Night hunts were for seasoned cultivators, not sheltered greenhorns like Li Hanyi. She can’t say she regrets coming (even though she does to her very core) without running the risk of offending Liu Feng. Her shizun had warned her that this wasn’t for the faint-hearted and she had taken the stupid deal anyway.

Li Hanyi had no one to blame for her predicament but herself.

She’d spent an awful lot of time carefully cultivating a reputation as an aloof and eccentric little lordling, the furthest she could go from the truth. And now, here she was, immaculate ashen robes stained with grass and hair a mess. There was blood on the hems of her sleeves and splatters of ichor dotting the side of her face. No, Li Hanyi was not having a good time.

She was dirty, miserable, sore, tired, and fed up with the entire affair. Li Hanyi wanted her needles back and knew she wouldn’t get them. So, instead, she began resorting to the same high-speed tactics that drove Liu Feng’s blood pressure through the roof. There was no room for grand-standing, no prideful show of skill, or honorable manners.

Li Hanyi hit the monsters as fast as possible. Her sword was a silvery flash in the night, the only sign that she was even there, and she slipped through the trees like a ghost. There was no pride to mar her blade, only a fierce and burning need to get this done and over with so that she could go home and never come out on a night hunt again.

She had to be quick to get the drop on monsters that could smell her very spiritual energy from ten paces out. Faster and faster, cutting deep and with nigh surgical precision. Li Hanyi left rational thought behind. Instinct, honed over years of sparring with a baby war god, was the only thing that mattered. The moral quandary of taking so many lives could come later.

For now, she would worry about staying alive long enough to regret what she had done. Fast enough that she didn’t even so much as rustle the grass as she passed overhead. Quick enough that the most anyone saw was the ghost of her shadow beneath the trees. Faster and faster until she was nothing more than a malevolent ghost, surviving on blood and death.

Li Hanyi was more than willing to become a monster in order to kill monsters. There was no room in her heart for doubt, only death. Every swing of her blade put her closer to the ideal perfection Liu Feng wanted from her. Closer and closer until she would fall over the knife edge into true mastery.

At least, that was the goal.

Her goal wasn’t to have the most successful kills under her belt. A pity, since she would probably be number one in the race to the finish. With Liu Feng at her back and a whole forest of malignant monsters before her, there wasn’t much else she could do. On the upside, at least her kills were getting cleaner and cleaner.

But this wasn’t a trip just for Li Hanyi to practice the fine art of monster-hunting. The whole point of this was for her to figure out just what made her sword special enough to be a cultivation tool. She hated it.

Li Hanyi wanted nothing more than to go home.

As if it could read her thoughts, the System chimed a dire warning. [Mission failure will lead to a reduction in character satisfaction points!]

She scowled as she perched neatly on a branch. Li Hanyi hadn’t worked this hard for this long to just throw away all the progress she had made with being Liu Feng’s friend. Failure was not an option. “A hint would be nice,” she groused under her breath.

“Your sword is named Ghost Bone. That’s all the hint you should need.” Liu Feng gruffly reminded her, perched on the branch above her. “The name and your own nature determine what your blade can do.”

Yes, thank you, Liu Feng for that completely useful information that did her no good whatsoever. Ghosts, not even the weird western ones, didn’t have bones. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. They had the bones they left behind when they died. Those bones were the thing that tethered them to the world of the living. Whatever was done to the bones would affect the ghost.

Li Hanyi rolled her eyes. What, was her sword supposed to be a fancy way of performing an exorcism? Sure, she’d get right on that. Li Hanyi: acupuncturist, family doctor, and exorcist. A one-stop shop for all your health needs.

She could treat disease on a physical and spiritual level. How nice. No, thank you, Li Hanyi did not want the fantasy Chinese people to start thinking that her treatments were all they needed to be healthy. They could kindly continue the fine art of washing their hands, thanks very much.

But the idea stuck with her. Maybe this really was what her sword did. It was a hypothesis, sketchy at best, but it was far better than just flailing her sword around and hoping something would happen. Without this hypothesis, her sword was about as useful to her day-to-day life as boiled cabbage.

“Huh,” she hummed thoughtfully. “Might as well give it a try.” Li Hanyi was not foolish enough to tempt fate by asking the universe for the worst that could happen. No, she’d test the hypothesis, prove it wrong, and move on with her life.

