Before Round 3

Even though the food was hot and fresh and this was a popular restaurant, Shui knew not to trust it. As soon as the food was brought in, he searched for any toxins based on the smell that drifted to his nose. It seemed fine at first, but with his senses that had been enhanced through practicing a divine art, how could he not notice that it was a trick? He didn't know if the culprit was originally a worker here or if they managed to slip in, so he kept his mouth closed while the staff were still in the room, but when they left, Shui held his hand out to Emily so that she stopped herself from reaching for a utensil.

"Wait, everything except the meats are poisoned."

"Really?!"

It had hidden itself very well, but the poison could not disguise itself before Shui's nose. He could immediately tell that the person responsible was a professional at both poisons and cooking, for this wasn't a simple matter of sneaking in poison into the food. Shui had to admit that he wasn't as good as them, but thanks to his great reservoir of knowledge and his experience in alchemy, Shui was able to deduce how the poison worked.

Although the meat wasn't poisoned, it was actually the core of the poison. The side dishes were laced with a special type of poison which when combined with saliva and meat would rapidly become toxic and corrosive. Once it went through this transformation, it would easily slip down the throat and begin burning through the body's living tissue. It wasn't a poison that used rare or expensive materials, so usually it would be simple for a cultivator to purge it from their body once they detected it, but this poison was special because it could spread throughout the body in a very short time, so even if you reacted immediately, it would be hard to purge all of the poison without replacing the fluids in your body.

Shui thought it was an interesting poison, but Emily didn't need to worry about that so he kept it to himself.

"It's fine, I saw this coming."

Shui then pulled out several side dishes from his storage ring and stored the poisoned ones. He had bought these last night while he was settling the debts of Emily's family. Since he predicted that her food would be poisoned, he could have stopped her from going to a restaurant in the first place, but he thought it would be better to get a sneak peek of what their enemies were capable of, and steal whatever information he could get from them.

After taking the side dishes out, they continued lunch while wary of an unknown assassin, and they weren't disappointed. When both of them had been satisfied by their meal, two pairs of silent footsteps approached. Shui noticed them first, but Emily also detected them before they reached the door. Emily took out Dull Harmony to protect herself, while Shui turned to face the door.

The assassins, who dressed as staff of the restaurant and happened to be in the Earth Realm, knew they had to be careful, so instead of using their spiritual sense and accidentally alert the target, one of the men slightly opened the door to take a peek, but that was a mistake. The moment his eyes met with Shui's, he was frozen still like a statue. His partner was quick to notice this change so he was also quick to flee, but a mere wall was not enough to stop Shui. Once he grasped his position, Shui caught him with mental control and choked him long enough for him to lose consciousness. Just like that, the two Earth Realm assassins were neutralized.

Emily knew that if she had time to set up arrays, that she would be able to achieve a similar result, however, Shui's ability to defeat them without raising a finger or getting up from his seat was just so,

'Cool...'

Naturally, Shui was able to sense the admiration in Emily's gaze, so he puffed out his chest a little. Alia released a mood-crumbling laugh at the sight, but fortunately Shui could ignore her and Emily couldn't hear or see her. There were times when she wanted to force him to react to her shenanigans, but more often than not, she was satisfied with observing this amusing young man.

After they were incapacitated, Shui used mental control to drag the assassins inside the room and then closed the door. Originally, he was going to handle this differently, but he felt that it would be better if Emily saw it.

"Now then, although it would be better if there was no need to, in the future you might have to search the memories of people with protection on their souls. I'm going to show you a relatively simple way to do that," Shui said.

In response, Emily's eyes lit up as she stared at Shui with the air of an eager student. If all he needed to do was extract the relevant memories from the target, then he could go for a more complex but effective approach like tricking them into offering the information, but for Emily's sake, he went with a rather easy method.

Most cultivators would argue with his definition of 'easy', but he had faith that Emily would be able to learn this technique.

"First, you must gently pierce into his mental world with your spiritual sense. Be careful not to rush or use too much force or else you'll alert his instinctive response, which could trigger the protection on his soul. After you've entered their mental world, pay keen attention to the nucleus where their soul is. Since it's inside an abstract place to begin with, it's hard to describe it in a physical sense, but you'll know it when you detect it. The protection can present itself in many ways, but most of the times it can be seen on the surface of the nucleus."

As Shui continued his explanation, Emily took mental note of his every instruction. In order to properly comprehend his lesson, she had also slipped inside the assassin's mental world and quietly observed Shui's spiritual sense. Since her master hadn't taught her about this, Emily had only heard about cultivators reading the memories of others, and she still remembered how much she wished she could use it to solve her problems.

"Next up is the most difficult part so pay close attention. The protection in this case comes in the most simple form, the 'lock'. With the right 'key', it's possible to openly view his memories and meddle with his emotions, but that method requires too much luck and skill for general application, so instead of opening the lock, I'll teach you a way to dive into his memories without touching the protection. Focus."

Although he tried his best, the next part wasn't something that could be fully explained through speech so Emily concentrated on the next actions of his spiritual sense.

Shui's spiritual sense was like a caring stream when it snuck into the man's mental space, but now it split into several slender serpents that bypassed the lock. Emily was bewildered when she noticed this, thinking,

'Why didn't the protection react?'

Guessing that she would have this question, Shui told her the reason behind it.

"Generally, the lower the quality of a protection on the soul, the less sensitive it is. After all, it may be called a 'protection', but its main function is to destroy or erase a part of the soul if the affected party's mental defense was breached, therefore, it only needs to sense when the host is in danger of having their mind tampered with. Since this is the case, all you need to do is breach the protection with a spiritual sense of a lower intensity than what it could detect."

However, while this method was effective, it would be difficult regardless of one's cultivation as even Masters struggled to restrain the intensity of their spiritual sense so that they didn't inadvertently harm their juniors. Fortunately, array masters also had to be aware of the intensity of their spiritual sense interfering with their arrays so this was something that Emily already had experience with.