This Poisonous Scorpion in black produced a strip of paper from the front of his clothes and handed it over. Sun Ding took it, looked it over, then touched it to the candle flame and set it alight. A bloodthirsty smile unfurled on his face, turning the ghastly half of his face even more crimson and horrifying. Raising his hand, he rolled his sleeve up. His palm had turned purple--he grabbed at empty air, as though he had seized something and was grinding it into smithereens, and then rubbed his fingertips together lightly.

Like he had received the order, the Poisonous Scorpion turned and leapt out of the window.

It was like the two people had put on a soundless puppet show.

Sun Ding raised his head slightly, a satisfied expression blooming on his face. He murmured to himself, “Xue Fang, you have finally...shown yourself.”

He wrapped his coat tight around himself like a bat, and exited the room with a crazed smile on his face--he and Xue Fang had been grappling for eight years. How many more eight-years could a mortal on this earth have? It was time for a new Master of Fengya Mountain. Once he got rid of Xue Fang and got ahold of the Lapis Armour, Sun Ding believed, there was no one else in this world who could stand in his way.

No one else would restrict him from leaving that place of ghosts and demons, and he would finally eradicate the false righteousness and shallow sects--why talk about good and evil in this world?

There were no more than victors and losers.

Xue Fang’s traces had been exposed; he was a sitting duck for Sun Ding to destroy in one fell swoop.

Concurrently, in that insignificant corner deep in the red light district, the Head Scorpion, dressed head to toe in black, was fiddling with a handful of black and white checkers. The checkers were separated from one another, and then shuffled together in the next moment. A smile lurking with intent slowly formed on his face.

Zhou Zishu and his party remained at the inn to await Lord Seventh and the Great Shaman. While they had been enjoying themselves in the Puppet Manor in Shuzhong, forgetting about the world outside as they existed in a blissful dream outside of time, the tense situation in the pugilist world of the Central Plains a hair’s breadth away from chaos had reached the stage where the thousands of potential changes that could occur in a single breath were out of anyone’s control.

Today, the five major clans had split; their alliances disintegrated long ago, their past glory now buried under three feet of yellow earth. Gao Chong and Zhao Jing were considered to be the only ones to have survived.