Chen Qiankun coughed loudly twice and did not turn around. “Quite right — a man really can’t afford to be idle. Old Chen is going to go write those letters.”

He set off at a brisk pace in the opposite direction.

Say what you would about a Core-Nurturing cultivator: even at his age, the old man moved like the wind. In a few breaths he had vanished entirely.

Jiang Qiulan’s expression was composed. One eyebrow lifted, barely.

The old general might be somewhat clumsy in his cultivation, his strength nothing remarkable — but it was precisely because of that he had always been more careful than the other Demon Suppression Generals. He would never allow a moment’s carelessness to bring disorder to Qingzhou. Sending to a younger colleague for help was embarrassing enough; he had every reason to be cautious.

And he was, reliably. At Qingfeng Mountain, he had sensed a demon and immediately sent word to Yushan Prefecture — even though the thing had done nothing at all.

For him to say something that foolish just now meant he was feeling genuinely, thoroughly secure.

Jiang Qiulan looked at Shen Yi. It was obvious enough where the old general’s confidence was coming from.

The corner of her mouth shifted slightly. “I’m curious what the old general actually saw, to make him set down all that worry and caution of his.”

“I think he’s still pretty cautious,” Shen Yi said.

He was watching the direction Chen Qiankun had gone, with a faint, inexplicable admiration for the man’s talent for looking straight at something and seeing nothing.

“There’s actually no need to have General Chen send those letters.”

Jiang Qiulan walked closer. “I was planning to come find you after I’d dealt with things here at the Yangchun.”

Shen Yi looked back, puzzled. “Oh?”

“About seven or eight days ago, every demon of any standing in Qingzhou suddenly began to withdraw.”

There was a faint note of uncertainty in Jiang Qiulan’s voice. “Does that have anything to do with you?”

After they had parted last time, she had been thinking that Shen Yi needed demon cores, and since her own cultivation had hit a bottleneck — sitting still was useless — she had put out inquiries to Demon Suppression Generals in the other prefectures asking about demon activity.

The replies had been strikingly uniform.

Demons that had been ravaging all twelve prefectures had vanished without trace within the space of a few days.

Only the Howling Moon Demon King could have done that.

It was as if the old demon king had deliberately given the Division and the demon-hunters a holiday — cleared everything away so they could finally rest.

“…”

Shen Yi looked down, turning it over for a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing to do with me.”

The timing was wrong.

He had only just finished with the blue-faced lions and the rabbit demon at that point. Unless You Longtao also happened to have the Unfettered Wind-Riding Art at Perfection and had ridden at full speed to warn the demon king — there was no way the Howling Moon could have reacted that quickly.

“Something sits uneasily with me.”

Jiang Qiulan seemed to have grown accustomed to speaking her mind in front of Shen Yi. “The Junior Demon King is wounded. Under normal circumstances, they would never give the Division a free hand. And yet they’ve done the opposite — and on top of that, arranged for the old flood dragon to ambush General Chen.”

Without Shen Yi, that would most likely have succeeded.

And then the Division would have been driven into a fury.

That was what puzzled her. The Howling Moon had pulled back its demons, and then moved to provoke the Division — to what end? It couldn’t seriously be an attempt to draw Jiang Yuanhua out.

After all these years of stalemate between the Howling Moon and the General, surely the demon king understood: there was nothing in the world that man would not endure, so long as Qingzhou was intact.

“…”

Shen Yi’s brow furrowed. He had only reached the fifth demon when their side started pulling back.

This was not good news.

Once they regrouped, they would inevitably notice that several more Core-Nurturing demon lords had gone missing. Even without knowing it was him, they could infer that Qingzhou had acquired the ability to eliminate them quietly.

A pity.

Given enough demon cores and lifespan, both the Immortal-Demon Nine Transformations and the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art had the potential to break directly into the next realm. By Shen Yi’s earlier estimate, the Howling Moon’s stock of demon lords had been more than sufficient — and with his current strength, as long as the intelligence was good, the assassinations carried almost no risk.

Now things were more difficult.

Jiang Qiulan watched the expression on his face and pressed her lips together slightly. So it wasn’t only her who felt something was wrong.

She said quietly: “I’d like to travel with you for a while.”

Last time, they had only exchanged a few idle words, and somehow her cultivation had made progress.

“…”

Shen Yi reined in his thoughts. A moment’s consideration told him exactly what she was after, and he felt mildly exasperated. “I already told you — you could swap in a wooden post and get the same result.”

Stuck at a bottleneck again, clearly, and clutching at anything within reach.

“I have nothing else to do anyway.”

The curve at the corner of Jiang Qiulan’s mouth became slightly more visible. “With General Shen here, even General Chen doesn’t need my help. And if I’m not wrong — the three demon lords you mentioned killing earlier, those were in Tingyang Prefecture?”

“Quite impressive,” she added, her voice dropping some of its usual detachment and picking up something cleaner, lighter.

“It was fine.”

Shen Yi had the distinct feeling this conversation had happened somewhere before.

Fine — she could come along.

As it happened, he had nothing much to do either.

Since becoming a silver-bell demon-hunter, this was the first time Shen Yi had found himself in the awkward position of having no demons to kill.

He turned and walked toward the house where the widow and the madman lived.

The two of them had long since tidied one of the rooms until it was spotless.

In the courtyard, old Chen sat with a brush in hand, working out how to phrase the letter — how to strike exactly the right tone of effortless calm while still making every other prefectural general profoundly envious.

Then the girl in black armor appeared behind him, hands clasped behind her back, watching him write with perfect composure. “There’s apparently one for me as well.”

Chen Qiankun coughed dryly twice and, in some embarrassment, crumpled the letter he had been drafting for Yushan Prefecture.

Fang Heng rose and bowed with great correctness, quietly laughing to himself. There was really no one in Qingzhou who wasn’t at least a little afraid of his senior martial sister.

Behind the closed door of his room, Shen Yi did not rest. He took the old flood dragon’s demon core from his silver bell.

The demons had made an unusual move.

The reason was unclear, but it was unlikely to be anything good.

His strength had made a qualitative leap, yet against a true demon king, it would still fall short.

The Immortal-Demon Nine Transformations already incorporated the flood dragon. He intended to put this core toward the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art.

He opened the panel and used the flood dragon’s core to fill the external pill.

Vast reserves of demonic lifespan began to flow away.

A hundred years… six hundred years… thirteen hundred years…

Shen Yi had no sense of how tedious and colorless the world inside the panel was. What he saw, in his own perception, was this: the path seed inside him, teeming with vitality, was taking shape at a terrifying speed.

The inner core of a Core-Nurturing Perfection old flood dragon held nearly seven thousand years of cultivation. It poured ceaselessly into the external pill, which in turn fed the path seed. The fierce, savage demon qi was swallowed down by the path seed without reservation.

Along the blood-thread tendrils extending from the seed, the outlines of a torso and a head gradually formed and grew more solid. It curled within the inner core like a sleeping infant.

【Year 2,670 — you successfully condense a path embryo from the path seed. Demon qi issues from heaven and earth, and the path embryo formed from demon qi is a life born of the world itself. You gaze quietly at its blurred features, and at last a thread of excitement you can no longer suppress rises from the depths of your chest.】

【In that moment, you suddenly notice it open its eyes — and look up at you with a contemptuous smile.】

(End of Chapter)