Martial Arts: My talent multiplier increased

Northwest corner of the city.

The third quarter of the hour of Xu (7:45 PM).

Tie Meng heard the sound.

It wasn't footsteps. Footsteps have rhythm, a sense of beginning and end, and varying intensity. This sound didn't. It came from the ground, muffled and heavy, like a lump of mud being slowly rolled over by something.

Tie Meng's back left the earthen wall.

The snaps on the iron arm guards had long since popped open. His right hand gripped the end of the fuse rope. The rope was thick, hemp, twisted into three strands, and soaked in tung oil. It was slippery.

The direction of the alley entrance.

When the first pair of dark red eyes lit up, Tie Meng's throat tightened.

It's not how bright it is to the human eye. The human eye reflects light as white, with a slightly yellowish tinge—that's the color when the torches of the city guards on patrol flicker by.

Those eyes were dark red, seeping from the deepest recesses of their sockets, like two embers buried under charcoal ash.

The second pair.

The third pair.

Tie Meng started counting.

The fourth pair. The fifth pair. The sixth pair.

His fingers tightened their grip on the fuse.

The seventh pair. The eighth pair.

The gazes formed two rows, varying in height. The ones in front were shorter, the ones behind were half a head taller. They weren't standing in a square formation—they were arranged alternately, left and right, along the shadow of the alley wall.

Tie Meng had been a mercenary for twenty years. He had witnessed wolf packs hunting at night on the grasslands. When wolves approach their prey, they use this movement—alternating left and right, with the front lower than the back, compressing the prey's escape route.

The ninth pair. The tenth pair.

The eleventh pair.

The twelfth pair.

Twelve.

Tie Meng's Adam's apple bobbed. Fang Yuan had said—"The number won't be too many." Twelve. He didn't know what Fang Yuan's "not too many" was based on.

The six dark red figures in the front row had already completely entered the alleyway.

Tie Meng saw clearly how they walked. Their feet never left the ground. They were dragging. The soles of their shoes scraped against the bluestone slabs, making a very low rustling sound—the rustling sounds of the six people combined, creating the dull thud of "mud being crushed" that they had just heard.

The one on the far left in the front row turned his face.

Tie Meng's stomach contracted slightly.

The face—the features were positioned correctly, the nose in the center, the eyes on either side. But the skin color was wrong. It wasn't the skin color of a living person. It was a pickled, dehydrated, grayish-white. The lips were chapped. A dark red liquid seeped from the cracks—not blood. A deeper, richer color.

Like rust.

Tie Meng rubbed the fuse around his palm.

It's not time yet. Fang Yuan said, "Wait until they're all within coverage area."

The three barrels of fish oil covered a radius of twenty zhang. The ignition point of the fuse was under the old locust tree. The old locust tree was fifteen zhang behind Tie Meng.

All twelve dark red figures had entered the alleyway.

Six in the front row. Six in the back row. The last one just crossed the edge of the alleyway.

Tie Meng's gaze passed over the twelve figures and looked towards the city wall outside the alley entrance.

empty.

The watchman on the city wall has already passed. The next patrol point is in half an hour.

The patrol intervals of the city guards—the one-hour window that Fang Yuan and Xiao Zhennan had requested—were coming into play.

The twelve heretical cultivators' direction of movement was extremely clear. They weren't spreading out to search; they were advancing in a straight line.

Direction: Fangjia.

Tie Meng clenched his teeth. Fang Yuan was right—that bastard Li Jue sold out the route. The evil cultivator knew how to take the shortest path.

The heretical practitioner on the far right of the front row suddenly stopped.

His nose twitched.

Tie Meng's heart skipped a beat.

Tung oil.

Three buckets of fish oil soaked the dry grass and wood scraps beneath the doors on both sides of the alley. The fishy smell was masked by the night wind, undetectable to ordinary people. But the five senses of the heretical cultivators—

The evil cultivator tilted his head slightly. His dark red eyes darted halfway around in the darkness.

Tie Meng didn't wait any longer.

The fuse was suddenly pulled out from the palm of his hand.

-

The fire didn't start all at once.

