Finally…. The exam is over!!!

They knew it would be extremely difficult to snatch someone from Qiu Fa’s hands. A White Tiger with his level of atavist purity was a once-in-an-age rarity, and among the Four Symbols, the White Tiger was the fiercest god of slaughter.

Qiu Fa had already proven what he was capable of by turning the Tribunal Division from the atavist families’ private playground into a real law enforcement agency.

But that didn’t make him invincible. Two fists couldn’t beat four hands. Three cobblers could outwit Zhuge Liang. They had sent so many atavists this time that even if they couldn’t kill Qiu Fa, surely they could keep him tied down long enough to seize Zhang Simiao.

The man curled a strand of bangs around one finger and sneered. “I don’t know what game Long Jin is playing or what she plans to do tomorrow. But if she thinks Qiu Fa alone can keep the test subject safe, she’s far too naive. She has no idea what kind of powerful, magnificent organization she’s up against.”

“Hss… if this fails too, I really will be angry,” said the long-haired researcher in white.

The man hurried to reassure him. “Doctor, please don’t worry. Nothing will go wrong this time. Quite a few of them are high-purity atavists from the major atavist families. Their families have all developed attack plans specifically for dealing with Qiu Fa.”

“Heh. Arrogant, hostile to outsiders… hss… what a pack of selfish, conceited people.”

A weapon was only as useful as the person wielding it. To make the most of their power, every atavist family had, over the years, developed a martial system best suited to its own atavist species—methods for protecting themselves and killing their enemies.

In a wuxia novel, these would be each family’s secret manuals and ultimate techniques. The difference was that because every atavist species was different, outsiders couldn’t learn them even if they stole them. They wouldn’t get anything out of it, so no one worried about theft.

And many of those families had created a specialized set just for dealing with Qiu Fa, the “traitor”—so that if relations ever collapsed completely, they would at least have the power to fight him, maybe even kill him.

Most families had never had a chance to test those techniques outside simulations. This time, however, they would finally get to see whether the things they had devised were of any use against Qiu Fa.

Surely they would be useful to some degree. After all, those families had pored over combat footage of the Qiu family line, analyzing it frame by frame. Back when Qiu Fa was still a child in prison, their people had severely injured him more than once. They knew his weak spots, more or less.

“Quite a few of the atavist families have already arrived. Where did the Long family put them up?” the doctor asked suddenly. They hadn’t been able to tell what Jing Pei was planning from her own movements, so perhaps the movements of the rest of the Long family would offer a clue.

The man playing with his bangs froze for a second, then checked at once. “At the Lou family’s hotel.”

“The Lou family? Hss…” The doctor frowned. Was that a coincidence? The Lou family was the only atavist family they still had no foothold in.

…

As the hosts, the Long family had arranged transportation and lodging for their guests, housing them in a hotel owned by the Lou family.

That made the furious members of the major families pause. The Lou side had been startled too when they first received the Long family’s order.

Lou Ting’s birth had caused the Lou family to fade into the background among the atavist families for many years. They took part in none of the atavist families’ activities, and in time no one invited them anymore. Quite a few people had probably forgotten that one of the great atavist families was still named Lou.

Why had the Long family chosen a Lou family hotel? Still, business was business. Since the order had come from the Long family, they followed the requested arrangements to the letter.

The others quickly put the Lou family out of mind and went right back to cursing Jing Pei.

“She actually teamed up with Qiu Fa? Are they that close? Does she even know Qiu Fa is a traitor?”

“What exactly are the Long family elders teaching her?!”

“Mutants are thieves. They’re counterfeit products made by stealing our genes, and she’s actually joining forces with Qiu Fa to protect one!”

“Is this what happens when a family has no atavist elders left? Our family would never raise a child like this. Betraying atavists like this? Tomorrow we’ll educate that girl properly in the Long family ancestors’ place.”

Long Yiming, who had been assigned to receive them and had just been insulted six ways from Sunday, wore a crocodile smile, as if he hadn’t heard a thing. “Everyone,” he said, “we’ve prepared a welcoming banquet. Why not sit down, have a couple of drinks, and then return to your rooms to rest?”

Their emotions were running hot, the whole crowd worked up, and it was rare for members of so many families from all over the country to gather in one place. Naturally, no one objected to sitting together and talking more. So Long Yiming led them into a large hall.

At the front of the hall stood a giant screen.

They had barely sat down when the screen lit up.

“What is this?”

