Heat surged, smoke and dust filled the air. Throughout the teahouse, tiles and dust rained down from every corner, and the chaotic shouts out on the street seemed to carry in from somewhere far away.

The figure with blade and shield had already pushed forward through the gray haze.

The drifting smoke still spread outward on all sides; the ears of nearly everyone in the teahouse still rang with that droning hum. Near a section of the inner wall, the pulsing of the smoke turned suddenly savage and violent as the whistling clash resumed.

The swinging long blade traced a sharp arc through the air in an instant, blood spraying and scattering in its wake, dust rising in clouds where blade met shield. Each collision between the assassin and “White Asura” sent a whole cloud of dust exploding outward. “Dragon Blade” Xiang Dasong’s steel blade danced wildly, carving paths through the air that seemed etched right into the smoke itself. His “Dragon Blade” clashed twice, heavily, against the man’s shield, his mouth bellowing curses the whole while, the very air shaking with the force of it — followed, in the midst of that cursing, by a sudden cough.

The assassin’s steel blade swept back in a whistling arc, a heavy, ferocious stroke that cut clean through the dust and struck Xiang Dasong’s shin with a “thwack.”

A terrible spray of blood.

Xiang Dasong was called “Dragon Blade” not only for his towering, powerful build but for the sheer ferocity of his swordsmanship, fierce as a demon god’s. As he charged forward, blade raised, he stood nearly half a head taller than the assassin coming to meet him, his roar alone enough to terrify. Yet this attacking assassin was no less savage, and as that stroke fell, it sheared clean through flesh and bone, snapping Xiang Dasong’s thick shin in two.

Human muscle and bone might look fragile against a blade’s edge, but in truth they have considerable resistance — much like a pig’s trotter on a butcher’s block, where even a heavy cleaver cannot easily sever the leg-bone in a single stroke. But this assassin’s long blade struck with both weight and precision; one moment it had been attacking “White Asura” He Qinzhao, and the very instant a cough sounded, it had already come chopping down. Xiang Dasong, like some great charging bull, crashed to the ground in agony under that single stroke, dust exploding outward.

A guard charged in; the assassin’s long blade swept back in a reverse stroke, a streak of white light flashing upward through the air, and the guard’s chest seemed swallowed by a wave of death itself. After the sickening crack of shattering bone, he was knocked into the stair railing beside him and tumbled, rumbling, down to the ground floor.

“Waaugh—”

Even having crashed to the floor, Xiang Dasong remained fierce — his right leg broken, he drove hard with his left, hurling his body forward, arms reaching to seize the assassin’s legs.

Blade in one hand, shield in the other, the assassin’s footwork traced a circle; in that same instant he kicked out, striking the airborne Xiang Dasong squarely in the forehead, his own body leaping forward.

Xiang Dasong crashed as though into an iron wall, his body freezing mid-air before falling once more.

Ahead, the old man called “Fifteen Strings,” Yu Ci, had only just clambered up out of the dust when he saw the assassin roll and lunge toward him. He too was an old hand of the jianghu; with a flick of his wrist and a cry of “Ah!” he hurled out the iron top in his grip with all his strength — this was an extremely technique-demanding, unconventional weapon: the iron top in front to smash a man’s skull, a three-pronged dart trailing behind to strike at vulnerable points, and between them a tough metal wire that, once looped around a man’s neck, could kill in an instant with a single pull from both ends. The iron top, trailing its wire, cut a sudden arc through the air, aiming to snare the assassin’s body. The assassin, shield forward and blade raised behind, charged straight in to meet it.

Amid the dust, the old man threw everything he had into the struggle, grappling with the assassin as the two figures crashed together into a nearby cluster of tables and chairs. The metal wire and iron top struck the floorboards with a clang as the old man pulled at the wire, wrestling with the assassin, the three-pronged dart in his other hand stabbing with an “Ah” toward the man’s face. Farther off, “Ox Demon” Xu Batian charged in swinging his great axe, and amid the roiling dust, saw the old man suddenly shoved toward him by the assassin.

“Ox Demon’s” axe chopped down toward the ground; Yu Ci’s back and side collided with him. In a swirl of dust, the old man, both hands still gripping desperately at the steel blade before him, felt it plunge into his belly, while the shield pressed against his face. The old man said, “Don’t—”

The next instant, the steel blade twisted with a jerk and was dragged back out.

