If the existence of evil men makes ordinary people afraid — then whose existence makes evil men afraid?

Ours.

We are not good men. We simply enjoy killing those who are wicked.

The moment Prince Ning Li Chi and his people donned their Yaksha face masks, it was a declaration that there was no second option before them — only killing.

That Yaksha mask was a signal. It meant: kill first.

Gui Yuanshu relished this kind of rule. He relished this kind of style. And he relished this kind of mask.

One slash — the constable before him was split in two. The body crumpled to the ground, blood spreading slowly across the floor. The sole of Gui Yuanshu’s boot pressed down and passed through it.

“Who are you!”

Yin Chang shouted in fury.

Gui Yuanshu closed his eyes and recalled the words that Yu Jiuling and the others had taught him. He didn’t want to get them wrong. The words were not meant for anyone else’s ears — but he still wanted to speak them properly, solemnly, without a single slip. Because he loved these words.

“Every soul you have murdered clings now to my blade as a wronged spirit. My blade is therefore unstoppable by any living hand. The wronged spirits on my blade will shred your soul to dust. Life and death are decided by this blade — by the authority of Prince Ning’s edict, I decree: you shall never be reborn into the cycle of rebirth.”

These were the words Li Chi spoke whenever he put on the Yaksha mask and took a life. Yu Jiuling and the others all knew them.

So when they donned the Yaksha mask, they spoke these words too — with one change.

Li Chi’s version contained the line: *I command the wheel of reincarnation; you shall never be reborn.*

The blade decides life and death.

What Gui Yuanshu unleashed in this moment was not merely his killing intent toward evil men — it was the uninhibited freedom he had never been permitted to express within the great city of Daxing.

One slash. One man.

Most of the people in Yin Chang’s county yamen had been dispatched elsewhere, yet there were still close to a hundred remaining. Even so, none of them could stop Gui Yuanshu’s advance. With each step he took and lifted, the sole of his boot would drag a smear of blood upward with it — as if he were forging a connection with the underworld through the blood beneath his feet, sealing a contract, consigning each soul he killed to the eighteenth level of hell with no return.

“By Prince Ning’s authority…”

Yin Chang heard those four words.

His face drained of all color in an instant. He had always believed nothing would ever bring him down — and yet the dread of it had never left him.

On the road back to Yuzhou from Yanzhou, the members of his family had spent the entire journey discussing one single question: how to place themselves beyond any power that could suppress them.

Their clan had a history of nearly two hundred years in Yanzhou, rising to become a renowned and distinguished family. In peaceful times, they had wielded great prestige and authority.

But once the armies came and rebel forces erupted across Yanzhou, the status of a distinguished family counted for nothing before naked steel.

Their prestige and authority were trampled underfoot by rebel soldiers — as were the souls they had considered so nobly elevated.

The common people they had once regarded as insects transformed into marauders and turned to degrade them in return.

So when Xu Ji’s letter arrived, inviting Yin Xin’an to enter Prince Ning’s service, the Yin family knew their opportunity had come.

But their window was narrow. After careful deliberation, they concluded they had three years at most — perhaps as few as two — to accomplish what they intended.

While Prince Ning remained unable to attend to Yuzhou, and while the Grand General Tang Pidi held the front lines, they could openly accumulate power in Yuzhou without check.

In that time, no one could make a single error. Whoever erred would be immediately cut off by the family.

They had already taken control of Dengzhou and all thirty-one counties beneath it. Through their methods — vampiric in their ferocity — they accumulated wealth at extraordinary speed.

In a single small county like Shang’an, they had over six hundred constables and a numberless following of thugs and ruffians — which meant that from one county seat alone, they could at a moment’s notice field a force of more than a thousand.

Add to that the jianghu fighters who could be bought and the soldiers who could be recruited: when the Yin family gave the order to rise, those thirty-one counties could rapidly assemble a force of at least fifty thousand.

They had no intention — and no courage — to face Prince Ning’s soldiers head-on, nor did they dare cross blades with Grand General Tang Pidi.

Their plan was different. Come next spring, they would consolidate their forces, take all of Dengzhou’s wealth and grain, then swing wide around Yang Xuanji’s army and press into Jingzhou from the other side.

Their goal was precise and unambiguous: not hegemony, not the throne — they knew their own limitations. What they wanted was a force in their hands, so that no matter who ultimately became emperor, they would have the leverage to negotiate their place.

More than anything, with tens of thousands of soldiers behind them, they need never again fear being bullied by rebel warlords.

And so, as far as the Yin family was concerned, any emperor would be better than Prince Ning.

To this end, the Yin family had also been secretly in contact with Yang Xuanji, the self-styled King of Heaven’s Mandate.

The previous year, while Tang Pidi drove his campaign eastward and Yuzhou stood thinly defended, the Yin family had sent word to Yang Xuanji.

Which was why Yang Xuanji dispatched one of his senior commanders at the head of one hundred and fifty thousand troops to strike into Yuzhou.

This had forced Tang Pidi to abandon his eastward plans and wheel his forces back, committing everything to stopping Yang Xuanji’s Heaven’s Mandate Army.

The Yin family’s scheme was extensive and intricate. They would exploit every available opportunity to eliminate Tang Pidi, or to engineer a crushing defeat of the Ning Army in Yuzhou.

Toward that end, they had devised multiple contingency strategies, ready to adapt at any moment.

If they could combine with Yang Xuanji to destroy Tang Pidi, they would forgo the march on Jingzhou and instead seize more of Yuzhou in the aftermath, later trading Yuzhou as their bargaining chip with Yang Xuanji.

