The heavy mahogany doors of the Patio of the Silent Cloud were locked, but the three shadows were already waiting outside, at the top of the stone staircase that led to the wide street.
The air was thick with the acrid smell of sweat, dust, and fear. Blocks away, the sound of splintering wood and the rhythmic hammering of hundreds of iron boots and steel-scale armor swallowed the city's natural murmur. The Guard of the Celestial Lance had split like a swarm of pests to sweep through the inns, tearing doors off hinges in search of assassins who, in truth, had never existed.
Yù Méi cracked her neck. The sound of her own bone grinding was muffled by the racket of the approaching troops. The muscles beneath her thick dark-gold tunic trembled in uncontrollable spasms, her skin tingling with hunger.
Two squads turned the corner of the cobblestone street. Ten men total. Heavy armor, drawn swords. Five marched aggressively toward the neighboring courtyard, while the other five stopped before Zhì Yuǎn's staircase, coming face to face with the wall of three veiled women.
The squad leader — a 2nd Stage cultivator whose arrogance-shot eyes could barely focus through his helmet visor — spat on the ground.
"Get away from the door, widows. The City Guard is here to search this trash courtyard," the man's voice rang metallic and imperious, his blade raised and pointing directly at Mò Yán's face. "Stand aside, or we pull out all three of your teeth and drag you by the hair to the dungeons."
Mò Yán did not move a single muscle. Her scarlet irises fixed themselves on the extended steel, her rigid posture exhaling the lethal cold of a guillotine primed to fall.
But before the diplomat could eject the gravity of her Sea of Laws, Yù Qíng raised her pale hand. The priestess was seated in the air in a perfect invisible seiza, hovering centimeters above the stone floor.
"The silence of the soil is sacred when the garden's master is reading," Yù Qíng's voice flowed like velvet poisoned beneath the star-threaded veil. The blue goddess's cold fingers pinched the empty space.
The air rippled around the courtyard walls. A microscopic dome of the Void Lotus encapsulated the entire property, sealing its architecture so thoroughly that not even a volcanic eruption in the street would make the pages of Zhì Yuǎn's book tremble inside. His rest was guaranteed. The street, however, had just become an open-air slaughterhouse.
"Let their whistle sing in the wind, little flower," Yù Qíng whispered, her black eyes curving into a complacent smile toward the youngest. "Call the rest of the fertilizer."
Yù Méi released a guttural, hoarse and wet laugh that raised the hairs on the five guards' arms.
The Brutal Blade descended the first step. The invisible continuous repulsion barrier of the Suspended Lotus Step — which kept the city's toxic dust away from her body — flickered and dissolved with a subtle snap. She deactivated the protection intentionally.
The warrior raised her hand and, with an impatient yank, tore the black opaque veil from her face, throwing the fabric into the gutter.
The air in the street seemed to disappear.
The five guards froze instantly. The tips of their steel swords — moments ago raised with murderous intent — yielded millimeters toward the ground. The leader's pupils dilated beneath his helmet visor, his breath locking in his throat and his saliva drying in his mouth as the vision struck him.
Perfectly sculpted features of a goddess from another world, white jade skin, and strands of vivid gold framed a predatory smile that hungered for the dirty air. The unreal, scandalously erotic, and lethal beauty paralyzed the mortals' brains in an absolute stupor of shock and blind covetousness. She did not look human — she looked like the very incarnation of divine fertility descended for the slaughter.
Ignoring the men's pathetic fascination, she kicked her heavy leather boots aside. Her bare feet — of an immaculate paleness — touched the cold cobblestone of the street. She wanted the texture of the world. She wanted the warmth of blood running between her own fingers.
"Don't bore me to sleep," Yù Méi growled, her voice raw and free, shattering the street's trance in a single blow.
Woken from the spell by survival instinct mixed with the panic of that purely carnivorous threat, the guard leader roared. His Qi-imbued steel sword came down in a vertical arc, tearing through the wind directly against the blonde girl's exposed neck.
