The damp mountain loam smelled of crushed grass, sweet sky dew. The faint, bitter tang of spent copper.
Elder Han Gu lay face-down in the clover, his gnarled fingers digging into the moist black soil. The blood platform that had carried him into battle had long since evaporated, its crimson vapor blown away by Lin Xiao’s titanic burp. His robes of stitched human leather were torn at the shoulders, caked in mud, and stripped of every protective demonic ward that had shielded him from mortal weapons for three hundred years.
Han Gu stirred, a sharp, ragged cough rattling through his sunken chest.
He opened his eyes. The world was blindingly bright. Not with the flickering emerald soul-fire he was accustomed to, but with the clean, golden light of an undisturbed autumn afternoon. Birds were singing in the pine trees along the eastern ridge. Down by the river, the cheerful splashing of river otters drifted on the breeze. And the sweet aroma of simmering turnip soup hung in the air like a warm blanket.
Han Gu’s breath caught in his throat.
“Where... Where is the slaughter?” his mind scrambled, claws of cold panic raking across his mind. “Where is the sea of blood? Where are the weeping ghosts?”
He tried to summon his Nascent Soul.
In standard training, a Nascent Soul grandmaster possessed a tiny immortal infant seated upon a lotus of condensed spiritual laws within their dantian, capable of surviving even if the physical shell was destroyed.
Han Gu focused his inner vision, diving into his lower belly.
What he found made his blood run cold.
There was no immortal infant. There was no lotus of blood. There was only a hollow, cracked cave lined with withered, blackened spirit veins that looked like dried grapevines in winter. The backlash from the cooking pot’s total dissolving, combined with the total mental shock of witnessing the Heavenly Sky-trial turn into lotus rain, had triggered a violent, end-post Qi Deviation.
His Nascent Soul had shattered. His Golden Core had crumbled. His three hundred years of piled up blood-laws had bled out into the mountain dirt.
He was no longer the Soul-Flayer of the Southern Marches. He was a seventy-five-year-old mortal man with arthritic knuckles, a hollow chest. A spine that throbbed with every shallow breath.
“No... No, no, no...” Han Gu whimpered, his cracked voice scraping like dry autumn leaves across gravel. “This is an illusion! A high-tier mind-fog array! The blue fiend is torturing my soul with an illusion of peace!”
He scrambled to his hands and knees, clawing at the earth. He reached into the hidden lining of his sleeve. He pulled out a crumpled yellow magic charm inscribed with dried blood runes—a Tier-3 Blood-Escape Magic charm, his final emergency measure for escaping righteous sect ambushes.
“Burn!” Han Gu wheezed, biting the tip of his tongue and spitting a drop of watery, thin spit onto the paper. “Blood-mist step! Ignite! TAKE ME AWAY FROM THIS DEMON!”
The magic charm didn’t ignite. Lacking even a single spark of spiritual qi to activate its starting red stone, the yellow paper merely soaked up the mud. It tore into a soggy yellow clump between his trembling fingers.
A low, deep-throated shaking stirred the grass behind him.
Han Gu froze.
The air grew heavy with the clean scent of crushed pine needles and cold starlight. Slowly, with the stone-hard dread of an unsafe heretic facing the headsman’s block, Han Gu turned his head.
Towering above him was Xiao Hei.
The sky moon-wolf king stood twelve feet in length, his coat as lustrous and black as midnight black glass. Silver star-pattern runes pulsed with calm, steady majesty along his flanks. His ruby-red eyes gazed down at the withered old man with neither cruelty nor anger—only the indifferent, unmoving patience of a mountain looking down upon a pebble.
Xiao Hei raised his right front paw.
The massive, padded foot, tipped with crescent claws of solidified moonlight, dropped with feather-light care. It settled onto the center of Han Gu’s spine. It pressed the former demonic elder flat against the damp clover.
There was no bone-crushing impact. Xiao Hei didn’t exert enough weight to crack a single fragile rib. But the sheer gravity power in that single paw locked Han Gu to the earth as firmly as if a ten-ton granite slab had been lowered over his back.
“Spare me...” Han Gu blubbered, pressing his forehead into the mud, his yellowed teeth chattering wildly against a flat river stone. “Sovereign wolf... Ancient beast king... Don’t skin me! Don’t drink my marrow! I know ancient flesh-refining arts... I can teach you how to distill mortal fat into lamp oil... I can make you pills...”
