"Kneel down and repent for your wrongdoing!" A powerful voice echoed throughout the twilight forest, shaking every leaf, silencing cicadas and crickets alike. Even the slowly rising fog was blown apart by that voice.

"Kehehe! Like anyone believes your lies, righteous sect scum! You poisoned my entire village, killed my whole family, all for this Lightning Essence Crystal! A hundred innocent people... dead! For your greed!" The voice that rose in answer was laced with pain and desperation.

"Demonic sect deviant, your death is certain! But you can still repent in the final moments of your life. Heaven has eyes, and has sent me to allow you to atone for the sins you've accumulated throughout your sinful life. As you handed over the Crystal, I will grant you a merciful death... if you repent. Otherwise... don't plan on leaving an intact corpse!" The bright, powerful, righteous-sounding voice reiterated and threatened with practiced glibness.

"You fart too much! Nobody sane would believe you anyways, not after this massacre! My wife! My parents! My children..." The other voice breaks down in sobs, then there's a wet coughing sound and the smell of blood splattered about. "Feng'er... daddy will be with you... soon... Just a second longer..."

"Demonic sect sinner, there's no sense in drawing out this any longer... wait... what are you doing? Not good! I've got to get away!"

A softest sound of a tear falling on a leaf disguised the suicidal burning of an expert's core. A terrible explosion shook the forest; a body was flung away from the explosion, leaving a hundred metre long path of broken branches and blood.

The half-dead righteous expert landed right in front of Chiasa Akiyama's hiding spot. She had followed the conflict for a while now, and the outcome was not unexpected. What was unexpected was the barely living man gasping weakly on the ground in front of her. She knew him by reputation, but right now he was as powerless as a newborn chick.

Nobody can be called blameless in the martial world, and strength reigns supreme. Then again, even a cat can kill an injured tiger for profit... or justice. Chiasa's Red Ghost Lily Sect had sent her here to see the world and train. The decision here was entirely her own.

Would she help the almost dead man, or let nature take its course?
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:07, Tue 16 Nov 2021.

Chiasa considered the options before her. If she had interpreted what she had overheard correctly, the expert before her had a Lightning Essence Crystal on him, but he also was strong enough to single-handedly kill a village with likely multiple demonic sect practitioners in it. And from the sound of it, the one helpless before her had done so before, given his confidence in setting out on his own to achieve the task. There were benefits to letting him die, of course, but those were short term ones, whereas a potential ally that was likely more advanced than her in terms of cultivation would provide her with long term ones. Especially if this sect of his made a habit out of gathering such treasures, which the man's reputation certainly had hinted at, winning his favor could provide her with a location of excellent Feng Shui and spiritual richness to train her own cultivation in.

And so, she knelt down next to the man, and began to apply acupuncture to guide the expert's flow of Qi around his wounds, in order to aid the healing process. Helping to stop the bleeding would have to come later, but the first order of business for healing any practitioner would be to reduce the leakage of Qi. Once that was done she would see to the more urgent of his physical wounds, though a lot of them seemed to be burns that therefore did not bleed much, so she would likely have to focus mostly on removing the wood shrapnel from his wounds.

It took a few days for the man to regain consciousness. It took an inordinate amount of effort to open his eyes. He tried escaping a second later, but bursts of pain from all over his body convinced him to let that idea go for now and observe his environment first.

An obviously foreign woman was tending to the fire nearby; bandages held medicinal herbs against his skin; the forest glade around them seemed to be not far from the village he exterminated. Stealthily, he checked the pocket sewn into his tunic for the Lightning Essence Crystal. Only upon verifying that the treasure was still with him did he pay attention to the girl at the fire. She was obviously cleaning acupuncture needles. Even in his weakened state, the man managed to figure out what happened. Karmic luck? Not even he had a thick enough face to claim that, after all the things he had done. It was a case of the heavens being blind, instead.

The thought made him laugh, very cautiously, as even the slightest movement made his wounds burn. That demonic expert had been vicious... but not vicious enough to live. But first things first. it would take time to recover from near-death, and getting to know this woman would make him know if he hadn't become part of someone else's scheme again.

"Girl. Was it you who saved me?"