The lay followers’ expressions grew more tranquil. The devotion in their eyes wasn’t performed.

In the low, steady chanting—

Hong Lei scanned them in silence and felt nothing like peace. Something about it made his skin crawl.

He stepped back out of the hall and looked at Shen Yi with visible tension. “Sir — what now?”

They’d found the right place, it seemed.

But what was in front of them wasn’t evidence.

This had already moved well past a private grievance. Word had reached Hong Lei on the road: Shen Yi had walked into the Dashun Pavilion and used pure force to put down the better part of Qingzhou’s young establishment in a single evening.

He’d left almost no room for anything to be smoothed over.

Right now, inside the city, countless eyes had temporarily put away their hostility and were waiting quietly to see how this ended.

If he couldn’t maintain the momentum — couldn’t deal with the Jingang School as cleanly and decisively as his entrance had promised—

If he let his footing show even for a moment, let them see that Shen Yi was less certain than he’d appeared—

The backlash would have no end to it. Never mind the subtler forms — complaint documents citing Commander Shen’s abuse of authority and private vendettas would fill the General’s desk by morning.

And beyond the outside world, within the Division itself—

These Deputy Commanders and Commanders had followed because they believed in him, giving him an authority far beyond what his rank normally carried. That kind of trust, newly formed, needed time to set. If the first test went wrong—

“Up!”

Two Inner Division Deputy Commanders flipped the young novices off the ground and said coldly: “What’s the game? Where’s your abbot?”

“The abbot — the abbot isn’t here, sir. We were just bringing the lay followers up to collect qi and meditate. What’s happening? What is all this—”

The novice’s words cut off. The young man with the yin-yang fish at his collar had walked over. He reached out, opened the novice’s robe, and ran his fingers over the skin and bones.

“Just starting to practice?”

Shen Yi withdrew his hand and stood up straight.

“Practice what? I don’t know what you—” The novice’s heart lurched, the denial half-formed on his tongue — and then a scream tore out of him. “AH—!”

A clean boot pressed casually across his arm. A crisp snap.

Shen Yi had been watching quietly up until this point. Now he walked to the hall entrance and released the full weight of Jade Liquid Realm qi outward — sweeping the drifting incense smoke out of the hall entirely.

Almost simultaneously, every lay follower looked up in confusion. The bliss in their eyes began to dim. In its place — a clawing, hollow ache.

They gripped the hems of their robes. Veins stood out in their necks.

The chanting became low moaning. They inhaled desperately, but no matter how they tried, the happiness wouldn’t come back.

“Master — I’ll write a letter right now — I’ll bring my grandson here, we can sit in meditation together—”

“Mercy — give me more—”

Someone lurched to their feet, hollowed out, moving like something already emptied of what made them alive, and pressed toward the door.

“Paper and brush — someone give me—”

Hong Lei and the others blinked, and then all their brows came together at once.

Shen Yi pulled an emaciated hand off his sleeve. The golden light filled his eyes again.

Grey, indistinct fog. White qi and gold light alternating. He held the method for a long time.

Finally, barely visible — a thread of crimson emerged from below.

He closed the technique and walked forward, stopping in front of the clay Buddha.

He closed his fist and drove it through.

As the statue exploded outward, a concealed passage appeared in the clearing smoke.

“Hold up here.”

He stepped down. Two Inner Division Deputy Commanders clasped their hands in acknowledgment.

Hong Lei exhaled and followed quickly.

“They’ve got this many people up here, plus a secret passage. Can’t be just for a bit of prayer money.”

The words were unfinished when his expression shifted. He pressed a hand over his nose and mouth, held back the revulsion, and kept moving.

The quiet stairs went on for some time. The ground at the bottom was wet and slick. Several smells wound together into something deeply unpleasant — excrement, blood, something animal and rancid.

Both sides of the passage held cages of black iron.

Beyond the bars, the space looked mostly like natural cave — the only feature being a stone trough along one side. Waste and something grey and paste-like had mixed together in it, dusted with traces of powder along the edges.

In the filth of the trough—

Bodies with their upper halves draped into it. Sunken, yellow-grey faces smeared with excrement. Dull eyes. They chewed at the paste without awareness, as if the act of eating were the only thing they still understood. Dirty, hollow — resembling pigs in their pens.

