Chapter 457: The Assasin Lord

She didn’t pull back.

She released the downward pressure of the spatula, abandoning her defensive guard.

The sudden release of tension threw the assassin off balance.

He pitched forward slightly.

Ji’an’s left hand shot out like a viper. Her fingers hooked under the edge of the blank white porcelain mask.

With a violent, aggressive yank, she tore the mask completely off his face.

The porcelain shattered against the rocky ground.

Ji’an stumbled backward, lowering her spatula, the breath completely knocked out of her lungs.

Standing before her, his face exposed to the harsh desert sunlight, was none other than Mo Wuchen.

The Assassin Lord.

One of the primary protagonists of the original novel. The playful, seemingly innocent disciple who had infiltrated her sect, flirted shamelessly with the female elders, and mysteriously vanished midway through the Vanguard tournament without a trace.

But the man standing in front of her bore absolutely no resemblance to the coy, playful boy she remembered.

His face was pale, drawn, and completely devoid of emotion.

His eyes, once bright and mischievous, were entirely dead twin pits of dark, hollow, absolute nothingness. A jagged, fresh scar ran down the side of his neck, disappearing beneath his black silk collar.

There was no smile.

There was no innocence. There was only a cold, venomous, mechanical intent to kill.

"Mo Wuchen?!" Ji’an gasped, entirely dropping her guard. "What the hell are you doing?! Why are you here?! And more importantly, why are you attacking me?!"

Mo Wuchen did not blink.

He did not show a single flicker of recognition.

He slowly stood up straight, twirling the black daggers in his hands with terrifying, lethal precision.

"The target has been identified," Mo Wuchen stated. His voice was no longer artificially distorted, but it was completely flat, monotone, and chillingly devoid of humanity. "The anomaly must be excised. The order is absolute."

"The order?!" Ji’an yelled, stepping forward, desperately trying to reach the boy she knew. "Wuchen, it’s me! It’s Lin Ji’an! We literally shared a plate of dumplings three months ago! Snap out of it! Who gave you an order?!"

"There is no negotiation," Wuchen replied, raising his daggers. "The Star-Seers have spoken. The threads must be severed."

Ji’an’s blood ran colder than Xie Wangchen’s ice.

The Star-Seers.

The Stargazing Tower.

The cosmic conspiracy wasn’t just pulling strings in the background. It had actively used one of the main protagonists. They had taken the playful, coy assassin, hollowed out his personality, and turned him into a mindless, vengeful venom directed entirely at her.

Or... no. Is it that he was always like this from the beginning?

The other part of him that she wasn’t aware of?

This is it, it must be... even though Ji’an didn’t think his daggers would someday be pointed towards her, but he is an assassin who kills people.

A killing machine cultivated from a young age that kills people with a smile on his face, that’s who he really was, not the warm and playful guy she found him to be. How could she forget this important information?

Ji’an felt like a fool.

It was a dog-blood cultivation world, today’s friend can become tomorrow’s enemy. Today’s enemy can become tomorrow’s ally.

In this world, everyone is like a coin with two sides.

At least, Ji’an hoped that she wouldn’t be betrayed by the people she once knew. Though, now it was proven, no one was to be trusted.

"Sovereign Zhaoge!" Ji’an screamed over her shoulder, completely terrified by the implications. "Do you see this?! Your colleagues at the Tower just sent an assassin to murder me! Don’t just stand over there and enjoy it! Your intern might lose their life! I’ll haunt you down for an eternity if I were to die here today! You hear me?!"

Yan Zhaoge was no longer leaning casually against the spire.

The Overtime Boss was standing up straight.

The lazy, entertained smirk was completely gone. His amber eyes were narrowed into terrifying, glowing slits of pure, demonic fury.

He didn’t look at Ji’an.

He looked directly at Mo Wuchen.

"They bypassed my authority," Yan Zhaoge whispered, his voice a low, vibrating rumble that caused the very earth beneath their feet to tremble. "The High Council issued an excision order without a quorum. They are trying to clean the board before I can bring the glitch to the server room."

