Putting on an imposing air was the best Ming could do for now to salvage his disgraceful image from earlier. He continued to stand there with arms crossed and legs spread as Baihe charged toward him. Once Ming gets his hands on the girl, he promised to properly discipline this unruly half-sister of his. The bitch nearly killed off his family’s future generation bloodline!

Resting inside her space, Qian wanted to admonish Baihe for her sudden regressive intelligence. This wasn’t her old world where a weaker person could easily overcome a much bigger and stronger opponent by using the right combat moves through diligent training and hard work. This monkey girl of his was seriously underestimating the art of cultivation and how much of a difference each rank could make in this world.

Before he could even muster the strength to warn her through telepathic transmission, her monkey legs grew wings and sped off in a blur. Qian wanted nothing more than to shield his face with his phoenix wing to prevent himself from seeing the tragedy that was about to unfold, but he couldn’t even find the energy to do so.

Just as Baihe reached Ming, instead of kicking him as he’d expected, she slid under his legs and came up behind him. By reflex, Ming immediately closed his legs and covered his groin with both of his hands, completely forgoing his noble composure. In that instant, it was much more important to protect his family jewel from this girl’s shenanigans than to maintain the bearings of the heir to the Huang’s general household.

Taking advantage of momentarily catching him by surprise, Baihe promptly jumped and turned her hips at the highest peak in the air to execute a flying knee strike to the back of his head before landing softly on the ground. Without allowing him the time to recover, Baihe flexed her knee and followed up with a punishing horizontal knee strike to the side of his ear.

The knee was an extremely powerful weapon for close-range combat and every strike from Baihe was lethal. His ears rang with a buzzing sound and Ming shook his head to clear the dizziness.

Unfortunately, as powerful as her knee attacks were, the force behind it with her Early Dao Stage 2 strength simply wasn’t enough to knock Ming out.

Okay, so maybe not so easy…

His bloodshot eyes glared at Baihe with venom. Forsaking all pretense of cordiality, Ming summoned numerous sharp icicles at her. At such a close distance, Baihe was unable to escape from the trajectory of the crystallized attack and she was pinned down to the ground.

Each shard of ice was manipulated with great accuracy, piercing through her clothes to the ground, locking her down on the platform. To forcefully remove herself from the ground, her robe would tear and reveal her body in all its glory to the public because there wasn’t a single spare space in-between the outline of her clothes that hadn’t been covered in icicles. The seams might as well have been replaced by them.

Baihe narrowed her eyes dangerously. She could already guess what Ming wanted to do — teach her a lesson by finishing what Fei Fei couldn’t.

Sparing her a glance filled with ridicule, Ming waved his hand. Five sharp icicles formed around him in a semi-circle and darted toward Baihe. She bit her lips to prevent herself from yelping aloud when they drilled through her flesh. Two of them pierced her legs; another two pierced her hands; and the last one penetrated through her stomach.

Each and every one of them were deeply embedded into the hard ground of the arena platform. Blood seeped out from the wounds, quickly freezing over and turning into frozen blood ice. Baihe could feel her body temperature dropping as the cold invaded her veins and she couldn’t help but shiver.

The crowd sucked in their breath, eyes glued to the scene with rapt attention. The royals continued to enjoy the match like a person’s life wasn’t at stake, as if the two on stage were merely performers enacting a play for their entertainment.

Ming strode toward her — step by step — a hunter collecting a fallen game who fell into his trap. His shoes paused by her head; squatting down to her eye level, he revealed a perverse smile, his eyes flashing with malicious intent.

Baihe watched him, taking in every action through her exhaustion as she fought against the drowsiness. Her heart already knew what was to come. He wanted to personally destroy her dignity as she watches on powerlessly — completely under his mercy.

By this time, the shivering had stopped and Baihe could no longer feel her limbs. Her pulse was weak and slow while her breathing turned shallow. If she didn’t die by his hands today, she would die from severe hypothermia soon.

Ming trailed his fingers up her arm; it would have given Baihe the feeling of a creepy spider crawling on her skin if she could still feel them. His hand stopped once it reached her shoulder. With a rough tug, half of Baihe’s robe was ripped from her body, exposing her collar and the whole left side of her milky shoulder. A shudder passed through her body as her face visibly paled.

Anger, indignation, fury. All those emotions boiled in her eyes, but most of all — helplessness.

She could take his fists, his kicks, his punches; she could handle his insults and mockery. She could tank the pain from the icicle arrows piercing through her flesh, but — she could not accept this type of humiliation with indifference. He better make sure she was 120% dead, or else she’d make sure he would never forget today’s transgression!

This sort of vulnerability was similar to a defenseless solider abandoned on the battlefield without her armor and left with just a broken sword as her only weapon. Baihe had not experienced such powerlessness in a long time. Not since the day she became the woman she molded herself to be — eradicate all weakness — eliminate all emotions.

Fatigue tugged her body and blackness threatened to overtake her, but Baihe refused to let go. She needed to remain conscious, to watch his every action, to remember his crimes and to engrave his face — the face of her enemy to her mind.

An abnormal look crossed Ming’s pupils when he gazed at her bared skin. He scanned her body with reminiscing eyes while the crowd held their breath in anticipation. They were all hoping for another show of a beauty shedding her petals for their eyes to feast upon. No one would have suspected the two on stage to be siblings born of the same father. If they did, the crowd would have exploded into a bubbling pot of conspiracy theories against the Huang family.

His hand reached toward the lower part of her robe…

♦

From a distance, a tea cup shattered into pieces — spilling its liquid over the slender hand of a majestic man sitting by the window of a tea shop in the upper floor. His dark sapphire eyes hazed over with murderous intent and a type of fury he’d never experienced before gripped his heart.

Before Fenglong even realized what was happening, his body had already hopped through the window. As he dropped 10 meters down from the tea shop, his legs immediately sprinted off toward Baihe the moment they touched ground.

It would have been a glorious display of prince charming rescuing his damsel in distress, but something unexpected stole his spotlight. Something that caused even Fenglong to widen his eyes in pure shock as he stared at the miraculous scene before him.