The sun was warm upon the flat stone slabs of the safe hall’s outer courtyard. There, the morning’s battlefield dust was being swept into tidy heaps by badger apprentices wielding wide bamboo brooms.
In the center of the square, surrounded by thirty armed bear warriors and a dozen watchful shadow wolves, knelt Elder Han Gu. The former terror of the southern provinces looked smaller now, stripped of his blood clouds and his skeletal staff. His gray hair hung in limp strands over his ears. His hands, once stained with the gore of forty slaughtered mortal settlements, rested trembling upon his knees.
Beside him, two bear guards dumped four heavy, carved iron-and-bone spatial rings onto the low wooden council table with a dull clatter.
Tie Shan stepped forward, resting both hands atop his massive five-hundred-jin smithing hammer. His bearded jaw was set like a granite bluff. His dark eyes burned with two hundred years of piled up mountain grudges.
“Master Lin,” Tie Shan rumbled. His voice low and was heavy enough to vibrate the wooden rafters of the nearby granary. “This butcher and his sect have terrorized the forest clans for sixty years. They flayed my second cousin for bone dice. They poisoned the southern river with corpse rot to catch spirit carp. Every law of the martial world, from the highest righteous sect to the lowest demonic warband, demands his head. Let me take him behind the forge shop and sever his neck with one clean hammer strike. We can mount his skull upon the southern border wooden wall as a warning to any other Blood Sea fiends who think our valley is weak.”
Several older bear warriors grunted in agreement. It slammed the butt-ends of their heavy iron axe-spears against the stone floor.
Su Ling’er stood beside the table, holding a fresh silk ledger and an ink brush. Her five snowy tails flicked with quiet tension. While her gentle nature abhorred needless cruelty, she knew the brutal reality of the Azure Cloud Realm. In this world, letting a defeated demonic master live was universally regarded as suicidal folly. One day, they would recover their strength, slip a cursed needle into your well, and slaughter your family in their sleep.
She looked toward Lin Xiao, waiting for the young sovereign’s command.
Lin Xiao stood in his cloud-gray scholar robes, his hands tucked loosely into his wide sleeves. He looked at Tie Shan, then at Su Ling’er, and finally down at the shivering old man in the dirt.
“A cut head on a pole,” Lin Xiao said mildly, his warm deep carrying effortlessly across the silent courtyard, “is a remarkably useless piece of territory decoration. It scares away the songbirds, it smells terrible in the summer heat. It produces exactly zero bushels of grain.”
Tie Shan blinked his small, dark bear eyes, momentarily thrown off balance. “Zero... Bushels, Master?”
“Exactly,” Lin Xiao replied. He took three quiet steps forward until he stood directly before Han Gu. “If you execute him, what do we gain? A brief moment of righteous satisfaction, followed by a rotting skull that does nothing to repair the turnip patches he ruined with his sulfur smoke. Revenge is an emotional expense with zero return on investment. We’re building a commonwealth here, Tie Shan, not a butcher shop.”
Lin Xiao stopped in front of Han Gu. He looked down at the former elder, who was staring up at him with the wide, scared eyes of a trapped rabbit waiting for the wolf’s fangs.
“Elder Han,” Lin Xiao said softly.
“Kill me...” Han Gu wheezed, his cracked lips trembling. “Just do it quickly... Spare me the humiliation of your mocking words... Take my heart...”
“I don’t want your heart,” Lin Xiao answered, letting out a soft chuckle. “Human hearts are full of cholesterol and fully inedible. Hold still for a moment.”
Before Han Gu could scramble backward, Lin Xiao extended a slender, pale hand. Then he pressed his palm gently against the center of the old man’s forehead.
Han Gu clamped his eyes shut, bracing for the soul-shredding agony of demonic soul-extraction.
Instead of burning fire or bone-crushing pressure, a wave of deep, soothing coolness washed through his skull.
Lin Xiao channeled a micro-thread of purified Primordial Chaos qi into Han Gu’s battered spirit veins. The chaotic essence moved with razor-sharp, compassionate care. It didn’t tear. It didn’t burn. Wherever it met the jagged, blackened residue of three hundred years of demonic blood-training, it gently dissolved the rotting calcifications like warm springwater melting winter ice.
The blood-worm parasites that had gnawed on Han Gu’s spinal marrow for decades dissolved into harmless cellular mist. The twisted, septic energy channels that had forced his body to crave raw marrow were cleansed and smoothed into ordinary mortal spirit veins.
