ass if I had to. But in the back of my mind, I was hoping that whoever decided they were going to do the stupid ambush against us was about to become a double agent.Outside lookout and I flicked my shoulder to men to the direction. Men was still at third realm though I could feel her gathering power to get to the fourth room. Our tit for Tat meant that she was still trailing behind me no matter what. Or should I say tit for cat, because the Moon Spirit was doing some things that were a little bit suspicious on the regular.

  She got the message she followed through and when she left, Xiran also followed. They're on, being a third realm cultivator who had perfected the styled up infiltration and walked through the shadows was the perfect person to stop the lookout from alerting his people that we were there. Even though we wanted them to know we're there would really hurt our chances if they could spring an ambush. I was expecting them to try to ambush us out in the open, but there was also the chance that they might try to lure us into a building with a suppression field or something like that. And to be clear, that was not going to happen.“Hey,” I said. “How do they get you?”The blue robe official in front of me stopped and looked. I was already disrobing. He gawked at my figure. Look I'm not going to lie to you, I was about as cut as a man has ever been. I just didn't want to get my ceremonial robes dirty. I had the ropes off to Moon Le Who held them across her chest. I debated taking off my pants too but those I could replace much easier. I was tired of losing pants and shirts to these battles, but I could at least keep the one garment that the emperor's office had given me.“My question to you is how. What do they have on you?” My voice dropped very low so that only the two of us could hear and I bought the man into my domain.“Please sir,” he said. “I have a family they took my wife.”“That's all you had to say,” I said. “We'll get your wife back.”The chances of his wife being alive now were very slim but I had to hold out hope that the institution that was doing this was on its back legs. Nowhere was it more clear than ever.Them trying to ambush me in the open in the capital city a few blocks away from the emperor's court was a final gasp. It was so brazen that it had to be a final act of desperation.I stole a glance at men who had come out on top of one of the slate roofs. Next to My Moon Spirit, Xiran was tying up a dude and not being quiet about it.The mindset of somebody who's about to get into an ambush is probably one of the two things. They're probably thinking that this is about to be the easiest job ever, or they're probably thinking what these guys should be thinking right now, which is oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.At least that was what I thought they would be thinking. I killed enough to cultivators to know that I probably had a reputation.That is if they were able to pass the word on between each other. There was always a chance that no one knew was happening because I kept leaving them without a trace.A single nondescript gray building stood in front of us. It was of course in a highly residential neighborhood, and this appeared to be a converted blue robe building. It had to be pre-gentrification or there was about to be some imminent domain because it was like a warehouse in the wrong place.The kind of man that we're hiding in there and I want to say men because women wouldn't do something so dumb. We're the kind of men that were career people, but they were on the take. They had opted into the game. My deal with Xiran was that she was getting out of the game and that was it. If she was still in the game if she was on the other side, I would have blasted her. But since she showed remorse and we reforge our cultivation path, I could at least say that she put in the effort. These men were not going to get a deal. They were probably going to be executed by the state once I was done with them, which meant that there was little value to be gained unless they knew something. The door opened.All around me, the crowds of people walking slowed and it felt like a little miasma seeped out of that small gray building.Answering my mind went back to imagining a poisonous gas going around but that would not be the kind of thing that would kill people, that would just cause a lot of panic and problems.Or it could be one of their paths that perhaps their Mason stole just appeared to be like on my asthma. I pushed back it their outreach with my domain, focusing it directly on the building. The door frame cracked.“Come out. Come out, wherever you are,” I said. There was a pause as the crowds cleared for at least one building on each direction. They had chosen fortunately or unfortunately a building in the center of a through fair. Meaning that people were now trying to pass, but realizing that it probably wasn't good to get in between cultivators of such power.I saw a man with a rickshaw cart nearly flip as he turned backwards and honestly, I could tell you I felt the same.Mood: about to flip my rickshaw.A man stood at the front of the door gawking at me. I let up enough. He could walk and he just sounded like he was cursing. Now I don't mind it when people curse hell. I'm a mother fucker myself and I'll curse up a shitstorm. But it looked like he was both ill-informed and unprepared. These two things together meant that when he saw me and my domain, I could see the brown stain going down his pants. It was a shame.They were nice pants.I need to. I'm going to need you and your three friends to come out here, I said. I reached out with my nascent soul pushing them towards the door like they were little toddlers. It was like a little tentacle of force pulling them back in. With a combination of this and my tactile telekinesis. Heck, I could even lift them off on the ground. If I just had a little bit more power, I could use my soul as an anchor to fly off somebody else.The Blue Robe escort knelt down. I was already expending a lot of energy just to hold