For all that Tong Guanting was doing to keep that one building out of mind for everyone, Sen didn’t believe for a moment that it wouldn’t be defended. In fact, he expected heavy resistance. That meant that he needed to either work very quickly or very quietly once he got inside. Otherwise, he ran the risk of someone getting away to warn Tong Guanting. While Sen was confident that he could kill the man, he had zero confidence that he could accomplish that goal while also trying to avoid getting crushed into a bloody paste by the nascent soul cultivator. His plan depended on surprise, not direct force. The main advantage he had was that no one was going to know he was inside until after it was far too late to stop him. The subtle apathy his extended break had prompted would help as well.

Still, Sen didn’t want to assume that everything was going to go according to plan. So, when the true dark of night fell, he spent a little time setting up a backup option in the form of a formation of his own. It wouldn’t necessarily save him, but it might give him enough breathing room to get away if everything went tragically, horribly wrong. With the formation in place, he scaled the back wall wrapped in shadows. While hiding was limiting his senses, he was still getting enough information to understand where people were inside the building. He picked a window on the second floor, away from the main concentration of people, and used that as his way in. He did need to remove boards that someone had put on the inside of the window to keep anyone from doing exactly what he meant to do. It wasn’t that the boards could really stop anyone who wasn’t mortal, but that it would be difficult to do it quietly.

Fortunately, Sen had some extra advantages. His metal qi let him liquefy the nails that held the boards in place. Then, it was simple enough to move them out of his way with a gentle application of wind qi. With that accomplished, he slipped inside. Once he was inside, he took his time again. Listening and sensing what he could. The information wasn’t as perfect as it could have been, but it was enough to tell him there were twelve core formation cultivators in the building with him. Three of them were on the top floor with him, while the rest were clumped together on the first floor. He waited for nearly thirty minutes, just to see what people would do. The cultivators on the first floor moved around occasionally, but the three on the second floor hadn’t moved at all. Sen suspected that meant they were asleep.

Satisfied that he had learned what he could by waiting, he opened the door to the room he was in, using a little strategic air qi to ensure that no sounds would escape from the hinges. He crept down a spacious hallway to the first room where he sensed life. Using the same air qi trick, he opened the door a little and stole into the room. There were a pair of beds in the room, although only one was occupied. He observed the pair briefly before he summoned a jian from his storage ring. He reinforced the blade with metal qi, which also helped ensure that the edge was sharper than any metal could normally hold. When he’d first begun this campaign against Tong Guanting, he’d found himself hesitating in moments like this.

He didn’t know anything about these cultivators or why they were part of the Shadow Eagle Talon Syndicate. He’d rationalized that maybe they’d been forced into the group by some desperate need. Then, once they were in the group, they couldn’t get out. But those had been the fantasies of a child, desperate to avoid grisly work. Hard experience had taught him that. These weren’t qi-condensing cultivators who had no choice but to follow the instructions of their elders. The cultivators in that bed were late-stage core cultivators. They had choices and options. They had chosen to keep doing this when they could have chosen to do something else. Maybe being criminals wasn’t all they were, but it was the only part that mattered to Sen. If he let them wake up, they would attack him. So, he didn’t let them wake up. After his jian passed cleanly through their necks, he wiped the blade down on a blanket and left them where they lay.

Sen returned to the hall and pushed his senses hard. If the cultivators downstairs had been paying attention, they’d have felt the lives of those two cultivators wink out of existence. It would have altered them to his presence. Instead of feeling a rush of cultivators headed his way, he heard the sound of laughter coming up a short stairwell. Sen wasn’t worried about the people downstairs discovering his presence. That was inevitable. He just wanted them to discover it on his schedule. Sen walked farther down the hall. He noted a door that was sealed with a formation but chose to ignore it for the moment. He snuck into another room and, a few moments later, he left a corpse behind him. Only then did he return to the room that had been sealed with a formation.

Sen was impressed. While the work on the formations protecting the building had been good, the work around the door was excellent. He thought it might even be good enough that Uncle Kho wouldn’t have sniffed in derision. Well, he thought, maybe not quite that good. To call Uncle Kho’s standards exacting was a profound understatement. Sen did think that Uncle Kho might have said that the person who put the formation around the door wasn’t entirely hopeless. As with the formations outside, Sen didn’t just want to get through it. Breaking a formation wasn’t easy, exactly, but it was straightforward. The problem with breaking it was that it tended to set off anything in the formation designed to alert someone to tampering. Sen wanted to go through the formation without breaking it.

