It was a dark and windy night—the perfect night for murder.
The streets of the Great Yan capital were deserted.
Even the night watchman had gone into hiding early.
The moon was shrouded by dark clouds, and the entire city lay beneath a suffocating blanket of blackness.
In that pitch-dark night, where one could not see even a hand in front of one’s face, a crimson blur—bright and sharp as fresh blood—flitted across the rooftops like a ghost.
It moved so fast that even the most alert alley cat had no time to let out a startled cry. All it could sense was a chilling gust of wind sweeping past.
That red blur was none other than Ye Honglian, the bloodthirsty leader of the Netherworld Divine Cult.
The pitiful wails of her red-robed envoy earlier that day had enraged the Great Yan's Number One Assassin.
They had stolen her followers, smashed her source of income, and even dared to open some so-called immortal cultivation clinic right across from the Divine Cult’s headquarters?
They had truly overstepped their bounds. They were simply asking to die.
Ye Honglian wore a scarlet robe that snapped in the wind, and her face was hidden behind an asura mask with a snarling green visage and bared fangs.
Her icy eyes held not the slightest trace of warmth.
Tonight, she had brought no attendants. She had come alone.
In her eyes, this shabby folk-run medical clinic was beneath notice. Even if it concealed some so-called expert, it was still nothing worth worrying about.
Within the borders of Great Yan, there was no one who could withstand an assassination by Ye Honglian.
With a soft swish, Ye Honglian’s figure traced a perfect arc through the darkness and came to a steady stop outside the high wall of the “Science Immortal Cultivation Clinic.”
She let out a cold laugh, her face filled with disdain for the clinic.
There was not even a hidden sentry on patrol. With defenses like these, they actually dared open their doors and conduct business by stealing other people’s customers?
They clearly had no idea what death meant.
Ye Honglian lightly tapped the trunk of an old locust tree with the tip of her foot.
She did not use much true qi, relying only on the peerless movement technique she had always taken pride in—one that stood above all others beneath the heavens.
Her entire body drifted over the three-zhang-high wall like a weightless leaf, without making the slightest sound.
The movement was graceful, light, and deadly.
Based on her more than a decade of experience as an assassin, she would conceal her presence the instant she landed.
Then she would transform into a shadow that harvested lives and slip into the bedroom of the father and daughter.
The tip of Ye Honglian’s foot pierced through the darkness of the courtyard.
She landed flawlessly on the smooth lawn in the rear courtyard of the clinic.
However—
Just as her delicate red shoe touched the ground, there was no soundless, perfect landing as she had expected.
Instead, a strange, muffled sound rang out—one that made the hair on the back of one’s neck stand on end.
Splat!
The sound was impossible to describe. It was elastic, sticky, and deeply unpleasant.
It was like stepping barefoot into a huge pile of half-dried cow dung.
Or like planting one’s foot in a basin of thick paste.
A trace of confusion flashed through Ye Honglian’s cold eyes.
What was that sound?
The battle instincts of Great Yan's Number One Assassin told her to change her position and launch herself into the air the instant she heard the strange noise.
Without hesitation, Ye Honglian drew on her true qi and pushed off with her right leg, trying to yank her foot free.
“Hm?”
It did not move.
Ye Honglian froze. Beneath her asura mask, her brows drew together slightly.
What was going on?
Her right foot was as firmly rooted to the ground as if it had grown there. It would not budge.
Unwilling to believe it, the cult leader took a deep breath and infused both legs with twenty percent of her inner strength.
This time, she increased her force and pulled upward with all her might.
Rip.
A strange, indescribable stretching sound echoed through the silent rear courtyard.
Ye Honglian felt a tremendous resistance beneath her foot.
The adhesive was astonishingly strong. Although she managed to lift her foot half an inch, countless transparent, viscous strands stretched between the sole of her shoe and the ground.
And at the instant her old strength had faded before her new strength could take hold, the transparent, gel-like substance snapped back with shocking force.
With a wet splat, it yanked her foot straight back onto the ground.
It was stuck even more firmly than before!
Ye Honglian was completely dumbfounded.
She was Great Yan's Number One Assassin, a master of peerless lightness techniques—and she had been trapped by a mysterious blob of glue?
She looked down. In the faint starlight, she finally saw what she had stepped on.
It was not a lawn at all.
It was a huge, perfectly flat sheet of transparent, colorless adhesive, a full zhang long and wide.
This was a trap Su Yaoyao had casually exchanged from her personal storage space during the day, simply to guard against burglars.