Lin Xiao didn’t cripple the old man’s physical life-force. He cleared his internal hemorrhaging, steadied his fluttering heart. Then he lined up his bones, leaving Han Gu with the sturdy, robust physical constitution of an honest seventy-five-year-old mountain farmer.
When Lin Xiao drew his hand back, Han Gu gasped.
For the first time in three hundred years, the burning fever in Han Gu’s veins was gone. The constant, gnawing agony in his chest—the eternal price of demonic arts—had ceased fully. His lungs filled with cool mountain air without wheezing, and his arthritic knuckles bent without pain.
“Procedure finished,” the Dao Spirit reported. “Malignant yin-blood spirit veins fully stopped. Subject possesses zero spiritual training capacity, but baseline physical stamina has been restored to optimal agricultural standards.”
Lin Xiao turned to Su Ling’er. “Record the sentence, Ling’er.”
Su Ling’er dipped her brush into the vermilion ink. “Yes, Master.”
“Former Elder Han Gu,” Lin Xiao announced, looking down at the confused old man. “For the crimes of trespassing upon safe hall territory, disrupting our peaceful morning tea, and terrifying our turnip fields with sulfur smoke, you’re hereby sentenced to five years of compulsory community service.”
Han Gu stared blankly. “Community... Service?”
“You’ll be assigned to the northern agricultural terraces,” Lin Xiao explained, speaking with the clear, calm power of an experienced judge. “Your main duties will include weeding the spirit turnip beds, hauling compost from the beast paddocks to the peach orchards, clearing rock debris from the irrigation water chutes, and chopping seasoned peachwood for the communal dining hall kitchens.”
Han Gu’s mouth opened and closed like a stranded carp. “I... I was an Early Nascent Soul elder... I refined seven cities...”
“And now you’ll refine your technique with an iron hoe,” Lin Xiao countered without missing a beat. “In exchange for honest daily labor, the Commonwealth will provide you with three warm meals a day, a clean cot in the third agricultural bunkhouse, two sets of coarse cotton work clothes that don’t smell of dead bodies, and permission to soak your feet in the lower warm stone run-off every evening. If you work hard, cause no trouble, and grow good turnips, your sentence may be reduced for good behavior.”
Lin Xiao paused, leaning down slightly so his sapphire eyes met Han Gu’s stunned gaze.
“However,” Lin Xiao added, his tone sharpening by a single fraction, “if you try to harm any child, spirit beast, or mortal citizen, Xiao Hei will personally use you as a chew toy. Do we understand each other?”
Behind Lin Xiao, Xiao Hei let out a low, rumbling growl that shook the gravel beneath Han Gu’s knees.
“I... I understand...” Han Gu stammered, his head bowing involuntarily until his forehead touched the stone flags.
Lin Xiao gestured toward Tie Shan. “Hand him his equipment.”
Tie Shan let out a long rumble from deep in his chest, shaking his massive head with a mixture of disbelief and grudging admiration. The titan bear reached behind his back and produced a sturdy, well-balanced iron farming hoe fitted with a polished ash-wood handle, forged that very morning in his workshop.
Tie Shan thrust the hoe into Han Gu’s hands with a heavy clatter.
“Take it, old bones,” Tie Shan grunted, crossing his massive arms over his breastplate. “If I catch you leaning on that handle when you’re supposed to be digging weeds, I’ll put you on anvil-hauling duty. And those turnips better be sweet, or you’re answering to me.”
Han Gu looked down at the iron hoe resting across his palms.
The forged metal was smooth, clean, and cool. It carried no curses, no blood-stoppers, and no screaming souls. It was an honest tool made to dig fertile soil and help seeds grow beneath the warm sun.
Tears, quiet and unbidden, welled up in the corners of Han Gu’s wrinkled eyes. He gripped the wooden handle with calloused fingers. He felt the solid, grounding reality of mortal life settling into his palms.
“Turnips...” Han Gu whispered to himself, his voice shaking with a strange, newborn lightness. “Five years of... Turnips.”
“Report to Section Four tomorrow at dawn, Elder Han,” Lin Xiao said with a warm smile. He turned back toward the inner pavilion. “And tonight, make sure you eat two bowls of hot congee. You’re far too skinny for heavy farm work.”