[Editor: Ajax Flameborn, Rain, Author]

The young man had been watching in glee as his black ‘undead’ chess piece began taking over town after town, when a large white Prince piece on the mountains that had been still for years moved. The gleeful expression on the young man’s face immediately dampened.

He raised his hand and tapped the Horse piece, saying in a slightly annoyed voice, “Butcher. Retreat, Hide.”

With the First Prince awake, they couldn’t play around so blatantly anymore. What a shame, he’d enjoyed the fun they’d been having immensely.

Whatever else could be said, the First Prince was good at hunting his pawns down. If possible, he didn’t want to lose hardworking pawns just for a moment of pleasure. Therefore, he would warn them instead of watch them struggle, something he also enjoyed doing.

It was important for useful pawns to feel like their loyalty was appreciated. If he was too cavalier with their lives, they might look for some other master. Then all he’d have was idiots for pawns, which wasn’t nearly as fun. That’s why he was careful and treated his pawns like his treasures.

At least… until he decided he didn’t need them anymore.

———

The moment Shan Hui left Lanhua his speed dropped and his senses dulled. The rotten odor, both physical and spiritual, spreading from the undead was so strong it didn’t matter. He scanned the horizon until he located the heaviest, most noxious scent and went in that direction.

He found a strange scene of patches of frozen skeletons, forming a wall around three of his younger siblings. His twin De brothers were sprawled out on the ground while his second brother, Yan Li, stood. Yan Li was looking directly in Shan Hui’s direction, which secretly pleased him. It was good to see this second brother of his always on alert.

When he landed in their bizarre circle of the dead, Yan Li’s face visibly brightened.

“Older brother!” He walked over and gave him a single pat on the shoulder.

He didn’t get a chance to say anything further. The two De twins, lacking any sense whatsoever, immediately ran over and fiercely hugged Shan Hui. They were like climbing vines on a tree that the fiercest winds couldn’t shake off.

“Big Bro, you’re here!” De Taihua had grabbed him around his neck, eyes sparkling.

De Weishan grabbed him around his middle, eyes sparkling as bright as his older twin,“Big Bro, we missed you!”

The reason they clung so fiercely was because Shan Hui would usually brutally toss them away without any regard to their safety. This didn’t bother them at all, only increasing their desire to hold on tighter, treating it like some kind of game.

Despite his age, Shan Hui still didn’t look a day over 16 years old. While his younger siblings were clearly grown men, towering tall like their Old Man. Getting embraced by two grown men was off putting under normal circumstances, but in this case they’d been fighting the undead for hours.

“You two…” He grimaced, “...get off me, you stink. You rival the smell of the undead.”

All three men gaped at Shan Hui in surprise. The De twins let go out of shock rather than because they were embarrassed.

“Who are you?” One asked, stepping back.

“What did you do with Big Bro?” The other asked, also stepping back.

They clung to each other like they’d seen a monster.

Shan Hui only glared at the idiot duo and didn’t bother responding.

Turning to Yan Li, he commented, “I only stopped by to ask if all our brothers are accounted for and safe. How long has this situation been going on?”

Yan Li was feeling like his foundational world views had been shaken but still managed to stay on topic.

“All the little brothers are fine. It has been going on for under 6 hours, or at least that is our guess. They chase only us, the princes. If we go into Lanhua, where they can’t reach, they will wander away to find more creatures and people to turn…”

Shan Hui’s whole body suddenly blasted a furious aura. It was so intense several nearby skeletons fell apart upon impact. The De twins had to dig their heels into the ground to prevent themselves from being pushed back.

“Devil Sect really dares to target this prince’s family and thinks they can live?”

Without giving Yan Li time to speak further, Shan Hui jumped off the ground and flew away.

Watching him leave in an arrogant temper, Yan Li suddenly felt much better.

His Big Bro was still his Big Bro after all.

———

This was not the first time Shan Hui had dealt with the undead. He knew quite a lot about them because when he first went to Jianghu, he’d started his investigation asking about who could create them.

Even among the Evil Factions not many cultivated to control the dead. It wasn’t about the morality of it, but simply because it stank. Literally. People’s hearts may be numb, but their noses were surprisingly sensitive. Those who dealt with the dead often ended up with the rotting flesh smell clinging to their skin from prolonged exposure. Therefore, puppet masters (those who reanimated the dead) were universally reviled and avoided.

