Yu Jiuling had run for his life. After plunging into the woods, he still had the presence of mind to wonder whether he ought to add an honorable epithet to his name.

*The Man Who Raced a Horse for His Life.*

*The Fellow Who Outruns Stallions?*

He kept running until he burst out the far side of the forest, then turned to look behind him. The horse bandits were nowhere to be seen.

Yu Jiuling nimbly hauled himself up a tree, thinking the higher vantage would help — and immediately realized what a fool he’d been. He was in the middle of a forest. The view from up here was worse than from the ground; nothing but a dense tangle of branches in every direction. Still, since he’d already climbed up, he figured he might as well hide here for a while.

He crouched in the fork of the tree and watched the direction he’d come from. A long, long time passed without anyone approaching, and he finally allowed himself to be certain he was safe.

Crouching in a tree fork for so long made his legs go faintly numb — but that wasn’t the pressing issue. The pressing issue was that after crouching for so long, he needed to… relieve himself.

He suddenly recalled that the last time he’d crouched in a tree like this, a woman had eventually climbed up to join him. That time, she’d gotten away.

—

Inside Gao County’s town walls.

Gongshu Yingying studied Xiu Luoluo’s face and saw in this man’s expression a profound, settled killing intent.

This man was clearly someone of great self-confidence — arrogance, even. He had just been made to look foolish by an opponent he’d underestimated, and he couldn’t accept it.

This was precisely what Gongshu Yingying found so amusing and childish about men: for the sake of face, they would do spectacularly stupid things.

All the way back to the Gao County yamen, she kept watching him. Xiu Luoluo seemed to sense her gaze, glancing sidelong at her from time to time.

She pressed her lips into a smile.

It had to be said — that blend of seductiveness and girlish coyness was genuinely the sort of thing that stirred a man’s heart.

The horse bandits in particular couldn’t stop staring at Gongshu Yingying; beautiful women were a rare sight in their lives. And Xiu Luoluo was not so different — he had lived alone since leaving Black Wu, and having a reasonably attractive woman look at him like that produced a faint, pleasant itch somewhere inside him.

So Gongshu Yingying deliberately pushed out her chest. Her features were beautiful; so was her figure.

But just then, an arrow came flying straight for her.

*Snap.* Xiu Luoluo’s hand shot out and snatched the arrow from the air in front of her face — almost exactly as he had caught the spear the night before.

This gave Xiu Luoluo pause.

“Why does he keep trying to kill you?”

He scanned the direction the arrow had come from. No one was visible — which meant he now had a pretty good guess. The figure who had lured them away just now had not been the Night Demon at all. The real Night Demon had taken advantage of the diversion to conceal himself somewhere in the town. Last night’s hunt had been cut short; now he was continuing it in daylight.

“So he may not be after us at all. He’s hunting you — and you led him straight to us.”

Xiu Luoluo looked Gongshu Yingying in the eye.

She shook her head. “Impossible. I spent over half a month camped outside Jizhou. No one found me. I have no enemies.”

He studied her eyes and saw no deceit — yet he didn’t believe her.

He didn’t believe in ghosts or monsters. He didn’t believe in coincidences, either.

Before they crossed paths with Gongshu Yingying, they had ridden south from beyond the northern passes and encountered no such nonsense as a Night Demon.

If the Night Demon had come seeking vengeance for the civilians they’d slaughtered, then they’d killed plenty of people along the way south — so why had the Night Demon never appeared before?

His conclusion was certain: this Night Demon was hunting Gongshu Yingying.

“Someone’s after you. The Night Demon is hunting you down. You knew you couldn’t stop him and couldn’t outrun him, so you deliberately wove yourself into our group.”

Xiu Luoluo said, “Your scheming mind is a vicious thing.”

Gongshu Yingying flared with anger. “Are you an idiot?”

She gave a cold snort. “I joined your group — not because I sought you out, but because your people came to me.”

Xiu Luoluo opened his mouth to reply, but at that moment wails erupted from the rear of the column. Someone had been hit by an arrow and tumbled from his saddle, thrashing on the ground for a few moments before going still — a precise shot, straight to a vital point.

“That’s impossible,” Chudong said, her face going pale. “The arrow just now came from ahead of us. For someone to reach the rear of our column this fast — no lightness arts are quick enough for that.”

Xiu Luoluo looked at her as if she were a simpleton. “You still think it’s one person?”

Another cry of pain — this time from the side. An arrow punched through a bandit’s throat and lodged there. Xiu Luoluo spurred forward, dropped from the saddle, yanked the shaft free; a gush of blood followed it out.

“These are our own arrows,” he said. “They snuck into our camp while we were leaving town and stole our bows and quivers. They didn’t even have ranged weapons of their own — so there’s nothing to fear.”

He continued, “They’re hoping to scatter us — a few high-level fighters staging endless ambushes, picking us off one by one. If they think that will work, they’re thinking too shallowly.”

He raised his voice and gave the order: “Burn it. Burn the whole town down.”

At a single command, the ferocious horse bandits dismounted and set torch to wood, moving through the streets as a single mass — walking together, setting fires as they went, not breaking formation.

Xiu Luoluo’s expression remained perfectly composed. “I don’t care about this town. I don’t care how many houses burn or how many people die.”

Even Gongshu Yingying felt a chill at those words.

The bandits went from building to building. One house after another caught fire; the light grew and grew, the blaze hotter and broader with every passing moment.

From the shadows, Mister Ye watched the bandits set the town alight, and the killing intent in his eyes deepened.

He was no great archer — but his inner energy was formidable.

