"Now only three spots are left.." Yang Qing muttered with a sigh as he continued with the report.

Next on the list was a cultivator by the name of Han Lei who operated by a different name, Chen Xin.He was an elder of an assassin organization known as the Ghost Viper Court. In terms of infamy, the Ghost Viper had the same level as the Blue Soul Flame Crow Syndicate. For the right price, you could them to kill anyone. They had no qualms about who their target was. Of course, they were not foolish in the jobs they undertook as they never accepted any jobs that were associated with ancient rank 1 and rank 2 organizations but anything below that was fair game.

They had assassinated prominent figures from sect leaders to clan heads, to prized princes and princesses, heirs to prestigious organizations, talented seedlings, down to the mundane targets. They could target an individual or even an entire organization which was how Han Lei's path crossed with theirs.When he broke through the core formation realm, he left his clan to spread his wings on the wider continent which had been the term set by his parents to allow him to leave home. His parents had been one of the elders of the Han Clan, which had been a fairly decent clan having two palace realm cultivators with one of them being his grandaunt.

The plan was for him to roam the continent for three years before he had to come back and serve his clan. However, his trip was cut short about one and a half years in when horrible news reached his ear.

His clan had been pretty famous because of their talisman refinement abilities. The talismans they refined could contain 70% of a cultivator's power from the qi refinement up to the palace realm. It was the foundation with which they propped themselves up. Because of their exceptional skills, the Han Clan was known far and wide, so when they got killed one night to the last member, the news spread like wildfire fast, reaching even the ears of Han Lei who had been hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from their territory.

When he heard the news, he thought it was a joke, and when it proved it wasn't, he thought it was another Han Clan out there that had been destroyed. But as more news trickled in with apt details, he could no longer pretend it was not the same Han Clan that he knew.

The thing about bad news, one would always try to deny it up until it hit them square in the face. Before then they would make all sorts of excuses, try to rationalize it with irrationality and find threads of truth that didn't exist that seemed to disprove the news and label it as fake.

Up until one was face to face with the undeniable reality of that news, they would not accept it no matter how detailed and clear the details. This was what happened to Han Lei. As he was madly rushing back to his clan, all he could think about was how the news he had heard was all a lie, but ultimately when he reached his clan, reality smacked him dead center, and he could not deny it.When he reached there, the structures were intact. There were no signs of struggle. The scene of utter destruction he had expected to find wasn't there. Everything seemed as he had left it except one thing, the buildings were absent their occupants. A place that he had left so full of life was now deathly silent filled with the stench and grievance of death.

He couldn't believe it, even when he saw the bodies of his clan members, he couldn't believe they were gone. Their bodies were strewn about in the various buildings all bearing the same characteristics. They were pale grey, looking as if they were about to turn to stone, while their eyes, nose, and ears had dried black liquid, and at their necks were four tiny puncture wounds that looked to have been made with tiny needles.

Han Lei said from the facial expressions of most of the bodies, it seemed like none of them realized how and when they died, with some even frozen in the middle of doing a particular action.

Eventually, he made his way to his parent's courtyard and found them the same as the rest, his father was in the same posture as he always was, in the same room as he always, doing the same thing he always did. He was seated in a lotus position in his cultivation room with his hand holding a scroll that contained a record of sales and expenditures for the various businesses belonging to the clan. As for his mother, she was in their garden and looked to be tending to it.

Though by the time Han Lei arrived, the garden had been empty, same with the other places. It had taken him six days to reach his clan which was more than enough time for looters to pick his clan clean of all valuables. At least the bodies of his clansmen were not among the things stolen but everything else even the furniture and clothes was looted.

It was only when he made his way to his grandaunt's abode did he find signs of a struggle, but even then, the signs were not signs one would expect from a palace realm expert. What he saw was her alarmed and looked to be swinging a sword which had obviously been looted, as she wore a look that was indignant, and terrified. She had more puncture wounds than the rest, with her entire body filled with them, which was the same thing he observed from the remaining palace realm expert of the clan who had been the clan leader.

He searched for hours, but not a single member of his clan was alive

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