The Night Niche Gang has been routed.
To be honest, the strength of the Night Niche Gang was not weak at all.
Not to mention, if the three Foundation Establishment leaders were together, there would be a Wind Spirit Root Armor-breaking Main Attacker, a spiritual cultivator who assisted with various Skills, and one with special Shadow Skills capable of sneaking assaults and both control and burst damage—a versatile fighter.
Even then, that wasn’t their full state—wealthy Yuhua Cultivators have distinct combat bodies separate from those they use in everyday life. It’s rare for wilderness Tribulation Cultivators and mercenaries like Qu Tong and Steel Skeleton to have only one body; most Yuhua Cultivators associated with corporations possess multiple bodies.
The Night Niche Gang made a fortune from human experiments and Spirit Stone smuggling, and its leaders Meng Ang and Dark Niche were no exceptions; their earlier performance was far from their full strength.
The trio was enough to handle most situations, and with their well-trained, uniformly acting faction fighters, they were a match for the average corporate maneuver forces. It’s no surprise the Night Niche Gang had been around for so long, even expanding in the Xuanye City Lower City District filled with all sorts of demons and gods.
Unfortunately, they were facing An Jing.
"After defeating higher-level opponents, taking on ordinary peers seems so easy."
The Night Niche Gang left behind a plethora of corpses, and An Jing did not pursue.
Truth be told, this was the first time he had accomplished his goal so effortlessly—if An Jing had truly gone all out, dealing with Dark Niche and Hun Hui would have taken only thirty seconds. The near two-minute delay in countering the fighters’ Joint Attack Skills was due to his constant vigilance for surprise attackers and unexpected complications that might emerge out of nowhere.
——Where are they? Surprisingly, where are the Foundation Establishment experts brandishing Purple Mansion Treasures? Hidden superweapons capable of threatening my life? Their backup Reinforcements? The elite armed forces patrolling outside?
The Thunder Cannon could be counted as one, but it was handled by Huo Qingnian Spring, and his partner’s help was indeed considerable, but An Jing never expected his partner to shield him from all calamities.
After nearly a minute of battling wits with thin air, An Jing had to admit that the battle might, indeed, be that simple.
So he struck, instantly killing Dark Niche and Hun Hui.
Now that it’s come to this, the three leaders of the Dark Niche Gang have been slain by An Jing—it’s possible that Dark Niche wasn’t killed thoroughly, as prepared Yuhua Cultivators are hard to kill—but the downfall of the Night Niche Gang is a foregone conclusion.
Even if it could struggle on for a while, soon, corporations, families, and other gangs of Xuanye City will converge like sharks smelling blood. Having lost most of its Martial Force, the Night Niche Gang will be devoured like a wounded fish, utterly destroyed.
An Jing continued forward.
The outermost layer of the underground base housed the rest areas for the armed personnel and entertainment rooms, as well as pantries, no wonder these fighters could assemble so quickly.
A bit further in were armories and warehouses. Huo Qing and Nian Quan emerged from within to meet with An Jing.
"Strip their armory, and we’ll take the weapons back to crack them later!"
Huo Qing handed An Jing a Great Void Magical Instrument shaped like a ring, smiling: "There are quite a few good things inside."
An Jing waved his hand, refusing to take it: "As long as you are safe, there’s no issue. I don’t really need these things."
"The central control system of the Night Niche Gang hasn’t collapsed."
Nian Quan’s eyes flashed, and he frowned: "I don’t know much about Formations, but this should mean that the main controller isn’t dead yet—but An Jing, you should have dealt with all of them."
"Yuhua Cultivators might have left a separate soul backup for themselves." An Jing could be certain that those he engaged with had definitely died, but there was no way he could handle the backup measures left behind: "We’ll just destroy all backups in the main control room later."
"Let’s see if we can save some people first."
An Jing finally concluded, "Although they might all be dead, or half-dead, or possibly killed by the aftermath of our battle, it’s still good if we can rescue even one."
An Jing certainly didn’t possess the mentality of feeling guilty for the ’innocents’ affected by the aftereffects of his own battles in such places.
If he hadn’t come, the victims here would have died long ago, and certainly in a more ghastly manner. Dying by his hand was indeed bad luck, but at least they suffered less. If there really were lost souls aimlessly wandering after death, not seeking revenge from the Night Niche Gang but instead coming after him, let’s see if he doesn’t send them scattering with a single Blast Fist.
—Your morals are somewhat questionable, but I helped you reincarnate/disperse your soul, no need to thank me.
Actually, this could be considered an extremely high moral standard from An Jing’s perspective, as neither Huo Qing nor Nian Quan had even considered this issue. "Rescue people?"
Nian Quan was a bit better; he remembered, "Right, it’s written in the data that the Night Niche Gang kidnapped a bunch of Wilderness people for experiments, and some from the safe zones and city as well."
He looked over the data again and nodded, "With such a short time, they should be alive."
"But what to do after rescuing them?" Huo Qing didn’t have much concept of this, but since An Jing decided to rescue them, he started thinking about the follow-up: "Now the Night Niche Gang is crushed by you, An Jing, but there’s still a large number of fleeing soldiers, rescuing them could cause more casualties."
"Indeed, it’s possible, let’s see first."
An Jing, unsure of the situation, couldn’t make a decision, so he led the team forward.
Soon, they arrived at the experimental garden area.
As they approached the garden, the three of them stopped in unison.
An Jing furrowed his brows while Nian Quan and Huo Qing also felt a chill. Their Spiritual Perception as cultivators informed them that there was no danger here, but a sickening feeling was creeping up on them.
An Jing was the first to react; his memories from his previous life had exposed him to many disgusting things: comrades whose faces were smeared with the mush of their own bodies from shells, enemy biological labs, civilians burned by thermobaric and white phosphorus munitions, and patients dying of body putrefaction in a dirty bomb’s radiation zone.
He had a premonition of what he was about to see, which was why he just sighed.
He stepped forward and kicked open the double-layer alloy doors.
As expected. What met his eyes was hell itself.
In the Night Niche Gang’s experimental garden, there were many surgical tables that looked no different from those in a regular operating room, but they were so densely packed that they resembled an assembly line slaughter table.
On these slaughter tables were the corpses of people, with their limbs intact, but their heads and abdomens had been cut open, exposing their internal organs and brains, bathed in the Spiritual Light created by the devices. Their ’Spirit Roots’ had already manifested, allowing An Jing to see with his own eyes what he would normally have only been able to see with Inner Observation.
These people were alive during the surgery, and the activity in their brains had ceased only minutes before. Evidently, the Night Niche Gang was conducting some sort of surgery or ’experiment’ until recently. On the other side of the slaughterhouse were rows of translucent immersion tanks, with some well-processed brains and spinal cords, along with some important organs completely extracted and placed within them, marked like pig meat in quarantine.
[Wood 6 Fire 4, Life and Fire Burning Wood, actual effect Wood 3 Fire 7, healthy, consciousness erased, carrier use.]
[Water 2 Metal 4 Wood 3, Life and Death Water Nourishing Wood Gold Unique, actual effect Water 1 Metal 4 Wood 5, healthy, consciousness erased, material use.]
Only brains and internal organs with complete Spiritual Rhyme and Spirit Root are stored together.
Besides, there are also various containers preserving disparate organs.