The blade struck Yù Méi's pale, immaculate skin with the shrieking sound of a cracking bell. The superior steel shattered into dozens of metallic fragments upon colliding with flesh forged in the god's cosmic furnace. It did not leave so much as a red line on her neck.
The guard's brain had no time to process the impossibility of the physics.
Yù Méi's hands shot forward like a serpent's strike. Her long, delicate fingers seized the sides of the man's iron helmet and squeezed. The war metal crumpled like warm wax. The sound of the skull bone being ground and the gray matter being pressed under pressure was wet and nauseating (squelch). Without releasing the chewed head inside the helmet, Yù Méi wrenched both arms violently to the side.
CRACK.
The guard's spinal column ruptured at the base of the neck. The throat flesh yielded with the grotesque sound of a wet rag being torn in two. The head was ripped from the torso together with a long, white, dripping length of spinal cord that whipped through the air.
The carotid artery burst at the stump of the severed neck. The thick, scalding blood shot out like an uncontrolled geyser, washing Yù Méi from bottom to top.
The thick, warm liquid struck her forehead, briefly blinded her almond-shaped irises, and soaked the collar of her golden tunic, trickling past her full lips. The dense smell of dark copper and rust filled the warrior's lungs. She ran her tongue across her teeth, savoring the salty, metallic moisture of her own prey with a shiver of pure ecstatic pleasure.
"Too easy!" Yù Méi cackled, overtaken by a bestial ecstasy.
The other four guards stumbled back, terror drowning the lust as their captain's blood painted the street red.
The golden goddess advanced in a blur. Her left fist fired like a siege cannon directly against the second guard's steel-scale breastplate. The impact did not merely dent the armor — Yù Méi's entire arm drove through the iron chest, shattering ribs and pulverizing the man's lungs. The youngest's bare hand tore out through the guard's back, clutching sharp fragments of his spine.
She wrenched her arm back, soaked scarlet to the shoulder. The vacuum of the open wound spilled the man's viscera like a slippery cascade. The nauseating stench of bowels loosened by sudden death, mixed with the acid of bile and blood, poisoned the air. The thick, steaming intestines fell with a wet thud directly onto Yù Méi's bare feet. The suffocating warmth of the internal organs heated the girl's jade toes, drawing a long sigh from her — skin prickling at the viscous texture pulling at her heels.
The third guard shrieked, dropped his sword, and tried to run. Yù Méi's bare foot — now slick — pressed into the cobblestone. She delivered a dry kick to the side of the fleeing man's knee. The joint reversed completely with a sick snap. He crashed face-first into the stone. The warrior's bare heel came down like an anvil on his back. The rib cage gave way with a dull burst; the broken ends of his own ribs punctured his heart and lungs, silencing him in a foamy, bloody gurgle.
The fourth guard, trembling hysterically — his trousers soaked by the urine of absolute panic — raised a metal whistle to his lips. The sharp, piercing shriek tore through the stone street.
Yù Méi smiled openly, her golden irises burning in a face dirty with red.
With both hands dripping clots, she seized the whistling man's face — her fingers digging like claws into his lower jaw and the top of his skull. In a raw, bestial, and rotational motion, she pulled her hands in opposite directions.
The guard's jaw was torn from his own face.
The vocal cords, neck muscles, and tongue snapped in a storm of fleshy repercussions. Saliva and blood flew through the air. A rough piece of chewed cartilage came loose in the violent yank, flying directly into the Brutal Blade's cheek and parted lips.
Yù Méi wrinkled her nose at the taste of dead flesh, running the back of her hand across her mouth to spit the piece of human tissue onto the blood-soaked ground.
---
Across the street, the five guards searching the neighboring inn froze at the sound of the distress whistle and the repulsive noises of flesh being ground. When they turned, horror swallowed their sanity: the golden goddess stood in the middle of the road, sunken to her ankles in intestines and pools of steaming blood, holding the lower half of a human face.
Yù Méi dropped the torn jaw, which fell with a dull thud into the gutter. Blood streamed from her in thick rivulets. She tilted her head back, breathing deep the smell of the slaughterhouse.
