Aster looked at the guy who easily accepted to betray his companions in front of his leader and he snorted.
“You better not lie, because I will know it and then I won’t be merciful with you like I was with the previous guys”.
The bandit’s body shivered, feeling the indifferent cold gaze of the black-haired youth, he discarded his last hopes of surviving.
It’s not the first they time he has been captured, but since their targets are usually member of the young generation, with some feigned wailing and fake promises of changing their way to live, he has managed to trick his captors into let him leave… just to return with his companions and team leader to take revenge.
But this time they kicked an iron plate offending someone who has killed God knows how many people, so the best thing he could aspire for was quick painless death, given his line of “work”, he is well aware that there are ways to make others wish to die without being able to, and he didn’t want to experience them.
“We are…”.
The “bandit” proceeded to answer Aster’s questions.
Turns out they are group of mercenaries which could be considered a “hunting” team, they were hired to find “high quality materials” for an unknown person, their base is in the stellar system Lagrae, one of the one hundred stellar systems of the Dragon Legacy heavenly quadrant.
They are not the only ones with this task, but according to the bandit they are the only ones in this star cluster to not raise suspicions, needless to say but they target star clusters which are known to not have high ranked cultivators, nor connections with strong forces.
Apparently, they were having “fun” at other planets before, since they couldn’t find anyone which fitted the description of the “materials” they needed to capture, then they arrived at the Azure sky planet and by coincidence caught a glimpse of the personal spaceship in which Aster, Kana and Sarina were travelling.
After giving a quick visit to a town to learn about the relative level of the cultivators here, they decided to give a try at the ones riding the space ship, since they didn’t see any other spaceship in the surrounding area, and they weren’t travelling with escorts their supposition was that they were some merchants in a personal vacation or something like that.
“It is a common thing for rich people to have pretty daughters and wives, and even if that isn’t the case, we can still rob them”, that was the logic behind the actions of the mercenary group.
As the story advanced Aster frowned more and more, basically these guys had the job to capture girls for someone, since with their strength they would be invincible in lower ranked star clusters, the Rodia star cluster became their hunting ground.
“An evil sect, or maybe some asshole with a high status”, thought Aster, mercenaries are always rogue cultivators, they don’t join any force for a wide variety of reasons, unlike evil cultivators which openly use other human beings as resources and are considered the dark side of the society, rogue cultivators tend to live in a more “grayish” line of life.
They take all sort of jobs in exchange for a payment, but some of them have to be done with secrecy, that being said not all the mercenaries are scum, there are alliances among the bigger groups of them which form their own forces and regulate the others.
But with the correct price all the rules can be broken, not to mention the fact that these guys Aster met weren’t decent people to begin with, the reason as to why Aster killed one of them without even taking the time to interrogate him wasn’t just a whim.
That particular peak star tribulation cultivator had a dense amount of yin energy in his body, but unlike the mysterious and eye-catching feeling that Aster gave to the members of the opposite sex, that guy had a certain eerie disgusting air around him.
Yin and Yang energies are emotional based, if done properly a man which has a satisfied a decent number of partners on a regular basis, will be attracting to other women, but the contrary applies as well… if enough girls are taken by force, the mix of yin and negative emotions will leave a mark in the person.
Not everyone can see the aura developed by the mix of yin and negative emotions, only those with a high enough rank on the soul cultivation path or experienced dual cultivators can actively recognize the cause of that eerie feeling around some people.
On the other hand, there are also people which are quite perceptive and can “feel” when something isn’t right, some children for example had the capacity to know if a person is good or not, that is something which isn’t exclusive to cultivators, even normal human children had that capacity, it’s one of the many mysteries of the soul that no one has been able to solve.
“… But I don’t think it should be something that can be seen directly without any technique, so why am I able to?”, he wondered.
And that wasn’t all, after he killed the first two guys, some kind of gray mist was suddenly expelled from some of the other bandits, which at first, he thought was a suicidal technique or something similar, but after a close inspection it wasn’t spirit or soul energy.
