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The clouds hung low on the summer night, and not a single star could be seen over the open field.

A torrential rain is approaching, and a strong wind is rising.

The howling wind crushed the stalks of green corn in the field, sending them hurtling along the ground and crashing into the lonely Peace Farm on the outskirts of the city.

This farm, usually unremarkable, now resembled a lurking wild beast in the dark, howling wind.

Three low-rise bungalows surround the central two-story main building, with only a few dim lights shining from inside.

"Clang-crack-"

The glass windows in the downstairs living room rattled loudly in the wind, as if they were about to fall apart at any moment.

A calloused hand reached out from the side and parted a corner of the curtain.

This was a thin, bony man, like a bamboo pole.

He squinted, peering through the gap in the curtains and through the dusty glass, coldly surveying the dark wilderness outside.

The man had a miniature communicator inserted in his ear.

In the dim light, the eerie green indicator light was flashing rhythmically.

"Position number one, clear vision, no abnormalities."

A deep male voice came through the communicator.

"Position number two, safe. I haven't even seen a stray cat outside."

"Position 3, everything is normal."

Several reports in different voices rang out in the channel one after another.

After listening, the gaunt man tilted his head slightly, waiting for the final confirmation.

About five seconds later, a faint static sound came from the communicator.

This was immediately followed by a completely emotionless, mechanical voice:
"High vantage point, unobstructed view, zero targets, over."

The gaunt man loosened his grip, and the heavy curtains fell again, blocking out most of the outside noise.

He turned around, his gaze sweeping over the living room that was now a complete mess.

The family photo frame on the wall was smashed to pieces, and shards of glass were scattered all over the floor.

The sofa was ripped open with several huge gashes by a sharp object, revealing the yellowed sponge inside.

In the deepest corner of the living room, the original owners of the house, a family of four, were huddled on the floor.

The male homeowner had a bruised and swollen face, with a bloody gash on his forehead and dark red blood congealed at the corner of his eye.

The woman, her hair disheveled and clothes in disarray, trembled as she held her two children protectively in her arms.

The older sister, around twelve years old, and the younger brother, just over eight, turned pale with fright and began to sob.

The four men were now completely bound hand and foot, and their mouths were wrapped with three or four layers of thick industrial duct tape.

The little boy's tears and snot kept flowing down his face, making a mess of the edges of the tape, and his sobs were muffled in his throat.

The couple watched their child suffer, their eyes filled with sorrow and fear, yet they couldn't even offer a word of comfort.

They didn't even dare to make a loud noise, for fear of inviting even more cruel torture.

They could only squeeze their legs together tightly, trying to use their frail bodies to block the villains' view for the child.

The gaunt man walked to the dilapidated sofa, sat down, took a cigarette out of his pocket, and put it in his mouth.

At the other end of the sofa, a burly man with a bald head covered in tattoos was looking down, slowly wiping a serrated military knife with an oilcloth in his hand.

Under the slightly swaying incandescent light, the blade reflected a chillingly cold light.

The burly man stopped what he was doing, turned his head, and looked the family of four up and down.

"I really don't understand, what's the point of keeping these pigs alive?"

He sniffed in disgust and complained:

"The whole room reeked of urine from people being scared, it gave me a headache and made my vision blurry. If you ask me, it would have been so much easier to just slit my throat."

The gaunt man lit a cigarette, exhaled a puff of white smoke, and gave a cold laugh:
“Bloodjackal, you’d better keep your hands to yourself before the hunt begins. You know the boss’s rules; he hates the smell of rotting corpses.”

The burly man, known as "Blood Jackal," snorted in dissatisfaction and inserted the cleaned dagger into the leg wrap on the outside of his thigh.

He then stood up, his military boots making a dull thud on the wooden floor.

He strode to that corner and looked down at the four people huddled together.

The woman was so frightened that she trembled all over and desperately shrank into the corner.

The little girl kept her eyes tightly closed, tears streaming down her face.

"Hehe, why go through all that trouble?"

The blood jackal grinned, revealing two rows of yellowed teeth.

He then slowly squatted down, extended his thick fingers, and gently stroked the little girl's face, his tone revealing a nauseating drooling:

“If the boss had allowed it, I should have killed them yesterday and hidden them in the refrigerator.”

"The food in this wretched place, Dongdu, is as hard to swallow as sawdust. I'm really starved for oil and fat. These two little brats look delicate and tender. If they were roasted, they would definitely taste amazing."

