"Why aren't you smiling? Give me a smile."
Li Fei held up her phone and urged him on in a sweet voice.
The City Lord squeezed out a smile uglier than weeping. In one hand he cradled the severed head of the Demon Suppression Bureau Chiliarch, its eyes rolled back to the whites, cheek pressed cozily against his big round belly. His other hand shook as he lifted it, index and middle finger spread into a V.
"Very good."
Li Fei snapped her fingers and waggled the screen in front of his eyes, delighted. "If I ever get caught, my Lord City Lord, your whole family, old and young, gets strung up on the city wall too."
"Now then, arrange a few rooms for me. Quiet ones… oh, right. Until I leave, she'll be with you every moment of every day."
Li Fei snapped her fingers again, and a [Qian Division] female ghost drifted silently in behind the City Lord, following him without a word.
"Yes… yes…"
The City Lord dropped the dripping head and turned to go, only to find himself staring straight into the secretary's eyes, still open, unwilling to close in death. His legs gave out. He sat back down in the pool of blood and vomited until there was nothing left.
"Relax. Relax. Deep breaths…"
Li Fei coached him patiently, and only once he had steadied did she send out a [Cleanse] to strip the gore from his robes. Her face was all warmth and kindness. "I'll handle this place. You know what you need to do, don't you?"
The City Lord nodded like a chicken pecking grain, and only when Li Fei waved him off did he stumble out of the hall, soul still half out of his body.
The doors swung slowly shut behind him, and the stench of blood faded with them. He stood there in a daze, looking at the banks of flowers in bloom beside him, and felt as though he had returned from another lifetime.
"My lord!"
A guard came hurrying over, eyes fixed warily on the female ghost trailing his master, weapon gripped tight.
"Useless! The whole lot of you, useless!"
The City Lord stood silent for a moment, then exploded, raining punches and kicks on the loyal man in front of him.
The guard took the beating full in the face without understanding a scrap of it. Alarm and fury churned in him, but he didn't dare move, only bowed his head and endured.
It took a long while for the City Lord to cool down. Then he set his face and said,
"This is a personal bodyguard, a gift from the lord of the Demon Suppression Bureau. Is that understood?"
"Yes!"
None of the guards questioned it. A few even stole sidelong looks at the female ghost, whose beauty was good enough to eat, envy plain on their faces.
In the eyes of ordinary people, demons and ghosts were terrifying things that ate a man and didn't spit out the bones. But sometimes a female ghost or she-demon who happened to suit human tastes wouldn't be killed after her defeat. There were men who hunted them on purpose, crippled their ability to harm by special means, and sold them to the powerful for a fortune.
The City Lord had bought and kept more than one or two such ghosts in his manor over the years. His men found nothing surprising in it.
"The Lord Chiliarch is resting in the hall. Don't disturb him… Ah, and afterward he'll be lodging at the Hanxiang Lodge. He likes quiet. Understood?"
Having given his orders, the City Lord waved a limp hand. "A-Da and A-Er stay. The rest of you, out."
"Yes."
All but the two trusted men accepted the order and withdrew.
The sky darkened. Two carriages had left the city. Three came back.
The drivers all came from the City Lord's manor and had done their share of filthy work over the years. They said not a word from beginning to end, and looked straight through the female ghosts drifting out of the carriage compartments.
With the City Lord's written order in hand, the convoy met no inspection at all. It rolled straight through, pedestrians scattering out of its way.
Inside the carriage, Qiao'er heard faint weeping from the street outside and narrowed her eyes, trying to catch a glimpse of the roadside through the gap in the trembling curtain.
Li Fei swept the curtain aside with one hand, smiling. "If you want to look, look openly. No need to worry about any warrant."
"Mm."
Qiao'er nodded her thanks and turned to the window.
Everything outside was white. Every household hung in mourning hemp, paper money swirled through the air, and countless old people knelt at the roadside wailing, clutching infants who were nothing but skin over bone, their cries thin as blood squeezed from a stone.
At the sight of it, Qiao'er's beautiful amber-toned pupils widened a fraction.
Lawlessness, the powerful who did as they pleased, demons, plague, famine, disaster of every kind: these things ground away at the common folk of Luyuan County, and of the whole Great Song, every hour of every day. Almost every morning, a few more nameless corpses turned up in the streets and alleys of Luyuan County. Qiao'er had long since stopped finding that strange.
But deaths on this scale came only once in several years. There had already been a wave last year. Why had a second come so soon?
Qiao'er turned it over, but she simply lacked the information, and no answer came.
Seeing this, Li Fei smiled faintly and explained for her.
"Hero Nie didn't tell you? A great many people died the night before last…"
On the night the Soul-Burial Spirit-Nourishing Grand Array took shape, great demons had assaulted the city and tangled Nie Yunyi up for half the night, leaving him no way to break free.
