Vermin!

Night had fallen deep, yet the gambling den remained brightly lit, its voices roaring like a boiling cauldron.

The howls of gamblers who had lost their heads mingled with the wild laughter of winners.

Wang Lang bypassed the main entrance, scaled the wall from the side rear, and dropped into the back courtyard.

Unlike the uproar out front, the rear courtyard was much quieter.

Several rooms were lit, with the rowdy sounds of drinking games and boozing drifting faintly from within.

Judging by the auras, the strongest source of blood and vitality was inside the largest room in the middle.

Body Tempering Level Two. That should be the gang leader, Zhao Hu.

Wang Lang did not hesitate and strode straight toward it.

"Who's there?!" The two gang members standing watch at the door saw the shadow approaching and had only just shouted their challenge.

Wang Lang's figure flashed, and he appeared before them like a ghost. Both hands clasped around their throats, he applied a little force.

Crack.

The two crumpled limply to the ground, the shock still frozen in their eyes.

Wang Lang pushed open the door.

Inside, Zhao Hu, the Changle Gang's leader, was drinking alone before a table full of food and wine.

Hearing the disturbance, he looked up in astonishment. The sight of an unfamiliar young face immediately filled him with rage.

"Where did this little bastard come from, daring to barge into my—"

Before he could finish, Zhao Hu's pupils abruptly contracted.

A lethal sense of danger that made his soul tremble crashed down upon him!

Wang Lang moved. No wasted words, no probing. He condensed fifty points of intent into his right fist and threw a punch!

Zhao Hu was, after all, at Body Tempering Level Two. His reaction was extremely swift, and the blood and vitality throughout his body erupted as he tried to block.

But the numbers crushed him.

A dull, heavy impact rang out.

Like Liu Biao's, Zhao Hu's head exploded. Red and white matter mixed with fragments of bone sprayed in all directions across the wall and screen behind him.

The headless body swayed twice, then crashed to the floor.

Wang Lang did not even spare it another glance before turning and leaving the room.

His goal was clear: the Changle Gang would leave behind neither chickens nor dogs.

Wang Lang's figure flickered through every room in the rear courtyard.

With the physical power of Body Tempering Level Two supplemented by intent, every strike he made claimed a life.

Some gang members went to see the King of Hell in their sleep.

Others awoke with a start and had only just seized their weapons when a fist punched through their chests.

Others dropped to their knees and begged, tears and snot streaming down their faces.

"Sir! Spare me! I only joined today! I've never done anything!"

"I have an eighty-year-old mother and a three-year-old child at home! I was forced into this!"

Wang Lang turned a deaf ear, his expression unchanged as his fist rose and fell.

He knew the Changle Gang.

Before Old Wang's lesson three years ago, anyone wishing to formally join the gang had to commit ten evil deeds as a token of allegiance.

Though they had appeared to restrain themselves afterward, their filthy deeds in the shadows had never ceased.

Everyone here, without exception, was guilty.

Sparing them would be the greatest injustice to those they had bullied, even killed.

Mercy toward evil was cruelty toward good.

He had understood that principle in his previous life.

Screams, pleas for mercy, and the sounds of shattering bones rose and fell through the night... then quickly faded into silence.

When the last gang member trying to scale the wall and flee was killed by Wang Lang's airborne punch from a distance, the entire rear courtyard fell silent.

Wang Lang stood in the center of the courtyard, corpses strewn beneath his feet.

The thick stench of blood surged into the sky, and even the distant clamor of the gambling den seemed to grow quieter.

He found some lamp oil, piled the corpses together, and set them alight.

The flames burst up with a roar and spread rapidly.

Orange-red firelight illuminated his calm, unruffled face and reflected the dancing light in his eyes.

He was thinking: why?

Why did Qinglin City have a City Lord's Mansion, yet allow a festering tumor like the Changle Gang to exist for so many years?

Did they not know? Impossible.

Could they not control it? Yet the City Lord's Mansion had several Body Tempering martial artists and Qi Drawing cultivators stationed there.

Then they simply did not wish to act? Or were there interests entangled behind the scenes?

The flames crackled and popped, reddening half the sky.

Wang Lang flashed away and landed atop a distant tree to observe what happened next.

"Fire! Hurry and get people to put it out!"

The cries of alarm from the residents and the commotion of firefighting drifted over from afar.

The shouts drew a crowd, but when they saw that the fire had started in the rear courtyard of that gambling den,

every intention of putting out the fire instantly turned into a shared understanding to merely watch.

