Chapter 5125 — No Chance
The Blossom Guardian · Page 1 of 3
Watching Hongniang's utterly oblivious expression from the corner of his eye, Jing Taiyang was elated. It worked!
The hallmark of the Thousand Blades Sect had never been any single weapon, but the legendary Thousand Blades in Unison. Even for a mere early-Foundation cultivator like Jing Taiyang, simultaneously controlling seven or eight blades in combat was commonplace. Now that his true qi was impeded, his signature Eight Blades in Flight was out of the question—but with the meager thread of true qi he could still barely muster, controlling a single poison needle of negligible weight was more than enough.
Die! With success almost within his grasp, the corner of Jing Taiyang's mouth curled into an imperceptible arc. No matter what, for an early-Foundation cultivator like him to fall into the hands of a mundane-world organization was an unforgivable disgrace. Better to die outright than to be taken alive.
Besides, he was not without a chance of fighting his way out of death. If he could kill this Hongniang, Jing Taiyang would overawe the other four; at the very least he could sow chaos, and perhaps in that chaos find a chance to slip away.
Clink! A crisp note of metal striking metal sent Jing Taiyang's heart plummeting to the depths. Neither Hongniang nor the other four had noticed his little maneuver, and the poison needle had indeed struck Hongniang's neck—but it had failed to pierce her skin. All that effort, undone at the last.
"How is that possible?" Jing Taiyang was struck dumb. He simply could not imagine why Hongniang's skin should be metal—one of the Central Headquarters' newest research achievements, tempered skin, something a man of the Primordial Alliance could never hope to understand.
Hongniang made no reply. She turned sideways and drove a savagely violent knee into him. Feeling the burst of agony in his abdomen, Jing Taiyang folded up like a shrimp and went flying backward.
An opening! Jing Taiyang's eyes lit up even as he fought down the pain. Even now he had not abandoned the thought of escape. Using the momentum of Hongniang's kick, he stamped down hard and burst straight through the floor-to-ceiling window. Leaping from the top floor of the Yongheng Building—the twenty-fourth story—was nothing short of suicide. But he was an early-Foundation expert out of the Primordial Alliance; how could death come so easily to him?
Reality, however, proved that Jing Taiyang had thought too much of himself. The instant he shot through the window, the four black-clad men moved as one, and a vast net descended to wrap him up tight. It drew ever tighter, and by the time he was hauled back up, his whole body had been squeezed into a ball, utterly unable to move.
Hongniang watched this without expression and spoke into the communicator implanted in her head: "Target captured. Hunter team, regroup."
A day later, Hongniang and her four companions returned to Central Headquarters, and Jing Taiyang was delivered to the laboratory the moment he stepped off the plane. A pack of mad scientists had long been waiting there for this prey of theirs—he was the first specimen since the founding of the Primordial Research Group.
As an outer-circle researcher, Dafeng-ge had no right to enter the core laboratory, but he could still glimpse it from afar. Looking at the unconscious Jing Taiyang, he could not help but be appalled. Even an early-Foundation expert of this caliber had been seized just like that. Central Headquarters was truly ruthless beyond all reckoning!