Threads of rain laced with a fishy stench swept across the grey tiles. Ye Fan stood on the threshold of the main house, watching four figures disperse into the curtain of rain. Lin Zhaoyue's plain white robe fluttered in the wind as she walked toward the back of the village, leaving faint sword marks with every step in the muddy ground—the traces of her sword qi flattening the accumulated water to prevent the cellar entrance from turning to mush in the rain.
"A-Ye." Su Qingxue's voice drifted from the misty rain. Having returned at some unknown moment, the pearl hairpin in her hair was dotted with water droplets, flashing with fragmented light as she raised her wrist. She was carrying a blue cloth bundle containing freshly ground "bone-corroding powder." "At the old locust tree on the east side of the village, I buried three poison-tipped Willow Leaf Darts in a tree hollow. If the Nether Soldiers circle around from that side..." She suddenly paused, reaching out to straighten the rain-soaked collar of Ye Fan's tunic, her fingertips pressing lightly against his Adam's apple. "Promise me, use at most thirty percent of the Power of the Heavenly Dao."
Ye Fan gazed at the rouge at the corner of her eyes, blurred by the rain like a patch of peach blossoms dissolving in mist. In his past life, he had witnessed too many partings and deaths, but at this moment, he suddenly thought of when he was six years old, crouching in the ancestral hall watching an old family servant wipe the o…
Chapter 384