Tian Zhanyuan watched helplessly as Wei Ye’s neck split open before him, blood pouring out like a waterfall.

In that instant, his wife let out a terrified scream and crouched down, clutching her own head.

“Don’t be afraid.”

Tian Zhanyuan stepped in front of his wife and said, “I won’t let anyone hurt you.”

No one knew quite what happened — perhaps the shock of it all had finally broken something loose — but the long-suppressed resentment his wife had been holding inside suddenly erupted. She shot to her feet and shoved him hard in the back.

“Won’t let anyone hurt me? Then who exactly has been hurting me all this time?!”

In an instant, her eyes turned red.

“Nearly my entire family was destroyed because of you — my father and mother, my older brother, my younger sister, who knows where she is now. You ruined my home and killed everyone I loved, and now you stand there telling me you won’t let anyone hurt me?!”

After screaming this, she suddenly bolted toward the entrance.

“Kill me then!”

She ran to the front door of the inn and shouted into the night: “Yaksha! Didn’t you come to kill people? Didn’t you come to collect souls? Come kill me!”

Tian Zhanyuan’s face went pale. He stood there in silence for a long moment before stepping forward and grabbing his wife by the arm, pulling her back. She fought and thrashed and screamed like a woman gone mad, and his expression grew darker with every passing second.

*Smack!*

Tian Zhanyuan struck his wife hard across the face.

“Shut up!”

He glared at her and said, “I let you live — and you still hate me for it? If I hadn’t kept you alive, you’d already be in the underworld with the rest of them.”

His wife looked at him, her eyes red as blood. “You want me to thank you? Thank you for the mercy of not killing me? Why didn’t you just kill me too?!”

Tian Zhanyuan tightened his grip and dragged her back inside the inn.

“I won’t let you die.”

He cast her one look, then turned and shouted out toward the night beyond the inn: “Yaksha! I don’t care who you are — don’t touch her. She knows nothing. She has no part in any of this.”

No sound came from outside. The silence was so complete it was as if even his men had vanished.

Tian Zhanyuan’s wife watched him with a complicated expression. In that moment she was barely holding herself together — every last drop of hatred, fury, and grief all crashing against the walls of her reason at once.

At last, several of the mountain bandits came running over from outside. One of them said, “Boss, we didn’t see the Yaksha anywhere. He’s probably gone.”

Tian Zhanyuan was silent for a moment, then issued his orders: “Round up everyone and bring them all in — stop spreading out. We all stay together in this main hall and wait for him here. I want to see whether this Yaksha can actually cut his way through the door alone.”

The men responded and turned to run back, but one of them had barely taken a few steps when he suddenly flew into the air. He let out a startled cry at first, then couldn’t make a sound at all — it was as though some invisible force had seized him by the throat and hauled him upward.

He kept rising. His limbs thrashed frantically, but the more he struggled, the tighter that unseen hand seemed to grip his neck. After a short while his limbs went limp.

Up on the rooftop, Li Diudiu gave his hand a shake and released the noose looped around the bandit’s neck. The loop had never actually been drawn tight — it was the man’s own body weight that had hanged him.

He turned and walked away without pausing for a second.

A few breaths later, a series of horrified screams erupted from the back of the inn. Someone else had apparently just died.

Only one person had seen any of this clearly enough to piece it together.

The Seventh Chief was crouched on the rooftop. He had watched the masked figure move back and forth, seen how he systematically cut off Tian Zhanyuan’s men one by one, and sent them to hell again and again.

At this moment, only one thought occupied his mind.

The Boss was right.

The Boss had said the young man, judging by his features, looked to be only fifteen or sixteen years old. If that was truly his age, yet he already possessed such cool-headed calculation and such ruthless capability — the Seventh Chief knew the Boss’s judgment would prove correct.

Did someone like this really need his protection?

He had never seen such a heavy killing intent in someone fifteen or sixteen years old. He had never imagined he would feel a sense of dread toward a person that young.

He watched the masked figure drop the bandit and immediately slip around to the back of the inn, where two more bandits were cut down before they could react. Then after killing them, the masked figure melted back into the darkness.

The Seventh Chief suddenly understood — the masked figure was in no hurry.

This person was torturing their minds. He was letting fear grind down every last shred of their courage, leaving nothing behind.

When killing, attacking the heart is the superior strategy.

More and more bandits began flooding back from all directions, their footsteps frantic as they rushed toward the inn. Even from the rooftop, unable to see their faces, the Seventh Chief knew — these men were frightened to the marrow of their bones.

At first the Seventh Chief had considered going down and lending a hand, maybe taking care of Tian Zhanyuan himself along the way. He wasn’t yet certain that Tian Zhanyuan was the one who had betrayed the Boss, but killing him wouldn’t hurt — the man was clearly up to something.

Yet now, all he wanted to do was keep watching. Watch how this young man continued to shatter their spirits.

This young man was terrifying.

“Nobody goes back out — not a single person stays outside!”

Tian Zhanyuan swept his gaze around the room. Those who had returned to the inn’s main hall numbered somewhere between seventy and eighty, which meant at least twenty men had been picked off without anyone even noticing. And not one of them had managed to catch a glimpse of the killer’s shadow.

The remaining seventy-some men formed a circle, with Tian Zhanyuan and his wife at the center. His wife was still weeping, head bowed, while Tian Zhanyuan’s mood grew more and more volatile.

“Stop crying!”

