The Fire Beast
The great sects, Zhongnan among them, had interrogated Yeo Yongmyeong, chieftain of the Anti-Dragon King Faction, and dragged every scrap of information from him.
What they learned was nothing short of devastating.
Who would ever have imagined the Anti-Dragon King Faction was working with the Mysterious Faction?
There had been an imposter—a man posing as a merchant of the Silent Merchant Guild—who had scattered manuals of demonic martial arts across Shaanxi Province before vanishing without a trace. The ones who had aided that imposter were waterway bandits of the Anti-Dragon King Faction. And the reason demonic arts had flooded every corner of the Central Plains was the same: the Anti-Dragon King Faction had ferried those manuals along the Yangtze.
We knew the Mysterious Faction had planted collaborators inside the Six Tyrant Coalition. But to think the threads would weave together like this…
He had wondered how the demonic arts had spread so quickly. It made sense, now that he knew a faction of the Yangtze Waterway Sect had opened the waterways for them.
And that was not the end of the Anti-Dragon King Faction’s service to the Mysterious Faction.
To think they had secretly moved jiangshi and spirit beasts and scattered them across the Central Plains…
The jiangshi outbreak that began in Jiangsu and spilled into Anhui and Hubei. When the Martial Alliance interrogated the suspicious Taoists of Guigu Gate who had led those corpses, they learned that the horde marching on Wuhan in Hubei was not the whole of it. Even the captured Taoists of Guigu Gate had not known how the jiangshi were transported—because the Anti-Dragon King Faction had been the carriers.
The Demon Spirit Jiangshi practiced the Essence-Stealing Qi Absorption Art, which meant they could grow endlessly stronger. The Central Plains were already crawling with heretical bands who had learned demonic arts and run wild. What would happen if Demon Spirit Jiangshi were unleashed into that chaos needed no imagination.
Ink Corpse Jiangshi, said to rival Peak Experts, might spring up like bamboo after rain.
Every great sect in Shaanxi had poured its strength into barely pacifying the south—and this news made clear that the work was far from finished.
And it isn’t only jiangshi. Spirit beasts as well…
Not every spirit beast was a blessing to humankind. Some species were no better than calamities in living flesh.
And these are no ordinary spirit beasts—they’ve been polluted with demonic qi.
There was the dual-headed serpent contaminated by demonic qi that Danwon had discovered when she took Cheonhwa to Danfeng County for relief work. That serpent, too, had almost certainly been part of their design.
Capture a beast on the brink of forming a Spiritual Nature, pollute it with demonic qi, and release it where you want the damage done. That was the plan.
Had Cheonhwa not subdued it in time, the dual-headed serpent would have become a vicious spirit beast and served their purpose exactly. If such creatures ran free, the destruction would equal a Peak Expert rampaging with deliberate murder in his heart.
Truly, one mountain after another.
No sooner had they solved one crisis than the next rose to meet them. At this rate, the plan to gather strength through the winter and prepare for the upheaval in the north would have to be abandoned.
The one mercy is that the Anti-Dragon King Faction’s information told us where the polluted spirit beasts were released.
They had transported the jiangshi around the time of the Jiangsu outbreak—roughly half a year past. Naturally the corpses had scattered, and with heretical bands practicing demonic arts stirring across the Central Plains, tracking their trails was nearly impossible. The polluted spirit beasts, however, had been moved far more recently. Most spirit beasts rarely left a fixed territory, and no word of rampaging beasts had reached them yet—which suggested the creatures had entered hibernation with the winter, or something like it.
The schism of the Yangtze Waterway Sect, the jiangshi, the polluted spirit beasts… the board is so vast there’s no way to seal every breach.
If the Central Plains were a great go board, Shaanxi was a single star-point upon it. Zhongnan’s stones were concentrated near that star-point, and the problems they could solve were limited to its vicinity. But the Mysterious Faction was not playing for a single star-point—they were reading the entire board of the Central Plains. When trouble born of stones laid in other regions crashed into Shaanxi, all one could do was what they were doing now: hold the line.
Our main mountain moves in the realm of tactics. The Mysterious Faction moves in the realm of strategy.
They were placing stones across the whole of the Central Plains. A single star-point could never answer that fully.
To stand against them, we must move in the same strategic realm—across the entire Central Plains.
And for that, they needed the Martial Alliance: the coalition that bound the whole of the righteous martial world. Half a year had already passed since it began reshaping itself from a mere network of correspondence into a true armed force. Once the Alliance moved in earnest, the burden would lighten.
The question is whether we can hold until the Martial Alliance can truly act.
This crisis was not confined to one province—it was erupting simultaneously across the land. The regions that would cry out for the Alliance’s aid would be many, not few. Most likely they would secure Hubei, where the Alliance headquarters stood, before turning to the rest. And as a coalition, every faction would howl to be helped first. Solving that would demand the Alliance Leader’s capacity and the strategists’ cunning. How effectively they answered would decide whether the Martial Alliance, remade as a force of arms, could be trusted at all.
