A hairpin wasn’t as thin and pliable as a wire, after a few too many twists it turned brittle, and after Yun Xiu had picked more than a dozen door-locks, it gloriously snapped off inside the keyhole.
Holding the broken half-hairpin, she tipped her head up a fraction toward the young man’s hair. Naturally he noticed, and his gaze swept over.
“What is it?”
“N-nothing.”
He didn’t seem to use a hairpin to bind his hair, only a single jade-white hair ribbon.
That was no use, then.
Next.
Even as Yun Xiu calculated how to open the next door, she pushed it open, and the next second met the startled, wary stares of two people.
A middle-aged man and a youth, both watching her with quaking pupils.
Yun Xiu: “…”
This was supposed to be apprehending the true culprit, yet at this moment she had the distinct feeling of breaking and entering.
She stiffened, then said softly, “Um, s-sorry, good evening, gentlemen?”
The younger one, Xiao Wu, turned and looked at the man with clear eyes. “Uncle Wang, didn’t you say the secret passage was riddled with traps, nine deaths and one life?”
Uncle Wang: “…Th-there’s still the one life, isn’t there.”
Xiao Wu: “But Uncle Wang, they’ve already found their way to our door. Looks like it’s our turn for the nine-deaths-one-life.”
Uncle Wang: “Don’t worry, Xiao Wu. Don’t we still have the plan that great one left behind? It’s time to enact Emergency Plan Busted-West.”
Xiao Wu started, a flicker of gravity and pain crossing his face. He nodded, drew a flute from his sleeve, put it to his lips, and blew a hard note. The shrill flute-sound reverberated through the dark underground chamber.
Out of the darkness rose a ferocious, shrieking beast-roar, and something came charging from the lurking shadows at the flute’s command, revealing its true form.
Yun Xiu stared at the black mass, thoughtful. Um… like a bear? Or a wolf? Its shape was very strange, bear’s paws, wolf’s body, and yet it was covered in fish scales.
The young man beside her spoke. “A demon-beast.”
But it seemed… a bit off.
Regardless, a demon-beast was nothing like those “toys” upstairs, it wasn’t something a spirit-less mortal could take on. One swipe of its claws could tear her body to shreds.
Watching the frenzied demon-beast lunge, Xie Wuwang was about to snap the spirit-locking chain and hurl the girl in front of him out the door, when she suddenly took a step forward, pulled off her veiled hat, and stuffed it into his arms.
“F-fellow daoist, hold this for me a sec.”
As she spoke, the demon-beast had already lunged in front of her, its bear-paw driving down at her head with the force of a thousand-ton mountain, wind trailing behind it. Against the girl’s slight, slender body, it looked as if one slap could flatten her into a paste.
And facing the demon-beast, the girl reached out her own delicate hand.
Then the three people present witnessed the following scene.
The girl lifted her hand and effortlessly caught the enormous bear-paw, then reversed her grip on its arm, pivoted with her back to it, and gave the demon-beast a clean over-the-shoulder throw.
Then, before the demon-beast could get up, she seized its legs with both hands and, hoisting it like someone toting a big goose, slammed it into the wall.
“ROAR—BAM!”
“BAM!”
“BAM!!”
“BAM—!!!”
After roughly a dozen slams, on the last one she swung hard and let go. The demon-beast crashed into the distant stone wall with a tremendous sound.
Dust flew, bricks and stones tumbled down, and after the demon-beast had punched a big crater into the boulder wall, it slowly slid down along it and then lay still.
“S-sorry, my hand slipped.”
The girl murmured, “How about I do it again?”
Slumped in the corner, the demon-beast’s body went rigid, and it silently curled up into a ball. A single glistening teardrop seemed to slip quietly from the corner of its eye.
Xiao Wu: “…”
Uncle Wang: “…”
Xie Wuwang: “…”
The hand holding Xiao Wu’s flute trembled slightly. He looked to Uncle Wang. “Uncle Wang, Plan Busted-West failed too, what do we do now…?”
Uncle Wang looked back at him, his tone heavy. “Xiao Wu, have you forgotten? We still have one last plan, Plan Busted-Ground.”
“Uncle Wang, do we really have to use it? I, I…”
“Xiao Wu, in our current straits, there’s no other way.”
The two gazed at each other, wordless, yet each seemed to find in the other’s eyes resolve and grim determination.
Xie Wuwang’s gaze swept over them, and he frowned faintly.
Yun Xiu patted the dust off her hands, took her veiled hat back from the young man’s grasp, and put it on again. Fortunately, without the hairpin her hair was down, loose, so it could block others’ stares a little and keep her from feeling quite so anxious.
