Tai Sui’s human body split off from the dragon. With his ashen dead man’s face that had yet to regain the mobility of life, he stood behind the dragon, getting soaked through by the rain. Amid the noise of the rain, he said, “General Zhi, when you were mortal, you said that you fought for the people of Great Wan. Now that you’ve gone to the divine mountains, you’ve forgotten us, haven’t you?”

General Zhi didn’t respond. Zhaoting had begun to shake. A part of the black dragon fell to the ground and turned back into a “shadow.” The “shadow” flowed towards Zhi Xiu like dirty water and wound around Zhaoting, which was linked to the earth.

At first, when the black shadow touched the sword, it was like cold water splashed onto fierce flames; it was vaporized at once. But as more and more black shadows poured off the dragon’s body, Zhaoting’s light began to weaken.

Pang Jian was about to speak, but he was choked by the blood still in his throat. For a time, he couldn’t speak, so he elbowed Xi Ping. Xi Ping somehow understood. He still had something to say after telling off Jiangli, so he turned and scolded the great demon: “Great Wan’s people belong to many families. But which family are you supposed to be part of? Do you carry your parents’ names, or do you make do with the name of the skin you’ve stolen…”

Tai Sui didn’t so much as turn his head. The black dragon’s tail came crashing towards them.

He sighed. “General Zhi, you were the one who abandoned us first.”

The black dragon wrapped around Zhaoting, then continued downward to pierce through the earth. Soon, an enormous dragon shadow had spread over the ground like an oil spill.

Raging waves rose on the calm canal outside of Jinping City, as if an enormous dragon were sweeping past underwater, the big waves nearly capsizing the steam-powered cargo ships ten lengths tall; the Southern Mountains' ridges cracked, and many ancient trees along the cliffs were pulled up, roots and all; on the Sage’s Road, eternally untouched by dust, inscriptions suddenly dimmed, and the snow-white stone blocks were splashed with mud from the rain; in Jinping, a crack appeared in the perfectly joined paving stones in Dangui Lane, like a snake, crawling from east to west, straight towards the imperial city, snapping the rich decorative carvings on the stones in two.

The Board of Astronomy’s golden seismic toad spat out a copper bead, setting off alarm bells.

An earthquake!

When the dragon’s tail came crashing towards them, Pang Jian was prepared. He seized Xi Ping with one hand and used his blood-stained other hand to draw a talisman on the ground. “Come on!”

The dragon’s tail fell with a rumble, but the two of them had vanished into thin air.

Xi Ping had seen Commander Pang walk through walls. This time he personally experienced “burrowing into the earth.”

He felt as if he had been turned into a piece of paper, temporarily losing his senses, his whole body shrinking into a thin sheet. In about the space of a breath, he was released once more. Xi Ping instinctively inhaled. The breath seemed to fill up his paper body and expand it once more.

And he was three lengths away, being pulled out of a gravestone by Pang Jian.

Amazing!

Xi Ping had no attention to spare for the fact that he had just nearly been pounded into the earth to join the beauties of the Blissful Village in their peaceful rest. He looked expectantly at Pang Jian, waiting for Commander Pang to instruct him to scold the demon again.

He wanted to have another go.

He looked his way but found that Pang Jian’s face was rather serious.

Zhaoting could no longer suppress the earth’s tremors. A golden cord broke through the earth and surged towards the sky,  but it was sucked midway into the black dragon’s mouth. The golden cord was pulled towards Tai Sui and wavered on the hem of his robe, quickly forming string after string of celestial inscriptions incomprehensible to mortals.

Pang Jian coughed twice to clear his throat. “This looks bad.”

“What’s wrong?” said Xi Ping.

Pang Jian didn’t answer. Actually, he didn’t especially believe that a half-dead evil cultivator could be a consummate ascended spirit, but this demon really could seize the Dragon Vein out from under Zhaoting, whether he believed it or not.

His face grave, he looked in the direction of Jinping—somewhere, black smoke was rising. The sky above Jinping was clouding over.

Tai Sui had been completely wrong. Even if Jinping’s earth dragon rolled over, the important personages of Dangui Lane would at most receive a fright. There were no tall buildings to crush people on the west side of the Lingyang River, and moreover every family had a big garden where they could shelter from natural disasters, as well as well-trained servants and guards; what did they have to fear?

The only ones to die would be the people struggling to survive in the narrow alleys and factory shacks… This demon must not have seen any wealthy people; perhaps he was a rustic demon.

“Exalted, don’t you think we ought to get a little further back?” The young master from Dangui Lane held him back. “All your subordinates have run off.”

“Then go after them.” Pang Jian brushed away his hand and calmly pulled a long bow out from his femur. “I can’t look after you. Go find a place to hide on your own.”