Yet a handful of Heaven Realm great demons would hardly have lasted long, not against Hero Nie, who was Sequence 5 at the very least. Even Li Fei could have butchered them in short order.
So the demons chose a method that was vicious but effective.
They slipped into the city in scattered groups and took the populace hostage, slaughtering some, abducting others, forcing Nie Yunyi to run from one fire to the next. And the demons truly did set fires. They burned the granaries.
With human living space shrinking and the fields outside the walls nearly impossible to work, grain was beyond precious. Burn one storehouse of it and the result was inevitable: corpses of the starved lying everywhere, dead beyond counting. The damage went deeper than indiscriminate murder ever could.
However high Nie Yunyi's martial arts, he was one man with a blade. Alone, it cost him enormous effort just to barely stamp the chaos down.
And even so, blood ran in rivers through the city, the dead and wounded past reckoning. Or rather, the City Lord's manor had never intended to reckon them at all. To the powerful, the common folk at the bottom were no different from weeds: a gust of wind, a lick of flame, and whole swathes of them died, yet before long they grew stubbornly back, ready for the next harvest.
As Li Fei laid out the whole chain of events, it wasn't only Qiao'er who drifted off into her own thoughts. Wang Yutong, who had once been one of the powerful herself, looked distinctly uneasy.
It wasn't a sudden attack of conscience. She had seen the warrants with her family's portraits on them.
She regretted the cruelty she'd shown Qiao'er in the past, but only because Eva had opened her up and taught her how good girls could be. What did strangers among the common folk have to do with her?
"No need to fret. I've persuaded the City Lord. He'll be providing us a place to stay."
Li Fei saw straight through Miss Wang's thoughts and reassured her. "The warrants will be pulled before long. Just be careful for a while and don't go wandering."
"Mm."
Wang Yutong nodded obediently, drawing all the security she needed from Li Fei's presence.
Qiao'er's gaze stayed on the window, on whatever she was thinking about, but in her eyes Li Fei glimpsed something she knew far too well, just beginning to sprout.
Clearly the upheavals of these past few days had, without the girl noticing, begun to transform her.
She had brushed against death and Betrayal, had been singled out for favor by an enchantress, had even earned Hero Nie's regard. Qiao'er was no longer content to drift wherever the current took her. Ambition was putting down roots in her, and the enchantress's tireless, all-pervading temptation was the finest fertilizer it could ask for.
The carriage fell quiet again. Li Fei watched Qiao'er with a smile and felt as though she were looking at herself, newly arrived in Loxibrook.
The difference was that her own ambition and greed had never needed anyone else to push them along.
Before long, the convoy rolled straight into the City Lord's manor and stopped before the gateway arch of a detached courtyard.
The drivers left at once without a word. Half a minute later Li Fei hopped down, tapped the gourd at her waist, and white smoke streamed out in ropes, taking shape as female ghosts who hauled the cargo out of the carriages.
With perfect ladylike grace, Li Fei took Qiao'er and Wang Yutong by the hand and helped them down, and the three of them strolled into the courtyard.
The courtyard the City Lord had arranged was rather elegant. A pond lay at its center, ringed with drooping green willows. Rockeries dotted the grounds, roses climbed the walls, and the antique pavilion had a charm all its own.
"Sister Qiao'er, you two go and rest. I'm going out tonight. I won't be back until dawn."
She saw them both to their rooms, then wandered out of the courtyard at a leisurely pace, fishing a bar of chocolate from her pocket as she went and waving to the City Lord, who waited a short distance off.
"Very good."
When the City Lord had trotted up close, Li Fei offered him that word of praise, unwrapped the chocolate and handed it over, smiling. "Eat it, and your poison will hold off another three days."
"Thank you, my lord."
The City Lord swallowed the chocolate down without hesitation.
The poison Li Fei had traded for was dirt cheap, and no great difficulty to cure if a master of medicine took a hand. But with a female ghost shadowing him, how would he dare go looking for a physician?
"Remember to leave the food box at the courtyard gate on schedule. I'll send someone to fetch it."
Li Fei's tone stayed pleasant. "I'll be gone in a few days, and after that my Lord City Lord may go right on lording it over this city as its little emperor. So do be sure not to do anything unwise."
"Rest easy, my lord."
The City Lord declared himself at once, swearing oaths to prove his sincerity: no outsider would ever learn Li Fei's movements.
"I believe you, of course. Then I won't take up any more of your time."
Li Fei turned unhurriedly away, the sweep of her skirts dissolving into the heavy dusk.
…
Li Fei rode out of the city on her skeletal horse, picked a direction at random, and cut down every demon she came across.
Lilith wouldn't arrive for a few days yet, and cultivation couldn't be allowed to lapse.
Unfortunately, demons were thin on the ground this close to the city walls, and every one of them was alert and cunning. Li Fei hunted hard for half the night and turned up only two or three strays. Not much merit went into the ledger.
The one pleasant surprise had come shortly after she left the city: a vengeful ghost by the name of Huang Zhenzhen.
