title: “Chapter 189” weight: 1890 date: 2026-06-04T15:04:15.519995+00:00

Chapter 189#

The Price 12#

The sheer shock left everyone in the audience unable to recover for quite some time.

Whatever happened to the gentle, mild-mannered science teacher?

This is what they were given to look at?

Is this even an arrow a human being could fire?

Before anyone could fully digest what had just happened in the fight, the next bout had already begun.

This time, Murphy’s opponent was Black Knight 390, whose ID read “Assassin.” He was a lean, small-framed man, slightly on the shorter side, giving off an air of nimbleness. The way muscle was distributed across his body spoke volumes—it was clear he was an attacker who excelled in agility and speed. He was, indeed, cut out to be an assassin.

The two individuals in the VIP seats bet on Vincent once more.

Having witnessed that terrifying, almost eerie archery, anyone with even a shred of survival instinct wouldn’t want to face Vincent’s drawn bow. The Black Knight known as “Assassin” decisively chose to fight unarmed.

The best way to deal with an archer, naturally, was close-quarters assassination.

In warfare, archers and marksmen were precious assets. To ensure the safety of a sniper or archer, observers always stood close by to protect them—but in the arena, no such arrangement existed.

—Well, they’d all bet on themselves losing anyway, but at least this time they wouldn’t be completely suppressed. Maybe they could go back and forth a bit…?

Thinking this, the Assassin lunged toward Murphy, closing in for a tight, serpentine grapple.

And then he endured a long, excruciating battle that he never wanted to recall ever again.

Meanwhile, the spectators in the audience finally had enough time to carefully observe Murphy’s fighting.

The Assassin was a good assassin. Fast on the draw, agile in movement, unpredictable in his angles. Though he carried no weapon, his knife-hand strikes, elbow smashes, and knee kicks came one after another, each packed with lethal force. Every move was savage and deadly.

And after every deadly strike landed—or rather, failed to land—he would find that a flawless defense was already waiting for him.

The moment a method for attacking the right side of the chest formed in his mind, Murphy had already sidestepped with crisp precision. The move failed, so he changed tactics immediately—but before his arm could even fully extend, it was intercepted mid-path and stopped.

He couldn’t land a hit.

He still couldn’t land a hit.

He still couldn’t land a hit.

What was an assassin’s greatest advantage? The element of surprise.

But now, before he could even execute a move, his own predictions had already been predicted. And the predictions of those predictions had been predicted as well. It felt as though he were throwing punches at cotton through a wall of air.

Even hitting cotton would only leave one feeling powerless and frustrated.

But now, the Assassin felt his very spirit being tormented. He had begun to doubt his entire life.

Was he really a qualified assassin?

Why couldn’t he land a single blow?

What was even the point of this?

Just let it all be destroyed.

Let it all be destroyed!

Gradually, the despair in the Assassin’s posture became visible to the naked eye.

The audience increasingly shared a powerful feeling: this level of prediction was beyond the scope of normal understanding.

Some even noticed that a seemingly purposeless movement by Vincent was actually setting up a payoff for another move over a dozen exchanges later. This could no longer be captured by the mere word “prediction.” The two fighters, though sharing an arena, seemed as though they didn’t even exist on the same timeline.

Every single action and motion the Assassin made from beginning to end—Vincent appeared to have seen it thousands upon thousands of times before. Because he had already seen them, his defense could only be described with one word: perfect.

The Assassin’s offense finally began to collapse beyond recovery under the weight of his inner despair, and his guard became riddled with holes.

After a fatal opening appeared, in the instant the two passed each other, Vincent’s right fist struck hard into the upper-left area of the Assassin’s abdomen.

That was exactly where the spleen sat. Not a fraction off.

The Assassin’s face turned ashen in an instant. After that, without Vincent needing to do anything further, the Assassin clutched his abdomen and crumpled helplessly to the ground.

