Chapter 110 — Assassination
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 6 of 6
Shangguan Lüe stood beside the corpse and looked closely. His face gradually darkened, and after a moment he murmured to himself in a low voice, "Formidable, formidable."
Li Xun, standing behind him, also looked at the corpse and could not help frowning. The fish-man's body still gripped a great saber in its hand, but the head was gone from its neck; not far away lay a fish-man's head, which must be his.
The fish-man had been cleanly beheaded with a single stroke.
Li Xun's gaze fell unbidden upon the neck, where the wound was exceedingly smooth—plainly a single fatal blow from a blade of extreme sharpness.
"Oh!" Suddenly Lü Shun beside him gave a low cry, stepped forward, crouched down, and examined the fish-man's corpse closely.
Shangguan Lüe frowned. "What is it?"
Lü Shun stared for a long while, then slowly rose to his feet. His face had turned very grim indeed, and he said in a heavy voice, "This wound is exactly the same as the one the killer left when he sniped the fish-man chieftain. The cut is smooth, the muscle not twisted in the slightest, yet deep within the blood vessels there is, for some inexplicable reason, a faint tinge of purple."
The crowd was greatly alarmed and hurried to look closely, and sure enough, it was as Lü Shun had said.
Shangguan Lue was shaken to the core. He whipped his head around, a fierce light blazing in his eyes, and said, "The killer is right here!"
Shangguan Lue's gaze was like a blade, supremely sharp; this ordinarily plain old man now seemed suddenly to radiate an irresistible edge from his whole body. Slowly he looked at every person around him, and not one dared meet his eyes.
A sudden silence fell over the gathering, broken only by the night wind blowing from some unknown place, rustling through the tips of the branches.