"Your companion here was rather too tactless — which is why he's dead!" Yang Kai regarded Zhang Fu with an air of indifference, his eyes devoid of any trace of emotion. The sight of it left Zhang Fu drenched in cold sweat.
He longed to flee, yet found himself utterly incapable of mustering the courage.
He had a gut feeling — the moment he tried to run, he would be the next one to lose his head.
"I hope your answer will satisfy me!" Yang Kai continued to press, reading every flicker of expression on Zhang Fu's face.
Zhang Fu's complexion had turned ashen, his eyes brimming with both terror and wariness. He pursed his dry lips and spoke: "If I tell you what you want to know, will you let me go?"
"What do you think?" Yang Kai let out a derisive laugh.
Zhang Fu's body trembled. His voice came out rough and strained: "Since you won't let me go anyway, why should I cooperate with you? It's all the same — just death."
"I'll make it quick. You won't even feel yourself die," Yang Kai replied with a faint smile.
That smile was like something crawling up from the depths of hell. Zhang Fu felt that facing this young man was far more terrifying than facing Lord Li himself.
"I need… to think about it!" Zhang Fu swallowed hard. As he spoke, his eyes darted left and right — clearly scouting for an escape route.
Yang Kai watched him with an amused smile, then suddenly flicked his finger. A flash of golden light flared, and Zhang Fu let out a wretched scream, stumbling backward.
But the instant his body moved, a supremely powerful aura enveloped him, freezing him completely in place!
Zhang Fu's eyes quivered violently as his gaze dropped downward. He discovered in horror that the tips of his left hand's fingers — roughly an inch's worth — had been severed by some invisible blade. The cut was perfectly clean, and blood sprayed into the open air.
For a seasoned Return Void Realm martial artist, this pain was actually nothing to speak of. What truly terrified Zhang Fu was that he had absolutely no power to fight back against Yang Kai.
They were both at the third level of the Return Void Realm, yet the other man stood over him like a god looking down from the heavens, casually controlling life and death!
The golden light flashed again…
Zhang Fu felt the pain anew. The fingers that had already lost an inch were now cut by another inch, and the severed segments drifted through the air, slowly floating off into the distance.
Yang Kai said nothing further. He simply continued to flick his fingers with a leisurely rhythm, the golden thread wrapped around Zhang Fu's hand pulsing with light time and again.
One inch, then another…
Zhang Fu's left hand grew shorter, inch by inch, until the entire palm was finally cut away — and still Yang Kai showed no sign of stopping. On the contrary, he carried on with evident relish, calibrating each severed segment to precise, exacting lengths.
What left Zhang Fu utterly horrified was that, even as the other man carried on with this game-like torture, his voice reached Zhang Fu's ears — cold as absolute zero: "Once I'm done with your left hand, I'll move to your right. Then your left leg, then your right. I'm sure that at your level of Cultivation, you won't die from that alone. After that, I'll carve open your body one piece at a time. Rest assured — I guarantee you'll still be alive and well right up until the moment I reach your heart. That way, you'll get to watch yourself die with perfect clarity."
Zhang Fu could no longer contain his terror. Gritting through the searing pain, he roared: "Enough! Whatever you want to know — I'll tell you all of it! Stop torturing me!"
In the end, death was death. A quick end was better than prolonged agony. Zhang Fu simply could not bear to witness his own death with his own eyes. Just imagining that scenario was enough to make his blood run cold.
Yang Kai's hand paused briefly. He regarded Zhang Fu at his leisure and chuckled softly: "If you'd said that from the start, you could have saved yourself a fair bit of suffering. What was the point?"
Zhang Fu clenched his teeth and growled through them: "The victor takes all. I'll tell you. Just ask."
"Good! Who are you people, exactly?" Yang Kai dispensed with ceremony and went straight to the point.
"We're from the Sword Alliance!"
"The Sword Alliance?" Yang Kai raised an eyebrow.
The Sword Alliance was a significant power within the Star Field — they commanded several Cultivation Stars. Though not as vast as the Heluo Commerce Association, their strength was not to be underestimated.
Come to think of it, Yang Kai had crossed paths with Sword Alliance cultivators before, though that had been many years ago. Within the Star Field, apart from the Heluo Commerce Association, the Sword Alliance, and powers like Purple Star, there were also the Spine of the Galaxy, the Abandoned Nest, and numerous other factions, each claiming dominion over their own territory. They vied for supremacy among themselves, and occasionally, clashes — large and small — would break out.
"What were you lying in wait for over there?" Yang Kai asked next.
Zhang Fu's eyes flickered, a hint of hesitation crossing his face. But in the end, he gritted his teeth and answered: "It was also someone from our Sword Alliance."
Yang Kai gave him a peculiar look.
Zhang Fu immediately blurted: "I'm not lying to you! The one we were planning to ambush was just a rival of ours. We may all belong to the Sword Alliance, but there are always factional divisions within!"
Yang Kai nodded slowly. From the look in the other man's eyes, he could see no sign of deceit, and the explanation was perfectly reasonable.
A major power like the Sword Alliance could never be a monolithic block on the inside — there were bound to be internal power struggles. But for those struggles to escalate to the point of staging ambushes and sneak attacks… that was something else entirely.