***

Either this was the angriest pixiu in existence or Airplane had been unspeakably lazy again. Her money was on the latter. Previous experience had taught her that the worldbuilding of Airplane’s so-called masterpiece was determined solely by how many energy drinks and cups of instant noodles he had consumed as he worked.

So, not a pixiu. The beast had the head of a proper Chinese dragon, the body of a lion, two sets of majestic antlers, and wings. It looked like a pixiu but very much wasn’t a pixiu. It was probably called something stupid like Winged Lion-Dragon and survived on a diet of virgins.

“Ah. A malevolent Winged Lion-Dragon.”

Li Hanyi should find the cultivation world lottery and play it. At this rate, she’d actually win just by guessing something ridiculous like chapter counts or how many comments on average a chapter got. She could make enough money to abandon her sect and raise chickens in some distant corner of the world.

The Not-Pixiu snuffled about, searching for something in the dew-dampened grass. It wasn’t looking in their direction and didn’t seem to have caught so much as a whiff of their scents. That was good, great even.

Her sword left its scabbard as she leapt, focusing her spiritual energy through the blade. Purify, purge, whatever. Scour the thing clean of evil energy and move on to the next monster in the woods. (There were an awful lot of monsters in the Xiaolian woods. If she didn’t know Airplane’s shitty worldbuilding, she’d think this was some kind of trap.)

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The beast turns, flares its wings wide in warning, and Li Hanyi lops off its snarling head in a spray of blood.

Except… she doesn’t.

Her sword hit its mark, that much she knew for certain. But its head stayed firmly attached to its body with not even a scale out of place. Her sword went right in and out like a ghost through a wall, a silvery cloud of condensed spiritual energy that shimmered like moonlit fog in the air.

Li Hanyi skidded to a stop, stared at her sword, and then the Not-Pixiu. “What,” she monotonously said to the universe, “the fuck.”

The Not-Pixiu sagged in place and began to deflate like a balloon left over from a child’s birthday party. As it collapsed into itself, bits of it flaked off like ash on a previously nonexistent wind. Soon, the only thing that remained of the beast was a silvery orb the size of Liu Feng’s fist.

Liu Feng soared down from his spot in the trees, landed beside Li Hanyi, and simply grunted.

Li Hanyi frowned back at him. “Don’t give me that look. You’re the one who wanted me to figure out what the Huangxiang Gu did.” Ghost Bone, Bones of a Dead Ghost, whatever. Ghosts didn’t do… whatever this was.

He grunted again and pointed at Li Hanyi’s head. “There’s more white in your hair.” His hand hovered between them, close enough to touch, and unwavering in its steadfastness. “What did you do?”

She resisted the urge to laugh. If she started, she knew it would just turn into a hysterical breakdown. Of course, whatever she just did had increased that whole Mystical White Hair nonsense she had going on. Nothing she did would ever turn out right. “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “I just figured… ghosts and their bones meant an exorcism.” An exorcism of what, she didn’t know.

It wasn’t as if she had been specific with what she had wanted exorcised. If she should even be calling it that. She’s going to call it that, however, because she didn’t know what else to call it. The System wasn’t exactly being helpful on that front either.

The blue text box in front of her face simply said: [Huangxiang Gu hidden technique has been unlocked.]

Great, wonderful, how very great for her. What even was the hidden technique? Was it supposed to be a secret even to her, the sword’s owner? That wasn’t a very useful hidden technique, now was it?

Li Hanyi was not an idiot. She might not be considered a fantastic scholar by ancient fantasy China standards, what with her inability to confidently regurgitate facts in the most flowery language possible, but that didn’t make her an idiot. Modern academics were just a different way of thinking.

She was entirely capable of putting two and two together to make four. So, I Hanyi looked back at the facts. One: her sword was named, essentially, Ghost Bone. Two: said sword did some strange things when she inserted qi and thought really hard about exorcising her enemy. Three: the Not-Pixiu had somehow turned into an orb instead of a corpse.

The conclusion had to be made that her sword did something with exorcisms. It wasn’t a difficult conclusion to come to. The only real question was what exactly she had just exorcised.

She refused to think about the new white streaks in her hair.

Instead, she folded her arms neatly at her waist and tucked her hands into her sleeves. She crossed the grass to stare down at the silver orb that was all that remained of the Not-Pixiu and hummed thoughtfully. “Do you think it’s an egg?” It didn’t match any of the treasures in Proud Immortal Demon Way. She would know.