The higher level puppet masters didn’t have the smell problem. If they found someone recently deceased in good condition, they could stop the rotting and have the undead retain a certain level of intelligence and cultivation. The soul was gone but the memories and habits would remain in the body. Puppet masters of that level could do many other interesting things with the undead and were extremely dangerous.

There were two types of undead:

The first kind were those who were given a certain amount of qi, simple instructions, and left on their own. They would last a few hours at most before eventually falling apart. This first kind was the type Shan Hui had come across when rescuing his Mother, though he didn’t know it at the time.

The second kind were given continuous qi from their master, allowing them to follow more complex instructions and “live” indefinitely. The latter could only be used by a mid level cultivator or higher. And the more undead of the second kind that were deployed, the higher the level of the cultivator involved.

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The difficulty of creating undead was quadrupled in Dalu. The energy levels in Dalu were pathetic compared to Jianghu. Any puppet master using their complex spells here would quickly find themselves drained to the point of being mortal. At which time they would lose control of their undead, causing the undead to go wild for a little while before falling apart or collapsing immediately.

Based on the amount of time that had passed since they first appeared and their intelligence level, they were likely controlled by a high level cultivator. Powerful puppet masters had few weaknesses in their craft, but the weaknesses they did have were easily exploitable for those of equally high cultivation.

In places like Dalu, puppet masters needed to be somewhere near their undead. The farther away the puppet master was from their undead army the more difficult it was for them to send energy and commands. But the biggest flaw that puppet masters had was their “puppet’s strings”. Each undead had a faint string of energy that you could follow back to its master. Puppet master’s put a lot of thought into hiding those strings, but if a cultivator was a high enough level it didn’t matter.

Shan Hui looked down, his gold eye sparkling, and saw the faint strings from the undead below him. They glowed a pale, sickly green and spread out deceptively, as if coming from all directions. But he could also sensed the other hoards of the undead and in his mind’s eye he could roughly guess where they were, as if checking them off on a mental map.

He followed in the general direction he guessed the puppet master was located and smiled slightly. The strings were starting to gather together towards a single location. He carefully suppressed his qi, slowing himself down further but also making it hard for them to notice his approach.

Everything seemed to be going fine until he blinked and the strings he was following disappeared.

Shan Hui cursed creatively under his breath.

Though he’d been careful, they still knew he was coming. If that was the case, he might as well just go all out.

Without further thought to strategy, he stopped suppressing himself and sped forward. Now was all about timing. If he was dealing with a low level disciple it would be easy enough to find them but this was a high level cultivator. A 3rd Ranked Demon at least. They were good at hiding. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been frustrated to death for years hunting down the Devil’s Cult.

A small city came into view. He could see barricades and soldiers set up around it, likely to deal with the undead invasions. He sneered. Of course they’d hide among innocent people.

Not only did it help disguise their wicked aura, they could use the people as hostages. A good person would naturally be constrained while fighting when they’re surrounded by children and the elderly. If that didn’t work, humans made good meat shields.

He circled around the city, probing the area with his qi to try and smoke out devil rats. A man flying around in the sky wasn’t a common sight and eventually he had a sizable crowd pointing up at him. He ignored them.

There were multiple people who stank of evil in this city. If an evil cultivator was living here like he suspected, it wasn’t too surprising. They tended to spread their evil like a sickness.

But whether it was a mortal or cultivator, he couldn’t tell at first or second glance. Once an evil cultivator suppressed their cultivation, they looked a lot like an ordinary wicked person. This was part of why he had difficulty ever finding them.

He thought about it for a little bit before he decided that it wouldn’t hurt to clear out the garbage while trying to catch the rat…

With that in mind, he descended on the city like the harbinger of death. It wasn’t hard for him to pinpoint a person with overwhelming rot in their soul. A person like that either committed murder or something equally vile to the point that their consciences were seared numb.

He landed in houses, courtyards, and streets, in public and private spaces, piercing each wicked person in the heart with his halberd. They died without knowing what had just happened to them. Before their body had a chance to stiffen from rigamortis, he set them on fire using the elements of nature, burning their bodies to ash. Just in case the evil cultivator thought to turn them into the undead.