“F-fellow daoist, are you all right?”
Xie Wuwang: “…Probably all right.”
Yun Xiu ducked her head and picked at her fingers. “Oh, good, then.”
Remembering there were still two other people present, she looked up, and suddenly two black shadows came lunging at her.
She took a step back but couldn’t dodge in time, and the two shadows flung themselves down at her feet.
The middle-aged man on the left, streaming tears and snot: “Good sister, it was my fault, I was in the wrong, I’ll never do it again, just hit me a couple of times, curse me a few words, and let me off this once.”
The youth on the right, bawling his eyes out: “Immortal one, I’ve an eighty-year-old mother above and a three-year-old son below, I beg you, immortal one, show mercy and spare our lives.”
Xie Wuwang: “…”
Yun Xiu: “…”
Yun Xiu whispered, “Did you two swap your lines by mistake?”
The two broke off their sobbing, sat up, and each pulled a slip of paper from his robes. Reading them, they were silent for two seconds, then handed each other’s back.
Then they resumed prostrating at her feet and dry-wailing.
Yun Xiu rubbed her aching head and asked, “Why did you fake your deaths?”
The two froze.
Uncle Wang: “Immortal one, I don’t understand what you mean…”
Xiao Wu: “How did you know…”
Uncle Wang smacked the youth on the back of the head.
Xiao Wu hurriedly clapped a hand over his mouth.
Yun Xiu pressed down her veiled hat and said in a thin voice, “I saw your ‘corpses’ up in the corpse-holding ground.”
Uncle Wang was suddenly speechless.
Xie Wuwang was a little surprised. “You memorized the faces of all three hundred corpses?”
Ordinarily, in a situation like that, no one would go turning over the bodies one by one.
Yun Xiu gave a small nod. “Mm. In our line of work you can’t mix up a client’s remains, you’ve got to check carefully.”
Uncle Wang and Xiao Wu both looked grim. Heads bowed, they said not a word, clearly with no intention of answering the question.
Xie Wuwang suddenly gave a small laugh. “The matter of the faked deaths aside, by Immortal Alliance law, whoever privately raises a vicious demon-beast is to be sent to the Immortal Prison, and the man-harming beast executed on the spot.”
As he spoke, he drew Zhezhu and pointed it at the demon-beast in the corner.
“No!”
Just as the sword-light was about to fall, Xiao Wu suddenly threw himself over, eyes squeezed shut, shielding the demon-beast behind him.
A few breaths later, feeling no pain, Xiao Wu opened his eyes and saw the sword had stopped just before his face. Pain flickered through the youth’s clear gaze. “Second Brother has never once hurt anyone, let alone eaten anyone, he’s no vicious beast, don’t kill him!”
Yun Xiu blinked.
Xiao Wu held the demon-beast tightly behind him, his gaze resolute. “If you want to kill someone, kill me, it was all my doing! I’m the one who slaughtered everyone in the city and then faked my death to escape!”
As he spoke, the demon-beast behind him suddenly stirred, slowly opened its mouth, leaned in toward the youth, and chomped down on his head in one bite.
Yun Xiu: “…”
Kid, don’t raise your death-flag so early!
“Second Brother!”
Yun Xiu bent down, working out from which angle she might attempt a rescue, when the youth, half his head in the beast’s jaws, suddenly spoke up, disgruntled. “How many times do I have to tell you to look before you bite.”
The youth pulled a strip of jerky from his sleeve and waggled it. “The jerky’s right here.”
The demon-beast seemed to give an aggrieved little growl, opened its mouth, released the youth’s head, snatched the jerky with a paw, brought it to its mouth, and began gnawing.
Xie Wuwang: “You say you’re the true culprit?”
Xiao Wu deftly wiped the drool off his face with his sleeve and went on facing off against Yun Xiu and Xie Wuwang. “That’s right, it was all me!”
Xie Wuwang’s tone was calm. “Then may I ask how, with no spiritual energy whatsoever, you managed to make three hundred puppet-mechanisms convincing enough to pass for real bodies, brew a drug capable of subduing cultivators, and cast a forbidden technique mixing demon-beast blood into human bodies to forge a vicious demon-beast?”
Uncle Wang and Xiao Wu both started.
The two exchanged a look. Done for, that wasn’t covered in the battle plan!
How does he know all of it?!
Yun Xiu: OvO?
Can’t follow along. Back to picking at her fingers.
Xie Wuwang said mildly, “I am not of Shuiling Palace. I came here today only to get to the bottom of this case and report the facts back to the Immortal Alliance, to be handled by them.”
