Yu Ziqing didn't kill the young man from the Yin Family, nor did he point him out, saving face for them.
Back when he was at the Feng family, Yu Ziqing had seen many of the Feng family members, who lacked the rigid hierarchy of other forces, yet possessed a terrifying cohesion.
He could sense that the Feng family indeed had internal conflicts; it wasn't all harmony and smooth sailing.
But that was just familial internal strife. Whenever it came to matters of greater good and external issues, they could stand shoulder to shoulder.
The Yin Family, standing parallel to the Feng family, even if different in details, must follow the same overarching direction.
If everything was as hierarchical as other forces, such a situation, where a bunch of the old, weak, women, and children were kidnapped to threaten the most powerful person at home, would not occur.
The simplest example, you could kidnap ten thousand spies, and it wouldn't threaten Song Chengyue, the Commander.
Song Chengyue would simply act first, taking down both hostages and kidnappers without hesitation.
Therefore, Yu Ziqing found it quite strange that the Yin family produced a snitch, and that snitch went undercover among the crowd, becoming the fifth guard.
"I am Yin Busi of the Yin Family, and you are?"
Yu Ziqing looked around, scanning over that Yin Family snitch again, then shook his head.
"Senior, it doesn't matter who I am. Finding you was an accident. Some things aren't suitable to say now, and we can't waste more time. Let me take you all away first."
Yu Ziqing took out a jade box.
"The only thing I can use on me is this marching box. The conditions are a bit poor, the space is small, so I'll have to ask you all to bear with it for a while."
"This isn't an imposition; it is a blessing for us," Yin Busi forced a smile, lifting his hand with difficulty to express gratitude.
Yu Ziqing started with the old, weak, women, and children, placing them one by one into the marching box.
The cramped environment inside would be very uncomfortable, but there was no other way; it was the only option Yu Ziqing had at the moment.
If it were someone like You Zhen, even throwing him into the Void wouldn't kill him; putting him in a storage bag naturally wouldn't be a problem.
But the people here, all of them were so weak they couldn't even lift a hand. Keeping them in a storage bag for a while would suffocate most of them.
The marching box was the only thing Yu Ziqing had to carry living things.
He had kept it all along, originally as a preparation for when encountering some Devil or when needing to capture someone without wanting them dead.
It had seldom been used, as Yu Ziqing rarely left anyone alive once he acted.
This item was used in the military but not often, only seldomly employed as a unique tactic.
Because there once was an incident where someone brought a marching box with thousands of elite troops inside planning to sneak behind enemy lines, only to be killed en route.
Those thousands of elites hidden in the marching box, without even seeing combat, were killed outright by a Big Array, dying very unjustly.
Later, this item mostly fell into disuse, and afterward, it was mostly the Spirit Plant Institute folks who used it.
They divided the marching box into spaces, digging up Spirit Plants along with the soil outside, storing them in compartments, simulating the right environment, adding abundant Spiritual Energy to keep the plant's Life Force sufficient until the journey's end.
Seeing the marching box, most of Yin Busi's suspicions were dispelled.
Because normal people wouldn't consider such an item, and it was hard to even see.
The kidnappers used Magical Treasures far superior to the marching box.
Apart from some people from the Spirit Plant Institute, only broke folks would resort to such things.
People from the Spirit Beast Institute looked down on this kind of item.
Yu Ziqing, starting by taking away the old, weak, women, and children, appeared different from those kidnappers, revealing many issues in the details.
Yin Busi was eighty percent sure now that no matter who Yu Ziqing was, he definitely wasn't in league with those who kidnapped them.
Yu Ziqing personally handled moving them into the marching box, also neatly collecting the corpses of the deceased.
He personally touched each person here, including the snitch who had fainted and was almost disabled.
After contact, Yu Ziqing's Earth Toad within him provided feedback that the snitch wasn't poisoned, or if he had been poisoned, he had been detoxified perfectly.
The latter was almost impossible.
What nonsense; Yu Ziqing had inhaled a trace of toxic Spiritual Energy, and even that required full cooperation from the Five Little Ones to neutralize it.
Such a thing, Yu Ziqing reckoned, didn't belong in the human world.
How powerful could a mere fourth-tier Qi Refining cultivator be to neutralize it so perfectly?
What, did he have a Mixed Yuan Gold Bowl inside him?
When most of the old, weak, women, and children were taken, and he went to pull up a middle-aged man, that man suddenly extended a hand and struck Yu Ziqing's chest.
The muscles in Yu Ziqing's chest rippled as if waves spread out, absorbing all the force without making a sound.
The energy flowed around inside him, resolving some of it, and the rest translated into a rebound force, which entered the middle-aged man.