He bellowed at her.

His wife lifted her head and looked at him. The wild frenzy in her eyes from before was gone, replaced now by something closer to despair.

“You’re going to die here.”

She said it plainly.

*Smack.* Tian Zhanyuan struck her across the face again.

He stared at her reddened cheek and said, one deliberate word at a time: “Let me tell you something — I am not going to die here. You are not going to die here. As long as I don’t want to die, nobody gets to kill me.”

He roared it out loud — ostensibly at her, but perhaps more to convince himself.

And then the Yaksha arrived.

He walked in with unhurried steps, a corpse tucked under his left arm and another slung over his right shoulder. He stopped at the inn’s doorway and turned his head to look at the people inside.

He said nothing. Just looked.

Not one person dared make a sound — as though staying silent meant the Yaksha couldn’t see them.

After a moment, the Yaksha dropped both corpses at the entrance and walked away.

No one could quite comprehend how a single person could exert such enormous pressure on a hundred. Yet when they saw the Yaksha leave, more than half of the seventy-some people in that room let out a breath of relief at exactly the same moment.

But the Yaksha came back not long after. Just as before, he brought two more corpses, left them at the doorway, and walked away again.

“What is he doing?”

Someone asked instinctively, not really knowing who they were asking.

“He’s… just trying to scare us.”

“Right, he doesn’t dare come inside. He’s only trying to frighten us.”

“What if he’s not actually human? Would he still be afraid to come in?”

“We outnumber him… he should be afraid of us.”

Hushed murmuring rippled through the room on all sides. Tian Zhanyuan, already teetering on the edge of a breakdown, was barely keeping himself under control.

The Yaksha came a third time, once again dropping two bodies at the entrance before turning to leave — and this time, one of the men finally realized what was happening.

“He’s using the corpses to block the door!”

“Maybe he’s going to burn us alive!”

Tian Zhanyuan snapped back to awareness. Six bodies were now piled at the entrance, stacked up, blocking roughly a third of the doorway.

Before long, the Yaksha came a fourth time. Two more bodies tossed down, then he silently turned to go.

“Push the bodies away!”

Tian Zhanyuan screamed himself hoarse.

But in that moment, not a single person moved. They all looked at each other — no one willing to be the first to step forward.

When the Yaksha heard Tian Zhanyuan shouting, he turned and glanced back. That one glance made every person in the room step back a pace.

Then he walked away again, vanishing into the shadows after a few steps. He swung his arm and sent something flying — knocking out several of the torches and lanterns by the entrance.

The doorway plunged into darkness. Only the light from inside the inn spilled outward through the entrance, and that single column of light looked like a pathway guiding the Yaksha in.

“Hurry, push those bodies aside!”

Tian Zhanyuan shouted again. A few men, seeing the Yaksha gone, gathered just enough nerve to rush forward and try to shove the bodies out of the way — but the moment they reached the entrance, the Yaksha returned for the fifth time, hauling two more corpses on his shoulders. He stopped and watched those men, and they turned and fled back into the room, stumbling over each other in pure terror.

This time, the Yaksha didn’t leave. He set the two bodies down and sat atop the pile of corpses, facing the interior of the inn, utterly silent. He seemed to be lightly bouncing his leg — his body moving in a slow, steady rhythm.

“I can’t take this anymore!”

One of the bandits, crushed under the unbearable pressure, finally snapped. He grabbed his blade and charged toward the entrance — but the moment he reached the doorway, one of the corpses suddenly stood up and ran him through, dropping him dead before toppling back down.

The Yaksha remained seated at the entrance, casually bouncing his leg.

“Hit him!”

“We have crossbows!”

Someone suddenly thought of it. They started aiming their handheld crossbows at the entrance. The first man to react triggered the response in everyone else — soon every person was loosing bolts frantically toward the doorway. Arrows and bolts flew like a downpour, so many that the door frame on both sides was riddled thick with shafts.

The Yaksha sitting at the entrance was struck by who knew how many.

When everyone’s ammunition was spent, they stared at the doorway in horror, then watched as the Yaksha tilted backward and fell.

“Is he dead?”

Someone asked reflexively.

“He must be dead.”

Someone answered reflexively.

“Go look!”

Tian Zhanyuan shouted.

Going alone wasn’t an option — a group of about ten edged forward together. They reached the entrance and looked outside. The Yaksha was lying on the ground, apparently no longer breathing.

“He’s dead!”

The bandit at the front cried out in delight.

In that instant, every person in the room felt as though they had been reborn. Some couldn’t hold back and let out screams of elation.

But the moment that joyful cry rang out, one of the corpses leapt up and sliced off the heads of the three men at the front with a single sweep.

He moved fast — blade rising and falling in relentless strokes. Of the ten or so men who had walked to the entrance, only the two at the very back managed to scramble back inside. Everyone else was cut down.

After the killing, the figure bent down and removed the Yaksha mask from the dead man’s head. He slowly pulled it over his own blood-soaked head.

“The Yaksha was already dead. The Yaksha can transfer between bodies.”

He turned to face the people inside and said: “So how could you ever kill the Yaksha?”

He stepped through the doorway.

In that instant, the last of every person’s courage shattered. Who knows how many of them wet themselves in that moment.

The Yaksha’s mask was drenched in blood.

He stepped into the room and looked toward Tian Zhanyuan. When those eyes found him, Tian Zhanyuan’s legs buckled beneath him.

—