Zhang Dahu held his breath, face tight.
A fight?
He was half considering slipping out to warn the other duty rooms. The way he saw it, this mountain of a man could flatten Constable Shen with one palm.
Chen Ji also had doubts. Maybe the friendly talk was a cover story — maybe this was about recovering the Gaunt Monk’s face after all.
“Well?”
Zhang Tuhu tilted his neck. The dried grass stalk rolled between his calloused fingers and dropped.
Shen Yi looked at him quietly. The man’s eyes were uncomplicated — no provocation in them, only a surging, unambiguous desire to fight.
He shifted his stance, let out a slow breath. “Come on then.”
The words were barely out before Zhang Tuhu’s leg connected with the stone lock. Three to four hundred jin of stone left the ground like a sling-stone, screaming through the air directly at the upright figure ahead.
The speed and force of it left no time to react.
Shen Yi glanced at the courtyard wall behind him, coiled his right fist, and punched.
The stone lock exploded into powder on impact.
“I can see you really do care about the masonry.”
The dust obscured everything for an instant — and that enormous frame had already materialized behind him. Two thick arms swung down like iron chains from above, a double strike that would have reduced both shoulder blades to something finer than the stone lock if it landed.
Shen Yi crouched without hurry, let the blow pass over him, and drove his elbow upward with his full body weight behind it — straight into Zhang Tuhu’s bearded jaw.
A dull crack.
Something changed in his expression.
Zhang Tuhu stumbled two steps, the whole courtyard shaking with his landing. He rubbed his jaw and grinned through the pain, entirely unbothered. “Fast reactions.”
An elbow strike that could shatter demon bone — and it had moved him two steps.
The others couldn’t read what they were looking at. Chen Ji’s pupils contracted.
Just yesterday that same force had sent a Threshold Realm tiger demon sprawling with blood in its mouth. What was this man made of?
“…”
Shen Yi’s own unease had a different source.
He’d channeled aperture qi into that elbow. He hadn’t expected to finish it in one hit — but the question was how Zhang Tuhu had absorbed it without circulating any qi of his own in response. He hadn’t felt the man draw on anything.
His thoughts sharpened into motion. Serpentine Eight Strides opened fully, and he became difficult to track.
Zhang Tuhu was quick despite his size, but the frame came with a cost — he couldn’t see his own feet, and his field of vision narrowed at the edges. None of that produced panic in his eyes. He let the punches come, his skin taking them like layered cowhide, dense and unyielding.
He waited for his opening, then whipped the black slaughter knife out from his hip with speed that defied the eye, driving it down toward the ground in a heavy arc.
It cut air.
Shen Yi had already read the overextension. One foot connected with Zhang Tuhu’s side in the window before he could recover — and that massive body hit the ground with a crash that sent the Niu brothers scrambling for the walls.
“Weak! That’s nothing!”
“However well you throw those fists, what’s the point — honestly, it barely counts as a warm-up.”
Zhang Tuhu clambered up covered in dust, eyes finding the saber at Shen Yi’s hip. He licked his lips. “Draw it. I saw what you did yesterday — don’t hold back.”
Shen Yi worked his wrist, then let his fingers find the hilt.
He’d intended only to spar, but given what the Cloudscattering Longfist had done to that body, pushing any further with fists alone was pointless.
Silver light trailed red mist across the air.
“Now we’re talking!” Zhang Tuhu lit up, arms crossing to meet it.
The blade came down — and rang out with a sharp metallic note against bare skin. A white line appeared on his forearm.
“Is that man part tortoise?” Chen Ji’s eyes had gone wide, his breathing short.
But the smile on Zhang Tuhu’s face was fading. He stared at his own arm. “Good bladework…”
Before he finished the sentence, the blade was already coming again — relentless, carrying that savage corrupting force, one cut after another.
Zhang Tuhu caught three more. At the fourth, he threw himself sideways in an undignified roll and came up waving his hands. “Stop — give me a moment—”
Shen Yi eased off.
Chen Ji still hadn’t worked out what had happened — why had it ended so suddenly?
His eyes drifted to the raised arm. Something cold moved through him. Every one of those cuts had landed in exactly the same spot — which only proved Shen Yi’s blade control was exceptional. What actually stopped his breath was something else: where there had been a single white mark, wisps of red mist were clinging, eating inward. Within a few breaths, the outline of bone was beginning to show.
Sweat stood out on Zhang Tuhu’s forehead in large drops. He gritted through the pain and circulated his qi steadily until the red mist retreated, then looked up with a long exhale, shaking his head with something like admiration.
“That technique of yours doesn’t belong on a decent person.”
“I love it.”
Shen Yi frowned, puzzled as to why he hadn’t used qi to defend from the start.
Zhang Tuhu was already on his feet, slapping his stomach with enthusiasm. “What do you think?”
“Exceptional body refinement.”
“Want to learn it?” Zhang Tuhu said, eyes sliding to the saber.
“Sir — don’t.” Chen Ji rarely overstepped, but he couldn’t hold this one back.
The relationship between the court and jianghu sects was more tangled than most people understood. Taking something from them was rarely simple.
“What’s the hurry.”
Zhang Tuhu wasn’t offended by the interruption. He laughed with some generosity. “I came here with an agenda — I won’t pretend otherwise, it’s not entirely clean — but I’m not going to do Constable Shen any harm.”
He stepped alongside Shen Yi and lowered his voice. “That bladework of yours — you developed it yourself from the Demon-Subduing Bladework, didn’t you?”
Shen Yi looked at him with genuine surprise.
“Seen enough of it to recognize the roots.” Zhang Tuhu raised an eyebrow. “The Demon Suppression Division’s techniques — I wouldn’t touch those if you gave them to me free of charge. But something you developed yourself? No rules attached to that. And as it happens I’ve been working toward something similar. Why not trade?”
Something in Shen Yi responded to that without his permission.
If he’d had a body like Zhang Tuhu’s last night, those two snake women wouldn’t have presented a problem in the same way.
After a moment he turned back, and chose honesty. “I have no objection. But you may not be able to learn it.”
Zhang Tuhu blinked, then let out a soft snorting laugh. “I know that. Something this vicious isn’t something a court official would have developed through any clean method — almost certainly comes from the corrupted residue of some demon’s beast core.”
“Only someone with nothing left to lose, or a martial obsessive past all reason, would do something that stupid.”
“That’s your problem to have. Since when does a man ask whether someone else can handle what he’s offering?”
Chen Ji caught the shift in the conversation, rounded up the remaining constables, and pushed them out of the courtyard. Then he stepped out himself and pulled the gate quietly shut.
(End of Chapter)