If Yang Xuanji failed to kill Tang Pidi, the plan remained: march on Jingzhou with their thousand-strong forces. Jingzhou was a prize worth having — it was the symbolic heart of power over the Central Plains.

For more than two years, they had been a colony of bloodsuckers, and Dengzhou was their enormous host.

They had no qualms about draining Dengzhou dry. They never intended to stay.

In a world of chaos, every man with power seeks more power. Every man who has the capability but lacks power seeks to gain it.

—

Inside the county yamen.

When Yin Chang heard the words *Prince Ning’s authority*, the figure before him in the Yaksha mask seemed to have ceased being a man at all — as if something had stepped out of hell itself.

“Kill him — kill him!” Yin Chang’s voice came out hoarse as he ordered his men to swarm Gui Yuanshu.

Someone fired a signal flare. Gui Yuanshu saw it arc up into the darkness and exhaled quietly.

He knew his time was running short. His brothers had drawn off as many of the enemy as possible, but the moment all those forces converged back on the county yamen, even he could not take Yin Chang alone.

So he killed with more savagery than before.

From the main gate of the yamen to the position where Yin Chang had been standing was roughly sixty paces.

In those sixty paces, Gui Yuanshu killed over forty men.

But by the time he cut his way through, Yin Chang was nowhere to be seen — he had slipped away during the fighting.

Gui Yuanshu stepped into the rear courtyard, and the moment he came through the door, a constable who had been hiding behind it brought a blade down at his neck.

The blade had barely fallen when Gui Yuanshu’s left hand shot out, fingers hooking into the man’s mouth and wrenching downward. The man collapsed face-first to the ground.

Gui Yuanshu placed his foot on the constable’s skull. It burst like a watermelon struck by a hammer — caved inward, crushed, a sight that turned the stomach.

There were still a number of men in the rear courtyard. Gui Yuanshu didn’t rush toward the study at the back — instead he cut around the building and ran for the rear gate.

Rounding the corner, he spotted several dark shapes sprinting toward the rear gate in the moonlight. The ferocity in Gui Yuanshu’s eyes deepened.

He hurled his long blade. The rearmost fleeing figure was pierced through the skull, the blade tip punching out through the bridge of the nose. The man pitched forward and fell.

Gui Yuanshu was there in an instant. He wrenched his blade free from the corpse, then drove it through the back of the constable directly before him.

The cut severed the spine. The man crumpled to the ground, writhing and wailing, unable to move — like a worm being slowly roasted.

“Good sir!”

Yin Chang had nearly reached the gate when Gui Yuanshu’s foot caught him square in the back and sent him sprawling. He immediately began pleading. “If you spare my life, I’ll give you everything — more silver than you can imagine.”

“I won’t need you to give it,” Gui Yuanshu said. “I’ll take it myself.”

He drove his long blade downward. Halfway through the motion, he turned it — and brought the flat of the blade crashing down on Yin Chang’s skull.

A resonant thud. Yin Chang’s eyes rolled back and he crumpled, knocked senseless.

If not for broader considerations, this blow should rightfully have split Yin Chang in half.

Gui Yuanshu crouched, hauled Yin Chang up, and slung him over one shoulder. Then he kicked the rear gate clean off its hinges.

A few steps out, he reached into his coat, produced a signal flare, and sent it arcing into the sky as he walked.

The Espionage Guard soldiers hidden near the city gates saw the signal and immediately charged toward him.

At the restaurant, the besieging constables had already pulled back some time ago, recalled to the yamen.

The four at the restaurant looked at each other, then simultaneously burst out laughing.

They walked out of the restaurant and stood in the street, watching the sky for the signal.

“The superior officer has done it.”

Zheng Shunshun raised a hand and wiped blood from his face. “He must have already taken Yin Chang. Let’s go meet up with him.”

The four of them headed toward where the signal had risen.

Constable Captain Yin Xincheng came racing back from the restaurant and stepped through the yamen gates to find dismembered limbs scattered everywhere.

Whatever kind of killer had broken in here, the carnage was something else.

He ran to the rear courtyard and questioned the survivors, only learning then that Yin Chang had already been taken away.

“Sound the gongs and drums — get everyone out here to search!” Yin Xincheng roared. “Forget everything else for now — we rescue the magistrate first!”

A group of constables snatched up brass gongs and sprinted out, striking them in rapid clanging beats as they ran.

In this small county seat, there were also a fair number of fighters Yin Chang had quietly recruited. They lived like ordinary residents day to day, but they had all received Yin Chang’s silver.

When the gongs rang out, the whole county was jarred awake. Gradually, every lamp and candle in every household across the county seat flickered to life.

From all directions, Yin Chang’s people came streaming in — local toughs, street ruffians, figures from the shadow world, jianghu fighters, gambling den enforcers, restaurant hands — all of them summoned by the gongs.

In a great rush of torchlight and noise, the streets blazed to life.

The over-six-hundred-strong constable force had not suffered catastrophic losses — forty or fifty at the yamen had been killed by Gui Yuanshu alone; about a hundred at the restaurant had been killed or put out of action by Zheng Shunshun’s group. The remaining five hundred were still on their feet, and with all the assorted rabble added in, nearly fifteen hundred people assembled outside the yamen gates.

Yin Xincheng shouted, “The county magistrate has been taken! But the criminals are still inside the city — they can’t get out! Everyone: fan out and search every street and alley. Find the magistrate, rescue him, and tear those scoundrels limb from limb!”

“Yes!”

They responded with a roar and scattered in every direction.

Yin Xincheng turned to his constables. “Keep those gongs going. Order every single person out to help — tell them: any household that doesn’t come out, regardless of age or sex, will die!”

He gritted his teeth and said, “I refuse to believe that in Shang’an County, these bastards can just walk out of here.”

—