Claro, who had been leaning against the back of his seat, suddenly touched his own upper-left abdomen. A trace of pain flickered across his expression, born from empathy.

The spleen—a vital organ, supplying a massive volume of blood. But it was also the most fragile organ in the human body.

So fragile that a single blow could rupture it.

Once ruptured, blood would rush into the abdominal cavity in a desperate race, and life would hang by a thread in an instant.

Thirty seconds. White side wins.

When the announcer declared the outcome, an expression of something like relief actually appeared on the Assassin’s face.

A man in a black raincoat sighed. “So, people shouldn’t—at the very least—shouldn’t try to fight him.”

The black raincoat sitting next to him nodded. “Thank goodness he doesn’t like fighting. He only likes painting.”

“But doesn’t his painting bring us pain too?” Xina said in a low, pointed voice.

“In the end, it’s all a form of torture.”

After a stretch of awkward silence, only Claro, ever tireless in poking at sore spots, spoke up.

“So, little Yu, I forgot to ask you before—what does it feel like to have the Arrow of Truth aimed at you?”

Yu Feichen glanced at Claro from the corner of his eye. He had the distinct impression that this man was practically radiating a desire to be beaten.

Yu Feichen: “You’ve never been on the receiving end?”

“Never,” Claro answered with perfect nonchalance. “The worst was during a kind gesture of keeping watch—standing atop the great cathedral and getting a cold arrow shot at me from behind. Hehe, very hard to dodge.”

Claro said it was hard to dodge, yet he was at least still alive.

The Arrow of Truth was indeed difficult to evade. Watching Murphy’s combat, Yu Feichen finally understood why Murphy’s weapon was an arrow—why it had to be an arrow.

Because the moment the arrow nocked the string, the god who governs time had already seen in their eyes exactly where it would strike.

In a corner, Sister Yun set down the prop and said: “After the effects of Fate weakened, the other Black Knights became weaker—but why did Mr. Vincent become stronger?”

Xina smiled sweetly. “Because the nature of the props is different, of course. Fate’s is to grant. Vincent’s is the exact opposite.”

Yu Feichen had once heard the Supreme God tell Murphy’s story. From the moment of his birth, Murphy had possessed a pair of eyes unlike those of ordinary people. They could perceive, in a dimension beyond reality, the shifting of things through time. But no matter how he tried to describe it, others dismissed it as the ravings of a delusional illness. This cast a shadow over Murphy’s entire youth.

Until later, when the Supreme God took him away and extracted one of his eyes to forge it into the Arrow of Truth, he was finally able to live a normal life.

After two bouts, Yu Feichen was certain that the current Murphy was not in a normal state. Having set down the prophecy cards, what he saw had become that world of interwoven time—his eyes had returned.

Could an eye that had been extracted ever return?

This question wasn’t particularly hard to answer, especially now that he understood the concept of power.

Everything a person could see was surface appearance. The so-called eyes, the Arrow of Truth, the prophecy cards—all of them were merely manifestations in the material world. What actually happened was that the Supreme God had taken away the portion of Murphy’s power related to time, imposed a restriction upon it, and then given it back to Murphy.

This time, entering the City of Mist, Murphy naturally had brought that “restriction” in with him. Only he hadn’t chosen something as straightforwardly offensive as the Arrow of Truth—instead, he’d chosen the form of prophecy cards, which could better assist the group. The power of time still resided within Murphy, but it could only be expressed through the faces of the prophecy cards.

Therefore, the moment Murphy set down a prophecy card was not a weakening of his strength—it was the lifting of a restriction. He could once again see that river of time.

As they spoke, Murphy won another round.

Those gray-white, blind eyes were now as fathomless as the silent abyss at the edge of the world.

Time—the one truth, the answer to every question.

But Claro let out a rueful sigh. “Without the restriction, he can manipulate time, but my brother is passively consuming his own essence to do it.”

The black raincoat: “…Facing these people hardly seems worth a loss of one’s essence.”