Liu Feng knelt beside her and scooped the silvery orb up. He rolled it in his hands briefly before tossing it at Li Hanyi with a snort. “It’s an egg.”

Cultivators did not squawk. They did not fumble as they tried to catch maybe-eggs thrown at their heads. Li Hanyi did both of these things at the same time. She tossed the orb from palm to palm, startled at its warmth and the sheer amount of spiritual energy it gave off. There wasn’t a trace left of the malignant malice the Not-Pixiu had before she had struck the beast.

“Huh,” she muttered. “I think I might know what my sword does.”

Liu Feng gave her a blistering look normally reserved for idiots. “You’re going to hatch it.” He sounded completely fed up with her nonsense and she hadn’t even started.

“I’m going to hatch it,” she confirmed as she tucked it into her sleeve for safekeeping until he gave her back her pouches. “For science.”

***

Liu Feng was a wonder to behold in action. Now that Li Hanyi had fulfilled her part of the deal, Liu Feng was free to clean up house. And, oh, how very quickly he set into motion. A baby war god was still a war god and she would be wise to remember that.

He didn’t let her rest on her laurels either. Li Hanyi, needles and drugs still stowed away in his sleeves, was still expected to hunt what she could with her sword and martial prowess. But compared to Liu Feng? She lacked his effortless grace and power, the sheer skill that only came with practice.

There was some saying about fearing not the man who had practiced a thousand strokes but the man who had practiced one stroke a thousand times. Whoever said that had never met Liu Feng. Even without becoming a Peak Lord, he was a veritable force of nature. Unstoppable as a hurricane, more dangerous than a meteor strike, Liu Feng was already far deadlier than any cultivator in the whole of Cang Qiong.

The only way to kill him was to make him kill himself.

Or, and Li Hanyi tried very hard not to think about this, use an in-depth knowledge of poisons and medicines to incapacitate him, then kill him while he couldn’t fight back. As his current personal doctor, she was doing her absolute best to make him immune to even that. Sure, that meant that he was guaranteed to star losing every spar. But she’d never had any illusions that she would be his equal anyway.

Watching him in action was a surefire way to remind herself of that simple truth. Water was wet, the sky was blue, Liu Feng could kick her ass with one hand tied behind his back. He was poetry in motion, the kind of mythical master that would have taken an entire stunt and CGI team to replicate. Not that it mattered.

Liu Feng did as he pleased and all that pleased him was fighting.

He fought until there were no more things to fight and still loked for more. Liu Feng turned to her with a scowl, his sword still flickering with the last embers from a clean-cut stroke, and grunted. “There were too many.”

Oh. So it wasn’t just Airplane’s awful world-building. This was some kind of nefarious plot at hand and she couldn’t remember which one. No matter which plot it was, it probably was supposed to lead back to a wife plot of some kind. But Li Hanyi and the rest had sprung it early, before the protagonist had even been born.

Whichever wife this plot was for could thank her for it later.

For now, there was the great mystery of why there were so many monsters running around the Xiaolian woods. So very many different monsters. It was like someone had tried to run a zoo and all the animals had decided to opt out. Then, all the young people died. None of these things made any sense separately or together. This had to be Airplane’s world-building at work.

Li Hanyi gave a long-suffering sigh. “Worst possible case is, what, a monster fighting ring? Underground betting?”

He grunted again. “Talk to the mayor.”

There was a lack of any personal responsibility that made Li Hanyi pause. She didn’t particularly want to talk to the fat man with the wobbling jowls and no sense of taste. Judging from Liu Feng’s deadpan face he didn’t either. “Isn’t that your thing? Ranking cultivator here and all that?”

“I did it last time.” That was the most childish thing she had ever had the displeasure of hearing come out of his mouth.

Li Hanyi was not proud of herself for entering into a staring contest with Liu Feng. She was even less proud when she lost. “He’s disgusting. Did you not see how much he was sweating? How much his jowls wobbled?” She shuddered. “He served us gold dust on duck dumplings when his town looks like a ghost town.”

He blinked back at her, nonplussed. “You’re going to talk to him while I find the source of all these monsters.” Oh. So she was going to be the distraction.

“Can’t I just knock him unconscious and let him sleep for three days? He won’t even notice,” she whined back at him. “I can knock out his wife too. Just as a bonus precaution.”

Liu Feng frowned at her. “That isn’t necessary. I won’t need that long.”

“Fine,” she groused and clicked her tongue. “You’re such a spoilsport. My way would have been faster.”