Invincibility Begins with Mastery of Fist Techniques-Chapter 43: Loophole

Midnight.

"The fourth one."

In the luxurious lounge on the top floor of a nightclub, the ceiling was stained crimson with blood. A man in his forties lay limp on the bed, his eyes lifeless. Blood soaked the sheets; he was long dead.

Zhou Yuanjue pulled a clean blanket from the floor, covered the man’s body, and turned off the light as he left the room.

Back in the car, Li Qingxuan watched as Zhou Yuanjue removed his mask, his expression utterly calm. She suddenly saw him in a new light.

Ruthless, decisive, cold, relentless, and tireless.

Without a weapon in hand, he was a pious Seeker devoted to the Martial Dao.

But once he took up a weapon, he became an Asura from Hell who treated his enemies’ lives as worthless weeds.

"That was the fourth. Who’s next?"

The faint smell of blood filled the car as Li Qingxuan asked softly.

"Zhao Zhengxuan."

Zhou Yuanjue said flatly.

Li Qingxuan’s body shuddered when she heard the name.

"Aren’t you going after anyone else? Zhao Zhengxuan could be trouble. He’s already sixty-six, but he was once a Great Master of Fist Techniques. Even with his physical decline, he’ll be hard to deal with. Besides, we’ll be on his home turf..."

Li Qingxuan said with a frown.

"It has to be him. He hired five assassins to kill me, so I will kill five high-ranking members of the Tianji Sword Sect."

"It’s fair, isn’t it?"

Zhou Yuanjue said, seemingly unconcerned about the danger she mentioned.

...

...

「12:30 AM」

In the most luxurious river-view villa in the Tianhao Villa District of Leshan City.

TAP. TAP. TAP.

TAP. TAP. TAP.

Luo Yongli paced back and forth in the large study on the villa’s second floor, looking extremely anxious.

"It’s so late. Why haven’t we heard anything yet?"

he asked Zhao Zhengxuan with a frown.

Zhao Zhengxuan, on the other hand, appeared quite calm. He poured hot water and slowly steeped a pot of tea. "Be patient," he said to Luo Yongli. "Assassination requires immense patience and timing. Especially when the target is a Great Master of Fist Techniques who has comprehended the ’Holy and Bright’ state. It requires waiting for the right opportunity. We might not get news until the latter half of the night. That’s perfectly normal."

"Do you think something could have gone wrong?"

Luo Yongli asked suddenly.

"Unlikely. I know the strength of those five very well. They are the Sharp Swords secretly trained by the sect. They may not be the strongest in Fist Technique, but in Sword Dao and assassination, with the element of surprise, even Wen would likely fall. Killing and sparring are not the same concept."

"To put it another way, even if Zhou Yuanjue manages to escape with his life, he will be severely injured. No matter how you look at it, the probability of our failure is low."

Zhao Zhengxuan said coolly.

"Is that so? Then let’s wait a bit longer. I can’t rest easy without definitive news."

Luo Yongli said in a low voice, but he sat back down nonetheless.

As the two were talking, a dark figure had already appeared in a large tree outside the villa, gazing at it from afar.

’On the second floor? That person seems to be Luo Yongli, the chairman of Tianji Group. What news is he waiting for here?’

Zhou Yuanjue squatted like an ape in the shadowy treetops, peering through a window to see Luo Yongli, who had just been pacing back and forth in the room. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

After confirming his target’s location, he began to observe the villa’s layout.

’The defenses aren’t that tight. They don’t seem to have made special preparations. It looks like they never expected I’d launch a counterattack on the same night they tried to assassinate me. But in terms of security level, the previous places can’t compare at all...’

The security inside the villa wasn’t especially tight, but he could still see bodyguards in suits walking by in pairs, apparently on patrol.

The physiques of these bodyguards were similar to the five who had tried to assassinate him. Their shoulders and backs bulged slightly under their suits, and they wore longswords at their waists. It seemed they were all Swordsmanship Weapon Masters specially trained by the Tianji Sword Sect.

Fortunately, their patrol routes weren’t very frequent, leaving a gap of at least a few seconds in between.

The only slight complication was the surveillance cameras on the villa’s courtyard walls.

Zhou Yuanjue continued to observe the villa’s overall structure.

Because the villa covered a large area, lighting wasn’t an issue. Factoring in the threat of intrusion, the courtyard walls were high, about three to four meters tall.

The cameras were at the top of the walls, covering a fan-shaped area of roughly a dozen meters in front of them. However, if one stayed close to the wall, there was a blind spot between the cameras large enough for one or two people.

’A three-to-four-meter wall, a dozen meters of camera coverage... as long as I’m fast enough...’

Zhou Yuanjue calculated the bodyguards’ patrol patterns. The section of wall he was facing had a window of about five to six seconds. That was more than enough time.

After climbing down from the tree, he silently counted the seconds in his head.

’Now!’

Zhou Yuanjue used the Bone Shrinking technique on his upper body. His bones contracted, and his frame suddenly shrank by a size. In contrast, his leg muscles instantly swelled, and he bent his knees to their limit.

Then, he explosively released the tension in his muscles.

WHOOSH!!

His body became a black shadow under the dim streetlights. In a single flickering pounce, he crossed the dozen-meter distance and pressed himself against the villa’s courtyard wall, entering the surveillance cameras’ blind spot.

Then, with a light tap of his toes, he leaped high into the air. He easily grabbed the top of the wall, and with a pull of his arms, he vaulted gracefully over it, landing steadily inside the courtyard with a faint sound.

In the villa’s security room, a guard who was staring somewhat dazedly at the monitors thought he saw a black shadow flash across one of the screens. But when he focused his eyes to look carefully, there was nothing there.

’A stray cat? Or am I seeing things?’

He blinked, not paying it much mind, assuming it was a hallucination from staring at the screen for too long.

Zhou Yuanjue landed in the courtyard. The ground beneath him was a lawn, which felt slightly soft underfoot. He didn’t pay it much mind and quickly darted away from the outer wall, pressing himself against the wall of the main villa building.

’The second floor...’

He identified the direction and, with a light leap, scaled the wall like an ape.

Just as his figure vanished from the ground, two bodyguards in suits with Sharp Swords at their waists walked out from around a corner on the other side of the villa.

They continued their patrol as usual. Everything seemed no different from normal.

But one of the two frowned and stopped, seeming to feel that something was wrong.

"What’s wrong?"

The man beside him gave him a strange look.

"I think... there might be something..."

He glanced around uncertainly, then his pupils suddenly contracted. He knew where that strange feeling had come from.

On the grass near the corner of the wall, he saw a shallow footprint. The turf was slightly bent, and the soil beneath was faintly indented.