X
Join our Discord server and get release updates for every novel you follow.
Join the ServerThe late summer and early autumn wind swept up leaves that were gradually turning yellow. It brushed past Lu Qingyu’s bangs and the gravestone in front of her.
In the photo on the gravestone, the youth stood in the morning light of twenty-seven years ago, smiling gentle and clean.
Lu Qingyu set a cup of milk tea in front of the gravestone. She bent down and wiped away the rainwater still clinging to the stone. Late summer and early autumn were typhoon season; lately Lin’an often got sudden rainstorms.
Besides the milk tea she had just placed there, there were other things before the gravestone. An old sword tassel, left by Xu Zhi. It had once been tied to that plain bronze sword.
Xu Zhi had originally wanted to leave the broken sword here, but the Demon Suppression Bureau’s regulations stated that spirit-power weapons like that bronze sword could not circulate among civilians. It was now in a War Preparation Bureau laboratory, where researchers analyzed it with all kinds of cutting-edge equipment. Afterward, it would be properly stored.
So Xu Zhi could only remove the rough sword tassel and return it to Feng Yi, as a token of his feelings.
There was also a sketch portrait framed under glass. Bai Ling had drawn it. She had made two copies of the painting using cinnabar as ink. One stayed before the grave; the other waited for a future chance to be handed personally to his master.
Bai Ling said Feng Yi’s master had suffered a lightning tribulation to his eyes, and only cinnabar ink would let him see it. Lu Qingyu did not know whether that was true. She only knew that when Bai Ling brought the painting, her fingers were red and swollen, as if something had corroded them.
In truth, the small gravestone before her could not even be called a cenotaph. Apart from the broken sword, the sword tassel, and his own remains, Feng Yi had left nothing of himself behind. His broken sword had been taken by the War Preparation Bureau for study and safekeeping. The sword tassel had been placed at the grave by Xu Zhi. And his remains had now been taken into the Nine Abyss Prison.
Yet they still erected a gravestone for Feng Yi. This gravestone did not belong to him as a zombie, but to the youth whose life had stopped in the surging river twenty-seven years ago.
“Another cup I owe you.”
Lu Qingyu lowered her eyes. A sudden gust lifted the hair by her ear.
****
The wind passing through the hall lifted a corner of the woman’s black Taoist robe. The hall was dim. The flame of the eternal lamp wavered slightly in the wind, and its flickering light cast the woman’s shadow onto the wooden floor.
The woman knelt on a rush cushion, softly chanting scriptures. Inside the cloth wrapped around her eyes, ink marks flowed like water ripples.
The moment the draft stopped, the soul lamp on the altar, already barely alive, suddenly went out.
The woman sighed. Her chanting stopped abruptly.
Her only disciple, the youth she had watched grow up since childhood, had finally found rest after twenty-seven years.
“Lady Mingyun.” A young woman’s voice sounded behind her. Two maids who looked to be in their twenties stood one on each side, heads bowed.
“Rest a while,” one said.
“You have been chanting the Rebirth Sutra for sixteen hours,” the other said.
Their faces were nearly identical. The elder twin was named Yinzuo, the younger YinYou.
They were orphans Mingyun had taken in. Their parents had died in the Fengdu Incident when they were just born.
When the couple received the call, they entrusted the infant sisters to a household, then threw themselves into the war to suppress Fengdu. Their blood dyed the river red, and in the end not even their bodies were recovered.
When Mingyun found them, they were still giggling in their swaddling clothes, their hands opening and closing to the rhythm of a bronze bell.
Mingyun did not know the couple’s surname. Demon slayers always called one another by nicknames. As time passed, even their names were forgotten in the river.
So she gave the sisters only names, no surname.
She did not want them to take her surname. She only hoped that in the long years ahead, they would one day find a surname of their own.
“Yinzuo, YinYou, prepare the invitations.” Mingyun’s tone was as long and resonant as a bianzhong bell. She slowly straightened up, like a bronze statue in the dim light.
