Golden light across the water. A few black-hulled boats sat still on the surface of the Yangchun River.

Inside the bamboo courtyard.

Shen Yi sat on a stool, cloth in hand, wiping down the scabbard with careful attention.

He was not, by any measure, skilled at tending to the wounded. Fortunately, the madman accumulated injuries regularly enough that the widow had developed some experience on him. She’d managed to at least stop the bleeding from Ma Tao and Li Xinhan and bandage them back into something recognizable.

When Li Muqing had come back to herself, she’d quickly produced several medicinal pills and gotten them down their throats, stabilizing both of them for the time being.

She came out of the room now, slowly.

Her hair was loose, strands falling across her pale cheek. Her qi was unsteady — the toll of fighting without restraint the previous night, spent past where she should have stopped.

The usual languor was absent from her face. Her lips, normally well-kept, had cracked.

She looked at Shen Yi’s back. Gradually, the shape of it matched the figure from last night in her memory.

The corner of her mouth tugged. Her voice had gone rough. “Where are the others?”

“Just exhaustion, no wounds. Woke earlier — they’ve gone to the yamen to get the horses.”

Shen Yi set down the cloth and settled the saber back at his hip.

Li Muqing dragged a stool over beside him, propped her chin on her palm, started to ask something, couldn’t find the beginning of it, and ended up just looking steadily at his profile.

When Shen Yi finally lost patience with being stared at and turned to give her a pointed look, she burst out laughing.

“So you really are good at killing demons.”

Good enough that she — having grown up in Qingzhou her entire life — genuinely could not have imagined it.

The villagers had blocked her sightline for most of it, but the river deity’s final shriek still echoed. For a creature that had spent four hundred years cultivating its dignity and composure to come apart like that — the fear behind it must have been real.

“I thought you were dead.”

He’d chased the black wind into the forest. She hadn’t known what was in there. But the look on the river deity’s face — she’d seen that clearly. Complete trust saturated with anticipation, utterly certain. The expression of something confident beyond question.

And then Shen Yi had walked back instead.

“I’m glad you didn’t.”

Li Muqing stood, let the smile settle, and gave him a formal, unaffected bow.

If Shen Yi had thought the same — that they were likely all finished — the most sensible course after escaping would have been to return to Qingzhou with a report. Against a demon whose cultivation was so far above his own, with no apparent path to victory, even the Division wouldn’t have blamed anyone for withdrawing under those circumstances.

“…”

Shen Yi hadn’t expected the sudden sincerity. He raised a hand to wave it off, opened his mouth—

And found his arm wrapped in something considerably warmer and more substantial than he’d prepared for.

“Ha ha.”

Li Muqing was back to her usual character, holding his arm, complaining cheerfully: “I was basically paralyzed — couldn’t move a finger — and still trying to look calm. And even that act didn’t scare the river deity at all. Maddening.”

Then with exaggerated mournfulness: “When you walked toward me, my eyes were about this close to actually leaking. The only thing that saved me is that you’re decent-looking — I decided I had an image to maintain.”

The warmth of it was, somehow, even more disconcerting than what Song Changfeng’s wife had once managed.

“That’s enough.” Shen Yi extracted his arm.

The spear had been coming straight down at her and she hadn’t looked frightened — just faintly wistful. Crying, she claimed.

Li Muqing stood with one hand on her hip and slapped her own chest with the other. “We’re alive. That’s the thing. Remarkable luck.”

Division people all seemed to share that quality — taking a clear view of things.

Something in her smile reached Shen Yi sideways, and the faint edge in his eyes softened slightly.

Maybe it had been there since the moment he’d woken up in that bed at the Liu house.

He’d been moving through this world in a certain detached, game-like way, and hadn’t noticed the shift until now. Somewhere between leaving behind the last traces of the predecessor and actually settling into this life—

He’d grown used to having blood on his hands. More than used to it. There was something unsettled in him when there wasn’t any.

Violence is a tool that kept me alive in this world.

