“So that’s what this is.”

Shen Yi turned the Blood-Corruption Bladework over in his mind, savoring each technique. Every form was steeped in a ferocious, predatory edge — the viciousness unmistakably demonic in origin, bearing no resemblance to the measured, methodical Demon-Subduing Bladework it had grown from.

Meet brutality with brutality.

This was a complete martial art, genuinely rooted in the Threshold Realm — an entirely different class from the Solarblade, which had been a mortal forcing his way into borrowed territory. Put up against the Yellow King now, Shen Yi was confident he could end it in three cuts.

He checked the panel.

Demon lifespan was down to one hundred and thirty years. The remainder had gone into the other two techniques — disappointing returns. One passive talent was all he had to show for it.

【Light as a Swallow: Years of accumulated movement technique have given you increasingly precise command of your own body. Your movements have grown lighter and more fluid.】

Better than nothing, he supposed.

He wasn’t disappointed. This night had clarified something about how the panel actually worked.

Deriving new martial arts wasn’t primarily about time. What mattered was accumulated material — knowledge, experience, things to synthesize. Raw lifespan poured into a vacuum could only hope for a random flash of inspiration.

The more techniques he learned, the more the panel had to work with when the time came. Synthesis required ingredients. The Blood-Corruption Bladework had needed both the bladework foundation and the corrupting essence of the beast core. The Thunder-Wind Scripture had needed the Solarblade’s Threshold-touching quality to find its way forward.

You couldn’t think your way to something new from nothing.

Be grateful for what you have.

What one night had given him would take an ordinary practitioner — without rare medicines or extraordinary encounters — an entire lifetime to accumulate.

He’d been extraordinarily lucky. That was worth acknowledging.

Shen Yi got up and opened the cabinet. His clothes were folded there, washed and dried — Lin Baixi’s handiwork. He took them out, stripped off his inner layer, and caught a glimpse in the polished surface nearby: the muscle definition was clean and close to ideal, though years of the predecessor’s deliberate laziness — too important to walk his own patrol routes — had left the skin an unhealthy-looking pale white.

Easy fix. More sun.

He dressed quickly, turned around, and found the woman standing very still at the back doorway, breath held.

“Something you need?”

“Just looking around.” Lin Baixi withdrew her gaze with the unhurried ease of someone who hadn’t been doing anything in particular, and turned her attention to more pressing matters, kneading her stomach hopefully. “Is there breakfast?”

“Wait here.”

Shen Yi went out to the street stalls, bought two jian bing, and stood considering. He still hadn’t received those two cultivation methods. After a moment’s hesitation: “Add an egg — how much extra?”

By rights, he was a constable with a head position and no bad habits — he shouldn’t have been short of money. The predecessor had run several reliable income streams. If Shen Yi were willing to look the other way just once—

“Constable Shen, sir! Two flatbreads, no charge — come as often as you like, sir!”

The vendor was already bowing and wrapping them up.

“I appreciate it. No need.” Shen Yi shook his head and laid ten copper coins on the counter.

He took the breakfast and headed for the yamen, eating as he walked.

Halfway there he noticed the looks.

Every vendor, every passing pedestrian — eyes flickering his way, then darting back down to their work the moment he looked in their direction.

“—told you, from now on anything to do with demons in this county goes straight to him.”

“Him? Constable Shen?”

“Nonsense this early in the morning — if you’re worried your wife’s too virtuous and you’ve got too much money burning a hole in your pocket, then he’s your man. Demons?”

“Keep it down — do you know what happened yesterday? No demons left in the western outskirts. Two farmers said it themselves. Every demon for miles, all their heads sent back to the county. Led by Constable Shen.”

Shen Yi, now a Threshold Realm practitioner, caught every word of it as clearly as if it had been spoken directly to him.

He picked up his pace and walked into the duty room.

Everything looked normal. Except for the emptiness.

The courtyard, which should have been busy, held exactly four people. Chen Ji swept the ground with a broom and no expression. The Niu brothers and Zhang Dahu crouched near the entrance in a stupor, staring at each other and the middle distance in roughly equal measure.

The moment Shen Yi came through, Zhang Dahu launched himself upright and came at him at a run, voice pitched with grievance.

“Sir! Thank heaven you’re here! You have to do something!”

He rushed over, visibly aggrieved. “Why are we being pulled off street patrol and told to deal with demons? The three streets on the western side — do you know how much we’ve built up there over the years? All of it, gone — Song Changfeng said so and that was that!”

“Sir, you’re Senior Clerk Liu’s man — if Song has the nerve to do this to us, it’s not us he’s actually slapping in the face, it’s—”

Chen Ji stepped into his path, redirecting him without ceremony, and lowered his voice at Shen Yi’s side. “This came from the Clerk directly.”

The four people left in the duty room were exactly the ones who’d been at the Liu family massacre site yesterday.

The message was not subtle.

Clerk Liu intended to marginalize them — and if things went badly enough, to see them dead. An object lesson for anyone else considering Shen Yi’s path. You want to kill demons? Fine. Here’s every demon in the county. Have at it. Put a man on the highest possible platform, then fold your arms and watch him fall.

And if he flinched — if he backed down — then he could go back to behaving himself.

“He knows it was you who killed the Yellow King. He came in the middle of the night and made a great deal of noise about it. Left before dawn — didn’t want to cross paths with you.”

Chen Ji’s mouth pulled into something tired.

Clearly, the power Shen Yi had revealed so suddenly had rattled Clerk Liu badly. Perhaps even frightened him.

But it still wasn’t enough to resolve anything.

Even the expert the county magistrate had brought down from Qingzhou — someone fully capable of fighting the Yellow King — was paid six hundred taels of silver a month. Six hundred taels could crush an ordinary person under its weight, but dropped into Baiyun County’s particular swamp, it didn’t even make a splash.

Beyond the Dog Demons, the surrounding area held far worse.

If things truly fell apart, even the Demon Suppression Division would need to take over the entire county first — evacuate the population, establish a methodical campaign. Three to five years to resolve the demon threat, optimistically.

And those few years, to the county magistrate and his circle of officials, represented the ruin of everything. A decade of work toward advancement, erased. Even if the court restored the post afterward, what remained would be a depopulated county with an empty treasury. That was unacceptable.

If obstructing demon extermination weren’t a capital crime against the dynasty — and if Shen Yi didn’t have the martial ability to make direct action extremely dangerous — the people above wouldn’t have wasted time on subtle maneuvering. They’d have stripped off his uniform or simply had him quietly killed.

“Sir.” Chen Ji’s expression had gone complicated. He had a sister to look after at home, and he’d just been quietly categorized as Shen Yi’s associate by people with the authority to make life difficult. The weight of that wasn’t pleasant.

And he was only a secondary target. Shen Yi was the center of it.

Something that might have been sympathy moved behind Chen Ji’s eyes.

“Clerk Liu left me a message before he went. He said—” a pause, “—if you’ve thought it over and come to your senses, bring a jug of wine and come sit with him.” His voice was flat and careful. “He said the magistrate can find six hundred taels for someone else. He implied you wouldn’t be overlooked.”

(End of Chapter)