“You’ve come a long way from Yushan Prefecture. I hope your accommodations are comfortable.”

Deng Jianyuan stood with his hands behind his back, looking at the three people in the courtyard with a calm expression. “If they’re not to your liking, you’re welcome in my quarters. An old man should do his part as host.”

Beside him, Deng Mingxu — who had been quietly resenting his ancestor for being so remote and standoffish yesterday, letting Lin Rou feel overlooked and pulling the whole dinner sideways — now felt his face light up.

The ancestor is taking the initiative to help me make an impression on her family.

Jiang Chengyun looked over with mild surprise. After a moment he inclined his head. “Thank you for the hospitality.”

Deng Jianyuan smiled, let his eyes pass over all three of them without lingering on any one face, dismissed the family members hovering nearby, and turned to walk deeper into the compound.

When they arrived—

Jiang Chengyun finally identified where the sense of wrongness had been coming from.

Standing in the courtyard was a figure in red.

Xiao Qiangwei was turning a jade bracelet over in her fingers, apparently having decided it was boring, and tossed it onto the stone table.

“I’ll leave you to it.”

With that single sentence, Deng Jianyuan walked inside his room and closed the door.

Leaving three people who knew each other — and didn’t much like the situation — standing around.

Shen Yi sat on the edge of the flower bed and took out Erhei, resting the blade across his knees, running his thumb over the gold inlay.

“You’re bringing young people along when you work? Think you can look after all of them?” Xiao Qiangwei’s manner today had none of the previous evening’s showmanship — only a dry sharpness.

Lin Rou raised her hand tentatively. “Senior Sister Xiao — I was just passing through.”

A small courtyard with two silver-bell demon-hunters in it simultaneously was not a comfortable environment.

She glanced at Shen Yi in the distance.

Same generation, less experience than her — so why does he look so unbothered.

“Better than fishing for old men in a brothel.”

Jiang Chengyun had no real interest in the exchange. He found a room and closed the door with a bang.

Xiao Qiangwei made a cold sound, decided the two junior people weren’t worth engaging, turned away herself.

Bang.

In the tense silence, Shen Yi looked toward the room belonging to the old ancestor.

The question that had come up on the road surfaced again.

Where did this information actually come from.

Put yourself in the position: if you were testing your own children, a quiet word at home was all it took. You wouldn’t advertise it.

It was too early for his opinion to register with anyone here. Jiang Chengyun, Xiao Qiangwei, even Lin Rou — none of them would give his read of the situation any weight.

As he’d said on the road: whether real or not, they wouldn’t let it pass.

Deng Jianyuan had lived in this city for centuries. Could he know something the demon-hunters didn’t?

Thinking back to yesterday — the old man’s abrupt, strangely worded goodbye.

Maybe it hadn’t been anything particular about Shen Yi. Maybe Jiang Chengyun and Xiao Qiangwei were simply too formidable to approach with the real conversation, and he hadn’t wanted his family frightened. The young man with plain water and braised meat had just been available.

If that was the case—

The whole situation looked considerably different.

An experienced practitioner, with two major fighters on his side, shouldn’t have lost his nerve before anything had even happened. Unless it wasn’t nerves.

Unless he’d already decided what was coming.

Shen Yi’s grip on the scabbard tightened quietly.

He’d originally thought of this as an observation trip — picking up methods and experience for future use. That assessment was starting to look less certain.

Three days passed. Night again.

Deng Jianyuan had not come out of his room since that day.

Jiang Chengyun and Xiao Qiangwei hadn’t relaxed their vigilance either — they watched him like practitioners waiting for a thief.

The court’s instinctive distrust of jianghu practitioners was written in generations of experience.

Lin Rou was visibly bored. She’d tried to start a conversation with Shen Yi a few times and found he seemed, unlike her, to be more than a passive observer.

“Hey — want to pull out before anything happens? They’re not sharing credit with us anyway.”

“…”

Before Shen Yi could answer, the silver bell at his hip gave a violent tremor.

A qi-carried signal reached his ear.

The content was — nothing. Just a blank pulse.

At the same moment, Jiang Chengyun and Xiao Qiangwei both pushed their doors open simultaneously, expressions shifting — carrying something that was also excitement.

About three breaths later, the bell transmitted a second signal.

This time there was sound — muffled, like someone hadn’t finished swallowing, the voice barely audible.