They’d swallow for a while, then slide sideways and lick at the powder in the trough, and then their eyes would go wide and strange, and they would spasm in something that looked like ecstatic torment, thrashing until exhaustion took them — and then lie still in the wet, staring at nothing.

Several had crawled to the bars and were pressing their heads through the gaps, banging rhythmically against the iron.

Hong Lei looked down the rows, which extended further than he wanted to follow, and found he didn’t have any desire to count.

He’d seen worse than this in his time, in a world overrun by demons.

But this particular combination of horror was new.

“The old man can actually stand to live down here?”

He’d stopped using any name for the abbot.

“He’s probably used to it.”

Shen Yi’s voice was quiet. He kept moving forward.

If Zhang Tuhu’s account was accurate, even dating the start from the killing of Yuanzhi, this had been going on for many years.

“What’s he keeping all these people here for?”

Hong Lei was genuinely puzzled. If he wanted to keep animals, he could have kept actual pigs.

Shen Yi stopped walking and tilted his chin.

Hong Lei followed the look and found two elderly figures carrying wooden buckets, pouring the contents into a large basin set into the floor.

Thick crimson churned and turned, threads of milky white rising through it, clots moving in the current.

They set down the buckets and stared outward, cold-eyed. They’d apparently known Shen Yi was coming. Not a trace of panic on either face.

They stood at the edge of the basin and said, in voices without inflection, as if announcing something already determined:

“Two benefactors have come one step too late. You die here.”

Hong Lei recognized both of them. Old-line Jingang School practitioners with genuine ability — neither of them weaker than Benjie had been.

“This is too much.” He let out a breath and put a hand to his scabbard. “Whatever happens, you’re giving me one of them.”

“You can have both.”

Shen Yi’s eyes went to the basin.

“Both?” Hong Lei’s mouth turned slightly. He was about to politely decline — and then his gaze followed.

The surface was churning faster. Something like boiling. Visibly decreasing.

A shaved head rose from it.

Pale-faced. No beard. Eyes opened, both completely bloodshot. Vacant. Witless.

In the space of a breath, the entire blood-pool poured into the body. Two colors moved under the skin — dark and pale alternating — no demonic taint in it at all. Something balanced, dense, settled. The kneeling abbot looked, in that moment, like a demon-subduing Arhat carved from flesh.

“Without crossing the kalpas—” the voice came out detached, like something recited in sleep, “—attain the Dharma body—”

The abbot rose. Movements stiff, mechanical.

“Ah?” Hong Lei gripped the hilt.

Is that how you interpret it? You distribute the kalpas — the suffering — to others, and claim the reward for yourself?

He’s taking the sutra literally?

“Thank you—”

“Thank you—”

The abbot shuddered, turned to the cages, pressed his palms together, and then reached for the two old Jingang practitioners and pulled them close in an embrace of something that looked like gratitude.

Under those arms, which looked slight—

The two men had no time to speak. Their eyes pushed forward from their sockets. Their bodies produced sounds like wet branches in wind.

When the arms fell away, two practitioners who had matched Benjie were slumped on the ground — no different from piles of spoiled meat.

The abbot looked at them, confused. Then his mouth split open.

“May I now achieve the fruit and become Jewel King — return to guide the numberless sand-grain multitudes—” the voice pitched into something high and wrong. “I am complete. I waited to guide you. But you had no affinity to receive it—”

He launched upward.

Solid stone — tens of zhang thick — crumbled in front of him like dried earth. In an instant he was through the ceiling and gone.

“…”

Hong Lei stared at the two bodies on the floor. His heart had hit the bottom of something.

He’d heard the rumors about the abbot’s half-volume Condensate Realm body-refinement text. He’d never believed in things like half-Condensate practitioners.

What he’d just watched had broken something in his understanding of what was possible.

Then a hand settled lightly on his shoulder.

Hong Lei instinctively pulled his arms around himself, then saw Shen Yi lifting two threads of dark-pale qi from his fingertips and placing them into the silver bell at his hip. Then turning and moving quickly toward the exit.

“Thank you for what?”

(End of Chapter)