Keeping an ear open and his senses open as much as he could to alert him to anyone approaching, he put most of his mind to work mentally disassembling the formation. It was actually cunning with those alerts he’d been worried about looped back into the areas that Sen would normally have used to bypass the formation. In the end, rather than try to work around the formation, he ended up adding to it to redirect the alerts to endlessly cycle back on themselves. Then, he opened the door and walked in. Much as he’d suspected, the room was full of money, natural treasures, and cultivation resources. While Sen thought that the formation on the door had been reasonably challenging, he doubted that was the last trap in the room. He spent another ten minutes identifying all the things in the room that were cursed in some way or intended as tracking devices. He was careful to leave all of those things untouched in exactly the places they had been left. Everything else, he stole.

He took the time to look in the rest of the rooms on the second floor but didn’t find anything of note. Accepting that he’d done all the damage he could upstairs, he made his way over to the short set of stairs that led downstairs. Once he got closer, he could smell the wine and hear the raucous calls between the men. Shaking his head, Sen fed lightning qi and killing intent into his jian. He’d discovered in one of his recent fights with Tong Guanting’s people that just leaving the technique in the sword was more devastating against a group than unleashing it. As Heavens’ Rebuke coalesced in the blade, Sen walked down the stairs. Everyone was so distracted with their drinking and joking that they didn’t even notice Sen. He just walked over to the nearest man and beheaded him. Everyone was so shocked that he’d driven his blade through a second man and nearly cut a third in half across the belly before anyone reacted.

The terrible destructive power of Heavens’ Rebuke was muted when it kept it contained to the sword, but only until the jian came into contact with something. One of the more sober ones managed to pull a dao and attack, only to see the blade sheared clearly into two pieces. She died a moment later with the same corrosive force chewing away at the wound across her neck. It was only then that someone thought to try a qi attack. Sen felt someone cycle for fire qi. He didn’t even bother cycling anything. He just grabbed the nearest person and threw them into the path of the fireball. The fire qi wielder stared in shocked horror as his attack set his companion on fire. Sen briefly ignited his qinggong technique, shot across the intervening space, and bisected the fire cultivator with a vicious upward slash.

Sen finally cycled for something other than lightning. The remaining cultivators, who had already been verging on panic at the ruthless slaughter that had seemingly come upon them from nowhere, tried to flee. Sen had been cycling for water and fire, turning all of the wine in the room into makeshift ice spears. Those frozen wine spears launched themselves at the disorganized and frightened core cultivators. Sen didn’t particularly need the spears to do any damage, although he was pleasantly surprised when the spears lanced through two of his less attentive enemies. What he needed them to do was hold the cultivators in place for a moment to divert the attacks. In that critical moment when they couldn’t flee, he landed in the middle of them. The ones he could kill immediately, he maimed. Cultivators lost arms or legs and kept screaming as Heavens’ Rebuke stripped away flesh and bone as it worked its way inside of them. Sen didn’t especially feel like a warrior in that moment, although he supposed some fool would probably have described him that way. He simply continued moving and cutting until he was the only thing left alive in the room.

He took a long moment to look around at what he’d done. Remembering the cultivator he’d thrown in the path of the fireball, Sen walked over to the man who had struggled to his feet and found a spear somewhere. It was clear that the man had taken some damage to his eyes by the way he kept squinting and blinking in Sen’s general direction.

“Who are you? Why are you doing this?” demanded the burned cultivator.

Sen didn’t say anything. There was no point. He didn’t draw things out. He wasn’t there to torture people or get information. Sen sidestepped a half-blind thrust and cut the spear in half. Then, he closed the distance and took the man’s head. It was as quick and clean as he could make it. Then, he got to work. One by one, he pulled vials from his storage ring and placed them around the building. He put them on the floor, on shelves, and on tables. He put them on the beds in the room upstairs. He even left a few in the room that had been sealed. Each one was linked to the rest by tiny formation plates that Sen had been making while he waited for alchemical solutions to boil down or mix properly. Once he’d put the last vial and its hideously dangerous contents in place, he checked the formation one last time.

With that done, he just stood there for a few seconds and looked around. He felt like he was waiting for something. Then, he realized that what he was waiting for was for things to go wrong. He really hadn’t expected the plan to go off without a hitch. They almost never did. Almost isn’t always, he told himself. There’s nothing to do now but see if it works. Sen went out the same way he’d gone in. Once he was a relatively safe distance away, he intentionally activated the defensive formations around the building. He leaned back against an alley wall and waited. If Tong Guanting was true to form, he’d arrive within two minutes. It was barely a minute later when the nascent soul cultivator crashed down through the roof of the building. Sen gave it five seconds, then activated the formation attached to the vials. It took about ten more seconds, but then Sen heard Tong Guanting start screaming in agony.