By Shen Yi’s reckoning, the Thunder-Wind Demon-Subduing True Interpretation had four stages — mapping cleanly onto the four phases of the Threshold Realm.

Three apertures open was Novice, which corresponded to early Threshold. His five apertures put him squarely in the middle phase — nearly twice the Yellow King’s level.

And fighting down from that advantage, it had still been a harder battle than he’d expected.

The reason was simple: he had no demon arts to call on. Faced with the Yellow King’s formidable defenses, he’d had no elegant solution — just raw cultivation pressed against raw resistance until something gave. Brute force from start to finish.

He exhaled slowly. Cultivation mattered — no argument there — but a technique or two with real stopping power wouldn’t go amiss. The three martial arts the Demon Suppression Division had passed down were beginning to show their limits against genuine Greater Demons.

He turned around. The villagers had already readied two flatbed carts. The bodies were too many and too heavy to transport whole, so they’d settled for the heads alone — and even so, the pile had become something of a small mountain.

“What are we doing with those?” Chen Ji looked mildly dazed.

“Going back to the city.” Shen Yi walked to where the old donkey had ambled up the road, and swung himself up.

Everything that had happened today had made one thing clear.

Earning a clean reputation and earning a place in the Demon Suppression Division were not going to be the straightforward thing he’d imagined. The yamen would not simply stand by and let him disrupt their arrangements.

Which meant a clean break was necessary.

Dusk gathered over Baiyun County.

Street vendors were packing up for the evening. A cluster of soldiers stifled yawns at the city gate.

Then the smell arrived.

The soldiers clapped hands over their faces. A vendor straightened up, peered curiously toward the gate — and then a row of demon heads filled his vision, every one of them grotesque and snarling, frozen mid-howl, eyes wide with the particular horror of a final moment.

“Demons — demons in the city!“

The ladle dropped from the vendor’s hand. He scrambled backward and went down hard on his hands and knees.

The soldiers seized up, hands flying to their spears.

The two villagers pulling the carts had been walking with the slightly hunched, wide-eyed look of people who hadn’t been inside city walls in a while. Watching the soldiers and the vendor lose their composure, they straightened up involuntarily.

“What’s wrong with your eyes? We were scared stiff when the demons were alive — but it’s just a pile of dead ones. Taste fine too.”

Chen Ji walked through the gate with an expression that couldn’t quite decide what it was.

Behind him, the old donkey chewed its grass with the philosophical ease of an animal that had seen everything. The young man on its back looked calm enough — but the reek coming off him made everyone in the vicinity take an involuntary step back.

“Is that — is that Shen Yi?”

The soldiers stared, spears still raised.

They knew that face. But the face was where the resemblance to the man they remembered ended. The bearing, the expression, the quality of the stillness — all of it was different. The street thug was gone.

“Gave me a fright, and he’s still a menace even now.” The vendor climbed to his feet, red-faced, brushing off his clothes — and then stole another look at the blood-soaked figure on the donkey, something almost awed moving across his face.

How many demons do you have to kill to end up looking like that.

“Right this way, sir!”

He stepped hurriedly aside, already savoring the thought of having something new to talk about. How long had it been since anyone from Baiyun County had ridden out to fight demons? Let alone returned looking like this.

“You’ve made enemies of the entire yamen now, sir.” Chen Ji took in the faces around them and let out a rueful half-laugh.

He couldn’t quite square this with the Shen Yi he thought he understood — the man famous for navigating every situation with careful calculation. What had just happened didn’t look like calculation. It looked like a decision made and acted on without looking back.

“Was there another option?” Shen Yi said without particular inflection.

“You have the strength to kill demons on your own. You didn’t need to make it this public. With that kind of ability, there were better paths—”

Chen Ji stopped mid-sentence.

His mind had caught up.

The Demon Suppression Division’s inspection was coming. Showing them a peaceful, well-managed county would have been the obvious play — the safe play.

But Shen Yi had already made enemies of multiple demon factions. If the apes and the Yellow King’s people came demanding answers, what was to stop the yamen from quietly handing him over to smooth things out? His life would be resting on the goodwill of people who had every reason to want him gone.

