The expression on Mu Fengliu’s face was complex — fury, shock, indignation, a trace of fear, and something else besides — enough that his features had twisted into something almost unrecognizable.

The Baishan Army had arrived. A bloody battle was unavoidable.

He had spent his whole life calculating against others, and now he had been calculated against in return — which was, of course, deeply difficult to accept.

Especially when the man who had outmaneuvered him was someone he had treated almost like a student.

Over all these years, every time he had returned to Yuzhou to meet with Cao Lie, Cao Lie had sought his counsel on all manner of questions, and he had answered everything fully and without reserve.

So in many people’s eyes, they had been mentor and student — close, respectful, genuine.

“You have to die.”

Mu Fengliu looked at Cao Lie and said it plainly. Then he took two steps back, retreating into the protective formation of his soldiers, and raised a finger. “Kill him.”

A mass of bandits surged toward Cao Lie. Cao Lie was not alone — but he had only those several dozen guards.

Whatever happened, the Shanhai Army’s forces would cut him down faster than the Baishan Army could fight its way up to them.

Yet Mu Fengliu had no intention of staying to watch Cao Lie’s head fall. A man of his temperament would never willingly place himself in the path of danger.

The instant the bandits charged toward Cao Lie, he became like a part of the darkness itself — absorbed into it, indistinguishable from the night.

This was his greatest skill: those surging past him would instinctively fail to register his presence, even if they brushed shoulders with him in passing.

Mu Fengliu extracted himself from the Shanhai Army’s formation at top speed. He understood clearly that if he stayed, his odds of dying in the chaos were very high.

The Baishan Army had come for revenge. Every man among them burned with righteous fury. The kind of carnage they would inflict was the kind where bodies were left unrecognizable.

The Shanhai Army had spent days hammering away at Dragon’s Head Pass, their morale already ground to dust.

One force driven by grief and the hunger for vengeance, ready to fight to the last. The other listless and fractured, without the will to stand. When those two meet in battle, the outcome requires no calculation.

So Mu Fengliu thought only of escape — getting out before the full collision began.

For a man of his abilities, this was no great difficulty. Before the Baishan Army fully closed the vise, he had already slipped into the treeline. The leafless winter woodland offered imperfect cover at this season, but to him it hardly mattered — his truest camouflage had never been foliage. It was darkness. Darkness was his native element; the forest was merely a tool.

Moving as fast as he could, he cut through the trees, descended the far side of the mountain, deliberately looped wide before making his way back to the Shanhai Army’s main camp. By the time he arrived, daylight had broken.

Walking up to the camp’s outer perimeter, Mu Fengliu’s expression was bleak.

The camp was almost completely empty.

A scattering of people remained — mostly wounded soldiers who couldn’t run, a handful who had stayed out of loyalty or some other attachment to care for the wounded, and a few others who had lingered hoping to pick through the camp for valuables before leaving. All told, they numbered very few.

Against the backdrop of a force that had once numbered over a hundred thousand, those few thousand remaining souls amounted to nothing.

Everyone who could leave had already left — and they had left separately, each faction pulling away on its own. Every commander had wanted to preserve his own strength. When word had reached them that the Baishan Army had appeared at their rear, no one had moved to reinforce or rescue Liu Feng and Zhao Ba. Whether those two lived or died was no one else’s concern.

And if the garrison at Dragon’s Head Pass seized the moment to sally forth in coordination with the Baishan Army, attacking from both directions — who could say how many more would die?

Mu Fengliu walked into the camp with unsteady steps. On his way back, he had allowed himself to imagine that none of this truly mattered — that with his ability, his influence over the men, his talent for moving people with words, even this situation could be managed. He could still get the Shanhai Army’s foolish commanders to fight for him one more time.

He hadn’t taken Dragon’s Head Pass. He could still make things painful for the Ning Army. Still make things painful for the Baishan Army.

He had even imagined consolidating what remained, finding somewhere to regroup and recover, waiting for the Black Martial Empire’s great army to arrive.

He knew Jizhou’s defenses had been stripped thin. A Black Martial army of nearly a million, once it poured through, would sweep everything before it. When the Black Martial forces drove east and reached Dragon’s Head Pass, the Ning Army would be annihilated.

Then he would bring whatever force he had gathered to present to the Black Martial supreme commander. The contribution would be considerable.

And if he could then lead those men as an advance force — taking cities, taking ground — he might become the most legendary figure in all of Black Martial history.

“Where is your commanding officer!”

Mu Fengliu grabbed a passing soldier and demanded it urgently.

The return journey had filled his head with so many possibilities that the reality of this empty, hollow camp hit him that much harder.

The soldier glanced at him — with eyes flat with indifference. With a flicker of contempt.

Those eyes said: *Look at the state of things. What the hell gives you the right to talk to me like that.*

But the soldier was too tired to argue. He yanked his arm free, gave Mu Fengliu one dismissive look, and walked away.

That single act of dismissal ignited something in Mu Fengliu. He strode after the soldier and drove a kick into his lower back. The soldier went sprawling, and before he could recover Mu Fengliu was on him, both hands locked around his throat. Moments later, both men’s eyes were rimmed with red — the soldier’s from fighting to breathe, Mu Fengliu’s from the force of pure rage.

