Mo Fan hauled the girl along at a dead sprint through the tangled web of black market streets and alleys.
The buildings and stalls on either side blurred into streaking afterimages,rushing backward behind them.
At first,the girl was practically airborne,dragged half-senseless by Mo Fan's terrifying explosive power.
Once she'd barely managed to adapt to this wind-like speed,she immediately started hollering behind him,beside herself:
"Slower!Slower!"
"Are you running for your life or rushing to be reincarnated?!"
Mo Fan didn't look back,and didn't ease off his pace in the slightest.
"You've got the nerve to tell me to slow down?"
"Who was it screaming'Senior Brother'every other word back there,like her own flesh and blood brother had just died?"
The girl felt a twinge of guilt,but her mouth refused to concede,and she muttered back:
"That was the heat of the moment..."
As they ran,Mo Fan finally couldn't stop himself from asking:
"What possessed you to go stealing someone's Storage Pouch?"
At the word"stealing,"the girl's hackles went straight up,like a cat with its tail underfoot.
"Who said I stole it!"
"I was investigating something!"
Mo Fan's steps hitched slightly,surprised.
"Investigating?"
The girl opened her mouth,then seemed to realize she'd said too much.
Her expression turned unnatural and she hemmed and hawed,trying to brush it aside.
"Investigating what?"Mo Fan pressed.
"I...look,something of mine went missing a while back.I tracked it all the way to Cangqing City,and it took ages before I finally spotted the same pattern."
"So you stole someone's Storage Pouch?"
"I thought the lead was inside!"the girl retorted with total self-righteousness.
"And?"
The girl went silent for a beat,her voice dropping.
"...I got it wrong."
Mo Fan was speechless.
"So those people were innocent?"
"Probably...yeah."
Hearing that,Mo Fan also fell silent for a moment.
"So those two really were innocent?"
The girl's expression stiffened,her eyes sliding away.
"...As far as I can tell right now."
"Probably."
"Possibly."
Mo Fan:"..."
Seeing that utterly speechless look on Mo Fan's face,the girl flushed with indignation.
"They looked super suspicious,okay?!"
"And whose fault is it they were going on about secondhand goods and Storage Pouches?!"
"People moving product in a black market.What are they supposed to discuss,poetry and song?!"
"...Just keep running."
Mo Fan couldn't be bothered digging further.
It was her business,after all.
In a black market where dragons and fish mixed together,who didn't have a few secrets?
The two kept sprinting for a stretch,but Mo Fan quickly noticed that while the pursuers behind them couldn't match his speed...
They were clearly far more familiar with the black market's convoluted terrain.
From several alley mouths ahead came faint,hurried footsteps and weak fluctuations of spiritual power.
Someone was clearly moving to cut them off.
Keep running blindly like this and he'd likely plunge straight into their encirclement.
Or worse,drag the commotion out onto the main street.
Then the trouble would be serious.
Mo Fan simply stopped.
Caught off guard,the girl nearly smashed face-first into his broad back.
"Ow...why'd you stop?"
The girl complained,rubbing her forehead.
"There are people ahead too,"Mo Fan said evenly.
The girl craned her neck to look.
At the end of the alley,several figures had already appeared.
And behind them,the pursuers were closing fast.
Wolves in front,tigers behind.
"So what do we do?"
The girl was getting nervous.
Mo Fan released the wrist he'd been gripping and casually rolled his shoulders,drawing a faint crackling of bone.
"What do we do?"
"We fight."
The girl blinked,staring at Mo Fan's excessively calm face.
Then,reading the room quite sensibly,she quietly backed up two steps to a relatively safe distance.
"Go get'em,Senior Brother."
She clenched her small fists and made a cheering gesture.
Mo Fan glanced back at her,his mouth twitching.
"That'Senior Brother'rolls off your tongue awfully smooth."
The girl grinned,flashing two little canine teeth.
"Those with ability shoulder the burden."
The pursuing cultivators were mostly at the early to mid Foundation Establishment level.
Their job had only ever been to detain the two troublemakers stirring things up in the black market.
Seeing that Mo Fan had finally stopped running,they had no intention of wasting words.
One of them snorted coldly and immediately launched a ring-shaped artifact that cut through the air with a sharp whistle...
Aiming to subdue this body cultivator who'd been barreling through their streets.
Mo Fan stood still,using no overt necromantic arts of any kind.
This was Cangqing City after all,the provincial capital of the Great Xia Dynasty.
He had no plans to expose his trump cards and invite unnecessary trouble over a trifle like this.
No overt necromantic arts.
He would fight exactly like a body cultivator.
BANG!
The glowing ring artifact slammed squarely into Mo Fan's chest.
Mo Fan retreated a single small step.
The spiritual light on the artifact flickered once,dimmed,and dropped to the ground.
Mo Fan was unharmed.
The cultivator who'd launched it froze.
Hiding behind him,the girl froze too,mouth slightly open.
And then Mo Fan moved.
Like a hunting leopard,he closed the distance in an instant,appearing right in front of the cultivator who hadn't yet recovered his wits.
A fist swung out.
No spiritual power wrapped around it.
No gorgeous flare of light and shadow.
Just pure,suffocating physical explosive force.
BANG!
A dull,enormous impact.
The Foundation Establishment cultivator didn't even have time to scream.
He flew backward as if struck by a siege ram and crashed hard into the alley's bluestone slabs.
Seeing this,the two behind him paled and acted at the same time.
One rapidly formed hand seals,casting an art meant to seal off Mo Fan's retreat.
The other launched a flying sword from the flank,a streak of cold light stabbing straight for Mo Fan's vitals.
Mo Fan didn't retreat.
He advanced.
Relying on physical speed and reflexes that could only be called terrifying,he bulled straight through the incoming spell and drove into the sword cultivator's close range.
In the instant the flying sword was about to run him through,Mo Fan turned sideways and clamped down with precision on the sword cultivator's wrist.
His grip surged with force.
The sword cultivator felt an irresistible,overwhelming power transmitted through him.
His whole body was flung away by Mo Fan's offhand toss,entirely beyond his control.
BANG!
He was used as a human sandbag,slamming heavily into the other cultivator still mid-incantation.
The two of them tumbled across the ground in a tangled heap.
The entire fight involved no flashy exchange of spells.
No exquisite trading and countering of techniques.
It was simply an exceedingly straightforward,exceedingly unreasonable...
Suppression.
Once upon a time,running into a Foundation Establishment cultivator meant Mo Fan had to take it seriously,even play every card he had.
Now,facing ordinary Foundation Establishment cultivators,close combat alone was enough to grind them down with ease.
The fight ended almost as soon as it began.
In the span of moments,the several Foundation Establishment cultivators who'd charged in so fiercely lay sprawled across the ground in every direction,clutching their chests or arms and groaning in pain.
Mo Fan knew exactly where he was.
Beating someone down and killing them were completely different in nature.
As long as nobody died,there was still room to maneuver in this black market.
The girl had been hiding behind Mo Fan,one hand already secretly clutching a talisman that gave off a subtle pulse,ready to throw out a spell in support at any moment.
She'd just been about to trigger it.
And then things went quiet up front.
She poked her head out.
Looked at the several Foundation Establishment cultivators lying on the ground.
Looked at the expressionless Mo Fan.
Then looked down at the talisman she hadn't even had time to throw.
It took her a good while to find her voice.
"You..."
"You're really a body cultivator?"