Compared to that — making enough noise that a hundred thousand county residents knew his name, knew his face, knew what he’d done? What yamen official alive would dare suppress that story when a Demon Suppression Commander was asking questions?

This wasn’t recklessness.

This was what someone looked like after thinking very carefully.

“Two days following you around and I’m starting to grow a brain.” Chen Ji shook his head, then squared his shoulders and lifted his chin with deliberate composure.

An unsteady cluster of constables spilled out of a tavern entrance ahead of them. He steered the two villagers toward them and brought his scabbard down without hesitation.

“Out of the way. Do you want to be dragged in?”

Zhang Pengfei was drunk enough that he turned around with his hand already going to his hilt. “Who the hell do you think—”

He saw Chen Ji. He started to draw.

Then his gaze traveled upward and met a pair of eyes looking down at him from the donkey — cold, unhurried, expressionless.

“S— S—”

Whatever face he’d been about to save for his companions evaporated the moment he processed what was piled on those two carts. Particularly the head positioned at the very top of the highest stack — deep yellow fur, unmistakable even in dim light.

Zhang Pengfei touched the side of his face where the scabbard had landed, and retreated without another word.

He could not for the life of him understand how that man had come back alive. He needed to find Clerk Liu. Now.

“Right, take these two to the yamen. Once that’s done, find them somewhere to stay and get them a proper meal.”

Off the main street, Shen Yi dug into his belt and flicked out a small coin of broken silver. “You’ve both worked hard. This round is on me.”

“You’re too kind, sir!” The two villagers had seen the man cut down demons with their own eyes — the ease and warmth now were a surprise they clearly weren’t sure what to do with. They nodded and thanked him vigorously.

Only Chen Ji held the coin up, looked at it, and felt an odd familiarity.

This is the coin I lent him this morning.

They parted ways.

Shen Yi swung off the donkey, rolled his shoulders, and walked toward home at an easy pace — keeping the exhaustion carefully out of his eyes.

This had been his most draining fight yet. Not just the physical cost — the apertures had been wrung dry, and the absence of that flowing current made him feel as though he’d fallen from somewhere high. The drop was disorienting in a way that left the mind tired even when the body could still move.

He stopped under the thatched eave outside his door.

To avoid seeing anything he shouldn’t, Shen Yi knocked before entering.

A voice reached him before he touched the handle.

“What took you so long? I’m absolutely starving.” Faint, a little weak — but clear and bright all the same.

He pushed the door open and stopped, brow drawing together slightly.

The room, which had been a disaster when he left, was almost unrecognizable. Swept, tidied, aired out — clean enough that he felt mildly guilty stepping inside.

The woman sitting in it had washed her hair, which hung damp down her back. The grime was gone from her face, revealing features that were sharp and striking — the three parts of warrior’s spirit in her brow and eyes doing something unexpectedly interesting against the soft lines of the rest. She’d helped herself to his spare black robe, which was a size too large but somehow made her look taller rather than swamped. Her trousers were still half-damp, clinging to the line of long, well-formed legs. Her feet were bare on the clean floor.

“I washed everything. Your outer robes are done too — borrowed the old ones for now.”

Lin Baixi glanced up. Then she looked more carefully.

“Did you go on duty, or did you go bathing in a blood pool?”

Her nose twitched. Something shifted in her face. “Demon blood?”

Shen Yi didn’t answer. He looked away, reached into his front, and dropped a lotus-leaf bundle on the table. “Make do.”

She read his silence and left it there — sat down at the table and lifted the leaf with anticipation.

“Oh! There’s actually meat.”

She pinched up a strip of salted pork — demon blood and all — gave it a cursory wipe against her sleeve, and tucked it into the cold flatbread.

“Mhm.“

“I said make do. At least pick the clean pieces.” Even Shen Yi found himself rubbing his temple at that.

“Only someone who’s never known a hard day would say something so precious. Out in the wilderness, nobody asks whether you’re going to starve politely.” Lin Baixi chewed with complete satisfaction and saw fit to add a review: “Genuinely delicious.”

“…”

Shen Yi had nothing to say to that. The way she told it, he was the pampered merchant’s child and she was the one who’d grown up fighting for scraps on the street.

(End of Chapter)