At one o’clock in the morning, a bank of low autumn clouds drifted across the crescent moon, wrapping the cobblestone lanes of Sky-Crown City’s working-class South Ward in damp, velvety darkness.
Inside the newly rented three-acre grounds of Willow-Breeze Courtyard, the main house was warm and peaceful. A faint scent of roasted mountain chestnuts and sweet-osmanthus tea still lingered around the kitchen eaves. Over by the moss-covered stone well in the east yard, a rhythmic, soapy scrub-scrub-scrub echoed softly through the night air.
Xiao Qing—the Rank 3 Peak Hundred-Year Water Ghost who had been fused four hours earlier into a [24-Hour Automatic Laundry & Dishwashing Spirit]—floated six inches above her wooden washboard. Happily humming a lullaby under her frilly white maid cap. She folded the last stack of warm cotton bedsheets.
Thirty feet above her head, along the grey clay tiles of the north perimeter wall, twelve pitch-black silhouettes materialized out of the night mist like giant hunting bats.
Not a single boot clicked against the brickwork.
They were the Night-Crow Assassins—twelve elite Rank 3 killers handpicked from Second Prince Qian Ye’s personal shadow unit. Every man wore sound-absorbing black night-silk, a grim iron crow-beak half-mask, and twin curved daggers coated in blue-gleaming Seven-Step Heart-Rot Poison.
At the front of the formation crouched Shadow-Captain Crow, a cold-blooded Rank 3 Peak assassin who had personally silenced fourteen frontier generals and court rivals for the Eastern Palace.
Holding up two black-gloved fingers, Shadow-Captain Crow swept his cold gaze across the quiet courtyard below.
In the center of the yard sat a spacious wooden caravan and a three-legged bronze drum that still radiated a faint. Mouth-watering warmth—the Rank 4 Hundred-Herb Medicine King Furnace that had humiliated his master at the Royal Treasure Pavilion that afternoon.
“Listen closely,” Shadow-Captain Crow transmitted in a raspy whisper barely louder than falling leaves. “His Royal Highness the Second Prince gave strict orders: no survivors in the main house. Six of you secure the bronze furnace by the wagon.
The rest follow me to the north bedroom porch. Slit the father’s throat before he opens his eyes, and don’t let the two brats make a sound.”
Eleven masked heads nodded in unison.
With synchronized bursts of Rank 3 lightness skill, all twelve assassins glided down from the ten-foot wall like falling shadows. Landing on the stone pathway beside the vegetable patch without disturbing a single blade of grass.
Over by the stone well, Xiao Qing paused with a damp pillowcase in her pale hands.
Her ghostly green eyes widened as she smelled the sharp, metallic stench of Seven-Step Heart-Rot Poison drifting across the yard. For a brief second, her old hundred-year ghost instincts flared—until she remembered how Gu Changsheng had casually stuffed her into a glowing golden box for dripping mud on his floor.
Oh, those poor masked idiots, Xiao Qing thought, shivering inside her waterproof rubber gloves as she quickly ducked behind her laundry tub. If they step on the master’s newly planted turnips with those dirty boots, the washboard will be the least of their worries!
Unaware that a Rank 3 Peak ghost was pitying them from the well, Shadow-Captain Crow led his eleven killers across the edge of the neatly hoed vegetable garden toward the bedroom veranda.
Their poisoned daggers gleamed coldly in the dark. Ten paces from the porch steps, Shadow-Captain Crow raised his right blade, preparing to slice the wooden door-latch—.
Creaaak.
The side door of the children’s bedroom swung open from the inside.
Shadow-Captain Crow froze in a low crouch, signaling his men to drop flat among the rows of green turnip leaves.
Out onto the wooden porch stepped nine-year-old Gu Nian, wearing a pair of fluffy yellow bunny-eared flannel pajamas and rubbing his sleepy eyes with one fist. Half a step behind him trotted seven-year-old Su Nuannuan, dressed in a pink quilted nightgown with two little bells tied to her slippers, hugging her [Pink Healing Watering Can] against her tummy.
“Brother Nian,” Su Nuannuan whispered, letting out a tiny yawn that smelled like warm milk. “Are you sure our sweet-radish and turnip seeds get thirsty in the middle of the night?”
“Of course they do,” Gu Nian murmured solemnly, shuffling down the three wooden porch steps in his cloth slippers. “Grandpa Yao said spirit-turnips grow twice as fast if you water them at one o’clock in the morning. If they don’t grow fat by Sunday, Auntie Qin won’t have enough crunchy pickled turnips to put in our morning congee.”
“Okay! I brought the extra-sweet dew water!” Su Nuannuan whispered back, pattering down the steps right behind her big brother.
Crouched only six feet away in the dirt between the turnip rows, Shadow-Captain Crow’s eyes glinted with cruel amusement behind his iron crow-mask.