His grip tightened, and he screamed: “I was speaking to you! You dare ignore me?! A worthless wretch like you — a common foot soldier — I speak to you and you dare not respond?!”

Perhaps the last, deepest layer of his self-contempt had broken through at this moment.

Within the Black Martial Empire, he had been lower than a slave — and now, in the ruins of everything he had built, a common foot soldier had looked through him. The shame and rage that erupted from that collision was terrifying.

Gradually, the soldier’s eyes rolled upward. The frantic struggling slowed. His body stiffened. His breathing stopped. He went rigid. And still Mu Fengliu’s hands did not release him, still he screamed.

People nearby saw it happen. No one intervened. The soldiers moved through the camp like hollow men, indifferent to what was unfolding.

The ones who remained fell into roughly three kinds: those too badly wounded to flee; those who had stayed out of loyalty or affection to care for the wounded; and those few scavengers prowling for valuables in the chaos of departure. Only that last group was moving freely through the camp. The others were either quietly finding ways to slip away or sitting silently, waiting for whatever came next.

Mu Fengliu had to return because his tent held secrets he could not leave behind.

He had a prodigious memory, but even so — across thirty-plus years of work, the volume of what he had accumulated was simply beyond what any mind could hold unaided.

He had hidden a trove of documents in his tent. Those were what mattered most to him — records of shadow banking operations, the locations of vast hoarded wealth, registers of killers and assassins he could deploy, the full apparatus of his underground empire.

Even without the army, those documents were still his key to becoming a legend in the Black Martial world.

The Shanhe Seal’s wealth, presented to the Black Martial Empire, would alone be enough to earn reward.

He choked the soldier to death, then came back to himself — remembered why he had come — and scrambled to his feet, breaking into a run toward the tent.

He rarely ran. A self-possessed man doesn’t run even in retreat — running is undignified.

Over the years, Mu Fengliu had cultivated his bearing with great care, and he knew that had everything to do with where he came from.

But dignity was a luxury that belonged to another time. Right now he ran like a rabid dog toward the tent — just as he had fled through the mountain like a rabid dog the night before.

From a distance, he could see figures moving around the outside of his tent, and his heart hammered.

If those documents — buried by his own hand — were discovered by soldiers who ranked below insects in his estimation, then everything he had painstakingly built across more than thirty years in the Central Plains could be destroyed.

That was the product of his blood and sweat. No one had the right to take it.

He didn’t stop to assess — he bore straight in. Without a word to anyone, he kicked the nearest figure off his feet, snatched the long blade from that man’s waist, and cut them all down in a few swift strokes.

One soldier collapsed into a pool of blood but hadn’t died yet. Lying there, staring upward with eyes full of disbelief, he managed a few faint words: “My lord… why? Why is it like this?”

The voice was weak, but Mu Fengliu heard it clearly — and froze.

These were his personal guards. The ones he had stationed here before leaving, with explicit orders: under no circumstances leave your post; let no one pass.

Men like Mu Fengliu are always cultivating loyalists — drawing people close with favors, making them dependent. Exploiting others had always been his finest skill.

When the whole camp had dissolved in chaos and most of his guards had fled, these few had stayed. They had decided that leaving would be a betrayal of the trust he had placed in them. So they had held their post.

Their loyalty had been repaid with his blade.

After it registered, Mu Fengliu stood completely still for a long moment.

Then, finally, he let out a long, heavy breath. The blade in his hand still carried blood. The bodies around him had already gone cold.

“Don’t blame me. You were each fated to end this way.”

He looked at the bodies, thinking: *Why didn’t you leave? If you had left like the others, you wouldn’t have died here.*

In this moment, Mu Fengliu seemed to have aged ten years all at once. The blows kept coming, one after another, and his composure — the composure he had always worn like a second skin — had begun to crack.

He breathed deeply, again and again, willing himself back to steadiness.

Then he carried the bloodstained blade inside the tent. There was no time to waste.

Liu Feng and Zhao Ba’s forces couldn’t hold the Baishan Army. They would be here soon. The garrison at Dragon’s Head Pass had hesitated to sortie at first out of caution — but they wouldn’t stay their hand indefinitely.

He had to take what was his and go. Find somewhere to hide. Wait for the right moment to rejoin the Black Martial forces.

Once inside, Mu Fengliu crossed quickly to the bed, crouched down, tossed the blade aside, and with both hands clawed away the loose soil beneath, extracting the small wooden chest he had buried there.

He cradled it and turned to leave.

But before he had fully turned, the interior of the tent flashed with light.

In that instant, a blade fell from directly above and swept clean through — entering from the crown and exiting below, the stroke sudden, absolute, impossible to anticipate or escape.

One stroke, and there were two Mu Fengliu where there had been one.

Blood and viscera hit the ground in a wet heap.

More remarkably, the blade had split the man without splitting the chest — and the chest never reached the ground, caught in midair by the hand that had delivered the blow.

Nie She stood with the chest cradled in one hand and the blade in the other.

He looked down at the remains on the ground without expression and spoke quietly to no one in particular:

“Young Master said: don’t speak a single word to him, and don’t let him speak a single word either. He said you were a monster who could bewitch people with your tongue… as long as the monster dies quickly, it can’t make any more trouble.”

Then he turned and walked away, carrying the chest.

—