Xiu Miluo reached over and took a longsword from the bandit beside him. He flicked his wrist and sent it spinning through the air. Two light sounds rang out from somewhere overhead, and the corpse stopped moving.

Xiu Miluo gave a cold snort.

“Nothing but a rope dragging the body forward. That kind of trick is the province of small, contemptible minds — nothing to be proud of.”

Even as he said it, he stayed sharply alert, scanning in every direction. He couldn’t determine where the so-called Yaksha was right now.

The opponent was fast — faster than anyone Xiu Miluo had encountered. And the most capable killer he had seen.

The moment the rope was cut, the Yaksha would already have shifted position. At minimum, this person’s lightness arts and footwork were exceptional.

“Light every torch in the area,” Xiu Miluo ordered.

He turned back to look at Gong Shu Yingying, and felt something — a faint, inexplicable pull toward this woman. He couldn’t quite name it.

Perhaps it was because Xiu Miluo had never seen a woman this ruthlessly decisive. More curiosity than attraction, if he was honest.

Black Wu women were nothing like the gentle women of the Central Plains — they had open temperaments and a fierce edge. But their fierceness was a different thing from Gong Shu Yingying’s cold-blooded decisiveness. They would lose their tempers. They would strike at men. But if you put a blade in their hands and told them to kill someone, they would flinch.

“Stand behind me,” Xiu Miluo said to Gong Shu Yingying.

A slight smile curved her lips — as though this hard, rough man had risen just slightly in her estimation. Or perhaps it wasn’t that she welcomed his interest in her, but simply that she was pleased to find her own charm still intact.

A woman like her — her entire life, what she had wanted most was the recognition of more men. Even their fear.

“Do you think I’m unable to protect myself?”

She asked it — but even as she spoke, she moved to stand behind him.

Which was, in its way, quite artful.

“You talk too much.” Xiu Miluo glanced at her once, then looked away again, scanning the darkness. In this particular moment, the Yaksha interested him considerably more than Gong Shu Yingying.

She gave a soft laugh. “People I don’t like — I don’t say a word to them.”

Xiu Miluo’s brow furrowed slightly.

And at that moment, he caught a faint flicker of something on a rooftop in the distance.

He understood in an instant: that was moonlight reflecting off a spyglass.

He reached out and snatched another spear from a bandit’s hands, then hurled it at the far rooftop. A crack sounded — a tile, breaking.

Several breaths later, Li Chi had moved to another rooftop.

He could not help but acknowledge the extraordinary capabilities of that bandit leader: his eyesight, his reaction speed, his fighting power — all were remarkable.

Li Chi had a habit of measuring people’s combat ability, comparing them in his mind. The three strongest fighters he had encountered so far were Luo Jing, Tang Pidi, and Elder Ye.

He could not judge which of those three was the strongest, because in particular circumstances, their fighting power shifted. Luo Jing and Tang Pidi on a battlefield would almost certainly surpass Elder Ye; but in single combat, Elder Ye would not necessarily lose.

And yet, Li Chi’s instinct leaned toward believing the strongest of them now was Luo Jing.

In that same instant, Li Chi also noticed the small-framed woman standing at the bandit leader’s side.

She appeared to be wearing a cloak. Standing beside the tall, powerfully built man, she almost looked delicate.

Li Chi recognized immediately who it was.

There were too many of them. He knew he couldn’t kill them all, and that bandit leader’s martial arts were genuinely formidable.

But this woman — Li Chi decided she had to be removed.

He paused a moment, watching as several torches were flung up to the rooftop he had been on before, and the bandits sent a scattered volley of arrows after them. Soon a command rang out — the bandit leader’s voice, telling them to stop: they were wasting arrows.

So Li Chi went back to that rooftop and retrieved the long spear the bandit leader had thrown.

He moved again to a different elevated position. In the darkness, he straightened slowly, regulated his breathing, and with one swing of his arm, sent the spear flying back.

How much force did Li Chi have in that throw?

The spear tore through the night and arrived in an instant.

The target was not the bandit leader. Li Chi knew this throw could not kill that man. His target was the woman.

Crack!

Two things happened at the same moment.

The spear appeared from nowhere; Gong Shu Yingying immediately swept her cloak up in front of her and threw herself sideways.

And before she had moved, Xiu Miluo’s hand had already come up in front of her — and seized the spear. The shaft shook in his grip, still vibrating.

“Excellent force. Excellent technique.” Xiu Miluo set the spear down on the ground rather than throwing it back. He knew the man would never still be in the same position.

“I want to know your name,” he called out into the darkness.

Li Chi didn’t answer. He turned and left.

The chance to kill more had passed. But Li Chi had no intention of simply letting that pack of animals go.

Three quarters of an hour later, Li Chi returned to the grove where Elder Ye and the others were waiting. They had grown restless.

“Too many of them,” Li Chi said. “At least three or four hundred. I killed about thirty. No good opportunity to do more — but every one of those people has to die.”

Not one of them had ever heard Li Chi speak quite like this.

Every one of them has to die.

The weight of the killing intent in those words brought the others to silence.

“They slaughtered the people of this town. When I found them, they were roasting and eating the bodies.”

Li Chi exhaled slowly. “And those people — they’re almost certainly the bandits from beyond the frontier. The same ones from before.”

Elder Ye and the two young Daoist novices had not been at that battle in the north, but Elder Ye had heard Li Chi and the others speak of it, and knew what the Northern Madmen were capable of.