"I really do need to take over the Demon Suppression Bureau soon…"
Li Fei was muttering to herself when her eyes lit up. She launched off the horse's back and returned before long with a female ghost dangling by the neck.
"Sister Lian, will this one do?"
Li Fei asked, hopeful.
Xiao Lian's eyes went pitch black, a cold ghostly aura coiling in them.
A few breaths later she shook her head, and her eyes returned to clear black and white.
Li Fei sighed with regret. Crimson battle qi surged, and the female ghost in her hand had time for a single wail before her soul scattered to nothing.
Earlier, a thousand and more female ghosts had invoked the [Soul Gathering] secret art, fusing into a single Ghost Giant that had held an Innate master in place by main force. Li Fei had watched it and wanted one badly.
But after inheriting the Tree Demon's legacy, she realized it wasn't nearly so simple.
Power always came with a price. The gap between Sequence 6 and the ordinary Sequence 8 female ghosts wasn't a matter of a little here and there. Without outstanding war-type Transcendents, without extensive training and fine equipment, without legion-class items to buff them, trying to make up a difference in quality with sheer quantity was harder than climbing to heaven.
The [Soul Gathering] art was no exception. It came bound by layer upon layer of conditions.
First, every activation consumed a material called [Soul Jade], and the more female ghosts were fused, the higher the cost climbed.
Second, the "raw material" for a Ghost Giant had to be female ghosts. No other kind of ghost would serve. And the ghosts needed a certain aptitude and had to have practiced the [Soul Gathering] art in advance to take part in the fusion smoothly. The aptitude requirement wasn't especially high; roughly one in ten was enough.
Third, every time the Ghost Giant was "wounded," some number of female ghosts were destroyed outright. Which meant that after a hard battle, Li Fei would have to replenish her ranks and also account for morale, lest she push the ghosts so far that they turned on her.
Even that vicious, blood-soaked Tree Demon had treated its female ghosts rather generously. Ones of outstanding aptitude like Xiao Lian it raised as disciples, securing their loyalty, so that when the crucial moment came the ghosts were willing to risk annihilation holding off the Demon Suppression Bureau's Innate master and buying it the opening it needed to survive the lightning tribulation.
In the end every last benefit had fallen to Li Fei, and having taken over this crowd of ghosts, Li Fei now had to work out how to manage the force. The most important item on that list was replacing lost numbers. Otherwise the Ghost Giant's combat strength would shrink drastically, and before an Innate master it would be no better than paper, no help to her at all.
Yet while the world teemed with demons and ghosts, the categories were endless. Narrowing her targets to female ghosts alone meant the numbers within any fixed area were sharply limited, and those with enough aptitude to master the forbidden [Soul Gathering] art were one in ten on top of that. Very hard to find.
What gave Li Fei the bigger headache was that within a hundred li in every direction, every usable female ghost had long since been swept up by the Thousand-Year Tree Demon. She had slain any number of ghosts these past two days and run into exactly one of qualifying aptitude, the one she had just seized not far outside the gates of Luyuan County. Named Huang Zhenzhen, dead only a short while, her whole body thick with resentment, she had been assigned to the [Qian] Division.
"That's about enough. Time to start breaking the unit in."
Seeing that the night was already deep and the take meager, Li Fei found an open stretch of ground nearby, set down the Pocket Residence, and gave the ghost gourd a light shake. The [Qian] and [Kun] Divisions came to two hundred and sixty-seven female ghosts in all, and every one of them was present save the one shadowing the City Lord. They formed a ring with Li Fei at its center, a cold ghostly aura spreading until the temperature of the place dropped several degrees.
The [Qian] and [Kun] Divisions were Li Fei's own arrangement. Those with prior experience went into the [Qian] Division, eighty-four of them, exactly enough to cover the blind spots in Miss Top Courtesan's Art of Tea, such as issuing Yusura a wife once they got back. The remaining one hundred and eighty-three went into the [Kun] Division, where they could receive Miss Top Courtesan's personal, hands-on instruction.
Of course, Li Fei understood the old principle well enough: people don't resent scarcity, they resent unfairness. She would need some time to think through the benefits and treatment of the [Qian] Division ghosts, so their resentment wouldn't fester and eat into their loyalty.
"Come now. Sit down."
All warmth and good cheer, Li Fei handed out [Ghost Spring] and [Yin Soul Stone] to the female ghosts with her own hands.
These had been scavenged from the Thousand-Year Tree Demon. Eating them gave ghostly beings pleasure and also purified their ghost aura. The female ghosts craved both no less fiercely than sprites craved sprite fruit.
Even the newly recruited Huang Zhenzhen hesitated only a moment before instinct's temptation proved too much. She lifted the [Yin Soul Stone] to her mouth in silence and chewed.
While the ghosts "dined," Li Fei seized the moment and launched into the ideological groundwork that had to come before any deeper integration.
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