In his old life, Shen Yi probably would have leapt straight to thoughts of ghosts.
Instead, he sat up and looked at the bed.
Something had been off from the start — what kind of person seals the underside of their bed with wooden boards?
He didn’t bother searching for a mechanism. A measured push and the boards gave way. His hand found the saber resting at the bedside.
Shing.
The blade was at her throat before the figure beneath had fully emerged.
Shen Yi’s eyes narrowed.
Under the press of cold steel, the woman’s dark hair hung loose and disheveled around a face that was sharp-featured and striking — even through the grime. Her eyes held a banked fury. A cloth gag muffled whatever she was saying, though the tone made the content easy enough to guess.
The long white robe she wore had seen better days — considerably better days.
Her hands were bound behind her back with hemp rope.
The faint redness on her forehead suggested she’d been knocking against the boards with her head.
Shen Yi looked at her face.
His expression moved through several stages — confusion, irritation — and arrived somewhere that required several slow breaths to manage.
How many problems did you leave me…
No point being angry at a dead man. Shen Yi exhaled and pulled the gag free.
“You miserable bastard — you were helping demons prey on people! You deserve everything coming to you! Let me go right now or I’ll report you to my sect and they’ll come and cut you into ribbons! You—”
A flash of silver.
He sheathed the blade. The woman stared at the severed rope falling from her wrists, opened her mouth, and found she’d run out of momentum. The stream of invective had nowhere left to go.
That was it? He just… let me go?
That’s not how I expected this to go.
She ran her tongue over dry lips and considered for a moment. “I’m hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”
Shen Yi glanced at her, shook his head. “Get out.”
He was perfectly willing to share his quarters with a woman. But he hadn’t lost his mind entirely.
Her particular circumstances were complicated enough to keep him awake all night just thinking about them.
Baiyun County had a handful of prosperous merchant families, and the Lin family was one of them — silk traders who’d done well over the years. That alone wouldn’t have warranted much attention.
What made this complicated was a single word: only.
The Lin patriarch, through some combination of bad fortune and unfortunate timing, had wives and concubines aplenty — but almost no surviving children. The ones who came had not stayed. Only this daughter remained.
With no male heir, he’d adopted one to carry on the family name.
As for the daughter, he’d spent a considerable sum sending her away to train under a martial sect.
What no one had predicted was that she’d actually come back competent — and that her first order of business upon returning would be to go demon-hunting with a sword.
That was where Shen Yi had entered the picture.
She’d ridden out alone and picked a fight with the local fox demon faction. Coming back alive had been a minor miracle.
The reason she had come back at all was that one particular fox had developed a curiosity about human life — enough to want to experience it firsthand. It had dragged her back into town, studied her mannerisms and speech until it could imitate both, then borrowed her face entirely and arranged, through Shen Yi’s cooperative assistance, to be delivered back to the Lin estate as a “gravely injured” daughter suffering from memory loss.
Shen Yi had handled the transaction smoothly. The fox had been satisfied, and as a reward, it had presented the real daughter to him — to do with as he pleased, provided she never appeared in Baiyun County again. To ensure compliance, it had sealed her cultivation.
“There was rice porridge every day for a while. At least that was something. Now they haven’t even given me water.” The woman hauled herself upright and sat on the edge of the bed. “Do you have any idea how I’ve survived the last two days?”
Shen Yi looked at her sidelong. “I freed you. You’re free. Why are you still here?”
A fox demon that could change its shape at will was nowhere near something he could handle right now. It had moved into the Lin estate without hurting anyone yet — he had no interest in making a complicated situation worse.
“I just wanted to get a few insults out. I’m not an idiot.”
Lin Baixi pressed a hand to her stomach, voice hollowed out with exhaustion. “That creature left a restriction on me. One step outside this room and it’ll have my head within half an hour.”
Shen Yi’s mouth curved into something cold. “So from where you’re standing — I’m the safe option.”
“You touch me and I’ll make you regret it.” She gave him a flat look, jaw set. “But if you don’t touch me, I need food.”
Shen Yi looked at the resolve in her eyes.
She was genuinely very serious about the food.
He decided not to pursue this line of conversation. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I need to sleep. You can do whatever you like as long as you’re quiet.”
He lay back down, tucking the saber under his arm.
“…”
“…”
A moment passed. Shen Yi turned his head.
He was willing to admit that Lin Baixi was genuinely beautiful — even disheveled and filthy, she was the most striking person he’d encountered since arriving in this world.
But none of that held up against the reality of her sitting beside him with her hair loose around her face, expression completely blank, watching him with the unblinking focus of a haunting.
“Is something wrong with you?”
“I haven’t made a sound.” She continued staring.
“I’m considering putting you back under the bed.” Shen Yi sat up slowly.
“Go ahead. Shall I put my hands behind my back again?” She offered both wrists.
That particular response made Shen Yi pause and genuinely consider which of the two of them had been a street thug in a former life. “Are you planning on staying indefinitely?”
“I’m planning on not dying. Staying alive requires eating.” Her tone was entirely reasonable.
“You don’t want to die and yet you went out picking fights with fox demons.”
He’d assumed she’d be the impulsive, spoiled type. The capacity to bend when necessary was unexpected.
She looked at him with genuine puzzlement. “They were preying on the people of this county. How does that become me picking a fight with them?”
As she said it, Lin Baixi leaned slightly closer, fingers trailing lightly over his collar — at the stain where demon blood had dried into the fabric.
She sniffed at it with the focused interest of a small animal investigating something unfamiliar. Then she looked up. “Besides — aren’t you doing the same thing?”
“I’m considerably less foolish about it than you.”
Shen Yi pushed her face away with two fingers. “This sect of yours. Does it actually exist?”
She’d recognized demon blood by scent alone. That was something.
“The Mountain-Cleaving Peach Blossom Axe style, the Demon-Slaying Peerless Sword, the Eighteen Tidal-Breaking Palm forms—”
She was ticking them off on her fingers like a menu.
“Two steamed buns,” she added. “Take your pick.”
Shen Yi’s eye twitched. “Go to sleep.”
Right. The kind of windfall that had landed Chen Ji’s scripture in his lap wasn’t something that happened twice. His panel was the more reliable investment.
Lin Baixi lowered her hand as he lay back down, resignation crossing her face.
Made-up technique names. Obviously not going to produce food.
She watched his back in the dim room, turning something over in her mind.
Had she been away so long that the standards in this county had changed that much? A minor constable in the criminal division — how in the world had this man gotten within reach of the Threshold Realm?
Hmm. Maybe I need to come up with something more convincing.
(End of Chapter)