“Whatever Shuiling Palace has done, you may tell me freely. The Immortal Alliance will then see justice done, and make it known to the world.”
Xiao Wu suddenly gave a cold snort. “The Immortal Alliance? They’re all in the same gang as that Shuiling Palace bunch, officials shielding officials, every one of them just as black-hearted!”
Xie Wuwang, thoughtful: “So you did once report it to the Immortal Alliance, and nothing came of it?”
“Then let it be this way, I’ll handle this matter myself.”
The young man let the words drop lightly. “Now can you tell me?”
Xiao Wu blinked. “You? But aren’t you her kept pretty-boy man-pet?”
Xie Wuwang: ?
Xiao Wu raised a hand and gestured at the chain between the two of them. “I get it. It’s the fashionable kink these days, the storybooks all write about it.”
Xie Wuwang: “…”
Yun Xiu: “Ahem…”
Yun Xiu shook her head, shaking all the “proper literature” out of her brain, and murmured to Xie Wuwang, “F-fellow daoist, that spiel of yours sounds too airy, too impractical, back in my hometown we’d file it all under ‘painting pies in the sky.'”
Yun Xiu crouched down and introduced him to Xiao Wu. “Th-this big brother is a good person, his name is Xie Wuwang, and everyone in the cultivation world calls him…”
“Sword Venerable Wuwang?”
“Sword Venerable Wuwang!?”
“Sword Venerable Wuwang—”
Three different voices spoke at once. Yun Xiu blinked and counted them off one by one, Xiao Wu, Uncle Wang… and a middle-aged man with stern, imposing features.
A familiar face.
“City Lord, why have you come back?! Weren’t you told to evacuate?” Uncle Wang hurried up to him.
Oh, so it was the City Lord of Baihua City.
Sure enough, the three of them launched into a round of pleasantries, followed by the whole meeting-Sword-Venerable-Wuwang fanboy routine, which Yun Xiu had already gotten a taste of from Feixiao.
Yun Xiu crouched down, doodling circles on the ground, chin in hand, spacing out.
She’d already gone a whole day without her phone…
The City Lord of Baihua City had seen Sword Venerable Wuwang in projected images, so there was no need to verify his identity. Their trust in Sword Venerable Wuwang was, you could say, one hundred percent, and they confessed everything.
The three hundred people in the city had faked their deaths, the aim being to escape Shuiling Palace’s disciple selection.
Shuiling Palace hadn’t produced an outstanding seedling in nearly a century, while the other families kept turning out talent in droves. Among the Three Palaces, Shuiling Palace was on the decline, not only could it not compare to the Seven Great Families, even disciples of some minor families could lord it over Shuiling Palace and throw their weight around.
So Shuiling Palace began stopping at nothing, rounding up young children en masse and hauling them back to the palace, casting forbidden techniques on children of ordinary talent, injecting them with demon-beast blood to strengthen their bloodlines.
But how could ordinary people withstand demon-beast blood? Large numbers of children died on the spot during the forbidden technique, and only a small portion survived, yet even they suffered the backlash of the technique, turning into demon-beasts, neither human nor demon.
Shuiling Palace worked in secret, and the City Lord of Baihua City hadn’t originally known of this, because they disposed of every child who turned into a demon-beast. Until one day, a child who’d been mutated into a demon-beast by the backlash escaped from Shuiling Palace and made it back to Baihua City.
That was the very one Xiao Wu called “Second Brother.”
Only then did the City Lord of Baihua City investigate and uncover all of this.
But he was only an ordinary mortal, even knowing of Shuiling Palace’s atrocities, what could he do?
He’d tried to disclose the matter to the Immortal Alliance, and in the end nothing came of that either.
The Baihua Festival was drawing near, and with the disciple-selection date almost upon them, the City Lord was frantic with worry. He couldn’t bear to let a single child more suffer such torment. Yet simply hiding the children away wouldn’t do, Shuiling Palace would never let them off.
Just as the City Lord was at his wit’s end, a certain great one sought him out.
“That great one laid out a plan for us, made the puppet-mechanisms, and had us fake our deaths and leave the city to make new lives elsewhere.”
“The plan was already halfway done. The people Shuiling Palace sent had already been fooled by the puppets, and all that remained was to burn every puppet tonight to destroy the evidence, and the whole thing would be complete.”
Xie Wuwang lifted his eyes. “What is this great one’s name?”
The City Lord: “He said his name was Lei Feng.” (a real-world icon of selfless anonymous good deeds, like saying “my name is Good Samaritan”)
The little mushroom Yun Xiu, down on the ground, suddenly lifted her head.
…hm?