At that moment, the curtain of the carriage was drawn back by a pair of slender, delicate white hands, revealing a face of devastating beauty. Her ruby lips parted slightly, right as she was about to speak, when her gaze darted to the side. The giant men pulling the cart reflected in her pupils, and her face turned deathly pale instantly, her slightly parted mouth making a clicking sound as her teeth chattered in terror.

Seven men pulling a cart everyone in the martial arts world knew exactly what that meant.

The woman inside the carriage was Zhong Yueping, and because she belonged to the martial arts world, she knew precisely what the sight before her signified.

Just then, a gap suddenly opened in the heavy coffin lid, and a pair of eyes gleaming with a cold light spun rapidly in their sockets, looking much like a young actor on a theater stage putting on a flashy, dramatic performance.

Suddenly, the eyeballs stopped dead in the center as if they had spun themselves dizzy. After a brief moment, the pupils began to dull, resembling those of a dead person, before the whites of the eyes flared brightly, completely covering the pupils. A pair of pale eyes, resembling dead fish, gleamed with a brilliant, ghostly light through the gap in the coffin, looking as round and bright as a full moon on the fifteenth day of the lunar month. However, it was not beautiful at all; instead, it was incredibly eerie.

Seven men pulling a cart, a white coffin, and dead fish eyes just what kind of formidable figure was inside this coffin?

The coffin lid was sliding down slowly, and just as it slipped past the one-third mark, a white shadow flashed out from within. The driver’s gaze finally broke away from the coffin, following that white shadow until it came to a halt directly in front of him.

The white shadow landed on the back of the horse, revealing a person sitting backward on the mount. He wore a white robe, white boots, and a white cloak, and his face and hands were so deathly pale that they lacked even a single trace of color. In short, everything on his body was white, so white that looking at him felt like looking at a snowman.

The moment he landed on the horse’s back, it was as if he carried the weight of thousands of pounds. The galloping horse withered instantly, its hooves giving a violent kick before all vitality drained out of it.

Although the horse died, the carriage did not stop. The snowman grabbed the two hitching posts of the carriage with both hands, using brute force to bring the vehicle to a screeching halt.

The driver at the front of the carriage was the first to fly outward, crashing straight into the snowman. The snowman was clearly careless, having failed to anticipate that the person from the front of the carriage would smash into him, and the collision sent the two of them rolling across the ground together.

When Zhong Yueping saw the white shadow land on the horse’s back, she seemed to have already anticipated what would happen next. Gripping the frame on both sides of the carriage with her hands, her body floated forward with the momentum of the sudden deceleration, though her hands still held onto the frame in a death grip. Her green blouse and purple skirt became messy, nearly exposing herself from beneath her skirt, but under such dire circumstances, no one would have noticed even if she did.

Inside the carriage, a bloody figure flew out from beneath Zhong Yueping. Just as he was about to crash heavily onto the ground, he was caught by four of the burly men. It was unclear when they had stopped and moved over, but they very carefully placed the bloody man on the ground.

As the snowman let go of the hitching posts and rolled away, the carriage collapsed. Zhong Yueping took advantage of the momentum to stand beside the vehicle and scanned her surroundings; the items inside the carriage had spilled out in a complete mess, and her sword was nowhere to be seen.

By this time, the snowman who had been rolling on the ground had already stood up, speaking in an unnervingly effeminate voice, “I finally found you. Just who are you, and why did you harm the King of Zhennan?”

As it turned out, the man Zhong Yueping had rescued was actually Yang Shao, the fifth son of the current Emperor Yang Feng of the Sui Dynasty. He had been enfeoffed as the King of Zhennan at the age of twenty to defend the frontier. Since it was currently the Emperor’s fortieth birthday, he intended to return to the capital to offer his birthday congratulations. Yang Shao, who was naturally cunning and suspicious on the battlefield, suspected that enemy assassins would ambush him on the official highway. Therefore, he disguised himself as a commoner and took a narrow, winding ancient path alone, agreeing to meet up with his accompanying soldiers in the town of Wu’an. Unexpectedly, when the time for the meeting arrived, the soldiers found no trace of the prince. Consequently, the Beiming Sect, which had always served as the henchmen of the imperial court, dispatched the White Rakshasa and the Black Asura to conduct a search.

Upon receiving their orders, they searched along the ancient path from Wu’an toward Yuzhou. Sure enough, they discovered the severed hand of the prince as well as carriage wheel tracks. They surmised that the prince had been targeted, and since the ancient path was rarely traveled by people, they deduced from the fresh wheel tracks pressing over the severed hand that the killer had fled in a carriage. Therefore, they pursued the tracks all the way down the ancient path. At the end of the path, it merged into the official highway near Yuzhou. Because there were too many wheel tracks on the official highway, they could no longer distinguish where the carriage had gone, so the Black Asura and the White Rakshasa split up to search in opposite directions. Any carriages or horses they encountered on the highway suffered terribly.

As for Zhong Yueping, after she rescued the prince, she did not dare to drive the carriage at a high speed because his injuries were severe. This not only delayed her from stopping her husband but had now brought upon her this colossal, unjust accusation. From this, it can be seen that throughout history, kind-hearted people have always been prone to getting entangled in trouble.

Hearing his voice, which sounded half-male and half-female, made Zhong Yueping feel incredibly uncomfortable, but she felt far more fear, because the person before her was the ruthless, bloodthirsty White-Faced Rakshasa.

What kind of person was the White-Faced Rakshasa? Everyone in the martial arts world knew the saying: “The seven men pulling a cart of the White Rakshasa, the seven ghosts carrying a coffin of the Black Asura.” Both of them were famous experts of the Beiming Sect. Not only were their martial arts excellent, but they also deployed poison silently and invisibly, making them exceptionally ruthless characters even among the poison experts of the Beiming Sect.

The horse must have died a sudden death just now because the White Rakshasa used some kind of poisoning technique when he landed on it. Furthermore, the driver who had crashed into him was now entirely pale, bloated like a corpse that had been soaking in water for a very long time.

“I… I was just passing by… and saved him. What… he is a prince?” Zhong Yueping felt a bit wronged at being falsely accused, but fear made up the greater part of her emotions, causing her voice to falter. She now deeply regretted not listening to the driver’s advice at the time. She never imagined that the story of the farmer and the snake would actually happen in reality, and to her of all people, and this particular ‘snake’ was even more venomous than the one in the fable.

The White Rakshasa stared straight at her with his pupil-less, pale eyes, seemingly unconvinced. After a long silence, he said coldly, “I see you have some martial arts training, so you must be part of the martial arts world. You should know of the Twin Perils of Beiming, right?”

“I know a little.” Zhong Yueping seemed to have already guessed what would happen next. The suffocating aura of death made her incredibly uncomfortable, and her tongue could not help but tie itself in knots.

“I am the White Rakshasa of the Twin Perils. Whether you were saving a life or taking one, I would rather mistakenly kill a hundred than let a single one slip away. The Twin Perils never leave survivors when they strike. Since you are from the martial arts world, give me your name straightforwardly, so I can record a stroke for you in my ledger of the dead.”

The White Rakshasa was a vain man who loved to boast in the martial arts world about how many people he had killed. Consequently, he had a ritual he always performed before killing someone, which was to ask for the opponent’s name. Of course, he did not ask just anyone, unless it was someone he felt was worthy of writing down in his ledger of the dead. It was just unknown how he intended to write down Zhong Yueping.

“Zhong…” For the first time, Zhong Yueping felt that her own name was incredibly difficult to pronounce. She truly did not want to die. A well-behaved son, a husband who doted on her, and such a warm, sweet life how could she bear to abandon it all?