He did not feel guilty for acting as judge and executioner. Rather, he suspected these people died too painlessly. Those they harmed would likely condemn him for giving them a quick death. But he didn’t have the time to be fair, he was looking for someone.

Screams of horror rose through the city.

Who in the east was unaware of the boy with a blue and gold eye, carrying a ji and murdering without remorse? The First Prince of Lanhua, Terror of the East, was very well known despite two generations having passed since he’d gone to war. Many towns and cities still held a reverential fear for the First Prince, even putting up small shrines and offering food sacrifices in hopes of never ever having him come near their homes.

He was like a God of War, raining judgement down on the wicked without mercy.

People wanted to flee, but they couldn’t leave because of the barricades and soldiers set up around the city to protect them from the undead monsters. With nowhere to go, they fled into their houses and hid under and in whatever they could find.

Men and women, adults and children, trembled in fear. They thought of all the big and little wrongs they’d done in their lifetimes and wondered where the God of War drew the line between ordinary flaws and real evil. Would they be next? Would someone in their household?

Shan Hui didn’t mind the screaming and fleeing of the people around him. He kept piercing people and setting their corpses on fire. Eventually one of these pieces of garbage should get him close to the person he was looking for. Or so he hoped.

He came upon a man in a bedroom doing something with a little girl that did not need mentioning. He pierced the man in the heart twice and set him on fire without a second thought. The little girl was shivering on the bed with her hands covering her head in fear, causing him to hesitate.

Unfortunately he’d seen this kind of thing before, and not just with little girls. Before he’d cleansed the east, and still in Jianghu to this day, there were brothels that specifically catered to this kind of “taste”. As someone who was raised to treasure children, this kind of behavior was so vile it made him want to vomit.

The problem was he never knew what to do with children afterward. Usually Huilang was around to deal with the children. He’d even turn himself into a small wolf, looking like a dog, so that the children wouldn’t be afraid. But he wasn’t here right now...

Leaving didn’t seem right though.

His moment of hesitation caused him to lower his guard and that was enough.

In a split second he felt an enormous surge of evil energy and his ji to protect himself. He managed to protect his head but his arm, leg, and belly got hit. He cried out and fell to his knees at the crippling pain. Looking down he saw several long, thin needles sticking out of him.

The little girl on the bed no longer trembled as if afraid. Grabbing the sheets on the bed she covered her nakedness and walked over to him. Her eyes were completely black and her face so beautiful it felt unreal.

She looked into his face, smiling in a deceptively innocent child-like manner. “You lucked out today, la. That was my best poison.”

Shan Hui’s vision blurred and he began to sweat heavily. The little girl reached out and gently ran her finger down the side of his face, causing him to vomit black blood.

“Such a waste of a beautiful face, how about giving it to me?” She said in a light voice.

“Go to hell.” He spat out, black blood spraying.

She giggled, “Eventually.”

He jabbed his halberd forward suddenly, but she jumped back quickly and avoided getting skewered at the last second.

Clucking her tongue, she advised, “You should take better care of your weapons, la.”

The halberd had taken a direct hit from three of the needles meant for his face. Two pin prick holes had appeared on the blade and one on the shaft, there were tiny spirals of smoke floating up from them.

He didn’t dare look too closely at the damage to his ji, instead fixing his glare on the “child” in front of him.

She sighed a little and shrugged, “I want to play, really I do but…. Orders are orders… perhaps next time?”

Taking a step back, she leapt to the open window and vanished.

Shan Hui cursed a thousand curses as he expelled the poison from his body. With trembling hands he barely had the strength to remove the needles. Each tiny pin prick hole they left in his chest seeped black blood.

There was devil’s blood in this poison.

It wasn’t an easy thing to get it out. If it had been any of his younger siblings, they’d have fainted or gone into a coma. As for him, it was like living in hell but he could remain awake. Until it was out of his system though, he wouldn’t be able to move, much less catch that little demon.

While he was suffering, he cursed the demon, the devil, and himself.

He had been careless.

When demons were roaming the streets, even children couldn’t be trusted.