The armored general could not have imagined, before receiving his orders, that he would one day lead his cavalry on a charge through the streets of Jizhou City.
The Xu family compound was vast, its layout sweeping and grand. Years ago they had specifically engaged a renowned geomancer to survey it — the arrangement, he had declared, would ensure the descendants’ prosperity and the family’s enduring flourishing.
It would appear they had been deceived.
The general leveled his saber forward, and a squad of soldiers hoisted a battering ram and charged — boom, the main gate shattered open.
The general raised his hand, pulled down his visor, and spurred his horse into the Xu compound.
He was not, strictly speaking, a general. He simply liked armor, and so Prince Yu had commissioned a bespoke set made to his measurements.
The townsfolk scattered in fright. In the moment when dusk began to settle over the world, death arrived before the moon.
Within the Xu compound, there were seven or eight hundred souls in all. The servants and attendants were, by some measure, fortunate — as long as they knelt and made no sudden movements, no one would deliberately cut them down.
The Xu family members themselves were another matter. Prince Yu’s order was: any person bearing the surname Xu — not one to be spared.
—
Twin Star Tower.
Gongsu Yingying was sitting alone in her room, lost in thought, when a rush of hurried footsteps outside the door startled her. She turned — the maid came running in, stumbled, and fell flat on the floor.
“Miss — something terrible has happened to the Xu family.”
“What’s happened!”
Gongsu Yingying was on her feet at once.
“Prince Yu has mobilized troops to surround the entire Xu compound. Orders have been given that not a single person is to be allowed out. Soldiers are killing inside the compound as we speak.”
The moment the words finished, Gongsu Yingying bolted from the room.
She was on the third floor; a corridor stretched outside her door, with the staircase to the left. She didn’t run for the staircase. Instead, she leapt clean off the third floor.
She landed in the hall on the ground floor, startling everyone nearby.
She sprinted for the front entrance of Twin Star Tower — but before she reached it, she saw a young man standing in the doorway, holding a stick of candied hawthorn, watching her with a faint, amused smile.
“Get out of my way!”
Gongsu Yingying cried out in her urgency.
“You’d be wise to stay where you are. The Xu family members will all die today, but someone thinks you may still be of use. If you move — you’ll end up like this candied hawthorn.”
As he spoke, he raised the skewer. A steel-tipped arrow came flying in from behind him and snapped the candied hawthorn to pieces. The arrow embedded itself in the doorframe with a thud, grazing past Gongsu Yingying’s ear — it punched clean through the frame.
A thin line of blood appeared on Gongsu Yingying’s ear.
The young man at the door said with a smile, “You should cooperate. Also — I should mention — we are with the Cui family, not the Prince’s household. That means we can say you refused to listen and we killed you by accident. The Prince’s side won’t care, because the Prince’s side may not even know you exist.”
Gongsu Yingying stood and stared at him. Then, in a split second, she lunged to one side and ran.
She’d taken no more than two steps before a steel-tipped arrow struck the ground in front of her with a crack, splitting the stone paving.
The young man let out a sigh. “Run again, and you die.”
Gongsu Yingying gritted her teeth and charged forward again.
“Going won’t do any good. They’re all dead.”
His voice rose behind her. Gongsu Yingying’s feet slowed to a stop.
The young man said, in an entirely indifferent tone, “I merely regret that someone as young and beautiful as you would throw her life away. Otherwise this is none of my concern and I’d never bother. My employer’s meaning is that if you live, you may yet have a chance at vengeance. No divine power could save the Xu family today — if you go, you’re just one more body.”
He gestured toward a carriage waiting not far away.
Gongsu Yingying hesitated a moment, then turned and walked toward it. The coachman opened the door and made a welcoming gesture.
When she stepped inside, she found a middle-aged man seated within, reading — but it wasn’t a book. It was a ledger. He didn’t look up when she entered.
He pointed to the seat across from him and said, “My name is Cui Tai. You stay on this carriage until we reach Three-Moon River House. You’re free to get off at any point before then — but my men will kill you. Get off at Three-Moon River House, and no one will be able to harm you freely after that.”
Gongsu Yingying asked, “And will I be able to seek my revenge?”
Cui Tai closed his ledger and looked at her for a moment. “I don’t waste my time saving people who want to die. Ask another stupid question like that, and you can get off right now.”
Gongsu Yingying bit her lip until it bled.
After a moment, she nodded. “Let’s go.”
—
The Xu Compound.
An old man, his body bristling with six or seven arrows, stood before a field of fallen soldiers — at least twenty bodies, all men from the attacking force. The sword in his palm had broken in half; blood still dripped from the jagged blade.
He turned to look at Xu Yuanqing and gave a faint shake of his head. “I’ve done all I can.”
Before him, the armored rider came thundering in. The saber swept horizontally — the old man’s head spun into the air, and blood fountained from his neck like a geyser.
A dozen of Xu Yuanqing’s men were cutting a path rearward.
“Sir — we’ll open a path through the back courtyard and break out. We can’t afford to delay any longer.”
Xu Yuanqing’s eyes were red. He was silent a moment, then turned and followed.
A dozen men drove through toward the back courtyard. When they reached the moon gate, a thunderous boom — the gate collapsed inward. A man built like an iron tower came through from the other side, both hands braced against the curved arch of the gate, and the whole structure came down, bricks and stones flying.