Xi Ping froze, watching Commander Pang step forward raising his bow.

Xi Ping knew nothing about “ascended spirits,” but he had already worked this much out from the blue-robers’ reactions: even the Exalteds of Heaven’s Design Pavilion had to keep clean of the fight between General Zhi and Tai Sui. It was the same way house cats and street mutts were best off not even watching battles among tigers and dragons, and instead running away as fast as they could. Even accidentally letting out a sound would result in mortal peril. They could only burrow into the earth to save their lives.

But something had possessed the “mutt” Commander Pang. With a struggle, he approached the edge of the enormous dragon shadow and brazenly drew the long bow with no arrow notched. A whirlwind formed at the center of the empty bowstring. The veins on the back of Pang Jian’s hand popped up as he forced his ceaselessly shaking hand to remain stable. Scraps of leaves, fragments of rock, droplets of rain… everything was pulled in.

“A near-shed skin evil cultivator” sounded too farfetched. Even the immortal sect couldn’t have expected it. If General Zhi had backup, it wouldn't have taken them this long to show up. Heaven’s Design Pavilion only had cultivators of the open-eyed phase. Pang Jian was well aware that in all of Jinping, apart from the immortal envoy, his own better than nothing cultivation was the highest.

“Time for a last-ditch effort,” Pang Jian thought. “At worst I’ll die in the line of duty. I’ll see it through.”

When the bow was fully drawn, a reddish-gold arrow appeared out of nowhere on the empty bowstring, with fletching like the legendary phoenix, so scorching it dazzled the eye.

The arrow whistled as it flew like a shooting star, tearing the grimy curtain of rain!

But when this awesome arrow hit the churning black shadow, it was like a weak spark sinking into a deep pool; before Xi Ping could even open his eyes, it was annihilated.

Xi Ping didn’t know what kind of bow this was, but he felt that the arrows it shot seemed to be a part of Commander Pang. As the arrow disappeared, Pang Jian staggered, the blood instantly draining clean out of his face. Only the blaze in his wild wolf’s eyes was unextinguished. He stared steady as a cliffside at the golden cord weaving inscriptions on Tai Sui’s clothes and notched a second arrow.

Having lost Commander Pang’s protection, Xi Ping knew he ought to turn and run, the further the better. But for some reason, he stared at Pang Jian’s figure for a time without moving.

Amid the reeking wind and bloody rain, Xi Ping watched across a distance of several lengths as Pang Jian set about his futile task, shooting arrows whose flames grew weaker and weaker to no avail.

A second arrow, a third, a fourth…

There was blood at the ghastly pale corners of Pang Jian’s mouth, but his aim was perfect. The arrows closely pursued the golden cord. Even if he had to move one step at time, he was still approaching.

The moment the sixteenth arrow fell into the black shadow, the golden cord actually paused for an instant. For just that instant, a segment of the golden cord “climbing” up the robe was pulled back by Zhaoting, and General Zhi and the demon were once again at a standstill.

Pang Jian couldn’t hold out any longer. His legs went weak, and he went to his knees. Before his knees touched the ground, he was dragged backward over three spans from behind. A sharp wind like a butcher's knife nearly scraped the soles of his shoes as it fell, cutting a deep gouge in the spot where he had just been standing.

Pang Jian turned his head in astonishment and saw Xi Ping. He didn’t even have the strength to speak now. He could only use his eyes to ask: What are you still doing here?!

Xi Ping truly had all the makings of reckless valor. Holding up Pang Jian with both hands, he cheered him on enthusiastically: “Exalted, shoot another one, that one just now worked, I think you can do it!”

Pang Jian: “…”

Easy enough for you to say, kid! Go fuck yourself!

“Are you out of arrows?” As if by divine aid, Xi Ping understood Commander Pang’s look. He produced a big tree branch, as long as the arm span of a grown man. All the little twigs had been pared away, and a long string of rotting paper was messily strung to it, all the lewd verses he had torn down in the Blissful Village—he had been pretty busy just now.

Then this miraculous young master took a paper fan from his robes and strung it onto the big branch as well. “Use this as an arrow! Exalted Zhao said this karma beast or whatever is the Southern Sage’s sacred beast and can expel evil. Try it! Hurry, hurry, while the wind is in the right direction!”

The karma beast that hated all evil, forced into coexistence with a pile of unspeakable material, showed an ominous glint in its enormous eyes, as if it wanted to expel this bastard Xi first of all.

Pang Jian managed to catch his breath. “Kid, are you even human?!”

He put a hand on Xi Ping’s shoulder, pulled himself up, and really did take the incredible “arrow.”

This time, Pang Jian didn’t shoot the branch at the great demon. He considered briefly, steadied his shaking hands as best he could, and shot the spear-like piece of wood into the air.

