After late autumn comes the bitter cold of winter.

And in the depths of that winter, the tide was turned back by force.

Jiang Yuanhua’s divine spirit, growing ever more unsteady, hung suspended in the sky, his ears filled with the demon’s howling. Winter was indeed bitter cold — but that bone-deep wind and snow now surged forward to strike the demon instead.

Shen Yi hadn’t gone off alone to hold a horde of demons at bay outside Qingzhou’s borders.

He simply stood there, fixed in the sky.

Before that tall, looming figure, whether a demon tried to come in or flee out, whether it stood inside Qingzhou’s borders or beyond them, the only thing left to decide was where, exactly, it would die.

The bull demon had long since lost any will to fight, and was now throwing everything she had into fleeing.

Every single time she shot across the open sky, that black-robed figure wreathed in red light would punch her straight back down.

She had needed a treasure artifact just to slip in undetected; now every thought in her head was consumed with how to get out.

Boom!

The bull demon was slammed back down over Qingzhou City once more, a daze the only thing left in her enormous eyes.

Jiang Qiulan lay quietly on the ground, her path infant having retreated back into her qi sea, leaving her with only half her field of vision — and even that half was smeared over with blood, blurred and indistinct.

And yet she kept her eyes open, straining to make out the black-robed figure streaking back through the sky.

A faint smile touched the corner of her mouth.

With him standing right there before her, an endless sense of safety settled over her — like a blade finally sheathed, with nothing left in the world to worry over.

“…”

Shen Yi gave his hand a shake, flicking off the blood.

He figured this should be about enough.

He drove a kick into the bull demon’s skull, sending it back, forcing her to meet his eyes.

The red mist filling Shen Yi’s eyes abruptly contracted into slitted pupils, uncanny and terrible to behold.

Lady Qinghua, already utterly exhausted, her will worn thin by sheer agony, suddenly heard a wolf’s howl rip through her mind, shrill and piercing. In her daze, her soul convulsed violently, then was wrenched, beyond her control, straight out of her demon body.

She finally laid eyes, with her own soul, on Jiang Yuanhua in the distance.

She had thought, only a moment ago, that he was the one on the verge of dissolution — and now it was she who scattered apart faster than even that divine spirit!

Amid that ear-splitting howl, fierce enough to shatter gold and crack stone, her insubstantial form guttered like a candle in the wind, and quietly vanished from where she stood.

【Mixed-Origin-realm Blood-Transmuting Demon Bull slain — total lifespan 16,000 years, 12,000 years remaining — fully absorbed】

【Remaining Demon Lifespan: 20,400 years】

“…”

Shen Yi opened his mouth on pure reflex, then gave a small cough and tucked the enormous bull demon’s corpse away into his storage treasure instead.

This fight alone had cost him a full eighteen drops of demon blood.

Some part of him was itching to make up the loss right away — he’d almost forgotten he had a crowd of people watching him right now.

Killing a demon king who’d clearly had some standing of her own — word of this was bound to reach plenty of ears before long.

“Hah — hah—”

The instant the massive demon vanished from the sky, the young man drew his path infant back in as well, and the heavens above turned clear once more.

Only then did countless people realize they’d forgotten to breathe, and they all began gulping down air in great ragged gasps, all at once — a scene that should have looked almost comical, and yet not a single soul laughed.

If not for this Grandmaster’s protection, Qingzhou City would already have become a living hell on earth.

Even now, a thick, suffocating dread still clung to every one of them.

“You doing alright?”

Shen Yi dropped back down amid the ruins and held out a hand to the girl.

“That was amazing.”

Jiang Qiulan, still lying on the ground, spoke in a weak voice — and yet the one eye she had left shone bright with something close to wonder.

It was the third time now she’d offered praise like this — once at Xitai Mountain, once at Shuiyun Township, and now, here.

The first time had been over the White Deer. The second, over the three demon lords of Tingyang Prefecture. The third, now, over the demon king Lady Qinghua herself.

“I meant, are you alright?”

Shen Yi shot her a wordless, exasperated look, reached down, grabbed her by the collar, and hauled her up, the red glow at his fingertips flowing swiftly into her.

Jiang Qiulan gave his sleeve a feeble tug, set her hand into his palm, and pressed her lips into a small, soft smile. “Thank you.”

As the red glow flowed through her, the wounds across her body knit shut at once, and the flesh on her once-lovely cheek, scoured raw and indistinct by the demon power, was quickly nourished back to wholeness.

Jiang Yuanhua lowered his gaze, looking down at the two of them.

The girl who’d spent her entire life protecting Qingzhou was, perhaps, tasting for the first time what it felt like to be the one protected instead.

