Xu Yi followed the pale blue tassel of incense with his eyes. The trail crossed over a wall, wound around a clock tower made of gray-black rice-washed stone, and disappeared into the chapel behind the main bell tower.
"I hope Ye Miao can study hard... As long as she gets a good education in this era, a bright future will be waiting for her."
Xu Yi turned and headed back.
The neighborhood where St. Mary's Hall stood was close to the foreign concessions. The roads were well-maintained and paved with asphalt. The plane trees on either side couldn't completely block out the sun, and the afternoon light fell on the asphalt road, releasing its heavy, tarry smell into the air.
Xu Yi caught the smell but deliberately ignored it. He was thinking about something important:
"That old man said I should take the incense burner back, and that once I could smell its fragrance, I'd naturally understand how to train my spirituality.
"Now it seems the method is to light the incense burner and wait for the smoke to rise and turn into an illusion.
"I managed to resist the illusion and hold fast to my true self, so my spirituality improved."
"Something like that... probably?"
With no one to guide him, Xu Yi was like someone trying to cross a river without even a stone to feel his way across. He could only "figure it out himself."
As he walked, Xu Yi went over what had just happened.
"That old man said himself that once I smelled the fragrance, I'd become a Night Roaming God.
"I've smelled the incense burner's fragrance now.
"And I gained the ability to [Trace the Source of a Scent].
"So does that mean I'm a Night Roaming God now?"
Xu Yi felt that something was off.
"Shouldn't Night Roaming Gods be outlaws skilled at fighting?
"At the very least, shouldn't they be assassins or sorcerers who roam the night?
"I lit the incense burner and burned my spirituality into divinity, becoming a Night Roaming God, but...
"How did my divinity end up giving me the ability to track scents?"
This wasn't what Xu Yi had imagined a Night Roaming God would be like.
Xu Yi held his breath for ten seconds and shut off his spiritual sight.
He decided to finish what he needed to do that night, then ask Jing Tao what exactly was going on with him.
Xu Yi returned to 38th Shop District and spent over three hours holed up in the study. When he came out, he went to the toilet first, then bought a bowl of wontons from a street stall for two copper coins. Eating as he walked, he headed toward Peacekeeping Hall.
At Peacekeeping Hall, Xu Yi cupped his fists toward Duan Hu.
"I'll have to trouble you to back me up again today, Second Brother."
Xu Yi had already discussed the matter with Duan Hu the day before, so Duan Hu was prepared.
"Good brother, let's get going."
Duan Hu called over a group of men who had been waiting in an alley beside Peacekeeping Hall. There were about ten of them, all the sort of street toughs no one wanted to mess with.
There were plenty of thugs on the streets, but few belonged to a gang of the Green Gang's standing.
Most of the aimless drifters and gambling addicts who wasted their days away were nobodies just scraping by. They didn't even belong to a gang, much less fight others for territory. Most of them stuck to petty crimes: "skinning the pig," robbing passersby of their clothes; "tossing the cap," stealing their felt hats; or "carrying the uncle," slipping a rope around someone's neck, dragging him into a dark alley, and taking his clothes...
Men like these weren't fit to appear in public, let alone work as hired muscle.
The thugs Duan Hu had found were a cut above.
They already belonged to gangs, and when fighting over business or territory, they used real weapons. Every one of them was a hardened thug who had fought his way up from the bottom.
Duan Hu had been in the underworld for a long time. He had connections, and he'd made a name for himself with his fists. He had beaten every one of these men into submission.
In the underworld, you looked at a man's fists first, his loyalty second, and his money last.
Duan Hu had subdued them with his fists, treated his brothers with loyalty, and made sure there was plenty of money to go around. Without all that, he could never have kept these dangerous men in line.
The group exchanged a couple of lines of underworld code, going through the motions. Once they learned Xu Yi's identity, they cupped their fists to him respectfully.
Green Gang enforcers stood far above ordinary street brawlers. They had the Green Gang's name behind them, as well as connections and territory. When a fight broke out, they could call for backup; if the Constabulary arrested them, they had ways to get their people out; and when trouble arose, they could settle it.
Every thug in 38th Shop District wanted to apprentice into the Green Gang, but joining wasn't easy. The Green Gang's masters were arrogant and rarely accepted apprentices.
Still, these men could count themselves half Green Gang.
As long as they recognized an official Green Gang disciple as their boss and could exchange the right coded phrases with others they met in an alley, they counted as Green Gang members.
The Green Gang's ordinary members were as numerous as cattle!
After exchanging the code phrases, the group headed toward 56, 38th Shop District.
By the time they reached the Big Factory District behind 56, 38th Shop District, night had fallen completely.
It wasn't raining, but the air was damp. Perhaps the day's strong sunlight had evaporated the moisture. The fog was thick that night, and visibility was under fifty meters—
Standing at the entrance to the Big Factory District, Xu Yi couldn't see through the mist at all. Naturally, he couldn't see the Lingtong Hall ointment factory either.
The Big Factory District wasn't pitch-black at night. There were no streetlights, but the factories were well lit. The glow spilling out of them kept the streets from going completely dark.
Suddenly, someone called out from the darkness a short distance away.
"Xu Yi."
It was Jing Tao.
Xu Yi raised an eyebrow.
Jing Tao stood in the darkness, barely five meters away, yet he hadn't caught her scent at all.
He figured she had used spirituality... or perhaps divinity, to conceal her presence.
Xu Yi knew full well that although he had become a Night Roaming God, he was still far behind an "experienced" Night Roaming God like Jing Tao in terms of the methods he had mastered.
Xu Yi joined Jing Tao. Duan Hu told his men not to draw blood, damage the machinery, or hurt the ordinary workers. Then he led the group into the Lingtong Hall factory.
The night before, nearly half of Lingtong Hall's office managers and workshop supervisors had died. When the remaining management came to work that day, they had barely managed to coordinate their operations.
The factory hadn't operated all morning.
That morning, Jing Tao had also visited the surviving managers one by one, building rapport with them and working on each of them.
She had thought through the entire matter carefully, weighing the connections and interests involved. That was why she had marked these people on the list and let them live.
Now she was persuading them to stay at the factory and help out. It was a masterful move, precisely calculated.
The surviving managers had already been terrified by the slaughter the night before. They didn't need to think twice to know that the Jing Family's main branch was responsible. Two of them had even fled with their entire families, fearing reprisals, and vanished without a trace.
The rest had plenty to consider:
Even across the entire Big Factory District, Lingtong Hall was a medium-sized factory. It had five assembly lines and dozens of machines, and employed several hundred workers.
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