Volume 3, Chapter 26 – Impact

In the small hours before dawn, the whole of Yujing City was jolted awake by explosions and fire.

Curious heads poked out from residential blocks and family courtyards one after another. Some even left their homes and walked into the streets, trying to trade information with the crowd gathering to watch the spectacle and figure out what on earth had happened.

“With a fire this big… it’s lighting up half the night sky. Did a chemical plant blow up?”

“Quit talking nonsense! There isn’t a chemical plant that big anywhere in the capital! Only those outlying facilities could manage an explosion on this scale!”

“If it’s not a chemical plant, what else could it be? A plain fire can’t get that big, right?”

“It definitely wasn’t just a fire… everyone heard that huge boom…”

“Gotta be an ammo depot going up!”

“From the direction, it’s over by Baishan. Did something happen to the Yuming Dojo?”

“…”

Standing on the roof of a residential building, Uncle Song Qiao looked down over the crowd in the street and also saw several police cars approaching in the distance.

If they were locals of Yujing, they would have already scattered the moment they heard the sirens. Only some young out-of-towners, not knowing any better, just stood there dumbly watching as the cars stopped ahead and a group of black-clad Inspectorate police got out, electric batons and riot shields in hand.

Without a word, the inspectors swung their batons straight into the gathered crowd. Chaos erupted downstairs like chickens and dogs scattering; roars, curses, and screams rose and fell without end, pairing nicely with the glow of fire at the horizon for quite the lively scene.

“Clueless out-of-towners.” A woman’s voice sounded beside him. It was the incense-shop proprietress who had met with Uncle Song Qiao earlier, walking over with measured steps.

“Whenever something big happens in Yujing, what’s the first thing the grandees think about if not gagging everyone?”

“Even people with official status can’t stand up to a crackdown. And these mere commoners think they can just stand here and watch?”

“They’re really courting death.”

“Madam Chong,” Uncle Song Qiao said, a little exasperated. “If you’ve got the energy to say all this, better to think about what we should do next.”

Xiang Xian’s return to the capital had originally been their opportunity—an opportunity to establish a line to the imperial daughter.

If they saved Xiang Xian, they’d have an extra bargaining chip when it came time for the imperial daughter to recognize them in the future—this was an important step toward ‘breaking the ice’. Skip this step and a lot of things would become far more troublesome.

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But in truth, it shouldn’t have been this troublesome at all.

Thinking back now, Uncle Song Qiao also found it unbelievable.

This imperial daughter should be the one Her Ladyship had left behind when fleeing all those years ago. As a mere bearer of the bloodline, she wasn’t supposed to enjoy such an important position. After all, even Her Ladyship herself only played the role of a symbol; many things still had to be deliberated on carefully with the elders.

If even Her Ladyship was like that, there was no way the imperial daughter could stand above her.

The problem was, the imperial daughter’s cultivation had shot up far too fast.

What does it mean to be a Human-Immortal Earthly Master at seventeen?

If you took the imperial daughter alone and compared her just to those Sword Lord emperors of the Sacred Great Yu Dynasty, quite a few of them couldn’t match her at that age.

It was basically like an old lottery ticket you’d lost over a decade ago suddenly sprouting a mind of its own one day, leaping onto your face and telling you that the numbers you’d scratched off were actually the passcode to a nuclear missile base—too absurd, too fantastical.

If the ones vouching for this weren’t those ‘historian crows’ of the Fengchang Directorate, Uncle Song Qiao would never have believed it.

Which was why things were so difficult now.

They wanted to acknowledge the imperial daughter, wanted to get a line to her, yet were also afraid the imperial daughter would take them for demon-cult freaks and slaughter them.

“What can I possibly do about it?” Madam Chong snorted.

“I told you to go looking for the imperial daughter ages ago, but you insisted she was definitely dead.”

“It’s not like I didn’t tell you to pay special attention to certain traits, but you just kept saying—oh! Young people nowadays all want to be trendy; dyed hair, colored contacts, there are too many of them to pick out!”

“And now you’re asking me?” She flicked her sleeve. “I don’t know!”

“As for this matter…” Uncle Song Qiao could only give a bitter smile as well.

Who could have predicted something like this?

The path through Xiang Xian was blocked; they’d just have to wait and see…

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See if there were any other channels.

…

Elsewhere, at the South Gate, Zhao Feng stood looking at the two burning corpses in front of him, both hands resting on his sword as he stared straight ahead, as if trying to see all the way to the end of the road.

Creak—

Brakes sounded behind him. A square sedan, black from end to end with a silver immortal crane carved on its hood, stopped there, and an old man hurriedly climbed out.

The old man’s name was Liu Xi, style Gongzhu. Like Xu Shilin, the Inspector who had gone to Chilong Circuit earlier, he too was a gongfu of the Central Court.

But there were ranks even among the court grandees, and this Liu Gongzhu also held the concurrent post of Left Chancellor of the current reign. He frequently ran errands and handled affairs on the Imperial House’s behalf, and the weight of his words in Qianyu Palace was not something Xu Shilin could compare with. Even the Imperial House had to show him three parts courtesy.

“Commandant Zhao!” Liu Xi headed straight for Zhao Feng after he got out, eyes wide as he demanded, “…What is going on here?”