On the battlefield, once a blade sinks into the gut, it twists.

“Ox Demon” Xu Batian swung his great axe with a roar; the assassin’s steps shifted to the side; “Fifteen Strings” Yu Ci tried to clutch at his belly, but the fingers of one hand were gone entirely, his body swaying amid the dust…

Shi Weiyang coughed, stumbling as he walked.

In the time since he’d clambered back up, he had remained somewhat dazed, his hearing muddled, his sense of direction unclear. Shouts and the sounds of fighting seemed to drift in from somewhere nearby, but for a moment he couldn’t tell one voice from another. It was only after he walked to a wall and back again that the sounds and commotion of the fighting grew steadily louder.

Amid the swirling dust, someone called out, someone let out a cry of despair — but more than anything, wave after wave of coughing kept building louder and louder.

Something came flying, striking wetly against his burning, aching cheek. Shi Weiyang steadied his eyes and looked ahead, and saw that the venerable master Yu Ci — who only moments ago had carried himself with all the bearing of a world-weary sage — was slowly shaking his head, half his body drenched in blood. What had just struck Shi Weiyang’s face was, in fact, the contents of the old man’s own belly.

“Ox Demon’s” axe swept whistling through the air, his face contorted in a scream, but the next instant, amid the dust, came a violent collision — Xu Batian, man and axe together, was sent flying by the savage figure’s charge.

A blood-soaked guard rushed in from the side, shouting, only to be blocked by one stroke, then struck by a second.

The figure with blade and shield, cloth wrapped over his face, turned to look this way. His body, too, was covered in dust, but even more in the blood he’d shed. Behind that cloth, his eyes were cold and merciless — and they had already found Shi Weiyang.

From the moment the bamboo pole first came flying through the teahouse, to the explosion after the man had landed, to this present moment of raging slaughter, no more than a few moments had passed — yet the assassin had already fought his way, alone and unaided, out of a chaos of countless struggling figures. This was, up to this point in his life, the most perilous moment Shi Weiyang had ever experienced. His hands, his body, even his face still burned with pain, but the fear and crisis welling up from deep inside him had already grown wild beyond control. He let out a “Waaah—” and shoved aside a toppled table beside him, fleeing once more toward the rear, as a guard beside him charged toward the assassin!

For all the ages that the jianghu wanderers of this world had largely remained an unruly, undisciplined lot, those who could truly make a name for themselves in this world were, for the most part, desperate men who lived and died by the blade. This was especially true within the vast Fair Party — whether these were renowned heroes of the jianghu taken in as guests by Shi Baofeng, or the many bodyguards who followed Shi Weiyang, most of them, arranged here now by Jin Yongsheng, possessed formidable skill and were, without exception, hardened men with blood on their hands, men who did not hesitate to kill.

And so, even thrown into disarray by the sudden explosion, those still able to rise despite their ringing heads and spinning vision still charged forward without hesitation. “Dragon Blade,” his shin shattered, still roared aloud amid the dust; “White Asura” He Qinzhao, soaked in blood after taking a blade, still staggered forward, trying to press the attack; “Fifteen Strings” Yu Ci, though he’d fought clumsily just before taking his wound, had unleashed, with his flying iron top and coiling metal wire, killing intent of the most extreme sharpness.

An ordinary master of the jianghu, even with the advantage of the initial explosion, dragged into chaos like this, would likely not have managed ten steps across this teahouse floor.

But what they faced in this moment was, in truth, the least “ordinary” practitioner of the martial arts in the entire realm.

Ever since coming down from the battlefield against the Jin invaders in the southwest, Ning Ji’s temperament had already undergone the most rigorous tempering; in the nearly a year that followed at Zhang Village, what he underwent went far beyond even the demands of ordinary special-warfare training. Extreme survival drills under the harshest conditions, pursuit and evasion exercises — a dozen or even several dozen veteran soldiers fresh off the battle against the Jin ganging up on him at once, unwilling to stop until Ning Ji’s face was bruised and swollen — this kind of extreme “human-post training” was something even the direct disciples of the most prestigious martial houses rarely had the chance to endure.