Only once the woman had fully recovered did Shen Yi finally let go of her hand.

The red glow could mend a body, but it could do nothing for a shattered path infant.

The two of them shared the same cultivation method, the Heaven-Devouring Core-Consuming Art.

Shen Yi could tell her presence now ran more than twice as faint as his own — likely from how much accumulated cultivation she’d burned through forcing her breakthrough.

Still, she was young yet, and a true prodigy besides — it shouldn’t set her back too badly in the long run.

By comparison, the divine spirit still hovering in the sky, liable to scatter apart at any moment, looked like the far bigger problem.

Jiang Yuanhua noticed Shen Yi’s gaze turn toward him.

With an earnest expression, he released his grip on the sword, and though he was nothing but a divine spirit now, he still reflexively swept back the hem of his robe out of habit, then bowed his head in midair in a deep gesture of thanks.

“On behalf of every soul in Qingzhou, this Jiang offers his thanks for the Grandmaster’s protection.”

“Much obliged, General.”

Shen Yi looked away. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around the way this man’s mind worked — half-dead and on the verge of dissolution, and still wasting time on flashy formal courtesies instead of scrambling to find some actual solution.

Still, the man had his uses.

Shen Yi didn’t know many people, but he had a handful here in Qingzhou City — and if any of them up and died, it would leave a knot of discomfort in his chest, one way or another.

This demon disaster hadn’t lasted long, in the end, and the only real damage done was to half the Demon Suppression Division’s offices.

But the uproar it had caused was, without question, the worst Qingzhou had seen in a thousand years.

A demon king had slipped, without a whisper of warning, straight into the most heavily fortified city in the province, and shown this comfort-softened crowd of martial warriors exactly how savage and terrible a demon could truly be.

Even the four great clans, each with Condensate-realm powerhouses of their own holding things down, had been left standing helpless before this disaster, no different from ordinary commoners waiting to die.

That black-robed figure had carved itself, deep and unforgettable, into every single mind that had witnessed it.

“The Howling Moon Demon King’s dead too?”

Jiang Yuanhua trailed behind Shen Yi like some restless ghost that refused to leave him alone.

“Dead.” Shen Yi rubbed at his wrist. This had been his first time fighting a demon this tough — he hadn’t felt it at all in the heat of the moment, but now that the adrenaline had drained off, exhaustion settled over his entire body, bone-deep.

“The three demon lords too?” The General had kept pace the whole way, asking questions the whole way along with it.

“Dead.”

Shen Yi glanced back at him, fingers slowly curling into a fist.

Jiang Yuanhua stopped in his tracks, offering a sheepish smile. “Just asking, just asking.”

“What are you planning to do now?” Shen Yi stood with his hands at his sides.

“Whatever works. I’m thinking I’ll head over to the War Temple and see what’s what.” Jiang Yuanhua wore a smile he couldn’t quite hide. With Qingzhou’s demons swept entirely clean, the thing he’d worried about most no longer posed any threat at all.

A thousand years’ worth of pent-up weariness drained out of him in a single moment.

His body was gone now, too.

There was, naturally, no way he could go on serving as General.

Though nurturing a divine spirit back to health wasn’t actually all that difficult a thing, and as it happened, Qingzhou already had a Demon Suppression General who’d long since prepared for exactly this.

With sufficient accumulated faith, You Longtao would soon be able to take over as the new General.

As for why You Longtao was the choice, it was simply because, over the course of trailing along behind him just now, Jiang Yuanhua had already asked Shen Yi the same thing several times over and confirmed — Shen Yi had no intention of taking up the position himself.

“Well, off you go, then.”

Shen Yi stepped into the room the Demon Suppression Division had set aside for him and shut the door behind him with a bang.

Funny — he’d never noticed before what a chatterbox this man was.

Jiang Yuanhua passed straight through the door. “Even if you don’t want the post of General — could you at least carry the title of Acting General until You Longtao breaks through to Martial Immortal?”

There’d be no need to actually take charge of Qingzhou. Letting the demon world simply know whose protection this city had once stood under would be more than enough.

Shen Yi sat down on the edge of the bed, let out a slow sigh, and his pupils began, slowly, to narrow into slits. “…”

Jiang Yuanhua’s whole form shuddered, and he beat a hasty retreat right back out.

He’d seen with his own eyes, after all, exactly how that bull demon had met its end.

A method aimed so silently, so precisely at the soul — somehow even more overbearing than anything the Howling Moon Demon King had managed.

A divine spirit might be far more resilient than an ordinary soul, but that was no reason to risk taking a technique like that lightly.

(End of Chapter)