Mo Fan stood at the edge of the mist, eyes fixed on the sunlit village ahead—the warmth of it almost offensive against the surrounding gloom.
When things are anomalous, there must be demons. Out here on the fringes of the cultivation world, in terrain that should be barren and hostile, this kind of picture-perfect "peace" was deeply suspicious.
He wasn't the only one who felt it. Wu Feng and San Niang, walking ahead, had clearly caught the same wrongness.
Wu Feng's cold eyes narrowed to slits. His fingers had already silently closed around the black blade hidden in his sleeve.
He watched the farmers laughing and working in the fields not far away, a flash of suspicion and cruelty crossing his face—he was half a step away from striding over and pressing a blade to someone's throat.
"Don't move yet."
San Niang grabbed his sleeve and stopped him with a sharp look. She swept the surroundings with a wary gaze and dropped her voice.
"Don't spook them. Watch and wait."
While the two bandit cultivators stood there uncertain, something unexpected happened.
"Aiya! Finally! Damn, my legs are killing me!"
Fang Tong—who had played the careful, reserved, straight-laced guide the entire journey—suddenly seemed like a completely different person.
He stretched loudly and dramatically, swaggered to the front of the group, and even waved with easy familiarity at the old woman feeding chickens by the village entrance.
"Hey there, Auntie! Busy as always? We're cultivators from Greenwood Market—picked up the bounty to deal with your evil entity problem!"
The sudden shift made Wu Feng and San Niang exchange another glance. Both saw the same flicker of confusion in the other's eyes.
At the back of the group, Mo Fan pulled his hood lower.
The eyes hidden in shadow narrowed slightly, watching Fang Tong lead the way ahead. He said nothing—just followed in silence, like a shadow with no feelings attached to it.
As the group stepped onto the dirt paths of Linshui Village proper, Mo Fan picked up on a second layer of wrongness that made his skin crawl.
The villagers' eyes.
Throughout Azure Cloud Sect's territory—even in the servant quarters where Mo Fan had once lived—common mortals facing cultivators typically wore expressions of numbness, reverence, or outright terror.
Not here.
At Fang Tong's shout, the old woman feeding chickens didn't flinch.
She smiled warmly and came forward to meet them, setting her basin of cornmeal aside with the ease of someone welcoming relatives from out of town.
"Oh my, the immortal masters have arrived! You must be exhausted from the road! Please, come in and rest your feet!"
The farmers in the nearby fields set down their tools and grinned at them with simple, open faces.
A cluster of children who'd been chasing each other around came crowding in out of curiosity, craning their dirty little faces upward to boldly inspect Mo Yan's black robes and the killing aura rolling off him.
No fear. Only a strange, almost rehearsed warmth and eagerness—as if they'd performed this welcome a hundred times before.
Even Wu Feng, a man who had spent years killing and robbing without hesitation, felt deeply uncomfortable. The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
"Old woman." Wu Feng cut off the greeting with a cold expression and no patience for it. "We're here to handle business. Where's the village head? Take us to him."
"The village head's right here—in that big tiled house in the center of the village. I'll take you there myself."
The old woman didn't take offense. She smiled pleasantly, set down her basin, and walked ahead at a surprisingly steady pace.
Before long, the group was led to a spacious, well-built brick-and-tile compound at the heart of the village.
Before anyone could knock, the gate swung open from the inside with a soft creak.
A white-haired elder stepped out to greet them, leaning on a dark wooden walking stick, face full of grandfatherly kindness. He wore a clean silk robe—the look of a comfortable, prosperous patriarch.
The moment the elder appeared, Mo Fan quietly ran [ Death Vision ] over him.
No powerful Qi and blood. Just a faint, barely-there flicker of a life-flame... First layer of Qi Condensation? Maybe second? Mo Fan assessed inwardly. Just a mortal old man who knows a bit of breathing exercises to extend his lifespan. Completely unthreatening.
Which only deepened his suspicion. If this place was truly a devil cultivator's den, why would they put someone this weak in charge as village head?
The group was welcomed into a spacious main hall and seated across from their host. Nimble village women immediately appeared with steaming cups of tea.
The fragrance filled the room. Mo Fan, Wu Feng, and San Niang didn't touch their cups. Their hands remained quietly pressed to their weapons.
"Old man."
Fang Tong, on the other hand, picked up his teacup without ceremony and took a sip. Then he pulled the gray bounty listing from his chest and slapped it down on the table with a sharp smack.
"Let's not speak in riddles. This listing says dozens of your livestock were drained of blood and turned to husks—suspected malevolent entity. We brothers came a long way for this reward. Tell us: where did the entity last appear? What did it look like?"
The moment Fang Tong finished speaking, the atmosphere in the hall went taut as a bowstring.
Wu Feng's short blade had already slid an inch out of his sleeve—one wrong word and he looked ready to pin the village head to the floor and start an interrogation.
The old village head, however, showed not a trace of alarm.
He looked at the bounty listing on the table. Blinked.
Then—
"Ha ha ha ha ha—"
He slapped his knee and burst into a full, booming laugh, his white beard trembling with it.
"My dear immortal masters! You've been... you've been had!"
In the stunned silence that followed, the old man wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes and shook his head with a grin.
"There's no blood-sucking evil entity! When we filed the report with the market, we... may have deliberately exaggerated a little. To make sure you immortal masters would come quickly."
