Tumbling through a hail of splinters, Jun Li deftly landed onto a wide table covered with a lavish assortment of various local delicacies.

  Jun Li swept her eyes across the dumbstruck Cultivators who were vacuously revelling until now.

  Had she been in a more coherent state of mind, Jun Li may have realized how terribly she was ruining the plan her peers had made just an hour ago. Alas, she had all but forgotten the details, latching onto the only part she found interesting.

  'More weaklings, just need to kill them before they escape…' From Jun Li’s body, thick Killing Intent swept out through the room like a suffocating haze of smoke.

  Following the instinct that had taken hold of her mind, Jun Li sank deeply into a comfortable state of flow.

  No longer held back by any sentiment of restraint, Jun Li felt able to manifest her current potential to the fullest extent.

  To one side, the gentle sound of one of the Cultivators apprehensively backing up could be heard.

  Whether it was from caution or if he simply felt intimidated by the sudden Killing Intent that pricked his skin like needles, it didn’t matter.

  The simple sound of him taking a step backwards was the spark that set Jun Li off. In a split second, Jun Li kicked off the table with enough force to send it grinding across the tavern, and appeared in front of the barely-retreated Cultivator.

  Seeing Jun Li raise her iron staff in front of him, the retreating man could only utter a pitiful sound of incredulity before the sickening crunch of his skull caving in rang out, his body crashing to the floor.

  In an instant, the crowded tavern burst into chaos, some of the Rogue Cultivators hurriedly backing away, and others shouting orders at their peers.

  In the chaos, the man in red furs at the Crimson Palace stage simply stared at Jun Li with a grim expression, as if unsure how to respond.

  Within moments, the stronger Qi Condensation Cultivators recklessly threw themselves towards Jun Li.

  As she easily stepped out of their collective ranges, Jun Li noted that the gap in speed between her and these Cultivators was insurmountable, far more so than she expected.

  Although they seemed to be at the Late Qi Condensation stage, Jun Li could tell from their auras alone that their cultivations were unstable, as though they had relied excessively on external resources to forcefully boost their cultivations to a higher level.

  They were far from strong enough to force Jun Li into fighting at full strength.

  Unfortunately for them, Jun Li had no capacity for restraint in her current state. The concept of taking prisoners or asking questions had never crossed her mind.

  With each swipe and thrust of her staff, flesh split and bones shattered, quickly turning the confusion of those present into horror as they realized the threat before them.

  The man in red furs began to sweat as he saw Jun Li tear through his men, and readied himself to abandon them. In his eyes, it was obvious that the person in front of him was experienced as a Cultivator and trained as a killer; the level of skill and confidence she displayed could not be explained otherwise in his mind.

  Although he was by far the strongest in his group, he was unsure if he could barge through their ranks as easily as the woman before him.

  Just a few months ago, he had the good fortune of meeting a young Cultivator who was passing through the Zhao Kingdom on their way to who-knows-where.

  That Cultivator was quite young, and although he seemed to be the progeny of a wealthy clan, he was na?ve and easily taken advantage of.

  The man in red furs was a lifelong bandit, and an exceptionally cunning one. With an amicable expression and an invitation to enjoy the local pleasures, this bandit was able to deceive that na?ve young master into lowering his guard, eventually tricking him into drinking enough poison to kill a mammoth on the spot.

  When he eventually passed out, the bandit didn’t care if he was asleep or dead, simply stripping him of anything and everything of value and running as far away as he could.

  Abusing the numerous treasures on the na?ve Cultivator’s body, he quickly grew in power and took over the local outlaw groups of his region.

  With a vague understanding of Cultivation from reading the manuals he looted, and with a small hoard of cultivation resources, he quickly elevated his group to a stature that he thought was truly and completely indomitable in the Zhao Kingdom.

  Now, he regretted his overindulgence and cursed himself for not moving on from this little village. The bandit leader didn’t expect the first real resistance to their action to be at the hands of a proper Cultivator, let alone one easily at the same level as him.

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  As he hesitated, unsure if he should fight or run, Jun Li continued to revel in slaughter. Those who came forward to resist her would die, and those who turned to run would die.

  Amidst the crowd of increasingly chaotic, disorganized, and fearful bandits, Jun Li moved too quickly and struck too decisively to be resisted.

  For these bandits with shoddy cultivation and no knowledge of Martial Techniques, there was effectively no value to their numbers.

  Striding amidst a dozen mangled corpses, Jun Li had unknowingly reaped a great benefit of experience from the slaughter.

  Surprisingly, even after Jun Li had piled up a small mound of corpses, there were still two remaining in the tavern, yet to run or fight, simply having watched as the many others had died.

  Perhaps the demonstration of their men's ineffectiveness had simply led them to realize they held no value at all while alive, and so there was no point attempting to intervene in their deaths.