"Are you waiting for an invitation?!" the warrior roared.
She did not wait for their attack. Her bare feet struck the wet stones, producing a disgusting and loud sound (slap, squelch) with each step as she launched across the wide street. Her impact against the new squad sounded like a sledgehammer striking ripe pumpkins against a stone wall.
The first head simply evaporated beneath a right hook, the brain's gray matter flying across the white plaster façade of the inn. The youngest seized the arm of the second guard who tried to retreat and pulled with such aggression that his shoulder joint tore from the collarbone; using the man's own body as an articulated club, she swung him through the air and smashed him like a whip against the skulls of the two coming up behind him.
The noise of five bodies colliding, skulls cracking simultaneously, and organs yielding formed the rustic drum of perfect carnage.
In less than twenty seconds, the main street was unrecognizable.
Fragments of mutilated arms, slippery intestines exhaling white smoke in the cold air, torn teeth, and blood thick as mud lined the stone pavement. The ferrous smell rose, mingled with the oppressive heat of the dead bodies.
At the center of the colossal river of ground flesh, Yù Méi panted heavily.
The exquisite tunic that had once been a breathtaking dark gold was now black and soaked, clinging heavily to her body beneath layers of fresh, sticky blood. Her vivid gold hair dripped red clots. The girl's bare feet gripped the filthy stones, her pale little toes playing and sinking into the thick puddle. She dragged a dirty hand across her own chin, spreading the massacre mask further across her face. Her hyper-dense body vibrated in an ecstatic state, sated by the tactile wonder of the slaughter.
On the courtyard step — a world away from that mud — Yù Qíng and Mò Yán's star-threaded and silver silks remained impeccably clean. The air barrier around them swallowed sound and repelled even the dust that rose.
Mò Yán swallowed hard, her throat dry, her scarlet irises hypnotized by the grotesque and poetic image of the warrior playing barefoot in mortal viscera.
Yù Qíng released a low, melodious, and crystalline laugh. The priestess's laughter descended over the destroyed street like music.
"Without our husband's leash holding the ends of that Rupture, our little flower turns into a small, rustic, untameable demon," Yù Qíng murmured, her abyssal eyes overflowing with an affectionate and deeply sadistic pride as she admired the carnage below. "She always loved playing barefoot in wet earth, Mò Yán. The old toys just stain a little more."
---
The distress whistle — before being silenced — had fulfilled its bureaucratic function.
From the adjacent streets and wider alleyways, the sound of heavy boots marching accelerated. Search groups began turning the block's corner and stopping abruptly. The guards froze instinctively. Breaths caught in their throats and stomachs turned at the sight of the open-air butchery and the profane goddess waiting for them, dripping red at the center of the inferno.
They did not advance. They trembled, hands sweating inside their gauntlets, the metal of their weapons faltering against the will to live.
And then, cadenced, heavy, and brutal footsteps shook the cobblestones. From the eastern end of the wide street, the Commander of the City Guard turned the corner, followed by the gray-steel mass of the main troop. Nearly two hundred and eighty armored men.
The Commander — whose face bore the typical arrogance of the Transcendental apex — stopped abruptly. The soldier's pupils contracted in a primitive horror as they registered the pools of viscera spread across nearly thirty meters of street.
Yù Méi wiped her slippery palms across her soaked thighs, opening a manic, wide-open grin that contrasted with sickening contrast against the blood covering her.
The Brutal Blade took two relaxed steps forward. Her bare sole snapped against the sticky wetness of the ground (squelch, squelch), and she delivered a casual, dry kick at the crushed-helmeted head of the first guard she had killed. The iron piece — packed with bone fragments and brain tissue — rolled quickly across the street stones, stopping at exactly centimeters from the Commander's polished metal boot.
"Finally, the sorry excuse for a main course shows up," Yù Méi's guttural voice tore through the funereal silence, the youngest's hoarse echo reaching the three hundred terrified men. She opened her scarlet-stained arms wide, as though welcoming them to a banquet. "Come on. Send everyone at once and let's see if the fun gets any better."