“Ahhhh!!“

The river deity pressed both hands over her greasy face, trying to block out the bewildered stares of the villagers surrounding them.

I am a deity. I walk the river’s waves. I protect this land.

She shrieked, and countless droplets condensed in the air — launched forward like volleys of arrows, the roar of them splitting the night.

Shen Yi moved between them, staying within a foot of her at all times.

His fingers traced their unseen paths and struck, again and again. Every point of contact: meridians severed, demonic energy dissolved.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Her once elegant form swelled. The blue-green robe strained at its seams, the body beneath expanding as what had been held in check collapsed outward.

Her foundations were already hollowed — the flood dragon had drained most of her essence, and she’d spent what remained overwhelming two Jade Liquid Realm Commanders. Li Muqing had forced her to burn through even that reserve. And now the Meridian-Severing Dragon Capture had sealed every major pathway in her body.

The rain of arrows faltered. Dissolved quietly in midair.

Shen Yi drove his foot into her with everything behind it.

The vast body smashed through the gilt statue with the sound of a sack of wet sand hitting a wall. The shrine shook. Roof beams split and fell, thick dust billowing outward.

He stepped to the side, reached up, and caught the dark blade as it fell free of the collapsed water-locks.

He walked into the shrine, grabbed the river demon by the back of the neck, and slammed her onto the offering table.

She shook from head to tail, both hands scrabbling at the collapsed table’s edges, trying to push herself upright on arms that had lost most of their feeling.

Shen Yi’s foot came down on her shoulder and pressed her back flat.

At the cold qi against her back, the river demon’s composure came completely apart.

“You can’t kill me — I carry a dragon child inside me!”

“I will be consort to the lord of the Yangchun River!”

“I am the river deity of Shuiyun Township!! Save me!!“

The shrieking nearly knocked the half-conscious Li Muqing back under.

Outside, torchlight surrounded the shrine as countless villagers stared at the vast, heaving form on the offering table.

The deity their ancestors had fed for hundreds of years.

The one they had sent three hundred children into the river to serve.

Helpless now. Pinned. Begging to be saved.

“Save the deity! Kill the court’s dogs!”

The village master held his son’s body, tears running freely, eyes full of nothing but hatred.

His only son.

He screamed until his voice broke. “Kill them!!”

The cry tore the silence of the night open.

More than a dozen young men threw their torches, seized their spears, and charged.

They had done this before — exactly this, again and again — and driven the Division’s people out every time.

Seven tens of thousands of people. Their rage.

Before that weight, even Jade Liquid Realm Deputy Commanders had stepped back.

“…”

Shen Yi gave no sign of having heard any of it.

He picked up a sharp wooden shard from the wreckage and drove it through the river demon’s back without hesitation, pinning her to the table.

Through the demon’s screaming, he turned his head slightly.

His left hand came up, five fingers spreading open. A black identity token swayed in his palm — the characters Zhen Mo engraved in silver-and-iron strokes, cold as the blade.

“The Demon Suppression Division executes its mandate. All bystanders — withdraw.”

The fishermen’s bloodshot eyes didn’t waver. They’d done this before. Rush in, and these Division people would have no choice but to retreat.

Their hands tightened on the shafts.

“Kill the dogs! Save the deity!”

But something stopped them, even as they were still moving — some quality in the torchlight that wouldn’t cooperate. No matter how they looked, they couldn’t find in that ink-black figure’s face what they’d always found in the others before him.

The hesitation.

They kept coming.

Shen Yi said nothing. His hand simply closed.

A thread of red light appeared — silent, barely visible — and swept through the air. At a speed the eye couldn’t follow, it opened the first skull. Then the second. Then the rest, in a line.

The village master stared at more than a dozen people folding simultaneously to the ground. Something cold opened in his chest.

This one was different from the others.

He hadn’t finished the thought when something burning and wet crossed his forehead, and the ground came up.

“…”

The remaining villagers — those who hadn’t moved — felt their faces go numb. One step back. Then another.

The men who had been holding spears to the injured Commanders’ throats dropped them, their hands shaking too badly to hold anything.

Thud. Thud.

Outside the shrine, people sank to their knees in waves. They pressed their foreheads to the ground until they bled, the weeping overlapping and continuous. “Please — spare the River Goddess—”

Shen Yi turned back.

Looked down at the demon beneath his foot.

The dark blade came down.

A dull impact. A head rolled across the floor and expanded — into the shape of a catfish, a full zhang across, whiskers trailing.

The blue-green robe split. A glistening, blubbered blue-green fish body filled half the shrine, tail twitching faintly.

In the stunned silence of the crowd.

The young man stood on the offering table, soaked in blood, face carrying nothing that could be called ferocity — and yet no one could look directly at him.

Something in that stillness was more frightening than the statue that had stood there before.

He drove the blade into the fish’s belly with focused attention and opened it in a long, careful line, the pale white flesh parting in layers like the pages of a book.

He retrieved the beast core.

Then he cut away a slice of the fish with the blade’s edge, held it up for a moment, and placed it in his mouth.

He chewed slowly.

“…”

The villagers on the ground stopped kowtowing. Their eyes went flat. Their expressions moved toward something blank — they had run out of faces to make for what they were seeing.

This figure — cold, composed, unhuman in his stillness — was eating their deity.

After a moment, Shen Yi tore off a large piece, stepped out of the shrine, and seized a dazed man by the collar.

Under the man’s stunned stare, he shoved the fish flesh into his mouth.

“Urgh—!“

The man gagged on instinct. Shen Yi’s fingers closed over his mouth.

“Chew it. Swallow it.” The flat voice sent cold through the crowd.

“Then answer me.”

He hauled the man upright, expression still unchanged. “Your river deity — how does she taste?”

The man’s eyes filled with turbid tears. His whole body shook.

But what broke across his tongue — the freshness of it, the richness — was something he’d never tasted in thirty years of living by this river.

Reflex. He swallowed.

Guilt, immediately after.

Then, despite himself, he swallowed again.

“Well-fed.” Shen Yi patted the man’s cheek once, put away the dark blade, and walked toward the others nearby.

The madman had come back to himself somewhere in the chaos. He crawled through mud toward the shrine, barely on his feet.

He saw his terrified neighbors. Saw the collapsed building. His gaze found the one figure still standing straight amid it all.

Then it fell on the fish inside the shrine — belly open, gutted and spread.

The madman erupted.

He shoved through the crowd, threw himself into the fish’s innards, and tore at the flesh with his teeth, swallowing in great hungry mouthfuls, snot and tears mixing with the meat — as if something he’d carried inside him for more than a decade needed to come out this way and only this way.

The people kneeling on the ground stared at him with hollow expressions.

The man who’d been forced to eat a mouthful — he watched, and beat his chest with his fists, and couldn’t stop himself swallowing once more.

In the torchlight, the gilding peeled from the broken statue, revealing the clay body underneath.

(End of Chapter)