“Must it really be like this?” Yinzuo said.
“Your body…” YinYou finished the second half.
For twenty-seven years she had supported the Heavenly Gate Formation that covered the entire country by herself. Mingyun’s body had long grown frail with age. The legendary demon slayer who once wielded her sword to suppress several thousand-year demon beasts now found even straightening up a strain.
“I cannot suppress Fengdu forever.” Mingyun stepped slowly past the sisters.
As she said, she could not hold up the Heavenly Gate Formation forever. Twenty-seven years of supporting it alone had drained her life force.
“It is time to see whether the young can protect this world.”
“But…”
“No buts. I believe they can do it, just as I believe in you.” Mingyun’s steps creaked on the wooden floor. She crossed the threshold. Outside the old building, soul-suppressing pillars outlined in golden light rose straight into the sky.
“You will deliver the invitations in person. I will speak to the stubborn old men of the Mystic Gate Council.”
Drumbeats rippled out in golden rings. Mingyun’s words drifted into the candle flame.
****
“I’m a little nervous. What should I do?”
In the elevator of AXE Group that led directly to the executive office, Qin Fengling pinched a soft spot at Jia Ye’s waist. The youth grimaced in pain.
The LED floor indicator climbed slowly, like an approaching death sentence. The cold light in the elevator made one’s heart crawl.
“It’s because you do things too impulsively, Sister.” Jia Ye muttered and retreated three steps, in case his nominal sister and boss, actually his keeper and lover, added another bruise to his waist.
“I always plan things meticulously!” Qin Fengling suddenly lunged and pinched the youth’s cheek.
Meticulous? Who would believe that?
‘You never do anything without acting on a whim.’
Jia Ye only dared to complain in his head. If he said it aloud, he would get another lesson at night. Just thinking about it made his waist ache.
Though somehow every time it seemed to work out in the end…
He added another line in his mind.
Amid their roughhousing, the elevator dinged at the target floor. The entire floor had only one office, belonging to the group’s mysterious boss.
Apart from the higher-ups, no one had seen him.
The elevator doors slid open slowly, like the curtain rising on a play.
“The boss is waiting for you.”
Night Owl stood in the shadow before the elevator doors. She had changed to a new mask. Her cold mechanical voice cut through the corridor.
Yet in that emotionless mechanical voice, Qin Fengling heard a hint of anger. It seemed Cheng Yu had caused her no small amount of trouble.
“All right, all right, I know.”
Qin Fengling waved carelessly, which counted as greeting Song Yingxue, who stood by the office door ahead. But the female executive wore the expression of someone looking at a dead person. It seemed the boss had plenty of complaints about her.
Qin Fengling pushed the office door open. In the spacious room, the boss sat behind a desk reading a book on the history of bronze ware.
“You’re here?” The light column from the ceiling lamp left the boss’s forehead in shadow, making his face hard to see.
The boss folded the corner of the page about bronze ding history as a bookmark, then casually closed the book and set it on the desk. The sandalwood bead bracelet on his wrist clicked dully against the desk corner.
“I heard you’ve been making quite a few little moves lately.”
The man laced his fingers and propped his chin on them. The dark brown old scar at the web of his thumb looked stark in the light.
“But you did help me find some restless sparrows.”
The scent of cologne and aged tobacco stung Qin Fengling’s nose. She knew what those sparrows referred to.
They were the board members who had contacted her.
In the two days since his return, this man had cleaned them up one by one. By now they were probably at the bottom of a river.
Qin Fengling knew this was no big deal to the boss. Few of those board members were clean anyway. On their climb to those positions, those beasts had gotten plenty of blood on their hands.
Every one of them deserved death.
As a villain, the boss still had principles. He always forbade involving innocent civilians in his plans. Last time Painted Skin killed seven people, if Qin Fengling had not helped clean up the mess, at least half of the STRB department would have been sent to their graves by the boss to atone.
“Then the jade pendant. Why was it not recovered?”