“Didn’t I already tell you over the phone?” Zhao Feng spoke without turning his head. “Yuming Dao Lord Xiang Xian rebelled and used ‘Furnace-Blasting Pills’ to threaten us into releasing someone… so I temporarily stood in for my master and agreed to a few of her conditions.”

Liu Xi’s chest rose and fell. “Where is she?”

“She’s gone, of course.”

“And Liang Yu?” Liu Xi asked.

“What’s burning on the ground is her.”

Liu Xi’s eyes bulged. “Who set her on fire?”

“I did.”

“Commandant!” Liu Xi immediately looked displeased. “While Xiang Xian was away, she’s been acting in charge of Yuming’s affairs. She might have secret arts on her.”

“No matter how many secret arts she had, they all belong to Yuming Dao, don’t they?” Zhao Feng turned his head slightly to look at him. “And once they belong to Yuming Dao, what difference is there from belonging to you?”

“Quite a lot.” Liu Xi shook his head. “Liang Yu harbored her own ambitions. Any secret arts she submitted in hopes of saving her life would never have been all of them. Her corpse was actually quite valuable.”

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“Let’s not speak of this any further, Chancellor.” Zhao Feng finally knitted his brows. “If blame must be laid, put all of it on me.”

“You are the seed the Old Celestial Master has his eye on, Commandant Zhao. How would I dare blame you?” Liu Xi broke into an easy smile by habit, then his expression shifted, turning tense and serious. “…How long will it take to screen for those Furnace-Blasting Pills?”

“Anywhere from a few weeks to a few months.”

“That long!”

“That’s exactly why I agreed to her half-year deadline.” Zhao Feng shook his head. “She truly lives up to the name ‘Scheming Immortal’ Xiang Xian… every step calculated to perfection.”

“I’ll explain this to His Majesty.” Liu Xi nodded. “It’s just that His Majesty will have to suffer some inconvenience and move out for a while.”

Zhao Feng didn’t reply. He sighed instead. “We still have to deal with the remaining Yuming remnants… The Southern Prince has only just gone under, and now all this flares up again.”

“What has this world come to!”

“…” Zhao Feng’s mouth twitched slightly. After a moment’s thought he said, “Let me take those people back to the North Pass.”

“Mm?” Liu Xi arched a brow. “That’s a bit…”

“Xiang Xian abandoned them. That means they’re not to be trusted, and there’s no way they know anything.” Zhao Feng explained, “But all of them do have real skills. Cutting them down in a hurry is too much of a waste. I want to bring them back to the North Pass to suppress demons.”

“That’s fine too.” Liu Xi frowned and thought for a while. “I’ll speak to the Imperial House. Commandant Zhao, just do as you think best.”

“Thank you for your trouble, Chancellor.”

“It’s nothing.”

After they lingered a bit, Liu Xi raised his head to look at the blaze in the sky, then leaned closer and asked in a low voice, “Has something happened at the North Pass… some change?”

The moment he asked, Zhao Feng’s gaze turned razor-sharp as he swung his head around to meet Liu Xi’s eyes.

But Liu Xi stood his ground under that scrutiny and said solemnly, “This isn’t about any leak. It’s just that I hold authority over three of the central offices, so I often see supplies being dispatched.”

“Lately the North Pass has been requisitioning more military equipment, but the rate of grain consumption has slowed.” He kept his voice as low as he could. “That’s not a good sign…”

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Once he’d laid out his reasoning, Zhao Feng’s gaze softened. After a pause, he said, “The pressure is indeed heavier than before.”

Liu Xi squeezed his throat a bit. “Can you tell me more?”

“I don’t know if this has anything to do with the ‘Blood Sea’ down in the southern lands.” Zhao Feng’s brows knit. “But at the same time the Blood Sea erupted in the south, in the northern Blood Sea as well, the rate at which Aberrations and monsters are breeding has doubled.”

Just thinking about it gave Zhao Feng a pounding headache.

No one had yet settled on a definitive explanation of what the ‘Blood Sea’ was. Some saw it as a ‘phenomenon’, some as a ‘strange object’, and others even argued it was a kind of ‘large-scale Demon Pool’.

That thing could bewilder minds and corrupt spirits all on its own, but the most maddening trait was still its ‘resurrection’.

Monstrous beasts in the Blood Sea could come back to life again and again.

Shattered bones, pierced skulls—so long as they soaked in the Blood Sea, they’d regrow at speed and in the blink of an eye be full of life again. This put enormous pressure on the defenders.

The North Pass’s original task was to guard the Demon Kingdom; that burden itself wasn’t heavy.

Most of the Demon Kingdom in the north had already been sealed and culled. One after another, they had slipped into void secret realms to await their resurgence. By the usual intervals, you wouldn’t see one emerge for nearly ten years, and once it was dealt with there was a long stretch of time to recuperate.

But once the Blood Sea appeared, everything changed.

Not only did the Demon Kingdom’s revival speed up, the beasts and Demon Pools it spawned grew ever more dangerous.

Endless waves of beasts needing cultivators to take shifts suppressing them—that they could still stomach.

But even the Demon Pools, Zhao Feng had heard, were spawning extremely troublesome new variants, and the garrison had taken grievous casualties while trying to grasp the ‘principles of Demon Pools’.

“The news will reach here soon enough; it hardly matters if I tell you a little early.” Zhao Feng shook his head.

“Once matters here are wrapped up, I have to hurry back to fill the gap.”