An army of some twenty thousand closed in quickly on the mountain where Cao Lie was hiding, sealing off every road in and out with equal speed.

The mountain was not particularly high, nor especially steep. At this time of year, the sparse woodland offered little in the way of long-term concealment.

So Mu Fengliu was confident: this time, Cao Lie truly had no way out.

Had Mei Yan not been killed, it might well have been he himself nearly caught off guard by an ambush.

The elite operatives of the Shanhe Seal, moving unseen in the shadows and waiting for their moment — that was a threat no one could guard against indefinitely.

So while Mu Fengliu was infuriated at his failure to breach Dragon’s Head Pass, the current turn of events brought him a certain satisfaction.

Cao Lie had already moved to kill him. Better to discover it early than to realize it too late.

At the base of the mountain, the forces had taken up formation, waiting only for Mu Fengliu’s signal.

He raised his eyes toward the heights — and spotted what appeared to be a cluster of scattered flame. Someone had deliberately lit a bonfire, as if afraid they couldn’t be found, posting a beacon to guide the way, practically calling out: *Here I am, come and get me.*

Mu Fengliu’s brow furrowed slightly. He knew Cao Lie was a man of considerable composure. A deliberate fire at a moment like this almost certainly meant he had something prepared.

Then again — it could also mean Cao Lie had nowhere left to run, and was staging a false show of confidence to buy time for an escape while the opposing force hesitated to charge.

Because both possibilities existed, Mu Fengliu faced exactly the kind of situation he despised: a gamble.

Mu Fengliu had never liked gambling. He managed vast underground operations for the Shanhe Seal — shadow banking houses, clandestine casinos. He had built an empire out of other people’s impulse to wager.

But he himself never played. Not once. In his view, gambling was the most pointless of all human activities.

To squander luck on gambling was the most wasteful choice imaginable.

He understood clearly: everyone who loves to gamble eventually loses.

“Search the mountain!”

He gave the order, eyes fixed on that point of firelight above, his mind occupied by a single thought: yes, he was gambling — but so was Cao Lie, and Cao Lie had no good cards left to play.

What did Cao Lie have? That fast and brutal killer?

One master-level fighter, facing tens of thousands — utterly meaningless. Not even worth accounting for.

He moved up the mountain with the search party, because he knew Cao Lie too well. If he didn’t go personally, even if Liu Feng and Zhao Ba managed to surround Cao Lie, those two would never be able to handle him.

Because Cao Lie was also an exceptionally skilled talker, and a man like that was genuinely dangerous.

Most people assumed that being good with words had little practical value — a shallow assumption.

Throughout all of history, how many men had talked their way into splitting an empire? How many had talked their way into unifying one?

So Mu Fengliu had to go himself. He had to watch Cao Lie die with his own eyes.

The search party moved quickly. Soon they reached the source of the firelight — and there Mu Fengliu saw him.

That expression of Cao Lie’s, unchanged since the last time they’d met — the one that had always rankled him.

Yes. He had always loathed Cao Lie. With a deep, abiding loathing.

No matter how respectfully he had behaved, no matter how much he had deferred, no matter how carefully he had concealed it — that loathing had never fully been suppressed. So he had compensated by being even more careful, ensuring Cao Lie never glimpsed it.

In his eyes, Cao Lie was a person who embodied every quality he despised: noble birth, arrogance, self-assurance — a complete and insufferable package.

A person like that was born on a platform already far above where most people ever reached after a lifetime of striving. The highest point another person could claw their way to through years of effort might not even reach the ground beneath Cao Lie’s feet.

Was such a person not deserving of resentment?

The more he had humbled himself before Cao Lie, the more his contempt for the man had grown.

Because his own origins were, in a word, wretched — not merely distant from the word *good*, but entirely unrelated to it.

Within the Black Martial Empire, people were sorted into explicit castes, their boundaries as unbreachable as iron walls ten spans thick and a hundred spans high.

At the apex sat the Black Martial imperial family. Below them, the other branches of the Ghost Moon Eight Clans. Then the various Black Martial tribal peoples, then steppe nomads, then Central Plains people, then Bohai people…

In the Black Martial Empire, even a dog belonging to a noble was of higher standing than a Bohai person. A Bohai person’s value was equivalent to that of a slave — or a sheep.

And was there anyone within the Black Martial Empire ranked below even the Bohai?

There was. People like Mu Fengliu.

He was born of a steppe tribesman and a Bohai woman — which meant, from the moment he drew his first breath, he ranked below slaves. In Black Martial eyes, a child of such a union was the lowest of the low.

Black Martial law explicitly barred people of his background from government positions, from official service, from any path that might place them on equal footing with the noble classes.

Of course, such regulations were not entirely unbreakable — extraordinary merit could, in theory, transcend them.

Given his birth, if he wanted to rise to the level of someone like Cao Lie in the Black Martial Empire, Mu Fengliu would need to create merit of a legendary scale.

Something like: becoming the foremost architect of the Central Plains’ destruction.

He had come as a young man. He had been embedded in the Central Plains for at least thirty years, building himself into a successful merchant — one who could live in luxury surpassing the vast majority of Central Plains traders.

There had been a period, once, when he had found himself repeatedly whispering to himself: *Just let it be. This is enough.*

But he could never escape the Blue Tribunal’s surveillance. He knew they had seeded countless shadow operatives throughout the Central Plains.

And what frightened him most was not the high-blooded Black Martial nobles, but people like himself — because those people, when they turned on him, would show not a shred of mercy.

In the Black Martial expression: a bear doesn’t earn standing by betraying a dog, because a bear is simply a bear. But a dog can earn slightly higher standing by betraying another dog — like becoming, say, a *good* dog.