"…We will pass the intelligence on the jiangshi and the spirit beasts to other regions through the Martial Alliance. And what if we cooperate with the other sects to hunt them down?"
At the Sect Leader’s proposal, the elders nodded their agreement. This was not a problem Zhongnan could handle alone, the way they had pacified southern Shaanxi. Like the heretical bands’ unrest, it would unfold not only in Shaanxi but across the whole of the Central Plains. Warning the entire righteous martial world through the Martial Alliance was the right course.
This winter is going to be a bitter one.
The spirit beast opened its eyes.
It woke for one reason only: hunger. Ordinarily it would have gorged itself against the winter and slept the long sleep through. This winter, there had been no chance. Human scum had come and dragged it out before it could fill its belly.
Its mind had been fogged at the time, too dull to answer properly. Looking back now, chewing their skulls open would not have been excessive.
A low growl rolled from its throat. Starvation had drawn its temper razor-thin. To sleep again, it needed food first.
The spirit beast left the cave it had claimed as its new den and began to prowl the mountain. Winter offered little in the way of prey. Then its senses caught a village at the mountain’s foot—humans clustered together.
In ordinary times it would not have spared them a glance. Now was different. First, the hunger was savage. Second, the memory of what humans had done to it scraped its temper raw. And third—though the beast itself did not know it—the demonic qi that polluted it whispered and prodded, urging it to run wild.
Reason went dark. Impulse took the reins.
Heat shimmered from its body. Pitch-black fur rolled like shadow. From eyes the color of fresh blood, a light like flame leapt. Then, in a maw crowded with jagged fangs, fire as red as those eyes gathered. The breath it drew deep and hurled forth was a sphere of knotted flame—a fireball.
The orb of fire traced a long curve toward the village. A few with sharp senses noticed the strangeness and looked up.
"Look at that!"
"What in the world is that?"
They stared blankly at the sphere, not yet understanding. The fireball fell into the heart of the village—and the instant it touched the ground—
BOOM!
A colossal blast hurled fire in every direction and swallowed the entire village whole.
"Aaaagh!"
"Fire!"
"Help me!"
The sudden inferno left people witless. Houses burned. People burned. They flung water, rolled in the dirt—nothing worked. The flames would not die, for they were born of a spirit beast’s power. In moments the village was ash.
The spirit beast strolled at its leisure into the ruined settlement. A few humans fled the fire; that was of no concern. Filling its empty belly came first.
"Ugh… ah…"
A survivor who had not yet burned to death made a sound without meaning to. The spirit beast preferred its meat charred black as coal, but flesh merely seared had a flavor of its own. It approached the survivor and opened a wolfish maw wide.
It was midwinter, yet the Zhongnan Sect moved without rest. They were hunting the jiangshi and spirit beasts the Anti-Dragon King Faction had scattered across Shaanxi.
When Cheonhwa heard the news, a single thought rose.
There’s no escaping bad fate, is there?
Demon Spirit Jiangshi. Spirit beasts polluted with demonic qi. He had dealt with both before—and knew exactly how dangerous they were.
For the jiangshi, unless they had grown to the level of an Ink Corpse Jiangshi, several first-class martial artists would suffice. The real problem was the spirit beasts. If they had been incomplete, like the dual-headed serpent he had faced, that would be one thing. But the beasts the Anti-Dragon King Faction had transported, though polluted with demonic qi, had already fully formed their Spiritual Natures. Facing such creatures required a Peak Expert—without exception.
And Peak Experts are not so many.
Ordinarily, dangers of a spirit beast’s caliber were left to elites like the Taiyi Swordsmen. Most of Zhongnan’s elite, however, were still tied down toward the southern marches. When they had cleared the heretical bands of southern Shaanxi, Hao Clan intelligence had let them map the threats and assign forces with precision, solving the shortage of Peak Experts that way. This time, that approach was impossible.
They say the beasts running wild now are ones that woke from hibernation.
Normally, after filling a hungry belly, a beast would return to its winter sleep. But demonic qi had made them vicious, and they were committing slaughter they had no need of. If even sluggish creatures just roused from hibernation were this bad, the damage once spring came and they truly ran free would dwarf what they faced now. Every polluted spirit beast in Shaanxi—those already rampaging and those still asleep—had to be hunted down.
Zhongnan, Huashan, and the Hao Clan are cooperating on this as well, I hear.
When they cleared the heretical bands, each sect had formed its own teams and taken assigned zones. This time, for want of numbers, they would move alongside Peak Experts from other sects.
Rendezvous on site, was it?
Cheonhwa checked his destination once more. Northwest of Xi’an in Shaanxi—Lishan in Lintong.