Two unguarded brats walking straight into our blades? Crow sneered inwardly. *That saves us the trouble of picking the bedroom lock.
Kill the children first, then use their bodies to shock the father!*
With a silent flick of his wrist, Shadow-Captain Crow and his eleven Night-Crow Assassins rose simultaneously from the turnip patch like a wall of black specters. Twenty-four poisoned daggers flashing straight toward the two children’s throats!
Gu Nian stopped in the middle of a yawn and blinked at the twelve tall men in black masks standing right on top of his third row of baby turnips.
Su Nuannuan tilted her small head, her big round eyes dropping to Shadow-Captain Crow’s muddy black boots—which had just squashed three tender green turnip sprouts flat into the soil.
“Huh?” Su Nuannuan puffed out her chubby cheeks in indignation. “Brother Nian, look!
Why are there twelve big black bugs standing on our pickle turnips?”
Gu Nian rubbed his eyes again and frowned, remembering the bedtime household safety lecture their father had given them after moving into the capital.
“Nuannuan, don’t be rude,” nine-year-old Gu Nian said in a serious, textbook tone. “Dad told us at dinner: anyone wearing black cloth over their face in the vegetable garden after nine o’clock at night isn’t a person—they’re overgrown night-crawling cabbage caterpillars trying to steal our root crop.”
Shadow-Captain Crow nearly stumbled mid-lunge.
Cabbage caterpillars?!
“You little—die!” Shadow-Captain Crow hissed in fury, thrusting his Seven-Step Heart-Rot dagger straight at Gu Nian’s chest while his eleven men slashed downward from left and right!
“Bad caterpillars! No eating our turnips!”
Seven-year-old Su Nuannuan raised her [Pink Healing Watering Can] with both hands, aimed the smiling brass flower-nozzle at the twelve lunging men, and let out a tiny, nose-tickling midnight sneeze.
Achoo!
POOF—SHHHHHH!
Triggered by her sneeze and her Rank 3 Mid Myriad-Poison Jade Body, a billowing, cotton-candy-pink cloud of Auntie Qin’s newly fused [Black-Licorice Weapon-Melting & Sweet-Dreams Mist] erupted from the watering can’s brass rose!
The fragrant cloud—smelling overwhelmingly of warm aniseed, brown sugar, and roasted chamomile—engulfed all twelve Night-Crow Assassins in a tenth of a second.
Shadow-Captain Crow held his breath by reflex, thinking it was a mortal smoke bomb, and drove his poisoned steel dagger forward—.
SPLAT-SQUISH!
Instead of the cold ring of tempered steel, a sound like a wet noodle hitting a warm pancake echoed in the quiet yard.
Shadow-Captain Crow stared at his right hand in utter horror.
The moment the pink mist touched his priceless, Seven-Step Heart-Rot poisoned steel dagger, the deadly blue poison neutralized into harmless sugar glaze. The three-hundred-fold forged black steel blade softened, drooped, and melted into a foot-long rope of sticky, chewy black-licorice taffy!
“W-What devil art is this?!” Assassin #2 gasped behind him, trying to pull his twin daggers apart—only for both melted licorice blades to glue his black-gloved hands together like warm maltose candy!
“My—my sword melted into candy?!”
“Wait—don’t breathe the pink fog! My eyelids—I can’t keep my eyes open—!”
The eleven Night-Crow subordinates didn’t even finish drawing a second breath. The Rank 3 Mid Sweet-Dreams Mist bypassed their martial meridians entirely, hitting their exhausted nerves like a warm goose-down quilt on a rainy winter morning.
Thud! Plop! Thump!
One after another, eleven ruthless capital assassins let out soft, blissful sighs, curled up between the cabbages with their licorice-glued hands tucked under their chins, and began snoring like hibernating piglets.
Only Shadow-Captain Crow—relying on his Rank 3 Peak cultivation and biting the tip of his own tongue until it bled—managed to stay on his feet for one more second.
Staggering forward with blood dripping from his mouth and a limp stick of black licorice drooping from his fist, Crow glared dizzily at nine-year-old Gu Nian. “I—I am a Rank 3 Peak Shadow-Captain of the Eastern Palace! I won’t fall to a child’s—”
Gu Nian let out a huge, jaw-cracking yawn, raised his small right fist—which glowed faintly with warm golden Chaos-Bone light under his yellow bunny sleeve—and gave Shadow-Captain Crow a sleepy. Half-awake thump right on the bridge of his iron crow-mask.
“Go to sleep, Mr. Caterpillar,” Gu Nian mumbled. “Dad gets grumpy if people make noise after midnight.”
BONK!
Shadow-Captain Crow’s iron crow-mask caved inward by half an inch. His eyes rolled straight back into his skull, his boots left the ground. He landed upside-down in the soft mud of the turnip trench with his legs sticking straight up in the air like a planted scallion.