It shouldn’t be allowed to become the other way around.

He breathed in slowly, and something clarified.

He looked toward the courtyard entrance.

The widow came in carrying a few borrowed pieces of old clothing, approaching with the careful deference of someone who hadn’t decided how to orient herself toward this situation.

“Sir — would you like to change? They’re old, but they’re clean.”

The madman trailed behind her, head down, none of yesterday’s wildness in him.

The glances he directed at Shen Yi carried fear and something else — a gratitude that didn’t know where to put itself. Those clear eyes seemed capable of seeing through anything, and when they sharpened, they were enough to stop a demon cold.

“Try to leave it for now.”

Li Muqing shook her head lightly. For a Commander, returning to headquarters with this particular appearance alongside these particular accomplishments would do more for Shen Yi’s standing in the Division than any clean change of clothes.

“Right — fair enough.”

The widow produced a short wooden measuring stick and held it with some hesitation. “Then — could I just measure your shoulder width?”

Li Muqing appeared to read something in her expression and, this time, didn’t decline. She took the measuring stick, stood Shen Yi up, and went to work with focused seriousness — taking in the shoulders, the arms, even accounting for the saber at his hip.

She recited the numbers, waved a hand. “Off you go.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The widow who had been so sharp-tongued the previous day wouldn’t meet Shen Yi’s eyes directly now. But it wasn’t pure fear either. The expression was one Shen Yi found vaguely familiar — he couldn’t place where from.

She went back out with the madman and immediately ran into a man at the gate. He thrust a bundle of fish tied with straw into her hands, then turned and ran toward the next house.

“He’s — he’s been to almost every house in the village by now.” She picked up the fish, somewhat at a loss.

The man that Shen Yi had made eat the river deity’s flesh — he’d become urgently invested in making sure everyone else tasted it too. As if distributing the act widely enough might dilute the guilt. As if eating it was the only way to cut through the lie they’d all been living with.

A demon was a demon. There were no three hundred children being kept alive in the river. Children who went into the water didn’t ride the waves back years later to take their parents to paradise. Every family that had made the offering had known this, in the part of themselves that couldn’t be deceived.

Once the excuse was removed, there was nothing left but shame.

“In years of famine, people have traded children to eat. Choices made from no other options.” Li Muqing laid a hand on Shen Yi’s shoulder, eyes quietly thoughtful, smile still present. “They can feed themselves now. What was never sustainable needed cutting. The one who was consuming people was the demon — useful while useful, and consumed in turn when that ended. That’s how ordinary people survive.”

She continued, “Division Commanders don’t fish or farm for our own food. We eat from the same pot they fill. We can’t put grain in their mouths, but we take a portion of what they have. We stand too high up to be too harsh about it.”

A finger of light in her eyes. “Shen Commander, be generous — let them off this once?”

Someone with an interest in keeping power had deliberately burned the grand offering into these people’s minds over generations, made it feel like inherited truth, something that couldn’t be questioned. And yesterday, more than ten people, including the village master, had been taken in an instant.

Honestly — that efficiency had startled Li Muqing. But it had also produced a clean, unburdened feeling somewhere in her chest. He’d done something her Qingzhou-raised group had never quite found the nerve to.

But more on top of that, and the quality of it changed.

“They weren’t thinking about letting you off yesterday.” Shen Yi raised an eyebrow.

“And isn’t that why we wear these?” Li Muqing made a face and tugged at her cuff embroidery. “The ones who actually moved on us deserved what they got. But the rest — without them working through every day and night, we wouldn’t have pay to eat.” She looked at his hand. “And stop pushing me off, what are you, a delicate maiden? You can’t be touched at all?”

“Stay on your side.”

He patted her hand away, casual.

From the moment he’d woken up in this body to right now, he’d never done anything with the intent to harm. Everything had been aimed at keeping himself alive.

In this woman’s telling, he sounded like someone who couldn’t get through a day without someone ending up dead.

(End of Chapter)