At bottom, it was because Ning Yi felt this son of his had too wild a temperament, and was bound, sooner or later, to have some kind of reckless adventure driven by that nature. Before he went to the battlefield, Ning Yi had hoped to talk him around, to dissuade him — but once he was on the battlefield, all that remained was to increase, by whatever means necessary, his chances of surviving whatever might come.

In that kind of extreme, brutal training, beyond all manner of escape techniques, there existed of course all sorts of painstakingly devised extreme-combat curricula. This was a direction that had been continuously refined ever since Zhou Tong had passed down his small-unit combat principles more than a decade earlier, and once gunpowder, firearms, and land mines had matured as technologies, using such tools in combination with martial skill for efficient killing had become the very core of the Huaxia Army’s special operations doctrine.

All the way from the southwest, even through the dark events at the Tongshan Li family, nothing had ever stirred up excessive rage within Ning Ji.

All along, though he was still young and relatively simple in temperament, having grown up at the very core of the southwest’s political circles, much as his elder brother might remark that “urban planning and governance is a major problem,” his father and friends, too, always spoke of the wider world with a certain broad, sweeping perspective. Which was also why the farce at Tongshan had angered him without exceeding what he had already come to expect.

And under the constant guidance of those around him in the southwest, he understood clearly enough that tragedies of this kind could only ultimately be rooted out of this earth through the gradual awakening and resistance of people like “Full of Promise” Lu Wenke.

All the way to Jiangning, his mood, for a long stretch, had remained fairly light. The repeated scuffles he’d had with the little baldhead around the city had, at bottom, been because he hadn’t invested much real emotional weight into any of it. He carried with him the warm memories passed down from his mother, having come to the hometown his parents once called their own, witnessing one absurd farce after another, and even when someone had flung the mocking title “Five-Foot Fantasy Devil” his way, that too had felt like nothing more than a harmless little episode straight out of some wuxia tale.

On the whole, it had all been rather amusing.

The already-collapsed Su family estate, its ruins still bearing traces of what once was; Xue Jin, lame and stammering, hiding beneath the bridge — it all left one feeling the strange, twisting turns of fate.

Those two people were, like the dust scattered atop the ruins of the past, living out their days beneath that bridge in miserable silence. Ning Ji had not spent much of his attention dwelling on the two of them. He would occasionally pass by the bridge and toss them something to eat; Xue Jin would kowtow beneath the bridge; while Ning Ji ran wild and loud through the city, Xue Jin would sit by the ruins of the Su estate telling stories from more than a decade ago, begging pitifully; and when the city fell into chaos, or the autumn rains poured down endlessly, Xue Jin would huddle beneath the bridge, trembling, holding his weakened wife close.

The space beneath the bridge was damp and foul, a corner of the world entirely beyond the notice of ordinary people. In the gaps between his running about the city, Ning Ji had occasionally thought that, one day, he might come by and find both of them, in whatever poor state they were in, simply gone, without a sound. He had entertained this thought before, and being himself a military physician within the Huaxia Army, he had already seen more than his share of lives slipping away…

And yet, having witnessed with his own eyes the tragic turn of events beneath the bridge, and having asked around and learned the full story of what had happened, a tremendous fury had, all at once, come surging up within him…

If Jiangning City was already, in a sense, a ruin, then the two beneath the bridge were merely a speck of dust within that ruin — dust that carried within it the traces of the past, lying there quietly. But now, in this moment, that speck of dust was about to be swept carelessly away.

The man named Shi Weiyang had displayed his power with arrogant pride, casually and unremarkably reenacting, once more, the very process by which all of this had been reduced to ruin in the first place.

The ninth of the ninth month. The Double Ninth Festival.

The young man named Ning Ji, for the first time since coming out of the southwest, unleashed the full force of slaughter upon this teahouse.

The explosives available within Jiangning were nowhere near as effective as those from the southwest.

And yet, as the powder ignited, the lime powder Ning Ji had specially mixed in scattered wildly outward, blanketing everything nearby, filling the air with a stinging, choking dust.

After the explosion, the many violent men in the teahouse struggled up from the floor, throwing themselves fully into resistance — most of them were, after all, true men who lived and died by the blade, hardened veterans of jianghu slaughter who feared nothing.

