The sky had a sense of occasion.

The dark, quiet air had been still a moment ago. Now it was beginning to rain, thin and light.

Deng Mingxu’s mouth was open — he’d been thoroughly startled — and then he looked at the young man in the main seat and leaned sideways with a trembling voice. “Miss Lin, what cultivation level is your brother?”

“I don’t know!” Lin Rou stamped a foot in frustration.

Her colleague wasn’t leaving. If she left, it would sit wrong no matter how she thought about it.

Demon-hunters weren’t bound by any rule requiring this. But everyone operating in the jianghu maintained some basic sense of obligation.

“Jade Liquid Perfection.”

Shen Yi answered without hesitation. The Deng family’s fighters were few, perhaps a dozen at Jade Liquid level, but in a real confrontation they might prove useful. Better to lay things out clearly beforehand so everyone could make decisions with some idea of what they were working with.

Deng Mingxu’s eyes went wide. His breathing came faster. This young, and at Jade Liquid Perfection? From a second-tier family in Yushan Prefecture?

Possibly not even the four great families of Qingzhou could produce one person like this in that age range.

He lowered his head in embarrassed contrast. “I — I’m at Threshold Perfection.”

Unlike the young master’s shock, the older Deng family practitioners with genuine experience weren’t looking particularly encouraged.

The ancestor had been carried off by other people. Was this really the kind of night that Jade Liquid Realm practitioners could get involved in?

“No wonder he said not to provoke him.”

Lin Rou’s surprise came with private calculation. A talent at this level would treat the Condensate method as more important than life itself. Everything tracked.

Crack—

A thunderclap lit up over a hundred faces carrying expressions that varied considerably.

Women and children had pulled back toward the walls. The Deng family fighters gripped their weapons harder, feeling the dampness spreading in their palms.

The courtyard outside was empty, at least. Though that was making everyone rather jumpy.

Then the young man in the main seat stood up. A single smooth motion — three feet of dark blade clearing the scabbard without a sound.

Almost simultaneously, a massive tiger head pressed down under the eaves.

Golden fur plastered flat in the light rain. Pale yellow vertical pupils sweeping the room with naked hunger. A rough tongue dragging slowly across a wide paw, blood-streaked saliva mixing with the rain and falling.

Drip.

The moment it landed, a dense, rank stench filled the entire hall.

The tiger demon’s roar — even a half-roar before the breath was drawn — carried with it something innate. A thing that hollowed out the will to stand and turned the legs uncertain.

“RRHHR—!“

Somewhere a weapon clattered to the floor. In the midst of the cry, the thin ring of steel on stone sounded like something pleading.

Every face had gone bloodless. Under Deng Jianyuan’s long protection, Yongan City hadn’t seen a demon this audacious in years — not only entering the city, but pausing to torment them before striking.

The tiger demon dropped into the hall, muscles rolling through the motion, hunched forward, one step inside the door. “Now it’s your—”

The figure at the main seat launched forward in the same instant. Sharp as a bolt splitting the air.

Robes catching the motion—

Shen Yi came through the open space and closed five fingers around the tiger demon’s skull, the force of arrival driving that massive, mountain-weight body backward into an arch.

The Solar-Fusion Furnace opened wide, releasing the seal it had been holding on the demonic force.

Right hand reversed grip on Erhei, crimson winding through the dark — a single fierce slash across the throat.

Shhk.

Under the Devouring Wolf Demon-Slayer, the blade passed through golden fur as if it weren’t there. Blood poured.

He held the severed head in one hand. The tiger demon’s large body stumbled back and hit the wet ground with a crash, throwing filthy water in every direction.

【Tiger Demon slain — Jade Liquid Perfection. Total Lifespan: 2,310 years. Remaining: 792 years. Absorbed.】

【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 1,266 years】

He tossed the head, opened the abdomen, retrieved the beast core, then pressed fingers to the demon’s chest and drew out a thread of blood qi. He walked back inside and sat back in his seat.

“…”

The Deng family fighter who had dropped a weapon reached down with shaking hands and picked up the sword again, gripping the hilt — but couldn’t find anything to point it at.

The tiger’s roar had been an iron fist closing around their throats.

Shen Yi’s sudden cut had felt like someone ripping the air out of their lungs.

Everyone was still operating somewhere between the event and the understanding of it.

“Jade Liquid Perfection?”

Lin Rou watched the thin trace of demon qi she’d just collected dissolve from her fingertip, and a question surfaced in her mind.

She’d performed considerably better than the Deng family in those initial seconds — when the tiger demon first appeared, she’d already made her basic assessment of its strength. Powerful, but manageable with proper coordination.

The blur in her thinking wasn’t about the tiger demon.

It was about the black blade.

Every strategy she’d assembled in those few moments had been cut through and ended before it started.

She stared out at the rain-soaked massive carcass in the courtyard and went quiet for a moment.

This isn’t a new person. This is something to hold onto.

She looked back at the slight tension in the young man’s brow — and realized it wasn’t what she’d assumed. Not the tension of someone who’d been frightened.

More like — dissatisfaction. Something faintly disappointed.

“…”

Shen Yi kept the posture of quiet breath-regulation and opened the panel on the inside.

Looking at the remaining demon lifespan, bringing even the half-volume Life-Death Zen Body to completion was going to be a stretch, let alone deriving a full Condensate Realm technique.

He’d been caught in a wrong assumption.

From a human practitioner’s perspective, with the Deng ancestor gone and the household in disarray, this was an ideal moment for someone to sweep in and take over.

But the enemy here was demons, who had no interest in jianghu reputation or standing. This was a hunting contest. They were looking for whichever human practitioner carried the most refined, most abundant cultivation — the finest medicine available.

The Deng ancestor had broken through by chance and had never been particularly demanding of himself or his family. The Jade Liquid mid-range practitioners left behind were probably not the finest material in Yongan City — which was why the demon that had come was this weak.

Rain outside, heavier now. The wet night air moved through the hall, carrying blood.

In the dark, the enemy’s position unknown. Don’t get complacent.

This still touched Condensate Realm territory. Every small advantage counted.

Shen Yi let the thought settle and began feeding lifespan into the Life-Death Zen Body while he waited.

Touching the Condensate Realm requires comprehension even in body-refinement methods. Demanding Buddhist cultivation as a prerequisite — the path really doesn’t leave much room for ordinary people.

【Year one — you read through this Buddhist body-refinement method, turning over the question of how to draw life-death essence from the breath of heaven and earth.】

【Year three — you find your progress faster than expected. In the moment of confusion, you recall the old days deriving the Thunder-Wind Demon-Subduing True Interpretation — how you depleted your own blood and vital essence through the Demon-Subduing Upright Yang Blade over and over, deliberately pushing yourself to the edge of depletion.】

【Year five — by the time you were still at the mortal frame stage, you had already been crossing the threshold of life and death with something like impudence, back and forth. For you, recovering that state is only a matter of time.】

【Year twelve — the dark and pale colors surface at your fingertips. You formally begin refining your body with life-death essence.】

Shen Yi opened his eyes. Something faint and surprised moved through them.

The Threshold Realm Thunder-Wind Demon-Subduing True Interpretation. A Condensate Realm body-refinement method, half a volume.

Two texts with absolutely no apparent connection — and they had somehow made each other possible.

An unexpected gift.

A pity there was no medicine or spiritual plant to assist the life-death essence work — he’d have to use raw demon lifespan to push through.

“…”

(End of Chapter)