them in place. Had I been third realm or lower, I would have already been spent but as I'd filled up my core and expanded it, this felt like just a little bit of sweat that I was dripping off rather than a full workout. And this was fine for him.With five men now well in my domain it was far easier to just focus and have them all kneel."I am inevitable." I could just see that this was not going to be their day. They'd already ruined my day so I might as well ruin theirs. "Who sent you?"The lead man, a blue robe with leader stripes looked at me in horror. I gave him just enough room inside of my domain that he could breathe and make a noise. He gasped as if he was breathing for the first time in his entire life, which honestly was close to what was happening to him. For as much as I complain about using up my energy, their dream Aura or rather their nightmare. Qi was just pushing me more than I could handle at that moment. I could literally see their nightmares coming up if an ethereal font of mist swirling from them to me. I wasn't stealing my dreams, I was just borrowing them and refining them into energy to stock up.I was a grown man, I had needs. Most of them, meaning to be the need to do something with these idiots."I'll talk. I swear," he croaked out.I can feel him trying to resist. It was ultimately futile.They had expected me to be a weak fourth realm which why these men were sent to deal with me. I could even feel little formation of a compression field on the inside. It would have been a good one had I not been ambushed so many times. I thought back to my first experience here, being approached by the Red Fang and them trying to sell me on their lifestyle and me instead turning it around so that I can give the local ahead a talk about boundaries. And was it appropriate for his work to require him to just always do everything. Short answer? It was not appropriate. It's hard to say no to somebody when they have you inside of their domain and harassing you with pointed questions. Which is why it was so curious why he wasn't so forthcoming with the information that I was asking for.“Who is it?”He struggled to speak. “Kael.”It was a name that I hadn't thought about in a while. The noble that had received an award before me when I'd been summoned by the emperor have been on my hit list for a while. I was thinking that perhaps this man had figured out that I could see his tattoo. Or maybe it was his brother or sister That didn't have that tattoo earlier that morning, when Xiran had told me that the family main branch was excluded from having face tattoos, I was surprised. But now I was thinking that I was facing main branch members or that a mange ranch member had figured out a way to slip past me and a team.I couldn't directly test someone's cultivation. It was just that they had picked a marker for each other. That was very blatantly obvious to me and no one else here.It wasn't that moment that I realized that I had stuck around for too long. I could feel him trying to charge something up. Fortunately for me, we had practiced for this exact scenario.“Eight six!” I yelled at the top of my lungs and put the man down, pushing him into the ground. All his friends were already kneeling but now they were touching the ground prone.I was looking at this in exactly one lens. That lens, being my survival. My enemy was not above basically eating people and turning them into pills or finding them for increasing the capacity of their soul cores.They would not be against a fair bit of terrorism and an improvised explosive inside of a cultivator. In one moment, I was flying at top speed towards my group.Time slowed down as I reached out for my girlfriend and my newest protege. Behind us, the power swelled.In less than three seconds, we were a block away with a frazzled group taking cover behind a building.“How nice was it that we're all here, I said I'm truly wondering why I got you here.”Lee and I were both breathing heavily. Egiya and her father were stunned and Xiran looked like she had seen a ghost. Xueyie was on the opposite side of the street, having pulled the rear-guard card. She wasn't even close. “What the hell? Joe,” my girlfriend said.And that was when the initial shockwave hit us. Now you might think that cultivator explosions are just like regular explosions. They're not because there's an amount of force that you can project back if you've reached a certain level. I reached out with my domain, and I pushed back against the wave of force that was emanating from or I just been. If I hadn't moved so fast, I probably would have been caught up in that attempt on my life. But yeah, if they can send someone to open the formation and unlock the door to my home City then why wouldn't they try to use and improvised exposure device instead of a human in the emperor's own backyard. The girls yelped but I enveloped them in a big hug as we all huddled together. Lee was getting close to her fifth-round breakthrough, and she did her best to Shield the girls. Our formations expert began to draw something on the ground, and I could only hope that whatever it was, it was an anti-nuclear device type of formation. Another thing that I wasn't expecting was for the explosion to continue on. The house that we had duck behind, a two-story affair that looked like a combination shop and apartment building was about to lose its structural integrity. Now I say this as somebody who is not an architect or civil engineer. I just say This is somebody who understand That a house is not a home when there's only one corner of the structure remaining. Where one sets to the entire block sized building now there was only a circular imprint in the dirt. At the center of that circle, there was nothing but Ash. “Homeboy really killed himself and his entire crew,” I whispered. I looked across the street to see if Xueyie had taken better cover and I can see that she was moving. She had embraced speed, flying at a steady clip away from the center of the explosion.

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