"What it actually was—a giant mutant weasel came down from the hills behind the village from who knows where!"
"Fast as lightning. It would sneak down at night and bite the necks of cattle and dogs to drink their blood. We're just common folk—we saw the shriveled-up carcasses and thought we'd run into a ghost!"
The old man waved a hand, his expression easy and apologetic.
"Just a few days ago, the creature came back to steal chickens. Some of our braver young hunters had set a rockfall trap in advance. Smashed it into meat paste! Crisis solved!"
"A weasel? Smashed to paste?"
Wu Feng and San Niang stared at each other.
The explanation sounded like absolute bullshit—but in this frontier territory where low-tier mutant beasts roamed freely, it was also, bizarrely, completely plausible.
"Exactly so!"
The old village head sighed and looked at the group with genuine remorse. Then he produced a bait that was very difficult to refuse.
"I feel terrible that you immortal masters have made this long trip for nothing. I really do. So—how about this..."
He waved a hand with great generosity.
"Since you've come all this way, please stay and rest in Linshui Village for a few days. Eat well, drink well—all expenses on the village! When you return to Greenwood Market, just tell the General Affairs Hall that you used your divine powers to slay the mutant beast and eliminate the threat!"
"Collect the reward! Consider it this old man making friends with a group of immortal masters and planting a good seed. What do you say?"
The hall went quiet.
No fighting monsters. No risking their lives. Free food and drink for a few days, then walk back and collect the reward anyway?
For Wu Feng and San Niang—robber cultivators who lived on the knife's edge at the bottom tier and would kill a man over a handful of broken spirit stones...
This was the kind of pie falling from the sky they didn't dare dream about.
The killing intent and suspicion in their eyes melted away under the heat of pure greed, fast as snow in summer. Both quietly slid their half-drawn weapons back into their sleeves.
"Well, that's just wonderful!"
Fang Tong seized the moment with practiced enthusiasm, slapping his thigh and laughing.
"Old sir, you're far too generous! If we kept refusing after an offer like that, we'd just be making things awkward! Since the village head insists—we'll gladly impose on your hospitality!"
Mo Fan sat in the outermost corner of the room, hands folded in his sleeves, watching the whole exchange from beneath his hood with cold, detached eyes.
Too many coincidences.
The village head's story was flawless. Fang Tong's agreement was perfectly logical. But that was precisely the problem—everything was too flawless, too smooth, too convenient.
But he didn't expose it.
He wanted to see exactly what kind of trap this group of people was setting. With his current physical strength and the skeleton army hidden in his storage bag, he had absolute power as his bottom line.
"Then we'll follow Brother Fang's lead." Mo Fan's voice came out low and flat. "We'll impose."
And just like that, what should have been a bloody bounty mission inexplicably turned into a rural countryside vacation.
The four of them were politely escorted out of the main hall and arranged into an independent side courtyard behind the village head's compound.
The courtyard was secluded. One room each—clean, comfortable beds, and before long, villagers arrived bearing a lavish feast of food and wine.
Wu Feng and San Niang ate their fill, locked their door, and sat in meditation—clearly running calculations of their own. Fang Tong's room, on the other hand, was already rumbling with thunderous snoring early on.
Night fell.
A waning crescent moon hung over the treetops. The side courtyard was utterly still.
Inside Mo Fan's tightly shut guest room.
He hadn't undressed. He hadn't touched the soft bed.
He sat cross-legged in a blind spot in the furthest corner of the room, [ Death Vision ] running at full capacity.
The grayish-white field of vision strictly monitored every blade of grass and leaf outside the courtyard walls.
In his right hand, hidden in his sleeve, two daggers coated in highly concentrated corpse venom had been gripped long enough to turn warm.
In the blind spot behind the door, Mo Yan held the cold-iron longsword, like a death-dealing reaper statue waiting to move at any moment.
The moment a single wisp of knockout gas drifted through the door... The moment a single red dot carrying killing intent drew close... Mo Fan would flip every card he had and start a massacre without hesitation.
He was certain of it: tonight, this bizarre, picturesque village would definitely tear off its mask and reveal its man-eating fangs.
Time slipped away amidst the extreme torment of minutes and seconds.
One hour... Three hours... The whole night passed...
Mo Fan's nerves were stretched to the absolute limit. Even a moth bumping against the paper window was enough to make his heart race.
And yet.
When the first crisp crow of a rooster rang out beyond the window.
When the first touch of fish-belly white pierced the eastern night sky, and the first thin thread of morning warmth slipped through the gap in the window frame and fell across Mo Fan's face—bloodshot, sleepless, held rigid through the entire night...
Mo Fan froze.
He slowly set down the poisoned darts he'd been clutching until his palm was damp with sweat. He stood up, pushed the window open a crack, and looked out.
The courtyard was still quiet. From the room next door, Wu Feng and the others were apparently still snoring.
From somewhere in the village came the smell of morning cookfire smoke—an early-rising farm wife making breakfast. Everything was exactly the same as any ordinary morning.
Mo Fan's brow furrowed. Hard. Deep.
Because across this entire night.
No knockout gas. No assassins. No devil cultivators. And no blood-sucking evil spirits.
Actually, completely, absolutely. Nothing. Happened?!