The other spy's voice sounded completely foreign to Han Li. He had surely never met this person before, but judging from the voice, the man seemed quite young—probably in his twenties.
Unfortunately, for the sake of caution, Han Li hadn't dared to steal even a single peek, fearing that both men might be skilled enough to detect his gaze and realize there was someone nearby. That would have cost him more than it was worth.
After this encounter, the rest of the journey passed in complete tranquility.
Han Li finally returned to his quarters well after the dinner hour had passed.
As usual, Doctor Mo showed no interest whatsoever in Han Li's mysterious comings and goings. Apart from occasionally delivering prepared medications, he left Han Li completely to his own devices.
If Han Li hadn't noticed that the medicines Doctor Mo delivered were all formulated from the precious herbs he'd collected on his last trip down the mountain, he would have assumed the man had given up on any expectations of him and was hatching some other sinister scheme.
The so-called precious medicines that Doctor Mo now sent over were completely beneath Han Li's notice, but to avoid arousing suspicion, he would still pinch his nose and swallow them down.
He wasn't afraid of the medicine being laced with poison—harming him now would amount to harming himself as well.
Regarding the Wild Wolf Gang spy he'd encountered along the way, Han Li had already thought of a good way to deal with the situation on his way back.
Although he didn't harbor particularly deep feelings for the Seven Mysteries Sect, he was still half an Inner Sect Disciple, and he couldn't very well stand by and do nothing while a threat to the sect unfolded right under his nose.
Besides, he had already found the perfect person to handle this matter on his behalf—Li Feiyu, Senior Brother Li.
From what Han Li had observed, perhaps because of the Marrow Extraction Pill he'd been taking, Li Feiyu's ambition for fame and fortune far exceeded that of an ordinary person. He harbored no small ambitions and had always dreamed of rising into the upper echelons of the Seven Mysteries Sect, becoming a figure of greater prominence.
Han Li had once speculated that Li Feiyu probably wanted to make himself as wild and as dazzling as possible in whatever time he had left.
Now, if he personally delivered such a great merit right to his doorstep, Li Feiyu would surely be overjoyed. This would also serve to repay the great favor of obtaining the sword manual for him.
The moment he thought of the Blink Sword Manual, Han Li's heart surged with excitement, wave after wave.
Regarding the Blink Sword Manual, he hadn't lied to his friend—it truly was unsuitable for Li Feiyu to practice. But Han Li had held back quite a few details.
For him, keeping small secrets from everyone was the cardinal rule of survival.
Even from those who appeared to be on the closest of terms with him, there were no exceptions.
However, the contents recorded in these secret manuals were truly vastly different from ordinary martial arts.
In Han Li's view, rather than calling it a sword art, it would be more accurate to call it sword technique. It was entirely an assassination secret art that combined factors such as timing, terrain, and human conditions—a supremely rare, pure killing technique where a single drawn blade meant death.
These books described, across various environments and at various times, the multitude of techniques for using one's painstakingly trained, insidious sword skills to kill an enemy with a single, inescapable strike.
They taught the practitioner of this sword technique to draw upon every blade of grass and tree on the terrain, to exploit the varying angles and intensities of light, to create visual illusions for the opponent, to seize upon the enemy's weakness in an instant, to see through their flaws, and to strike them down in the blink of an eye.
This was a secret art that placed extreme emphasis on technique—without even a modicum of talent, it was impossible to comprehend and master this sword art.
Therefore, anyone who practiced this secret technique had to possess extraordinary senses—vision and hearing far beyond those of an ordinary person—before they could hope to achieve any success.
Had the requirements stopped there, it would have been tolerable—some disciples would inevitably be tempted by its power and choose to study it anyway.
But what was truly outrageous was that it imposed even harsher conditions: anyone who wished to practice this secret technique was forbidden from possessing any pure internal energy, for it would clash with the methods of channeling and releasing force, making cultivation excruciatingly difficult.
Even if one managed to stumble through the training successfully, in actual combat the excessive internal energy raging within one's body would cause the sword moves to distort imperceptibly, leaving significant openings for the opponent—an invitation to certain death.
Such a requirement alone effectively eliminated the vast majority of aspiring practitioners. After all, a well-known saying had always circulated in the martial world: "Train the fist without training the power, and in the end you have nothing."
For them, abandoning the cultivation of internal arts was an unfathomable taboo. To give up one's own inner energy practice for the sake of this obscure, nameless sword technique—why, that would make one the laughingstock of the entire martial world.
And so, only a handful of people remained who still harbored intentions of continuing their training.
But even among those few—however great their talent, however impeccable their internal energy—there stood one final hurdle that crushed any lingering desire to persist.
That hurdle was the sword art itself: its impossibly vast and complex set of moves, its excruciatingly detailed and demanding conditions of application.
One need only glance at the thick stack of manuals packed in the bundle to feel overwhelmed at the mere sight of them.
In essence, each manual represented a single sword stance, and every stance was further broken down into over a hundred sub-variants, each of which required mastery of entirely different techniques depending on the environment, the weather, and countless other factors at the moment of execution.
Such a staggering volume of sword techniques—forget about actually practicing them, even reading through them all would give anyone a splitting headache, to say nothing of committing every detail to memory and then comprehending and applying it through personal experience.
These monstrous training requirements had turned away untold numbers of disciples who had once aspired to learn this swordsmanship, filling their hearts with silent curses aimed at the Elder who had created this supreme art.
As time passed, the entire Seven Mysteries Sect gradually lost interest in the sword technique, coming to believe that no one could possibly master it. This body of martial knowledge had most likely been fabricated out of thin air by that Elder on his deathbed—otherwise, how could anyone explain such absurd cultivation conditions? It was clearly nothing more than deliberate sabotage aimed at disciples ignorant of its true nature. And so the manuals were consigned to a high shelf, gathering dust, never again to draw a single visitor.
(End of chapter)