The Black Martial had leveraged this perfectly, stationing multiple operatives of similarly lowborn origin around Mu Fengliu to watch him.

In thirty years, he had quietly eliminated at least several dozen of them — and he knew perfectly well there were still more in the shadows.

So he dared not defect. He understood too clearly what the Black Martial did to traitors.

And now, he stood within reach of success.

True, he had failed to push the Shanhai Army through Dragon’s Head Pass, failed to arrive in time for the coordinated northern operation with the Black Martial Empire’s main force.

But single-handedly, he had thrown Yanzhou, Jizhou, and Qingzhou into chaos.

He calculated that with Li Chi’s forces — even with Prince Ning’s backing — there was no way to hold back the Black Martial Empire’s vast southern campaign army.

He couldn’t enter Jizhou himself, but he was confident the Black Martial army had already crossed its borders.

His contribution would stand, and no one could erase it.

If only he were a god, he would have known — the Black Martial Empire had suffered catastrophic losses from the start, losing their great general Chizhu Liuli and over a hundred thousand soldiers before being forced to withdraw.

Had he known, he would never have made the choice he had. He would have gone on hiding, continuing to play the role of Cao Lie’s loyal subordinate.

So in the moment he laid eyes on Cao Lie, Mu Fengliu finally felt something rise within him — a fierce, long-suppressed exhilaration.

He knew a person shouldn’t become too elated. Elation breeds mistakes. He himself had taught Cao Lie this. He hadn’t forgotten it.

Yet in this moment, he found he could not entirely suppress it.

“Young Master.”

Mu Fengliu was actually able to clasp his hands and bow with perfect courtesy.

And Cao Lie, somehow, was able to return the greeting with equal composure: “Master Mu.”

Mu Fengliu asked: “Young Master came here to kill me?”

Cao Lie smiled. “Kill you? Why would I… I came here to kill all of you.”

His gaze swept across the men who had surrounded him, as if seeing nothing but a landscape of future corpses.

Mu Fengliu smiled. “What I have always admired most about Young Master is precisely this confidence. Even at a moment like this, your composure is truly impressive.”

“There’s no such thing as composure without cause,” Cao Lie replied. “If you were to see an ant crossing your path and simply tap a finger beside it, the ant would scatter in terror. If you spotted a wild hare hiding in the grass and did nothing more than cough, the hare would bolt in blind panic — so composure is something that simply does not belong to certain types of creatures by nature.”

He smiled. “The composure Master Mu appears to display right now, for instance, is entirely performed.”

Mu Fengliu felt the words land like a needle in the chest.

Yet he showed nothing — maintained his smile and replied evenly: “Then I must ask Young Master — can your genuine composure save your life?”

Cao Lie shook his head. “It cannot. Composure doesn’t save lives. But it allows one to face death with dignity.”

Mu Fengliu said: “I genuinely did not know when Young Master became someone willing to face death with dignity.”

Cao Lie said: “Then let me tell you — it was the moment I learned you were a running dog of the Black Martial Empire.”

Mu Fengliu gave a slight shrug. “You are about to die, so what is the point of such fabrications? You call me a running dog of the Black Martial Empire — by that logic, couldn’t I just as well call you a loyal hound of the Bohai people?”

Cao Lie paused. “Ah — so you’re Bohai.”

Mu Fengliu blinked.

Cao Lie said pleasantly: “A Bohai person — someone who, in Black Martial eyes, ranks below even a slave.”

He raised his thumb. “Then Master Mu is truly remarkable. Loyalty of such… profound degradation. The Black Martial would certainly appreciate it.”

Mu Fengliu felt a flash of regret — why had he allowed himself, just for a moment, to let that satisfaction slip through?

He should never have said a word to Cao Lie. He should simply have given the order to cut him down with arrows on the spot.

Fortunately, it was still not too late.

So Mu Fengliu raised one finger and pointed at Cao Lie. “Send him off.”

But Cao Lie’s smile only broadened, and he pointed toward the mountain’s base. “You know — people like me never accept a loss. That has always been the one thing I simply cannot abide. I can only come out ahead.”

Following the direction of his gesture, Mu Fengliu turned to look down at the valley — and saw nothing. The mountain’s base was as dark and still as it had always been.

In that same instant, something appeared in Cao Lie’s hand. He raised it high, and a flare shot up into the night sky — blossoming open at tremendous height, blazing against the absolute darkness, brilliant and resplendent.

A heartbeat later, an ocean of fire erupted at the base of the mountain.

Cao Lie smiled. “I traded my willing walk toward death to lure you here. Your life, plus tens of thousands of bandit soldiers — it still doesn’t equal mine in value. But then I think: with the bandits broken, the Central Plains is preserved. Suddenly my life looks like quite a good deal.”

Below, tens of thousands of soldiers from the Baishan Army had encircled the Shanhai Army’s forces entirely.

Cao Lie turned to Mu Fengliu: “You really should not have played with so many people’s lives. It always leads to making enemies — and look, the enemies you made happen to be exactly the people I could use. You engineered the death of the Baishan Army’s chief commander. You arranged for someone to humiliate a Baishan Army general’s wife. Those things… have a way of coming back.”

Below, war horns rang out.

The Baishan Army, coming for vengeance, descended like a pack of tigers.

Cao Lie let out a long, slow breath and closed his hand around the hilt of the Jingzhe blade standing upright in the earth beside him.

Death comes in many forms.

The least wasteful kind is, of course, a life traded for a life — and the more lives you take in exchange, the better the trade.

—