Upon hearing these shocking remarks, the male homeowner's eyes widened, filled with horror and anger.

He let out a muffled roar like a trapped beast, ignoring his bound hands and feet, and mustered all his strength to ram his shoulder into the blood jackal, trying to knock the demon away from the child.

"boom!"

Blood Jackal remained crouched in place, motionless, and slapped him hard across the face with his backhand.

The male homeowner fell to the ground on the spot, the tape sealing his mouth was torn, and he spat out two bloody molars.

Even so, he still curled up and tried his best to move in front of his wife and children, attempting to protect them.

The gaunt man leaned back on the sofa, watching his companion's depraved behavior, muttering "pervert" under his breath, and then warned:

"Bloodjackal, put away your disgusting fetish. After we deal with those rats from the Illuminati tonight, you can do whatever you want with these people. But now, don't cause any trouble."

"Alright, Old Badger, I'll do as you say."

The Blood Jackal straightened up, listlessly twisting its thick neck, its knuckles cracking like popping beans.

He turned around, his gaze sweeping across most of the living room, landing on the figure bound in front of the other side of the load-bearing pillar.

He was a man covered in blood.

His waist was tightly locked to the pillar by two iron chains as thick as an adult's arm.

His arms hung down at a twisted angle, and his shoulder joints had obviously been violently dislocated, making him completely unable to move.

The kneecaps of both legs were smashed by a blunt object, and they limply dragged on the ground, with only a layer of skin and flesh connecting them.

Blood dripped from his tattered clothes onto the ground, pooling into a dark red puddle.

"Li Jie, you've rested enough, it's time to wake up!"

The Blood Jackal grinned as if it had seen a new toy, and strode over.

He stretched out his right foot, wearing a hard-soled military boot, and stepped on Li Jie's broken shinbone, grinding it hard.

The pain of the broken bones rubbing against each other, a pain that most people could not bear, caused Li Jie's head, which had been hanging low, to instantly rise.

His muscles were spasming uncontrollably from extreme pain, several veins bulged on his forehead, and beads of sweat the size of soybeans rolled down his face.

But Li Jie gritted his teeth and didn't utter a single cry of pain.

Those bloodshot eyes were fixed on the person in front of them, their gaze filled with a fierce intensity. "Truly a rock in a latrine, both stinking and hard."

After torturing the other party for a long time, the Blood Jackal was somewhat disgruntled when he saw that the other party still refused to beg for mercy.

"Li Jie, as a former friend, I have a piece of advice for you."

Old Badger then stepped forward, carrying a half-empty bottle of liquor he had taken from a nearby table, and said quietly:
"Your two good junior brothers and sisters have long since fled, leaving you here alone to bleed and wait to die. At this point, what's the point of you still holding on?"

As he spoke, he unscrewed the cap and poured the pungent liquor directly onto the everted wounds on Li Jie's hands and feet.

High concentrations of alcohol irritate damaged nerves.

Li Jie's body jolted violently, and a muffled groan escaped his throat, his lips bleeding from where he had bitten them.

Yet she kept her mouth tightly shut, as if this body did not belong to her.

"Sigh, I really don't understand."

The old badger shook his head and casually tossed the empty bottle aside; the sound of shattering glass was particularly jarring in the quiet living room.

"Is it really worth risking your life for some scrawny organization you've only known for a few weeks?"

"Tell me, what exactly is this so-called Illuminati? What cards does their leader hold? Just tell me, and I promise to give you a quick death so you won't have to suffer like this anymore."

"me……"

Li Jie was breathing heavily, his chapped lips slightly parted.

"Speak quickly!"

Seeing this, Blood Jackal's face lit up with joy, thinking that he had finally given in and was about to compromise, so he quickly bent down and moved closer.

"Pooh!"

A mouthful of saliva mixed with blood was spat directly onto the face of the blood jackal.

Li Jie grinned, revealing teeth stained with blood, his voice weak yet unusually firm:
“You…you will all die. The chairman…will tear your bones…out one by one.”

Blood Jackal wiped the saliva off his face, his expression instantly turning extremely gloomy.

His eyes twitched, and his right hand clenched tightly, making a cracking sound from his knuckles.

"You shameless bastard! Don't think I won't mess with you..."

Blood Jackal raised his fist, just about to smash it down on Li Jie's face.