“Mountain lord—”

Before it could finish, Deng Jianyuan’s door finally opened.

The old man came out at an unhurried pace, looking at Jiang Chengyun with a flat expression.

“Tch.”

He shook his head and moved — a swallow’s motion, carrying no effort, qi releasing without any attempt at concealment — and landed in the main hall in an instant.

Both silver-bell demon-hunters followed immediately.

The movement had clearly alarmed the Deng household. People poured from every corner of the compound, converging on the main hall.

Lin Rou stared at the small copper bell in her palm, expression serious.

Not because a fellow demon-hunter had died — that happened too regularly to surprise her. What she hadn’t expected was that a demon already close to Condensate Perfection would come into Yongan City at the risk of being hunted by Tingyang Prefecture’s General You.

Something occurred to her. She looked up, startled. “This is wrong — it’s about to break through. It came here to consume a few more human practitioners as medicine. It wants to become a core-nurturing demon lord.”

Some trial for its children. This entire thing was a banquet it arranged for itself.

“That was close.” She pressed a hand to her chest, a cold feeling moving through her. “Good thing it was Senior Sister Xiao and big brother Jiang who came. If this had been two ordinary Condensate Realm practitioners, that demon would have gotten what it wanted today.”

She looked sideways reflexively — and found the ink-dark figure that had been sitting there was gone.

Deng family main hall.

The household members, bewildered, clustered together watching the ancestor they hadn’t seen move like that in years.

The Lin family guard and the courtesan the young master had brought home now stood one on each side, hemming the old man in.

Jiang Chengyun’s brow furrowed. He issued the instruction: “Come with us.”

Against a mountain lord, every source of advantage mattered. The old man might not have detailed information, but a local presence with his roots here had probably put something together. He’d been afraid they’d flee — and the demon-hunters had been afraid he’d run. Their concerns had been the mirror image of each other.

“Not going, not going.” Deng Jianyuan grinned like a child being difficult. “An old man has to look after his family first. Even if the court has something to say about it.”

The two in front of him were about to lose their patience.

Then he changed his answer entirely.

“Unless you leave someone to watch over them—” he extended a hand, pointing into the crowd, “—him, say. He’ll do.”

Shen Yi stood inside a doorway with his scabbard, watching quietly.

Before Jiang Chengyun could respond, Xiao Qiangwei’s signal came through the bell first.

“Ignore the old man. Once we leave, if danger finds you, handle it as you see fit.”

Demon-hunters didn’t carry the Division’s obligation to protect a given location.

“Move.”

Jiang Chengyun stopped deliberating, grabbed the old ancestor, and swept out of the Deng compound.

A demon close to Condensate Perfection was significantly more compelling than a few tiger cubs.

Once all three of them had disappeared, the Deng family came back to themselves. Deng Mingxu saw Lin Rou running over and went to meet her. “Miss Lin — what’s happening? What is all of this—”

“What’s happening?” She pulled her hand away from his grip. “Demons are coming to eat you.”

With both silver-bell demon-hunters gone after the mountain lord, three tiger cubs remained. If even one of them had Condensate Realm strength, every demon-hunter and jianghu practitioner in the city was in danger of being hunted freely.

Run now, if not now, when.

She spun and beckoned urgently to the bewildered young man. “Everyone out — move!”

Without the old ancestor, the Deng family’s remaining Jade Liquid Realm practitioners couldn’t number more than a dozen. They’d become obvious prey.

Shen Yi seemed not to have heard any of it.

He walked to the main seat, gave his clothing a light adjustment, and sat down. He laid Erhei across the table surface and rested a palm on it.

Xiao Qiangwei’s warning had been somewhat unnecessary. Deng Jianyuan was no fool — he knew perfectly well that once he left, no one here had the ability to keep Shen Yi if he wanted to leave. The old man probably just didn’t want him tangled up in the mountain lord’s situation.

Convenient enough. A good deed on the way out. Better than pure retreat.

“All of them operating through half-truths.”

The mountain lord had leaked its own information to lure human practitioners to use as medicine for a breakthrough.

The demon-hunters had used a great family as bait to draw demons worth claiming as credit.

Deng Jianyuan had made his peace with dying, turned the whole thing around, and used the demon-hunters to stay and protect the city while he was busy not dying.

And then there was Shen Yi.

Straightforward. Uncomplicated.

He just wanted to kill some demons.

(End of Chapter)