How could an ordinary thing like this branch approach an ascended spirit cultivator? It had hardly left the bowstring before it disintegrated. The papers attached to it also went to pieces, floated towards Tai Sui like snowflakes.

There wasn’t a trace of spiritual energy in these scraps. Tai Sui didn’t so much as look at them.

But the next moment, he froze.

Slowly, Tai Sui tilted his head. His gaze fell on the hem of his robe.

A finger-length karma beast had transferred from the countless scraps onto his robes—the burial robes had designs on them. When the karma beast landed amid the inscriptions, it opened its mouth wide and bit!

The little beast’s body was immediately torn apart and disappeared into nothing. But it had bitten off a corner of the robe, and the dovetailing thread of inscriptions immediately went askew.

Inscriptions required extensive knowledge and profound scholarship. The least error, and everything would go wrong. With just this tiny tear, the inscriptions in drawn golden cord collapsed instantly and were pulled in by Zhaoting!

The collapsed inscriptions swirled wildly. Tai Sui’s robe seemed to become a pool of molten gold, lighting up the Blissful Village’s night as though it were noon.

At the same time, General Zhi’s spoke into Xi Ping and Pang Jian’s ears: “You two have some guts! Get back!”

General Zhi was far away from them; how could his voice reach their ears? Before Xi Ping could work it out, Pang Jian, without any hesitation, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled him back into the gravestone.

The two of them had just hidden in the stone when there was a furious dragon’s roar. The scattered golden cord gathered into a big net, one end wrapped around Tai Sui, the other pinned to the ground by Zhaoting.

The torrential rain came to a halt, as abruptly as it had begun to pour, as though someone had shut a sluice gate.

There was sudden silence all around. All sounds fell quiet in unison. For a space, even time stopped.

In the dead silence of the Blissful Village’s woods, you could have heard a pin drop.

The big golden net suddenly shrank. The enormous dragon in the net struggled desperately, trying to throw the net off itself. Then a fierce flash of light fell from the sky onto Zhaoting, piercing through the dragon’s body on its way.

Like a snake stabbed through the heart, the huge dragon arched its head off the ground. The whole Blissful Village was nearly razed flat. The gravestone where Xi Ping and Pang Jian were hiding fell over with a crash. Xi Ping, nearly suffocated, rolled out of the stone and was on the point of being sent flying by the dragon’s tail!

Just then, a ray of red light flew from Xi Ping and blocked the dragon’s tail as it came towards him.

Amid the sound of thunder, a woman’s faint sigh sounded in his ears, just for a moment, like a hallucination.

Pang Jian seized the opportunity to pull him back into the earth. At the same time, countless golden threads “grew” out of the ground. Pursuing Zhaoting’s light, they tied the black dragon and Tai Sui’s human body together, and sliced them to pieces. A ray of bloody light flew from the body parts towards the horizon, but an unshakeable golden cord stuck to its tail. The next moment, the bloody light was pinned to the ground by Zhaoting, following after the golden cord.

A thick scent of blood spread explosively in all directions, nearly knocking out Xi Ping, who had just climbed out of the stone.

Dimly, he heard pattering. The rain that had stopped earlier was falling once again.

The rain washed away the scent of rotting wood, but it couldn’t wash clean the stink of blood. A dull rumble came from the ground, like thunder, but also like a dragon’s roar, echoing the quivering of Zhaoting.

The quaking of the earth and shaking of the mountains stopped. The Dragon Vein had been placated by Zhaoting and returned to its original position.

After a long time, Xi Ping at last came to himself. He climbed shakily to his feet and found that he was covered in blood.

The dozen mu of the Blissful Village had all been soaked with blood coming out of nowhere, turning the rain into a red river, as if the beautiful souls whose homes had just been raided had returned to the human world to shed all the blood they hadn’t had time to shed while living, creating a hellish lake of blood.

Xi Ping dizzily supported himself against a tree trunk and retched. He saw the normally perfectly turned out blue-robers each looking even more sorry than himself. A few couldn’t even stand up. Far away, the haunts whose limbs hadn’t been intact to start with had suffered even more damage; there wasn’t a single one without parts missing. The dear friend who had originally been missing half of his skull was the most horrifying; there was nothing left in his head. He might not make it.

Only Jiangli was missing.

Xi Ping held his buzzing ears and felt faintly anxious. He thought, Has she run off?

“Looking for your lovely little confidante?” A hand covered in scars reached over and took the wine pot Xi Ping had kept tucked into his clothes—the wine pot had gone through all the rolling and scrambling with him, but it hadn’t broken.

Xi Ping blurted out, “She’s not my…”

“All right, she’s not.” Zhi Xiu sighed. “Stop looking, she’s at your feet.”