What are you doing?

A voice suddenly came from the stairwell leading to the second floor.

The voice was soft, even somewhat effeminate.

But when the words reached the ears of Old Badger and Blood Jackal, they made the two silver-ranked assassins, whose hands were stained with countless drops of blood, freeze in shock and abruptly stop all their movements.

The two men immediately took two steps back, lowered their heads, and their expressions revealed deep reverence.
"Boss."

The wooden planks of the stairs creaked slightly.

A tall, slender man wearing a high-necked black trench coat slowly walked down.

His skin had a sickly pallor, as if it had never seen the sun.

His narrow eyes, like those of some cold-blooded reptile, gleamed with a chilling, eerie light.

As he walked, a strange, almost fermented herbal scent filled the air.

This person is Ghost Fox, the commander of this operation to hunt down the traitor and the head of the Black Shark base in Xia Kingdom.

The ghost fox walked to the center of the living room.

He ignored the shivering family in the corner, and he didn't even look at Li Jie, who was lying on the ground in a miserable state. Instead, he raised his pale right hand.

Following his wide sleeve, a centipede, as long as an adult's palm and dark purple in color, slowly crawled out.

The centipede slithered along the back of his hand, its dense legs leaving tiny red marks on his skin, before finally stopping at the base of his thumb and rubbing affectionately against his knuckles.

"What's the situation on the periphery?"

As the fox spirit stroked the insect's hard shell, it asked casually.

The old badger immediately reported respectfully:

"We have just confirmed that all nine brothers in the three surrounding houses, as well as the sniper 'Poison Bee' on the mountaintop, are in position and there is nothing unusual."

Ghost Fox nodded slightly, raised his eyelids, and finally his gaze fell on Li Jie.

"There's no need to waste any more energy to torment him."

The fox spirit spoke calmly, as if discussing an insignificant, inanimate object:

"As a top assassin, his mental fortitude has been honed and tempered by the organization for over a decade, and cannot be destroyed by your brutal methods."

"Let's keep him alive for now. He'll still be useful tonight, at least as bait to lure the enemy into the trap."

After saying that, the fox turned around, walked to the window, and looked at the night outside.

In a voice audible only to himself and his two trusted confidants, Ghost Fox's tone became somewhat grave:

"What do you think of that organization called the Illuminati?"

The Blood Jackal chuckled and curled his lip in disdain:
"Boss, I think they're just a bunch of ignorant country bumpkins. I don't think we need to take them too seriously. If they dare to come, we'll just take care of them all later."

"madness!"

Ghost Fox coldly uttered two words, glancing sideways at Blood Jackal. The venom in his eyes silenced the burly man instantly.

"An organization that has only been established for a short time is acting so domineeringly. The chairman, who has never shown his face, even dares to reach out to us at Black Shark and poach our members. He obviously has ulterior motives."

"If he's not a complete madman, he must have a very deep background or great strength."

"The boss is right."

The old badger nodded in agreement:

"There is very little information about them on the market. All I've heard is that they had a conflict with several forces in Dongdu during a transaction on the underground black market a while ago. The so-called chairman stormed into their headquarters and killed the other side's leader."

"However, that level of opponent doesn't mean anything. Our organization could easily take care of any top-tier assassin we send out."

Ghost Fox's eyes flickered as he pondered the current situation deep within his mind.

The secret personnel deployment list that Li Jie stole was a deadly threat to him.

If the list falls into the hands of outsiders, or if the organization's higher-ups find out that it was his negligence that led to the leak of secrets, his position as protector will be over.

They could even be tortured, and their lives would be in danger.

This is why Ghost Fox acted so cautiously, even going so far as to use his authority within the organization to forcibly mobilize more than a dozen elites from nearby strongholds.

He had Li Fei deliver that extremely arrogant message during the day, threatening to wipe out the entire Illuminati.

On the surface, it appears to be an arrogant and blatant provocation, but in reality, it is a test and a provocation tactic he has employed.

He needs the other party to bring what he wants and voluntarily step into the chosen battlefield.

Ghost Fox reached out and pulled back the curtains, his gaze piercing through the window to the edge of the dark field.

A gale, carrying the oppressive atmosphere of an impending downpour, raged wildly across the open field.

The city lights in the distance are faintly visible in the night.

But the road in front of the farm remained deserted, with no vehicles or people in sight. (End of Chapter)