This man — he was the one who had stood guard over Prince Yu on the day the Princess Consort was attacked.
He was of staggering stature. The bodyguards were not short men, but the tallest among them barely reached his shoulder.
The giant reached out both hands, one to a man on the left, one to the right, seized them each by the head, and lifted them off the ground. Then he brought the two heads together.
The two skulls — like smashed watermelons.
The giant said in a deep, muffled rumble, “The Prince said not one to live. So not one lives.”
Xu Yuanqing’s remaining guards felt their courage waver — yet they knew that to live, they had to go through him.
The remaining men drove forward, slashing at the giant with blade after blade. The giant wore extremely heavy plate armor. He paid no attention to the blades; they struck his body and shed nothing but sparks.
He punched them down one by one.
Xu Yuanqing watched the giant walk toward him. He was silent a long moment, then tilted his head back and let out a long, wordless cry toward the sky—
Boom!
The giant’s fist swung in a horizontal sweep. A fist as large as a bowl, crashing into Xu Yuanqing’s temple — a single blow that nearly shattered his skull. Xu Yuanqing flew sideways for a great distance, struck the ground, and lay completely still.
—
One hour later. The Carriage and Horse Inn.
Yu Jiuling returned from outside, his expression grim. He sat down and exhaled heavily, as though words themselves were too much effort.
The others watched him. He was quiet for a long while before he spoke. “Too brutal. Even though I couldn’t wait to go in there and kill them myself — after seeing it with my own eyes, I realized I may not have the stomach for killing at that scale.”
“I was watching from high up with the far-sight lens. The torches inside the Xu compound moved like swirling water, and wherever the torches went, men died.”
Yu Jiuling sighed. “From what I could see — apart from the servants who knelt and begged for mercy — everyone else is dead.”
He turned to Li Chi. “There were two people — extraordinary combatants, both of them. One was on horseback, in full plate with a visor — couldn’t see his face. He had a saber, very long, the shape of a broad saber, but the blade was at least half again as long as usual — four and a half feet at minimum.”
“The other was a giant of a man. Truly enormous. The others looked like children next to him. He was swatting men down with open palms.”
Xiahou Zuo said, “The one on the horse is called Yu Jiangwan. Even when he doesn’t wear the visor he covers his face — because his face is frightful to look upon. People say he has the face of a leopard. Some call him a demon. Some say he’s simply a beast.”
He paused and continued. “The one with the immense build and natural brute strength is called Yu Juling. He’s Yu Jiangwan’s younger brother. My father took them in six or seven years ago. They grew up in the mountains — their parents apparently died early. Yu Jiangwan’s face is what it is because it was mauled by a wild animal, and he survived by sheer luck.”
He breathed out slowly. “Both names were given by my father. Those two — they have too much of the beast in them.”
Li Chi sat through all of this in silence. He hadn’t spoken because something was occupying his mind — something he couldn’t explain to himself.
He wondered whether his own luck wasn’t running a little too well. Every time he encountered some kind of trouble, that trouble had a way of being resolved by someone else — seemingly by chance, without his involvement.
The Xu family, with the resources they commanded, was still something of an immovable mountain to Li Chi. Even with the Yanshan Camp at his back, he could never have simply stepped past them in Jizhou City.
Now the Xu family was gone.
Every single time it was like this. It was as if heaven kept a watchful eye on him — and whenever the trouble exceeded his ability to deal with it, some other force appeared and swept it clean away.
Li Chi wasn’t thinking about this for the first time. Each time it crossed his mind, he dismissed it as his own overactive imagination, told himself it was all coincidence.
But the Xu family’s fate today was forcing him to look at the question again. And he himself had no answer to it.
“Our luck really is something.”
At that moment, Yu Jiuling looked over at Li Chi and said, “Without us having to do a thing, the Xu family just vanished like it was nothing — like a huge boulder fell from the sky and flattened them.”
Li Chi slowly turned to look at Yu Jiuling. Yu Jiuling saw his expression was somewhat strange and asked, “Are you all right?”
Li Chi came back to himself, shook his head. “I’m fine. You’re right — our luck has been rather good.”
Yu Jiuling said, “If our luck gets any better, maybe we’ll find gold ingots lying in the road just walking down the street.”
The words had barely left his mouth when a dull boom rolled in from the back courtyard, accompanied by a shudder — like a small earthquake.
Li Chi immediately pulled Gao Xining to her feet beside him. In the next moment, he was already outside the door, though he hadn’t quite registered how he’d gotten there so quickly.
Yu Jiuling watched this and remarked to Xiahou Zuo, “Did you see that? He didn’t call for any of us.”
Xiahou Zuo nodded. “Indeed.”
Li Chi looked at Gao Xining. Gao Xining pressed her lips together and smiled.
They hurried to the back courtyard. By the time they arrived, the others had already gathered around. Everyone had been startled by the sudden jolt.
But the tremor had come only once and did not repeat — it didn’t seem to be an earthquake.
“The cellar collapsed in on itself somewhere.”
Someone looked toward Li Chi and said, “Might be from all the digging we’ve been doing — but the strange thing is, it wasn’t the top that caved in. It was the bottom, like there’s a hollow space below.”
Yu Jiuling startled. “Don’t tell me something is trying to crawl out.”
Li Chi reached out and took a torch. He glanced at Tang Pidi, who nodded. The two of them went down into the cellar one after the other.
—