To be honest, Long Yiming had no idea either. But at this point, what could they do except listen to Jing Pei? Heaven knew how close he’d come to breaking down when he found out she had joined hands with Qiu Fa to pull something like this. In that instant, he had sweated more cold sweat than in the previous forty years of his life combined.

She had better resolve this without disaster. Otherwise, the Long family wouldn’t just lose its footing among the atavist families—they’d be branded traitors, targeted from every direction, and denied a moment’s peace. Needless to say, they’d also be kicked out of that cooperative project they had joined earlier.

Long Yiming said, “This is a little entertainment prepared by our A-Jin. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy it.”

Then he turned to look—and nearly choked.

There, on the screen, by the waterfall, on a chair perched atop a rock, sat a buzz-cut tough guy with a cigar between his teeth. Even the way he lounged in the chair radiated wild, arrogant ease.

Who else could it be but the man these atavist families hated most of all—Qiu Fa?

As expected, the families who had already been in a bad mood instantly became even more irritated. A few of the quick-tempered ones slapped the table and shot to their feet, demanding to know what this was supposed to mean. Were the Longs doing this on purpose? Why were they being made to watch the traitor Qiu Fa?

But before long, their eyes fixed on the screen.

The hall fell quiet.

…

The road Jing Pei had wrecked had been repaired over the past three days, but the streetlights still seemed to have wiring problems. A few flickered on and off, harsh and ominous.

The moon hid behind dark clouds.

Several shadows shot from the foot of the mountain to the mid-slope at terrifying speed.

Qiu Fa, reclining in his chair with one leg crossed over the other, slowly opened his eyes. His amber gaze swept the area.

There were people everywhere.

In the trees, beneath them, above the waterfall, inside the shadows—figures layered over figures. At a rough count, there were close to a hundred.

So this was why that brat had insisted on hiding surveillance cameras here? But for what?

“With this kind of mobilization, and there’s only one target?” one of the shadows called out loudly. “The organization’s making way too much of it. Where’s the test subject? I could bring it back by myself.”

A woman laughed. “Heh. Which backwater did this loudmouth crawl out of? If you underestimate him, you’ll die.”

That clearly struck a nerve. “Oh? Then I’d better broaden my horizons.”

He vanished from where he stood.

In the next instant, he was behind Qiu Fa, a long blade flashing cold light as it slashed across at Qiu Fa’s neck.

It was a famous blade—sharp enough to cut iron like mud, so fine it killed without drawing blood. It had been forged from blue iron, the toughest metal in the world to emerge from the Great Cosmic Convergence. Bullets couldn’t penetrate it. A machine capable of exerting one ton of force with two mechanical arms had tried to snap it in half, only for the machine itself to be sliced open by the blade. The blade remained flawless.

He was certain that aside from a Black Tortoise shell, this sword could split open any atavist’s defensive armor. And the White Tiger didn’t even have scales to protect its body.

That was the source of his arrogance.

The blade had almost reached Qiu Fa’s neck—no more than a few centimeters away—when it suddenly shattered in midair.

It was as if a blast of radiation had swept through, the kind of output no human body could endure. The sword collapsed from the inside and burst apart into fragments.

The attacker went pale. Realizing the danger, he tried to retreat.

Too late.

That quiet-looking, savage force had already swallowed him whole.

“Ahhh! Help—help me—”

His scream broke apart with him. It was as if he’d been fed through a meat grinder, torn to pieces in a spray of blood mist. Yet not a single drop landed on Qiu Fa.

That was Qiu Fa’s atavist power.

His defense was low because he had no need for defense.

That one move wiped the ease from everyone’s faces. Those who had already been on edge became even more wary.

Anyone who could release atavist power as a weapon was a formidable fighter—someone with vast reserves of atavist power and flawless control over it. And a weapon this sharp was rare in all the world.

“Qiu Fa—the only White Tiger left in existence. He really is a monster,” someone said through clenched teeth.

“Attack together. One-on-one is suicide.”

The shadows surged at him from every side.

Qiu Fa remained seated. He even took his time lighting a cigar.

And the instant he exhaled the first plume of smoke, they were already upon him.

In that instant, sharp tiger claws ripped through scale armor that should have been unbreakable, and sparks exploded in all directions.

…

The battle on the giant screen left Long Yiming staring with his eyes wide open.

Was this a movie?

No. No movie could film anything like this. This was a real battle between atavists.

