Death, it must be death—maybe a quick one—so I don’t have to worry every waking moment about being rotted alive by poison or stabbed in the dark...

Hand some intel to this woman... maybe she can kill that terrifying man.

Wu Xie only watched this man fall silent for a brief moment before he spoke: "I can only tell you one thing—Snow Lotus Festival. Since you’re that capable, look into it and you’ll find the person you’re looking for..."

Sui Yi nodded: "Mm, thanks."

Psycho, you’re thanking me?

And as she thanked him, her Inner Strength twined into a thread and directly pierced through the man’s heart meridians, sealing the deadly poison.

The man was dying.

"No need to thank me. In the end, if you win, he dies. If you lose, you die. Either way, I don’t lose out."

The man collapsed. Snowflakes drifted down coldly onto him, freezing into ice.

Sui Yi lifted her head to look at the sky: pitch-black, with only the snow showing white.

Even these insiders are this terrified, not daring to spit out more even at death’s door... The terror on the other side is probably beyond what she’d estimated.

The road to the Western Regions really won’t be easy.

She had a hunch that maybe, at the end of this road, something would change on a massive scale.

——————————————————————

Though Sui Yi and Wu Xie weren’t familiar with each other, their attitude toward Zhi was oddly consistent. So the two of them didn’t need to discuss anything: one of them stayed to protect these escapees from being assassinated by any enemies who might come back, while Wu Xie took the bird’s‑eye map of the town that Sui Yi had sketched and left.

The map was marked with the locations of one Hacker Inn after another; Wu Xie was going to take them all down.

As for how Sui Yi had determined which inns were black, Wu Xie didn’t ask. He seemed to trust completely that Sui Yi couldn’t be wrong.

Sui Yi watched Wu Xie’s figure fade into the wind and snow, thoughtful.

She was now somewhat curious how these two people from another world, Wu Xie and Liew Baiyi, positioned themselves in their hearts. If Liew Baiyi was so desperate to get back that he’d use any means, then this Wu Xie... was a bit harder for her to see through.

If she couldn’t see through it, she wouldn’t bother guessing or thinking about it.

Sui Yi led a group of people back to that inn.

Late at night, the inn’s doors were tightly shut. Many guests inside had already gotten up. The hall was brightly lit. A number of fierce, burly People of the Western Regions stared coldly at the travelers opposite them who had drawn blades and swords.

Most of these travelers had the faces of Central Plains People, but quite a few were from the Western Regions as well, with some Turks and people from Goryeo mixed in... 𝒇𝒓𝙚𝒆𝔀𝓮𝓫𝒏𝓸𝙫𝓮𝓵.𝓬𝙤𝙢

After all, the Western Regions were vast. These black inn‑keepers didn’t only target Central Plains People, so some relatively unfamiliar People of the Western Regions had been preyed on as well, and so...

The two sides were now facing off.

The inn’s proprietress was actually somewhat absent‑minded, unconsciously rolling the abacus beads with her fingers, glancing from time to time at the tightly closed front doors. The group facing her noticed her distraction and wondered if the other side had some powerful backup coming—that this was exactly whom the proprietress was waiting for...

It was precisely this misunderstanding that made them, even while itching to move, remain extremely cautious.

In the silence, one of them, a man with a full beard, drove his knife into the floor with a clang. In a rough voice he shouted, "Hand over our brothers. The Western Regions’ main road stretches to the sky; we each walk our own side, and there’s nothing we can really do to each other! If you won’t, then even if I have to throw this life away today, I’ll have a proper fight with you lot!"

What he said made sense. If even this couldn’t be agreed to and they just slunk off with their tails between their legs, how were they supposed to show their faces in the Jianghu later!

Emotions ran high.

The proprietress’s pupils suddenly contracted, and then...

The door bar suddenly gave a clack and lifted on its own.

The sound startled quite a few people.

The door slowly opened. The bodies hanging outside seemed to be completely ignored; only one person stepped into everyone’s field of vision.

Snow swirling thickly, blue robe unchanged.

Sui Yi walked through the doorway, giving her snow‑dusted sleeve a light shake. The people behind her all seemed to gain immense confidence, unafraid of the killing intent filling the room, and followed Sui Yi inside. The old man at the very back even carefully closed the door.

The coals in the brazier were burning low. Sui Yi walked over, casually tossed in a handful of firewood, and looked at the inn’s proprietress and the others, whose faces had gone ashen.

Her brows and eyes lowered slightly. As her hand that had just added firewood gave a light flick, sparks from the brazier shot out, directly striking the brows of dozens of Western Region thugs. The firelight bored in and burned through their brains.

In an instant, a swath of people collapsed, leaving only the proprietress standing.

She instinctively braced herself against the counter beside her to keep from falling, staring fixedly as Sui Yi sat down in the chair by the brazier.