The moment Tie Meng pulled the fuse, the tung oil-soaked section of the hemp rope ignited from the firewood under the old locust tree. The flames shot out along the rope at an extremely fast speed—the tung oil-soaked hemp rope burned four times faster than ordinary hemp rope.

The fire was divided into three routes.

The first path led along the left side of the alley, past the wall. At the base of the wall were stacks of hay bales half a person's height. Below the hay bales were the first barrel of fish oil-soaked wood chips.

The second route goes to the right. Same layout.

The third route—through the gap in the bluestone slabs in the very center of the alley. The gap had been pried open by Tie Meng beforehand, about two fingers wide. The gap was stuffed with oil-soaked cotton.

The three flames reached their respective ignition points within the same heartbeat cycle.

Then--

Orange-red flames simultaneously erupted from the base of the walls on both sides of the alley.

It wasn't a slow burn. It was the violent combustion unique to fish oil once it was ignited—a blue flame, half a foot high, first leaped from the surface of the liquid, then turned orange-red in a fraction of a second, and with the help of the wind, the orange-red expanded into a wall of fire two zhang high.

Three firewalls.

Left. right. middle.

The twelve heretical cultivators were cut into three pieces by the wall of fire.

The six people in the front row were split in two by the central wall of fire—three on the left and three on the right.

The six people in the back row were blocked at the alley entrance. The two walls of fire on the left and right compressed the width of the alley from eight feet to less than three feet. Heat waves poured in from both sides, and the edges of the dark red short trousers of the six people in the back row curled up at the same time.

Tie Meng smelled the burning fabric.

Then I smelled a different scent.

It smells worse than fabric. It smells worse than fish oil.

The foul stench emanating from the monstrous essence blood on the evil cultivator's body, scorched by the high temperature, was a mixture of rotting flesh and rust. Tie Meng's stomach contracted again.

The firelight illuminated the entire alley.

Tie Meng could see the evil cultivators' reactions clearly in the firelight.

The three on the left in the front row—two in the early stage of Bone Refinement, and one in the middle stage. The one in the middle stage reacted the fastest. His right palm cleaved towards the wall of fire on the left. The palm wind, carrying dark red energy, struck the flames—the flames were suppressed by an inch. But fish oil has an extremely low ignition point, and the flames immediately surged back after the palm wind subsided.

The six people in the back were in even worse shape. They were crammed into a narrow crevice less than three feet wide. Heat waves were hitting them from both sides. The hair of the two on the outermost sides was already on fire.

Someone is howling.

It's not a scream. It's a howl. After practicing evil arts, the vocal cords of evil cultivators mutate. That howl doesn't sound like a human voice—it's sharp, piercing, like the vibrato of a metal sheet being forcibly broken.

Tie Meng took five steps back. His mission was complete.

The end of the fuse had turned into a charred remnant between his fingers. The heat burned his palm. Tie Meng threw the remnant away. The clasps on the iron arm guards rattled in the firelight.

-

When Fang Yuan fell from the wall, the fire had already burned the alley into a scorching hot pipe.

His eight-fold standing technique completed a comprehensive environmental scan in the same breath as he landed.

Temperature – Over 600 degrees Celsius at the base of the wall. Around 300 degrees Celsius in the center of the alley. Temperatures drop sharply to below 100 degrees Celsius above three feet.

A wave of heat surged up from below. The moment Fang Yuan's shoes touched the top of the wall, he felt the heat radiating from it.

Do not stay on the ground.

Fang Yuan adjusted his posture in mid-air. He didn't fall vertically; he sprang horizontally. The outside of his foot touched the window frame on the left side of the alley—the wood of the window frame wasn't completely burned through, and it absorbed the force of Fang Yuan's eight times-powered stance training—his body shifted four feet to the side, landing in a narrow gap between the fire wall and the alley wall that wasn't covered by fish oil.

The slit was less than a foot and a half wide.

Fang Yuan's twice-strong spiritual perception propelled him forward despite the interference of the firelight.

The heat radiation from the flames can affect the accuracy of the soul's perception in capturing signals from the blood and qi. Under normal circumstances, a range of twenty-five zhang will be compressed to less than twenty zhang in a fire.

enough.

All twelve Qi and blood signals are within the range of perception.