"The Nine Demons Transmutation Method."

He glanced once more at the name of this new technique.

Shen Yi sighed, sank into inner vision, and looked over his blood-red, savage-faced path infant — even the divine spirit beside it seemed to have caught some of the influence, a faint air of killing intent now bleeding off it as well.

How had he ended up drifting further and further from the dashing wandering-hero image he'd once pictured for himself?

White robes, a fine steed in tow, a sword at the hip, roaming the world far and wide.

Back in Baiyun County, with his life on the line, he hadn't exactly had the luxury of being picky — back then, just having any technique at all to practice had been cause for secret celebration.

He'd once thought that once he'd cleared away the troubles his predecessor had left behind, he might finally get to ease up a little — do the things he'd actually wanted to do, like drawing his sword for a stranger in trouble, meeting some dashing, spirited heroine or other, and leaving behind some romantic legend of his own across the martial world.

Instead, the moment he'd left the county town, he'd plowed headfirst into the giant pit that was the Qingzhou demon catastrophe.

Dashing wandering hero, romantic legend... and then the moment he'd shown his face, someone had bellowed, "That demon is Commander Shen!"

A muscle twitched at the corner of Shen Yi's eye.

Now that he'd finished off both the Howling Moon Demon King and Lady Qinghua, Qingzhou was at least stable for the time being — but in the process he'd gone and offended the Thousand Demon Den, the kind of name that sounded like trouble the instant you heard it.

In under a year, his opponents had escalated from a newly-awakened black dog demon to a Spirit-Transformation-realm demon emperor.

And of all things, Shen Yi happened to be exactly the sort of person who hated surprises more than almost anything else.

By rights, given his current strength and cultivation, as long as he didn't run into…