  One was the man in red furs, who remained still despite having decided to run. The other was the second-in-command of their small group of bandits turned Rogue Cultivators, a middle-aged man wielding a gleaming spear that seemed so clean and vibrant as to be dissonant against the rest of his appearance.

  Though he truly didn’t want to face Jun Li, he knew that if he tried to run, his boss would kill him on the spot, even if it meant getting himself killed in return. That was how spiteful he knew his leader to be.

  Choking back his regrets, the spearman cautiously stepped towards Jun Li.

  Closing the distance faster than Jun Li expected, the man raised his spear in an arc and swiped down, intent on guiding Jun Li’s movement to his advantage.

  Raising her iron staff overhead, Jun Li intended on shoving the spearhead back as it fell, and thrusting her staff through the front of the spearman’s skull before he could recover from the recoil.

  The instant the spear fell, however, it cut effortlessly through the iron staff and descended on Jun Li almost too quickly to react to.

  Jolting back by reflex, Jun Li barely avoided the worst outcome and was able to escape with a shallow cut across the side of her face.

  After finding herself just a few inches from a potentially fatal wound, Jun Li snapped out of her flow state, suddenly out of breath as the built-up fatigue of her overexertion hit her all at once.

  Though her mental state had been altered, there was luckily no distortion regarding Jun Li’s memory of events, and she was able to gather herself after a few seconds of retreat. ‘That spear isn’t normal…’

  Suppressing the curiosity and wonder she felt about the strange mental state she had found herself in, Jun Li set everything aside and coldly assessed the facts in front of her.

  The man in front of her seemed surprised to have forced her back, but Jun Li was more interested in the spear than the man.

  Though the body of the spear seemed relatively mundane, the spearhead gleamed with an unnatural light and bore an intricate pattern across its surface.

  ‘Is that a Treasure Weapon…? Looks similar to Senior Brother Han's bow…’ Tossing away half of the broken staff, Jun Li gripped the smaller half tightly, wielding it as a club.

  Having been shocked out of her trance, Jun Li felt she was suddenly out of her depth, as if it wasn’t her who had just killed a dozen men.

  As the spearman before her stepped forward, Jun Li had no choice but to emulate herself from a few moments ago and defend herself.

  Under the glinting light of the Treasure spear, Jun Li felt incapable of guarding.

  Focusing the entirety of her perception towards her opponent’s spear, Jun Li slowly and deeply exhaled. As her breath emptied and her focus reached its peak, the man’s spear shot forth, splitting the air between them silently.

  Jun Li’s speed reached a new height, a perfectly executed step from the Glass Cloud Art sent her jolting into place, just half a meter away.

  Shifting gears in an instant, Jun Li shifted her grip on the short, broken iron rod in her hand.

  'Sparking Thorn - Single-Point Stab…' Jun Li’s arm and weapon both blurred into a vague shadow, striking out not at the spearman, but towards his spear.

  With a keening 'snap,' the mundane haft of the half-treasure spear was broken apart, disarming the spearman and sending him recoiling.

  With all of Jun Li’s attention having been focused on the spear she perceived as a threat, she had failed to notice that the man in red furs had begun to move, circling around the two as they stood against each other.

  Jun Li hadn’t noticed anything until the grating sound of metal clashing on metal rang out behind her.

  Reflexively jolting away from the sound, she saw the man in red furs holding a trembling sword and glaring off to the doorway of the tavern with a bitter expression.

  Standing in the doorway, Han Wenyan stood with his bow drawn, having fired at the man in red furs before he was able to sneak-attack Jun Li.

  “Junior Sister Jun! We’ve taken care of the fleeing ones!” Looking into the tavern, Han Wenyan flinched at seeing the numerous corpses strewn about the floor, appearing as if they had been rent apart by a vicious beast.

  Although Jun Li’s deviation from their plan was both unexpected and distressing, it was simple enough for Han Wenyan and Zhao Xiaoli to improvise around.

  Reaching to nock another arrow, Han Wenyan spoke. “Surrender now, please. And we might-“

  Before he could finish his sentence, the man in red furs lunged forward, not towards Han Wenyan or Jun Li, but towards his own subordinate, who was now disarmed and panicking.

  “Boss!?” Grasping his subordinate by the face, wrenching him through the air with such force that his neck audibly broke mid-movement, the man in red furs physically threw him towards the doorway.

  Tumbling out of the way, Han Wenyan was displaced just long enough for the man in red furs to dash past him, fleeing the tavern.

  “Don’t let him escape!” Outside, Han Wenyan quickly subdued the thrown subordinate and called out. Having been in waiting, Zhao Xiaoli shot past the tavern’s doorway in pursuit of the man in red furs.

  Before leaving to join in the pursuit, Jun Li remembered the Treasure Spear she had broken. The haft was mundane, but the spearhead was quite special.

  She quickly found and picked up the fragment with the spearhead still attached. There was enough of the haft still remaining to serve as a handle, though it was now proportioned more like a malformed sword than a spear.