But in that tremendous blast, they had already drawn that scattered powder deep into their lungs.

The full-force melee that followed came fast and fierce; the reactions of this band of jianghu heroes were nothing if not quick, and when caught in this narrow, desperate confrontation, the sheer force they unleashed was enough to shake the soul — but the more violently they exerted themselves, the more severely the flaw caused by that dust in their lungs revealed itself.

For any master among them, it was perhaps only the briefest instant of hindrance.

But for Ning Ji, his mouth and nose covered, this was a scene of combat he had rehearsed more times than he could count.

His steps advanced, his steel blade flashing; with every stroke, bone, muscle, entrails — all of it burst apart in this savage assault swept along by the churning dust, blood scattering in sheets. That ferocious killing intent, once meant only for the battlefields of the southwest, once aimed only at imagined Jurchen enemies as its target, now spread as a river of blood through this teahouse!

The slaughter drew closer by the moment, and the closer it came, the more clearly Shi Weiyang could see just how brutal that killing truly was. One after another, men who were themselves fierce and dangerous in ordinary times were cut down or knocked aside by that assassin, drenched in blood, wounds gaping, viscous matter spraying through the air. By now he had also found the direction of the wall facing the street, but this particular stretch was a sealed wall, not an open terrace, and the charging assassin was, if anything, closer to that terrace than he was.

If he wanted to leap straight out of the teahouse through the window, he would have to charge straight at that blood-soaked assassin.

“Ox Demon” Xu Batian swung his great axe through the mist, smashing tables and chairs into flying splinters, but his figure was cut off from Shi Weiyang by the assassin, now much farther away.

“Save — me—”

Shi Weiyang screamed hysterically, then threw himself with all his strength against the wooden wall facing the street.

The wall held firm. Shi Weiyang struck it once and dropped back onto the floor.

“Young Master, this way.”

Someone rushed forward to meet him.

Amid the billowing dust, a figure also came crashing in from outside the second-floor terrace — one of the masters originally stationed out on the street, now, heedless of the danger, rushing up, shouting loudly: “Second Young Master—”

He had barely landed and steadied himself when the assassin’s shield came smashing toward his face! The man’s iron-hard elbow dropped to block the shield, and the assassin, from beneath that shield, drove a kick with all his strength into the man’s abdomen — a dull, heavy thud audible even through the surrounding air — sending him crashing back through the railing behind him and flying back out through the cloud of dust.

“Save — me—”

Shi Weiyang scrambled up and screamed with everything he had—

Not long after the explosion sounded through the teahouse, an unexpected melee broke out below as well, at the turn of the staircase in the ground-floor hall.

A band of guards had occupied the hall and shut the surrounding doors and windows, leaving the space already dim; with the sudden explosion above, the light within grew dimmer still, dust sifting down endlessly. A moment later, someone came tumbling down the stairs, smoke sinking down after him.

The first guard to react tried to charge up the stairs, only for a bag of lime powder to burst open with a bang. A small, slight figure slipped past him in the gloom; the guard swayed and collapsed onto the stairs.

More men rushing in from behind were suddenly struck as well; the small figure charged down the stairs, vanishing into the dim light through concealment technique, and several men found themselves cut across the shins in the confusion.

Out on the street beyond the teahouse, the masters originally stationed there had also fallen into brief disarray at the massive explosion, the dust scattering wide; whether there was fire or poison gas mixed into that smoke, no one could say, and the fear of it was considerable. But within moments, hearing the tremendous commotion from above, the jianghu men on the Shi Family’s payroll steeled their nerves and resolved to charge up to the second floor.

One guard, eager to prove himself, was the first to scramble up from the side. The moment he cleared the terrace, he went silent. No one knew that he had, the instant he appeared, been silently dispatched — his throat slit — by a young woman who had been quietly lying in wait by the window.

The second man to climb up was “Iron Elbow” Xu An. As he leapt up onto the terrace after his running start, Shi Weiyang’s hysterical cry for help came drifting out through the smoke, and so he too shouted, “Second Young Master!”

Before a single breath had passed, the people down on the street saw Xu An come flying back out like a cannonball, slamming hard onto the ground.

“Save me—”

Shi Weiyang’s scream for help burst out shrill and piercing, striking an almost stirring note amid the tremendous chaos.