“They dared come into the heart of the Central Plains.”

Elder Ye said evenly: “Since they’ve come, let them stay.”

Li Chi looked at Yu Jiuling. “I have a task for you. An important one.”

Yu Jiuling had a vague sense that this important task might not be especially enjoyable.

Dawn.

Yu Jiuling sauntered up to just outside Gao County’s southern city gate. He was wearing Li Chi’s Yaksha mask, and he stood there in silence — just stood, exactly as Li Chi had instructed.

The moment he appeared, the bandits on the walls spotted him. Someone blew a sharp whistle.

From inside the city, the sound of horses beginning to whinny and mill about rose up — the bandit force was rapidly assembling. Before long, they would be in front of him.

Yu Jiuling breathed in deeply, and began muttering under his breath.

Heard from a distance, it might have sounded like a chant. But anyone standing next to him would have heard that he was repeating the same thing, over and over.

“I am very lucky… I am very lucky, I am very lucky…”

In short order, the bandits appeared near the city gate, Xiu Miluo riding at the front.

He looked into the distance. That figure in the Yaksha mask was standing there alone, several dozen zhang away.

“You’ve got some nerve,” Xiu Miluo called out.

Yu Jiuling thought: I’ve got no nerve at all. My courage is definitely smaller than a certain other part of me. If I had any choice in the matter, I would not be standing here.

His mind kept drifting to one person: Tang Pidi.

If Old Tang were here right now, he thought, he would absolutely seize this magnificent opportunity and deliver a few lines of devastating flair.

But no matter how Yu Jiuling racked his brain, he could not come up with anything sharp enough to crumble the bandits’ resolve with sheer brazenness.

After thinking it over, he settled for raising his hand and extending his little finger toward the bandit line.

Xiu Miluo was Black Wu — and while he had spent some time beyond Dachu’s northern frontier, he had spent most of it alone. He didn’t know precisely what that gesture meant, but it clearly wasn’t complimentary.

He asked the bandit beside him, “Is he insulting us?”

Gong Shu Yingying was mounted at Xiu Miluo’s side. She looked at the Yaksha and felt, despite herself, a measure of admiration for whoever this person was.

She explained: “That’s the little finger.”

Xiu Miluo said, “So?”

Gong Shu Yingying said meaningfully: “Little finger. Small.”

Xiu Miluo turned that over in his mind, and felt his temper rise. Central Plains people, he decided, were rotten to the very bone — just one word, small, and they could humiliate any man alive.

“Kill him,” Xiu Miluo said.

Three words.

The bandits came screaming out.

Yu Jiuling raised his little finger higher, gave it one more deeply satisfying downward point.

Then he turned and ran.

What followed left every bandit frozen in disbelief — and Xiu Miluo, and Gong Shu Yingying, and Chu Dong, all three of them equally stunned.

A galloping horse could not catch him.

The way he ran was terrible. Not a trace of the silent, shadowy menace from the night before. He ran like a duck waddling at high speed, twisting from side to side — and yet, inexplicably, impossibly fast.

The bandits drove their horses hard, shouting as they went. Yu Jiuling’s feet skimmed the earth, and as he picked up speed, even his form began to change. The ungainliness fell away; his toes barely grazed the ground, and he was no longer running so much as skimming — a figure flying just above the earth.

The bandits chased for three or four li and couldn’t close the gap. Yu Jiuling plunged into the grove where they had been hiding the previous night.

There was no stopping them now — the bandits wouldn’t let this go. With battle cries, they poured into the grove after him. Out on the road, Xiu Miluo watched this through a raised spyglass, and suddenly his brow contracted.

“An ambush,” he said.

In the grove, Li Chi and the others had laid ropes throughout. The undergrowth was knee-high, completely concealing the lines. When the bandits charged in, horses hit the ropes and went tumbling — people and mounts went down in disarray.

Yu Jiuling didn’t so much as glance back, running flat out until he disappeared deeper into the trees.

The grove was dense; the horses could not move at any useful speed. The bandits cursed and howled, but the Yaksha was long gone.

They rode back toward Gao County, sullen. Halfway there, Xiu Miluo arrived with the rest of the bandits, and the two groups merged.

Xiu Miluo had anticipated an ambush — and found only trip-ropes. A few men had taken falls, nothing more.

That left him puzzled. The man had risked his life to lure them here, for this?

An ant hiding behind a great tree, waiting for an elephant to come along — and then sticking out one leg…

To trip it once?

That didn’t add up.

And at this same moment, on the other side, Li Chi, Elder Ye, Zhang Yuxu, and Peng Shiqi — all four of them — had slipped inside the walls of Gao County.

They stopped inside the county magistrate’s compound, the same place where Li Chi had killed so many men the night before. Li Chi kept his voice low: “Spread out. Stay hidden. There are too many of them, so we have to split them apart. They won’t be able to avoid it, even if they want to stay together.”

Elder Ye asked, “Should we not wait until tonight?”

Li Chi shook his head. “Killing is urgent work.”

He looked at the weapons left in the courtyard — bows, crossbows. He went over and picked up a bow, took a quiver.

“I don’t like killing. Not at all.”

Li Chi tightened his grip on the bow, looked toward a high point across the way, and walked toward it with long strides.

“So when I want to kill someone — I don’t want to wait. Not even a moment.”

As Li Chi had always said.

Vengeance in ten years is still vengeance?

What is there to boast about if you have to wait ten years for it?

A grudge — repay it on the spot.