Xi Ping looked down. His black boots were soaked through with blood. He looked as though he had just waded through a sea of bodies. There was nothing at his feet but mud.

He looked up at General Zhi in confusion.

Zhi Xiu didn’t answer. He casually wiped the blood off the wine pot with his sleeve. With no thought for dirt, he drank the remaining wine in the pot.

Beside him, someone picked up in a hoarse voice: “You must not have noticed the ‘life-swapping talisman’ cast on you.”

Pang Jian limped over and saluted Zhi Xiu. “Shishu.”

“No need to be so polite,” Zhi Xiu said mildly. “Call some people to come clean up.”

Even a person as insolent as Pang Jian involuntarily became somewhat more respectful when facing General Zhi. He suppressed his wildness and responded with a proper, “Yes, shishu.” He turned and took out his whistle, faced north and blew three blasts. Then he said another word to General Zhi and went to inspect his companions and the haunts.

Xi Ping went after him and asked, “Exalted, what ‘life-swapping talisman’?”

Perhaps owing to the life and death adventure they had just gone through, Pang Jian’s manner towards Xi Ping had improved slightly. He answered, rather patiently, “A life-swapping talisman is a special type of talisman that doesn’t require very high cultivation to draw. It only needs to be drawn on some item you’ve carried close over many years. If the person who takes the life-swapping talisman encounters mortal peril, the talisman’s maker will take it on in their stead. That’s why it’s called life-swapping. Did she give you something?”

Xi Ping remembered something. He took out the birthday jade.

Its color, originally almost like blood jade, had turned to mottled coral. It looked even cheaper. There was a crack down the middle of the words “Ning’an Chen family.”

Jiangli’s accent had never changed. Xi Ping knew that she came from Ning’an, and the great demon had called her “sister of the Chen family”…

Was this her birthday jade?

“It does have remnants of a talisman.” Pang Jian took the birthday jade from his hand and smelled it. “But this talisman is a type of protection talisman that does no harm, so the head office’s karma beasts didn’t take it for an evil item. When that haunt’s tail nearly turned you into a pancake just now and suddenly froze, that must have been the effect of the life-swapping talisman. She took that hit for you.”

Xi Ping instinctively denied it: “Wait, no… Didn’t she think I was going to give that thing to Heaven’s Design Pavilion?”

“When the talisman’s maker casts the talisman, she only needs to have the person receiving it drink a drop of her blood, and in the future, even if the object that carries the life-swapping talisman is lost, the talisman will still remain on you. It won’t lose its effect.”

Xi Ping was dazed.

Yes, when Jiangli had given him the silk brocade bag, she had in fact poured him a cup of odd-tasting tea. He had thought it was because the pot was rusty.

“Tsk.” Pang Jian handed the jade ornament back to him. “Taking advantage of people with your pretty face.”

Xi Ping took the piece of jade. “Exalted, don’t you suspect me?”

Pang Jian gave him a strange look. It seemed to be ridiculing, yet without any malice. He was looking at Xi Ping, but Xi Ping wasn’t the target.

“You? If some of you sons of the rich and powerful had pushed each other into losing their heads and playing around with witchcraft and sorcery, then you would have been rather suspect. But stupid things like worshipping evil gods and sacrificing yourself… Your sort doesn’t usually have anything to do with that,” Commander Pang said with a trace of mockery. “You don’t have the makings.”

In all his life Xi Ping had never done anything but eat and drink, unless it was make merry. The greatest events of his life to date had been the Marquis attending to him with a discipline rod.

Now, dressed in bloody clothes and standing in the ice-cold rain, squeezing the cracked piece of jade, he had been informed that Jiangli was dead.

His ears had heard it, but his mind was still muddled. Standing perfectly still in the sea of blood, he still unconsciously looked around, waiting for Jiangli to appear so he could ask for an explanation—

Didn’t she see him as just the same as Big Dog Wang’s ilk?

Hadn’t she decided that as soon as he found the horoscope on the birthday jade, he would immediately hand it over without another thought?

Didn’t she think he was not only faithless and heartless, but also a complete bastard?

Then why would she give him her only birthday stone? And swap her life for his when he ran into peril?

Had she never met another man with a single shred of decency in her life?

Xi Ping could make no sense of it, however much he thought about. After a lengthy daze, he finally realized: he wouldn’t be able to find Jiangli again.

The immortal had said that she had turned into a pool of blood, becoming one with the many women like her in the Blissful Village.

He hadn’t had a last look at her. He only remembered the last words she had spoken in the human world. She had said: “But your feelings for me are more ephemeral than dew!”

But her life, her fate, her hurried trample through existence—which of it was more substantial than dew?

Only romance… Look at this silly woman. What nonsense was she talking?