Mo Wuchen lunged again.

This time, there was no hesitation.

He didn’t use stealth. He moved with a suicidal, reckless speed, completely abandoning his own defense, seeking only to bury his blades in Ji’an’s heart.

"I don’t want to kill him!" Ji’an yelled, bringing her spatula up to block a furious flurry of strikes. "I don’t care if he’s been brainwashed or is doing this willingly! How do I break the command?!"

"You cannot break a Celestial Command with a mere frying pan, Chef!" Yan Zhaoge barked, his purple robes billowing as he finally stepped into the fray.

The Sovereign of the Iron-Stone Monastery didn’t draw a weapon. He simply raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

An invisible wall of thermal pressure slammed into Mo Wuchen with the force of a speeding locomotive. The Assassin Lord was violently thrown backward, crashing through a petrified spire, burying him in a pile of rubble.

Before Wuchen could even attempt to stand, the air around him warped. A fiery transit portal ripped open directly beneath the rubble.

"The gate is open," Yan Zhaoge commanded, grabbing Ji’an by the back of her white collar and physically hurling her toward the flaming rift. "Get in! The extraction order means the entire sector is compromised! They will send more!"

Ji’an stumbled through the portal, the intense heat singing her silver hair.

She turned back just in time to see Mo Wuchen bursting from the rubble, his dead eyes locked onto her, leaping toward the rift with his daggers raised.

Yan Zhaoge stepped smoothly in front of the portal, blocking the assassin’s path.

He didn’t look at Wuchen. He looked back at Ji’an, a dark, thrilled, and unhinged smile returning to his face.

"Welcome to the cosmic conspiracy, little intern," Yan Zhaoge winked, stepping backward into the rift as it collapsed shut, leaving the broken assassin stranded in the desert wasteland.

The unsanctioned field trip to Heaven’s IT department had officially gone completely off the rails.

***

The physical sensation of being violently hurled through an unsanctioned, heavily encrypted, trans-dimensional transit rift felt exactly like being stuffed into a high-speed blender alongside a dozen angry badgers, and then having the blender dropped down a flight of concrete stairs.

Lin Ji’an tumbled out of the fiery portal and hit the ground hard, rolling head-over-heels before coming to a graceless halt.

She lay flat on her back, her Szechuan Red combat trousers twisted, her heavy cast-iron spatula still gripped in a white-knuckled death-lock in her right hand.

For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound was the frantic, ragged gasping of her own lungs trying to process oxygen.

She blinked, staring straight up.

She expected to see the apocalyptic, lightning-scarred sky of the Stargazing Tower.

She expected to see a horde of brainwashed assassins dropping from the clouds or the dark, heavy, suffocating atmosphere of a cosmic server room where the World Will conducted its audits.

Instead, she saw blue.

It wasn’t just blue.

It was the most perfect, vivid, immaculate, cloudless cerulean sky she had ever witnessed in her entire existence.

The light was soft, warm, and devoid of the toxic, hazy miasma that perpetually choked the Azure Empire.

Ji’an slowly sat up, her Body Fusion core humming as it repaired the minor bruises from the landing.

She looked around, her jaw dropping open.

She was sitting in the middle of an endless field of incredibly lush, vibrant green grass.

The blades of grass were perfectly uniform, swaying gently in a phantom breeze that carried the sweet, intoxicating scent of blooming jasmine, fresh rain, and... something else.

Something savory.

Something heavily spiced and deeply comforting.

Ji’an scrambled to her feet, her silver hair cascading over her shoulders, entirely forgetting about the murderous Mo Wuchen and the apocalyptic desert they had just escaped.

She stared into the distance.

Stretching out across the center of the idyllic, fairy-tale meadow, extending all the way to the absolute horizon in a literal, never-ending line, was a table.

It wasn’t a standard dining table, but a heavy oak banquet table covered in a pristine white linen cloth.