Qin Fengling’s interference that caused Feng Yi to fail in recovering it did not matter to the boss. Even Feng Yi’s corpse being taken by the Demon Suppression Bureau did not matter.
The boss cared only about the jade pendant.
“The thing inside the jade pendant is no longer there. Even if it were recovered, it would only be an ordinary piece of jade.” Qin Fengling answered smoothly, deliberately hiding the information that the thing inside the pendant had long since been transferred to Bai Ling.
After all, if the story ended too early, it would be far too boring.
“Is that so?” The boss seemed to accept Qin Fengling’s answer. Unconsciously, he rubbed the old scar at the web of his thumb.
The thing inside that jade was one of the pieces needed for his plan.
“The matter of searching for that thing will be handed over to Night Owl.” The boss suddenly opened the book on bronze history again. “Mingyun will hold a Mystic Gate Martial Tournament soon. You and Song Yingxue will go.”
“I don’t care what you want to do. Before the plan is complete, it is best you stay quiet.” The rustle of turning pages grated on the ear. The boss’s tone was as heavy as an evening drum. “After it succeeds, the thing you want, go take it yourself.”
****
“Bring it here!” In the Yuqi Beauty Salon in the old alley in the north of the city, the owner bared her teeth and called to the black cat.
The black cat, carrying a smoking pipe in its mouth, jumped onto the curio shelf and sent old objects clinking.
A green wind suddenly blew through the room, stirring the bronze wind chime and lifting the black cat into a spin toward Guan Qing.
Guan Qing pulled her old smoking pipe from the black cat’s mouth and wiped the cat’s drool off with distress.
The black cat, dizzy from spinning, meowed and transformed into a girl in a black sailor uniform landing on the floor. It was A Qi.
“Boss, you’re smoking again!” A Qi steadied herself on the counter to keep her dizzy self from zigzagging on the floor. “You lost another tail feather. Aren’t you afraid your butt will hurt?”
“Children should stay out of adults’ business.” Guan Qing squinted and took a satisfying puff, but while exhaling the green mist, she grimaced in pain.
In the end she had not withstood Xiao Mochen’s pestering and pulled out a tail feather herself to give him. A Qingluan tail feather took twenty years to grow back.
The last time that rotten Taoist took one of her tail feathers was exactly twenty years ago. It made one suspect he was consciously draining the pond to fish on a sustainable schedule.
But who told him to be the only person Guan Qing could call a friend now? The others were all buried under that locust tree in the demon market.
“I won’t bother with you anymore!” A Qi made a face at Guan Qing, then with a hop became a black cat again. In three bounds she leapt into the arms of Su Xuanhu, who was resting under the locust tree at the alley entrance, and began to purr.
“Tss… ah, that rotten Taoist…” Guan Qing clutched her butt, unable to sit or stand. Suddenly she turned and saw the two large faces of the Tiger Demon and Wolf Demon.
“Cough, cough!” She immediately switched to the dignity of a superior, face like frost, though the corner of her mouth kept twitching.
From pain.
“Where is your Young Miss?”
The Tiger Demon and Wolf Demon exchanged a look. “Young Miss said she had business and will not be back for now.”
They did not dare say that the Young Miss had already moved into the Demon Suppression Bureau dormitory two days ago. If they said it, one sentence might cost three demons six legs.
“That dead girl is disobeying again!” Guan Qing narrowed her eyes. She always felt Bai Ling seemed to be avoiding her.
“Your Young Miss’s demon power suddenly surged recently. Do you have any idea why?”
The Tiger Demon and Wolf Demon shook their heads violently.
The jade-green mouthpiece of her pipe tapped lightly against her lips. Guan Qing looked at the locust tree outside the door.
Her demon power had surged. That dead girl was one step closer to transforming into a dragon, but she herself probably did not know it yet…
You think this chapter was thrilling? Wait until you read Oh No, The Girl I Possessed Has Come Knocking On my Door!! Click here to discover the next big twist!
Read : Oh No, The Girl I Possessed Has Come Knocking On my Door!