Silence returned to Willow-Breeze Courtyard, broken only by twelve synchronized snores from the vegetable patch.
Su Nuannuan carefully watered the three squashed turnip sprouts with a gentle sprinkle of green healing dew from her watering can. Watching happily as the crushed leaves popped back up fresher and plump-er than before.
“All done!” Su Nuannuan patted her watering can. “Now the turnips won’t be thirsty, Brother Nian!”
“Good job. Let’s go back to bed before our feet get cold,” Gu Nian nodded, taking his little sister’s hand as they pattered back up the porch steps, closed the bedroom door. Crawled back under their warm quilts within thirty seconds.
Over by the stone well, Xiao Qing the Water Ghost slowly poked her head out from behind the washboard. Looking at the twelve elite Rank 3 assassins piled in the mud and the two children who hadn’t even woken up properly while demolishing them.
Xiao Qing hugged her wooden washboard tightly to her chest, tears of sheer relief sparkling in her ghostly eyes.
Thank heavens I signed the laundry contract! she whimpered softly. *Even the seven-year-old girl in this family is a monster!
I will scrub every sock in this courtyard until it shines like a mirror!*
Just then, the main bedroom window slid open an inch. Gu Changsheng looked out in his gray cotton sleeping robe. Resting his elbow on the sill while Grandpa Fu stepped out of the side gatehouse holding a brass oil lantern and his [Jade-Abacus Cane].
“Fourteen crushed turnip leaves, six trampled scallion roots, and twelve unauthorized overnight campers in the vegetable patch,” Grandpa Fu tutted, clicking his abacus beads briskly. “Master, shall I toss them into the alley?”
“Don’t waste good labor,” Gu Changsheng said quietly, glancing toward the woodshed by the carriage house. “Envoy Zhao!”
The woodshed door flew open, and former Royal Envoy Zhao Hu—still wearing his frilly Pink Chore Apron over his patched undershirt—trotted out at top speed holding a broom and saluting with both hands. “Present, Master Gu! The firewood is stacked and the spirit-oxen have been brushed!
What are your orders?!”
“Drag these twelve sleeping gentlemen over to the front gate, strip off their black night-suits so they don’t catch a chill from the mud. Tie them up neatly with hemp rope for the morning patrol,” Gu Changsheng instructed calmly. “If you finish before two o’clock, Auntie Qin left a bowl of warm chestnut congee for you on the stove.”
“Warm chestnut congee?! Right away, Master Gu!”
Envoy Zhao’s eyes lit up as if he had been promised a royal dukedom [Envoy Zhao Warmth: 31 -> 48/100]. Sprinting over to the turnip trench, Zhao Hu grabbed his former colleague Shadow-Captain Crow by the ankles and yanked him out of the mud without an ounce of hesitation.
“Look at you, Crow—always acting high and mighty in the Second Prince’s courtyard, and now you’re a turnip ornament!” Envoy Zhao muttered cheerfully as he shook the dirt off Crow’s tunic.
Flutter.
As Envoy Zhao turned Shadow-Captain Crow over to untie his utility belt, a thick, wax-sealed parchment envelope stained with dark red blood slipped out of Crow’s inner breast pocket and landed on the flagstones.
Envoy Zhao blinked, picked it up with both hands, and hurried over to pass it through the window to Gu Changsheng. “Master Gu! Crow had an urgent late-night dispatch from the Prince in his coat!”
Gu Changsheng broke the crimson wax seal under the lantern light and unfolded the parchment.
It wasn’t an order about Willow-Breeze Courtyard.
Written in Second Prince Qian Ye’s sharp, furious handwriting—and stamped with the secret emblem of the Royal Blood-Surgeon Guild—was a midnight command addressed to Chief Surgeon Cruel-Scalpel Mo in Coffin Alley:.
> [To Chief Surgeon Mo: Move the live extraction of Specimen #9 (the ten-year-old orphan boy with the Innate Sword Heart and Sword Eyes) into the deep ice-cellar. Double the Bone-Flaying guards. I want that boy’s eyes and heart in a frost-jade box before another thief can touch what belongs to me!]
As Gu Changsheng’s eyes scanned the blood-stained parchment, a golden notification chimed in his mind:.
[System Notification: Midnight Assassination Squad Defeated by Bedtime Turnip-Watering!]
[Protected Citizens (South Ward Neighbors Sleeping Peacefully): 50,000]
[Daily Income: +1,100,000 -> +1,300,000 DP/day!]
[Plot-Breaker Alert: Clue Obtained Regarding Child #3 — ‘Ye Xiao (The Destined Blood-Shadow Sword Fiend)’!]
Gu Changsheng’s fingers tightened slowly around the edge of the blood-stained parchment, the warm humor vanishing from his dark eyes as he looked out toward the black rooftops of Coffin Alley in the north. Let’s see how the Regressor likes his next surprise.