He scooped up a handful of pebbles from the ground, stepped around a corner, and hurled them at the bandits. They flew faster than arrows; the stones punched clean through skulls. In moments, four or five men lay dead.

“Over there!” A bandit shouted, and arrows flew toward Mister Ye’s position.

The bandit column was massive in numbers. Without dispersing, Li Chi and the others had no way to carve directly through it.

But if the bandits didn’t disperse to chase, what was the point of staying together?

Li Chi had said: *make them scatter the column — they have no choice but to scatter.*

This was Li Chi’s tactic: four people in continuous ambush, and all four of them consummate experts.

If the bandits refused to divide their forces and simply kept burning, Li Chi’s group could just as easily ignore the fires and keep killing.

Xiu Luoluo’s strategy was fundamentally sound — burning the town to flush his enemies out into the open, or drive them away. In the flat, open land outside the walls, even the strongest jianghu fighters couldn’t withstand a mounted charge from several hundred bandits.

He had simply underestimated one thing.

His enemies killed far too fast.

While the bandits were setting fires, they were dropping, one after another — and no one could even tell from which direction the blows were coming.

The flames rose higher and higher; Li Chi’s group was never flushed into the open. But the bandits’ casualties kept mounting.

With four people, Li Chi had reduced a force of several hundred horse bandits to something utterly incapable of striking back. Such was the art of tactics at its finest.

The Thirty-Six Stratagems that Mister Li had left behind had been an immeasurable gift; Li Chi had read them countless times and gleaned something new with every reading. A person who reads rigidly applies what they’ve read rigidly — but the business of tactics had always been about living application. Different circumstances demanded different expressions of the same principle.

Because people differed from one another, many learned tactics, yet true great commanders numbered only a handful.

“Out of the town!”

Xiu Luoluo finally abandoned the idea of flushing his enemies out. He shouted the command, and the bandits — already long since panicked — scrambled onto their horses and surged toward the gate.

Li Chi saw this and immediately signaled to Peng Shiqiu and Zhang Yuxu. The two little chubby Daoists understood at once and peeled away.

Li Chi had prepared for this. The two of them sprinted for the town gate and arrived there before the leading bandits could reach it. By the time they had climbed to the top of the wall, the bandit column was thundering toward the passage below.

“Damn it—”

In a flash of desperation, Zhang Yuxu slammed his shoulder into a battlement. The wall was old and long unmaintained; it wasn’t very solid to begin with. The impact cracked the merlon, but it didn’t break loose and fall.

Peng Shiqiu saw the lead bandits already reaching the gate. No time to think — he turned around, put his backside against the battlement, and gave a mighty heave…

That one rump-thrust sent the merlon crashing straight down. Several bandits below were crushed to death.

The two of them knocked loose three battlements in succession, raining rubble through the gate passage, killing a few men and choking the column’s pace to a crawl even if they couldn’t fully block it.

With no bows left, the two little chubby Daoists grabbed stones and hurled them down. Even an ordinary person dropping a rock from height can kill — let alone two experts like these, with inner energy behind every throw and accuracy to match. The bandits below scattered in panicked retreat, clutching their heads.

Their numbers were vast, and their rage had reached its boiling point. Howling, they surged up the rampart access slope, determined to kill the two men above.

Peng Shiqiu glanced over and saw the mob flooding up toward them. He shouted a warning at Zhang Yuxu — *watch yourself and don’t die* — then immediately turned and ran.

Zhang Yuxu yelled back — *same to you* — and also turned and ran.

They didn’t even run in the same direction. One went left, one went right. The bandits who had reached the top of the wall split apart in pursuit.

Watching this, Xiu Luoluo’s face turned a grim iron-grey. His enemy numbered only a handful of people, yet they had reduced his entire force to this humiliating shambles. It was naked, undisguised mockery.

Black Wu people were born proud — they carried an innate contempt for the people of the Central Plains. One could only imagine the fury burning in him now.

And it was in this very moment that he noticed someone was missing from beside him.

The woman who had been smiling at him was gone — vanished at some point during the burning, when she had still been standing not far away.

Xiu Luoluo’s fury blazed hotter still.

—

At a different gate, Gongshu Yingying spurred her horse forward. She glanced back, the ghost of a contemptuous smile at the corner of her lips.

Those damned men could all go and die — she wasn’t about to throw her life away here. She had slipped away quietly in the chaos; no one had noticed. This was precisely what she was best at. Over all these years, her instinct for danger had always been sharper than other people’s, and her methods of evading it always more effective.

This was she didn’t know how many times she’d successfully escaped catastrophe — so of course she felt rather pleased with herself.

She urged her horse onward and charged toward the gate.

Her horse was halfway through the gateway when someone appeared at the side of the wall — no sooner had the animal’s body cleared the threshold than a foot slammed into it.

The force of that kick was staggering.

The horse screamed and toppled sideways. The completely unprepared Gongshu Yingying was nearly pinned underneath.

Her reflexes had always been quick — quicker than anyone’s, which was why she’d escaped from so many dangers before. In this moment, they saved her again: in the instant before she hit the ground, she pushed off against the horse’s flank and launched herself clear.

She hadn’t even had time to exhale before a fist the size of a large bowl arrived.

*Crack.*

The punch landed directly on Gongshu Yingying’s beautiful, bewitching face — and shattered it.

She was sent flying backward, her spine slamming into the wall. She began to slide down — hadn’t slid an inch before a knee arrived.

A dark shape swept in; the knee crashed with tremendous force into Gongshu Yingying’s chest. Under the impact, her torso caved inward.

Her beautiful face had exploded. Her beautiful figure had exploded.

At the instant the knee connected with her chest, a plume of dust and debris burst from the wall behind her back.

—