【Year six hundred and twenty-three — you bring this half-volume Life-Death Zen Body to Perfection, and faintly, you cross that threshold…】
【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 643 years】
Shen Yi recognized the phrasing and closed the panel.
He’d already tested the effect personally on the Jingang School abbot. No need for the technique to introduce itself again in vague terms.
The dark-pale light flickered across his skin and was gone.
He closed his fist and measured the feeling. About what he’d guessed.
With the demon passive talents and the Bodhi Vajra Sacred Body as the foundation, his physical frame had already moved past the Jade Liquid Realm’s scope. The half-volume Life-Death Zen Body had closed the last remaining gap.
Now he only needed Demon Crystals to attempt deriving a complete Condensate Realm body-refinement method.
The tiger demons had probably each chosen their targets already. There was no particular reason to stay in the Deng compound.
He picked up Erhei and stood, moving toward the door.
In the main hall—
The ink-dark young man had quietly become the center everyone was orienting around. His sudden movement sent every already-anxious mind lurching again, the previous scene surfacing vividly.
“Demon — come out! We can see you!”
The Deng family fighters turned immediately toward the door with loud, aggressive shouting. Even Lin Rou started questioning her own assessment — she’d been running the Qi-Gazing Method the entire time, sensing no demon presence, and was still pulling herself taut, ready.
Then Shen Yi walked out into the rain and grabbed the tiger demon’s carcass by the leg.
“What are you doing?”
Lin Rou asked before she’d thought about it.
“Going for a walk.”
He stepped out, a single motion carrying him through the air, and was gone into the dark.
Going for a walk—?
Every person in the main hall — old, young, women, children, fighters alike — stared.
Whatever fragile sense of security had been assembled in the last several minutes dissolved with Shen Yi’s departure.
“Brother Lin has abandoned us?” Deng Mingxu was working hard to keep his legs from shaking visibly. The effort to appear calm was failing audibly.
“There is no Brother Lin.” Lin Rou rolled her eyes, mood sour, and held up the small copper bell.
Several of the more experienced fighters went still when they saw it. Then the look in their eyes became despair.
“Demon-hunters—”
They were a family of some local standing. The stories had reached them.
People like this didn’t value ordinary lives against the chance to track demons. She had no connection to the Deng family. An old man’s word wasn’t going to keep her here.
“Let me be clear right now — if we’re up against something I genuinely can’t handle, I’m not staying for your sake.”
Lin Rou sighed and walked to the main seat. She’d barely collected qi traces from a single tiger demon. She couldn’t even be sure what their cultivation level was — and she was weighing her life against the credit.
On top of which, finding two demons hiding in a city this size was not going to be easy.
“Not finding them might not be the worst outcome. At least I’d stay alive.”
Lin Rou had a reasonably clear view of her own capabilities. Whatever Shen Yi was doing was completely outside anything she could participate in or advise on, even if he was formally below Jiang Chengyun and Xiao Qiangwei.
Yongan City.
Years of maintained calm, fragile as it turned out — a few demons had been enough to shatter it entirely.
From a rooftop in the rain, Shen Yi looked down. The yamen was blazing with light, countless constables clutching swords that would do nothing, moving through the streets with no color in their faces.
The silver bell at his hip trembled without stopping.
Dozens of demon-hunters sharing information back and forth without pause, chasing trails, each one hoping to get a thread of qi from one of the mountain lord’s tiger cubs.
Every Division Commander stationed here had come out, urgently trying to contain the situation.
From every direction: cries of pain. Impossible to tell order or sequence.
Each cry almost certainly meant another well-known jianghu practitioner being consumed.
The entire city had become a hunting ground where demons moved as they pleased.
“…”
Shen Yi looked away and stopped paying attention to the silver bell’s chaos.
He understood now why the Division controlled Condensate methods so carefully.
Even at this level, a city of Yongan’s size offered no resistance whatsoever. The demons causing this were almost certainly beyond the reach of the demon-hunters in the city — and certainly beyond his own experience.
Barring something unexpected, this would probably end the same as last time. They’d eat their fill and leave.
“Selecting the striped king?”
He pressed his lips together slightly.
The next moment — the qi of Jade Liquid Perfection released outward, fully and without concealment.
In that instant, he was the most compelling human medicine in all of Yongan City. Mellow jade liquid drawn from heaven and earth, rich in the qi sea.
Then, without hesitation — the Solar-Fusion Furnace opened.
The demonic force from the Heavenly Demon external pill began spreading outward slowly, controlled by his intent — projecting something just above the Jade Liquid threshold.
He picked up the tiger carcass and swept toward the city’s outskirts.
Two completely opposed signatures alternating — the kind of presence that would only arise in an all-out fight. In this city, that combination would stand out brilliantly.
Shen Yi performing as human medicine. Shen Yi performing as the demon pursuing it.
Simultaneously activating the Turtle-Breath Method, gradually pulling back the jade liquid’s presence — as if he were a practitioner draining fast while trying to escape.
“With competition between them, and limited prey in the city—”
“The finest target isn’t something either one would want to share with a sibling.”
The dark figure moved with calculated stops and starts, ran past the city’s edge, waited a moment, then stepped onto the hillside beyond.
He hung the tiger carcass in a tree.
Turtle-Breath Method at Perfection, running at maximum — his body still standing there, his qi signature gone in an instant as if he’d never been.
He leapt to a high branch and looked down from stillness.
The ink-dark sky was torn open by white lightning, briefly illuminating a calm face. Deep eyes carrying no agitation whatsoever.
One hand resting easy on the scabbard, like an old man holding a fishing rod.
“…”
Wind and rain pressing hard.
Then — abruptly — silence.
From behind the great tree where the carcass hung, a claw appeared slowly. An unsettlingly powerful body emerged from the darkness — spine arching high, muscle structure standing out like poured iron. Even hunched, the full height was over a zhang and a half.
Vertical pupils carrying a faint luminescence, fixed on the carcass close at hand. No anger — just contempt and amusement.
“Well. At least it died. Stupid thing with no understanding of its place.”
As if something this dense and rich in human medicine could be touched by a piece of garbage who could only trail behind and pick at what was left.
Then a considerably wider arm settled lightly across its shoulder. A rough voice: “If it’s so good — why not go join it?”
Two heads the size of boulders turned to face each other. A simultaneous dismissive sound.
Two sets of fangs bared, stained red. Not entirely stable — but unmistakably, the qi of the Condensate Realm crashed against itself.
After a moment, the taller one lifted its head with a vicious grin and looked toward the treetops in the distance, something faintly mocking in the expression.
“You’re planning to stay up in that tree, shaking, hoping we’ll fight each other and tear ourselves open — then run like a dog while we’re busy.”
It released its sibling and fixed its gaze on the distant canopy.
“Come down. I already smell you.”
Before the words had finished—
From behind both tiger demons, a mildly puzzled voice.
“Hmm?”
The sound came with the pain of a blade entering the back.
The dark blade had found its way between the tall one’s shoulders silently, and the solid muscle was clamping down around the steel — unable to stop the blood being drawn inward.
“RRHHR—!“
Agony made the great body’s fur stand entirely on end. It spun with a roar of raw fury.
A black robe caught the turn. The sharp-featured young man released the hilt, and a palm carrying the dark-pale glow of the Life-Death Zen Body drove forward hard.
(End of Chapter)