Heat flooded his chest. Who wouldn’t long to become someone like that—someone who could soar through the sky and burrow through the earth? Who wouldn’t want to become an atavist?

Maybe that was why the Atavist Serum could never truly be eradicated.

Then Long Yiming noticed that the faces of these atavist family members were growing uglier by the minute. Was it because Qiu Fa was too strong, and they couldn’t stand it? But they should already have known how strong he was.

Long Yiming couldn’t make sense of it.

Even after the gathering finally broke up three hours later, he still had no idea why the families had reacted so strangely. After watching the entire multi-person assault with grim faces, they left in silence.

Not one of them muttered another curse.

Were they upset because Qiu Fa had won? But that wasn’t the right kind of reaction. If Qiu Fa won, wouldn’t the normal response have been a barrage of furious abuse? Or were they shocked by how many atavist fighters that illegal atavist organization had? After all, in their eyes, every one of those people was a traitor—traitors even worse than Qiu Fa.

The whole thing made him more and more curious. At his age, for someone with his temperament to still be this curious was rare indeed.

What exactly was Jing Pei up to?

Fortunately, he would find out tomorrow.

The next morning, at nine o’clock sharp,

the invited representatives of the major atavist families arrived at the Long family on time. Every face looked just as bad as it had the night before, their silence carrying the weight of a pressure front.

The Long family had spent a sleepless night worrying that their distinguished guests would find fault with the hospitality, or that someone would humiliate them the way people had in the past. Long Peici had even sent her troublemaking son off to kindergarten extra early, afraid some accident might set something off.

To their surprise, the guests were very quiet. They didn’t curse Jing Pei, and they didn’t pick a fight. They simply entered the Long family’s meeting hall in docile silence.

The Long family ancestral residence was a sprawling old-style estate, and the meeting hall matched it—antique in style, spacious, solemn. Rows of huanghuali chairs stood in neat lines along both sides, with the host family’s seats placed at the front.

At the very center was an Azure Dragon chair.

Two Azure Dragons twined together to form the body of the seat. Their heads crossed behind the backrest, while their claws on either side served as armrests. Every scale had been carved in exquisite detail, and to make the blue-green color match real dragon scales as closely as possible, they had even inlaid it with cut emerald slices. You could say that knocking off a single scale was like throwing tens of thousands into the Yellow River.

A thousand years ago, it had been gifted to the Long family by a foreign president so obsessed with the Chinese dragon that he had wanted to marry into the family. The Long family had refused him for the sake of preserving the purity of their Hualan bloodline.

Originally, the chair had been nothing more than a collector’s piece. It was only a hundred years ago that the Long family brought it out of storage—to prove the glory they had once possessed.

Under all those eyes, Jing Pei walked to the chair and slowly sat down. She rested both hands lightly on the dragon-claw armrests and looked at the crowd with a smile.

“Thank you all for doing me the honor of attending the first atavist family conference I’ve ever hosted.”

Everyone present was either the current head of a major family or an elder who had once held that position. Jing Pei was the youngest person in the room. Yet from where Long Yiming stood outside, it seemed to him that in both presence and bearing, she gave away nothing to any of them. If anything, that strange, hard-to-pin-down air of mystery around her made her stand out even more.

“Why does everyone look so awful?” Jing Pei said. “I’m in quite a good mood. Though I suppose someone did sneak into my bedroom last night and try to send me to an early grave.”

The organization had sent assassins to the Long family under cover of night, hoping to solve the problem at its source by killing Jing Pei outright.

They had not expected her to be prepared.

She had covered herself with a Black Tortoise shell.

After sneaking in, they hacked at the shell over and over. They failed to leave so much as a mark on it. Instead, their blades snapped. The bullets they fired ricocheted off the shell’s surface and struck their own people. They tried to lift it, only to find it rooted to the ground, it stayed rooted to the ground, until they exhausted themselves.

Meanwhile, she slept inside it like a rock, as if heaven and earth had nothing to do with her.

It was outrageous.

And deeply insulting.

Yet her words only made the family heads’ expressions turn even uglier.

“Long Jin, let’s get to the point,” said the head of the Feng family. “Why exactly are you keeping that test subject? What are you planning to do?”

Every one of them understood how serious this was.

Because last night, nearly all of them had recognized their own families’ anti–Qiu Fa combat techniques among the people besieging him.

Those techniques had been designed around each family’s unique atavist traits. No outsider could imitate them.

Which meant that the only people who could have learned them were atavists from their own bloodlines.