The sound of quiet footsteps brushed against the clover.
A pair of clean, dark-soled cloth boots came to a halt two paces from Han Gu’s face. The hem of a cloud-gray scholar robe fluttered gently in the mountain breeze. It smelled faintly of dried lavender and fresh steamed dough.
Lin Xiao had arrived.
Having finished his glorious afternoon nap, Lin Xiao had slipped back into his human scholar vessel to inspect the cleanup operations. He stood with his hands tucked loosely into his wide sleeves. He looked down at the shivering, pathetic heap of bones that had terrorized forty mortal counties for three hundred years.
“Test finalized, Host,” the Dao Spirit reported within his mindscape. “The subject is suffering from severe mental sour note and acute existential trauma. In his psychological paradigm, physical dominance must inevitably result in horrific sadistic punishment. His nervous system is producing eighty percent of the stress hormones needed to induce fatal heart arrest from pure excitement.”
“Good grief,” Lin Xiao sighed internally. “What kind of miserable sect teaches people to live like this? Even their paranoia is exhausting.”
Lin Xiao gave Xiao Hei a gentle pat on the flank. “Ease up a bit, Xiao Hei. He isn’t going anywhere. His knees are shaking so hard he couldn’t walk ten paces if he tried.”
Xiao Hei gave a soft snort of agreement. He lifted his paw by half an inch, though keeping it hovering directly over Han Gu’s shoulder blades.
Lin Xiao crouched down in the grass.
His sapphire-blue eyes, calm and untroubled by malice, met Han Gu’s bulging, bloodshot stare.
From his wide scholar sleeve, Lin Xiao produced a clean, white linen handkerchief stitched with a simple green willow leaf at the corner. Reaching forward with steady, warm fingers, Lin Xiao gently dabbed the crust of black blood and dried mud from Han Gu’s cracked cheekbone.
Han Gu flinched as if struck by a lightning bolt, his entire body convulsing.
“What... What are you doing?!” Han Gu shrieked, his voice cracking into a shrill, frantic sob. “Why aren’t you cutting off my ears?! Why aren’t you ripping out my tongue to weave into a whip?! You swallowed my cooking pot! You destroyed my training! Why are you cleaning my face?!”
Lin Xiao continued wiping the old man’s cheek, his touch surprisingly gentle.
“Because you have mud on your nose, Elder Han,” Lin Xiao replied. His warm deep was calm and matter-of-fact. “And walking around with dried blood on your face is terribly undignified, even for a prisoner of war. Besides, a clean face helps a person breathe better. Take a deep breath. The air is quite nice today.”
Han Gu stared at the white linen cloth, which was now stained with dirt and black soot.
In all his seventy-five years of mortal life and three hundred years of demonic ascension, Han Gu had known only cruelty. His master had beaten him with iron rods to teach him blood-refining. His martial brothers had poisoned his porridge to steal his pill rations. And the sect patriarch had branded his spine with soul-collars to ensure total obedience. In Han Gu’s universe, mercy didn’t exist. Mercy was a lie told by weaklings right before they were butchered.
Yet here, kneeling in the dirt before an Ancient Chaos Sovereign who had eaten an eight-hundred-ton divine ancient object like a sweet snack, he was offered a clean handkerchief.
The total, irreconcilable contradiction shattered the last leftover wall of Han Gu’s sanity.
The elder’s sunken chest heaved. A ragged, broken wail tore from his withered throat. Not of demonic fury, but of a broken, exhausted old man who had spent three hundred years running on a treadmill of blood and terror, only to find himself sitting in the clover with a soiled nose.
“You’re mad...” Han Gu cried, hot tears washing over his trembling cheeks as he slumped forward into the grass. “You’re all mad... The wolf, the fox, the serpent... And you, you blue devil... You’re fully, utterly mad...”
Lin Xiao folded the handkerchief neatly, tucking it away. He stood up, smoothing the front of his cloud-gray robes. Then he looked toward the safe hall gate where Tie Shan and Su Ling’er were approaching with a heavy iron chain.
“He isn’t mad,” Lin Xiao murmured softly to Xiao Hei. “He’s just never had a warm meal without having to murder someone for it. We’re going to fix that.”