“That is similar to what happened that time I messed with Isaac, when mom and me were bathing”, he thought remembering the gray mist which was absorbed by the black book in which the twins live.
Feeling curious about it he looked at the bandit before saying.
“Those two I killed, what were their relationship and position in this group?”.
The mercenary doubted for a split of a second but when he saw Aster frowning, he immediately spilled the beans.
“They were two vice leaders… and the older brothers of Faust and Sawyer”.
“Oh, I see”, mumbled Aster as he pointed at the two mercenaries from which he got that gray mist.
“Those two are the guys you mentioned?”.
The mercenary slowly nodded, while feeling a bit guilty of having sold two of his comrades.
But to their surprise Aster didn’t kill those two in the spot as they expected, and simply nodded before continuing with the interrogatory, that being said the two which were exposed still said things like “traitor” and “piece of trash” referring to the mercenary which Aster was talking to and who apparently was called Hector.
Aster tried to ask some other things but as a someone who joined the group not too long ago, Hector wasn’t too informed about a lot of things, and since Aster “accidentally” killed the two vice leaders if he wanted to learn more detailed stuff, then the only option was to interrogate the leader.
So, he walked towards the mortal transcending cultivator with Kana still processing what the mercenary explained.
“Mom is now strong enough to deal with these people, but if this would have happened before we met big brother, we would have suffered something similar to what happened to the citizens of the Riga continent… big brother is right, some people don’t deserve to be respected”, she concluded.
Aster noticed the slight change in Kana’s eyes and he inwardly nodded, he asked Hector to explain a bit of what they did in the town where they went before coming for them, and without any surprise the mercenaries looted and ravished the town and the people that lived there.
Of course, Aster stopped him before things got too graphic, but Kana still got the hang of it and now the only feeling she had towards the mercenaries was indifference, well it would be more accurate to say she hated them a bit.
It was still too soon for her to be indifferent about such things although they had nothing to do with her, like Aster is, but it was a good start.
Once Aster was about one meter from the leader, the latter suddenly moved his right arm like a snake, a large blade extended from his forearm as he gouged towards Aster’s heart.
*Clang*
The sound of metals colliding echoed through the whole area, the leader slowly looked downwards just to see something which’s memory will haunt him for the rest of life, not that it was going to be too long.
The tip of his blade was stopped… by the tip of a finger, that’s right, Aster used the tip of his left index finger to stop the tip of a blade which was designed to pierce through things, a peak sky grade weapon on top of that.
Aster snorted, a couple of golden sparks lit up on his finger and the whole blade was turned into dust which soon disappeared leaving no trace that the weapon ever existed.
Then the golden armor which was invisible until this moment, suddenly materialized cladding Aster in a dazzling golden light, which gave Kana a warm comfortable feeling since she was holding onto him.
Aster turned to see Kana who seemed to enjoy the feeling of being covered by protection light of the paragon body and he patted her head.
“One last lesson for the day, never let your guard down, remember that a lion must use its whole strength even to hunt a rabbit”.
Although the paragon body would have protected him automatically, since he detected the presence of enemies the golden armor was already protecting his body, it was him the one who decided whether he wanted the armor to be visible to others or not, that’s why Alice used to mock him back at Prasil for “showing off” in front of Kana and Sarina.
Of course, she feigned ignorance about it now that she also had the paragon body, as she proudly used the golden armor whenever she had the chance.
The leader felt his heart sinking, even if the black-haired youth was wearing an armor the tip of his finger wasn’t protected and yet, his strongest weapon a peak sky grade hidden blade with a pair of stellar stealth and piercing grade spirit formations didn’t even cut his skin.
The only thing he could think of, was that he somehow managed to offend the young master of a big family with at least a Law Integration realm cultivator or the equal in another path guarding the fort, which happened to be experiencing the world in a low ranked star cluster where there wouldn’t be anything that can harm him.
The leader wanted to cry but tears wouldn’t come out as he screamed in his heart.
“What kind of shitty luck is this!!!”.