The several masters below exchanged glances, gritted their teeth, and were about to risk charging up again, when, at that very moment, a rumbling crash sounded from within the teahouse, and more smoke billowed out in every direction. A moment later, someone realized what had happened — it seemed the section of second-floor flooring near the north end had collapsed, and that was precisely the area from which the Second Young Master’s cry for help had come.

There was no telling how many people the collapsing floor had crushed.

All around, shouting, chaos, and gloom…

Shi Weiyang thrashed his body like a fish struggling on land, not even sure how he’d managed to climb back up. Everywhere around him lay wreckage — figures seemed to be there, and then not…

Someone not far off was waving away the smoke, calling out weakly: “Second Young Master! Second Young Master—” It seemed to be “Single-Stroke Lightning Sword” Jiang Bing.

Just moments before, amid the chaotic slaughter above, “Ox Demon” Xu Batian had been swinging his axe wildly, and the assassin had been closing in ever nearer; “Single-Stroke Lightning Sword” had dragged over a guard to serve as an escort, only to watch that guard cut down, blood spraying, right before Shi Weiyang’s eyes — and Jiang Bing, seizing the moment, had dragged him off toward safer ground.

It was at that very moment that the floor gave way, and a great mass of people, corpses, tables and stools all came crashing down together onto the ground floor.

Shi Weiyang, swaying, tried to say something, when something struck him from behind, and then he felt a violent, jarring commotion.

He turned to look back.

He should not have turned around.

The masked devil, long blade in hand, was in the middle of cutting down a charging guard. He reached out a hand toward Shi Weiyang.

“Hey, shithead!”

Shi Weiyang gave a sudden violent shudder, gooseflesh rising almost instantly from the soles of his feet to the roots of his hair, and in that same instant his body threw itself backward with everything it had — but the man had already seized his collar and yanked him forward.

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH—”

Shi Weiyang, by now entirely grey with dust and streaked with blood, let out a scream, struggling with everything he had, kicking a foot out in front of him — whether it connected with anything, he had no idea — swinging both arms, straining to put distance between himself and the assassin. A blow landed hard across his face with a smack, but his body kept thrashing regardless, like a shrimp flopping at the very edge between life and death.

Amid the dust and wreckage, the battlefield remained savage. Around them, the Shi Family’s guards and retainers, having gathered their wits, were closing in — some engaging the assassin with blade and spear, while the assassin dragged Shi Weiyang along, who screamed and struggled like a man gone mad. Through the scattering dust, “Single-Stroke Lightning Sword” Jiang Bing had already fought his way over; he seized Shi Weiyang and pulled him backward. Shi Weiyang fled with everything he had amid the chaos, and had already put some distance between himself and the assassin — but one of his hands was still caught in the man’s grip.

In the vast confusion, no one could tell what the assassin might have shouted; Shi Weiyang heard none of it, his body and arm shaking wildly, his mouth crying without pause: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH—”

At some point, the pulling force on that side abruptly vanished into thin air. Shi Weiyang, dragged along by Jiang Bing, stumbled forward. In his dim, blurred vision, he saw the assassin’s steel blade whirling in a whistling circle, cutting down a thrusting spear — and his own arm had suddenly grown lighter by a good length, as though lost somewhere within that flash of blade-light.

The September sunlight shone down over the dust-choked street in the afternoon.

Just after the second floor of the teahouse collapsed, figures came stumbling out from the chaos of slaughter through the ground-floor entrance — it was “Single-Stroke Lightning Sword” Jiang Bing, half his body soaked in blood, wounded by who knew how many strikes, supporting Shi Weiyang, equally drenched in red, as the two of them fled with everything they had out of the billowing smoke.

Shi Weiyang’s right arm was severed clean at the elbow.

“Save — someone—”

In this moment, Jiang Bing’s voice had gone hoarse, straining with all his might, and the people out on the street rushed to meet them, only to hear him shout: “Stop! Him—!”

A long spear came whistling out of the smoke, striking down a guard who had rushed in to help, pinning him to the long street with a hiss. The blade-wielding figure came charging out of the smoke like a tiger, bearing down with full force on the backs of Jiang Bing and Shi Weiyang—