A starship-grade super glue trap!
This was not something meant for ordinary mice.
In the interstellar era, this terrifying adhesive was specially used on garbage planets to capture enormous mutated sandworms more than ten meters long.
Forget a person—even a fully grown mammoth would have no choice but to remain obediently stuck in place once it stepped on this thing. It could not pull out even a single hair.
“Damn it! What the hell is this?”
Ye Honglian cursed under her breath, her face flushed beneath the mask.
She began trying every possible way to escape.
She planted her left foot against the edge and pulled her right foot outward with all her strength.
The result was a wet splat.
Her left foot was now firmly stuck in the glue as well.
Wonderful. Now both legs were trapped, like a bug caught in a spider’s web.
Ye Honglian had experienced countless life-and-death battles since childhood.
Even when surrounded by dozens of imperial guards from the Great Yuan Kingdom, she had been able to escape unscathed, without so much as a strand of hair out of place.
But she had never dreamed that one day she would lose to a puddle of glue!
Her chest heaved violently with anger. She reached down, intending to pull off her shoes.
Reason stopped her.
If her hands got stuck too, the lifelong reputation of the Great Yan's Cult Leader would truly come to an end in this rear courtyard.
The dignified master of the martial world now looked like a ridiculous puppet, performing an absurd tug-of-war in the middle of the courtyard.
“Ha! Hah!”
Ye Honglian’s face and neck flushed red as her inner strength poured out without restraint.
She clenched both fists, braced her legs, and leaned her body forward, nearly stretching herself into a full-moon bow.
Rip, rip, rip.
The transparent industrial adhesive stretched to its limit, releasing a series of maddening sounds.
Her shoes had already been pulled badly out of shape. It looked as though the soles might be torn right off.
Yet no matter how hard she pulled, the instant she relaxed even slightly, the adhesive snapped her feet right back into place.
She had even tried using the soft sword at her waist to cut through the sticky strands.
The moment the sword touched them, it was glued fast. If she had not let go quickly, she would have lost her weapon as well.
Time trickled by.
The ridiculous, humiliating tug-of-war continued for a full half hour.
Ye Honglian was drenched in sweat. Her once-neat and imposing red robes had become hopelessly disheveled.
The reputation of Great Yan's Number One Assassin had been shattered in that moment, reduced to nothing.
What cold ruthlessness? What “treading snow without leaving a trace”?
Against this monstrous glue trap, it had all proved to be nothing more than a pitiful joke!
The cult leader’s mental defenses finally collapsed.
She trembled with fury, and her icy eyes seemed ready to spit flames.
Her current posture was simply too disgraceful.
Both feet were fixed in place, while her upper body was thrown backward as she strained desperately to free her legs. She looked just like a third-rate performer attempting a difficult iron-bridge stunt.
If the subordinates of the Netherworld Divine Cult, who worshiped her like a goddess, were to see this scene…
She might as well resign as cult leader and go find a block of tofu to smash her head against.
The more she thought about it, the angrier she became, and the more humiliated she felt.
Ye Honglian’s icy eyes were completely flooded with furious red veins.
To hell with assassination!
To hell with moving without a sound!
Since she couldn’t pull herself free, then she’d just rip up the entire patch of ground—and the glue stuck to it—along with her!
Ye Honglian finally gave up struggling. She drew a deep breath.
The violent inner qi of a top-tier martial artist began circulating wildly through her dantian, forming a faint layer of blood-colored protective energy over her body.
Her jade-like hands formed a seal as she prepared to slam her palm directly into the ground.
Even if she had to blast the entire rear courtyard flat, she would wipe away this disgrace!
However, just as Ye Honglian was about to use her inner qi to tear up the ground—
“Click! Click! Click!”
A series of crisp switch sounds suddenly rang out in the silent rear courtyard.
The next moment, several industrial searchlights, each boasting tens of thousands of lumens, lit up simultaneously from various corners of the second floor of the medical clinic.
Like several dazzling miniature suns, the searchlights in the rear courtyard all snapped on at once.
The intense white light mercilessly shone straight onto the face of Ye Honglian’s Shura mask.
The glare forced her to squeeze her eyes shut, interrupting the inner qi gathered in her hands.
Under the harsh illumination that left nowhere to hide, the Great Yan’s Number One Assassin’s wretched glue-trap predicament was exposed in full, from every angle.
Su Yaoyao stood in the corridor, wearing fuzzy pink bunny pajamas and holding a cup of hot milk.
With a beaming smile, she called out, “Oh? Making a late-night delivery?”