They stood in silence, ensuring only that the flames would not spread to their own homes.

Wang Lang withdrew his gaze and paid them no more mind.

He reached the city wall, poured intent into his legs, easily leaped over it, and melted into the night beyond the city.

The next morning.

Qinglin City was like cold water thrown into boiling oil, exploding into complete uproar.

News that the Changle Gang had been wiped out overnight and its headquarters burned to the ground spread through every street and alley at astonishing speed.

In teahouses, taverns, streets, and alleyways, everyone was talking about it.

"Have you heard? The Changle Gang is gone! Heaven has opened its eyes!"

"Who knows what great hero passed through and upheld justice, wiping out those scourges in one sweep!"

"Heh, my relative works at the yamen. I heard the scene was something else—tsk, tsk, Zhao Hu didn't even have a head left!"

"They deserved it! Those damned things should have met their retribution long ago!"

"Still, I heard there was a man named Li Laosi. He ran off yesterday afternoon to hide because of his debts, so he wasn't at the gang headquarters and luckily escaped disaster.

"When he came back this morning and saw that scene, he was so scared he pissed himself and ran straight out of the city!"

"Good that he ran. Saves him from dirtying that hero's hands."

"What did the City Lord's Mansion have to say?"

"What could they say? They put up a notice saying it was suspected to be a vendetta between martial artists and that they were investigating. If you ask me, it's just going through the motions..."

All sorts of rumors fermented. Some applauded in delight, some still felt lingering fear, and others speculated about which powerful figure had done it.

To the people of Qinglin City, the destruction of the Changle Gang was no different from having a great boulder lifted from their hearts.

Meanwhile, Wang Lang, the one who had started it all, was in the vegetable garden he had cultivated behind Listening Waves Mountain Manor.

Morning light spilled over the lush green leaves, and dew sparkled upon them.

The field held Qingyu cabbages, common in this world and similar to the Chinese cabbages from his previous life.

There was also a tuber crop called red-root vine, its leaves resembling sweet potato vines.

The tubers buried in the soil resembled beets, dark red throughout and brimming with juice. They had been a main source of his staple food in the past.

The crops were growing well.

Holding a small hoe, he first loosened the soil between the vegetable rows, then set it down.

He bent over and crushed with his fingers the plump green worms clinging to the undersides of the leaves.

Watching those insects chew through the vegetable leaves, Wang Lang's movements gradually slowed.

He suddenly felt that evil people were just like these insects.

They lurked beneath bright, glossy leaves, ceaselessly gnawing away at the flesh and blood of the plants.

Today, after clearing them out, the garden seemed clean.

But tomorrow, new ones might crawl out from some unknown corner.

As though they could never be completely eradicated.

Wang Lang straightened and looked over this small plot of land into which he had once poured so much effort. Suddenly, he found it somewhat dull and meaningless.

With [Innate Qi], this food had lost even its most basic meaning to him.

He stopped removing the insects and instead began harvesting the mature Qingyu cabbages and red-root vines one by one.

"Since I'm not eating them anymore, leaving them here would only be wasteful. Once I harvest this batch, this land... I'll leave it empty."

Listening Waves Mountain Manor had once possessed many fertile fields and estates, most scattered among villages and towns within several dozen miles of Mingyue Mountain.

But over the past few decades, Old Wang had gradually given them away to the common folk who rented the land or lived in hardship.

He called it accumulating virtue through good deeds and spreading blessings throughout the countryside.

Wang Lang had no objection to Old Wang's habit of scattering money like a charitable fool.

Because he understood that pitiful old man.

The Wang family of Listening Waves Mountain Manor had only reached its third generation with Old Wang.

Old Wang's wife had passed away early after giving birth to their son. He had painstakingly raised his only child, hoping to carry on the family line.

Sadly, fate offered no blessing. When Wang Lang was five, his adoptive father, Old Wang's biological son, who had not yet married, died of a serious illness.

From then on, Old Wang's last blood relative in this world was gone.

Perhaps those successive blows had caused him to divide all the feelings and hopes of the rest of his life into two parts.

One part he placed in upholding justice and seeking the satisfaction in his heart. The other he entrusted to Wang Lang, the orphan he had picked up from the water.

Perhaps it was because of that very attachment that Wang Lang had been allowed to remain at the manor.

Otherwise, Old Wang could easily have found an honest family, given them some silver, and entrusted Wang Lang to their care.

But in the end, he had not done so. Instead, he had guarded this last ancestral property and raised Wang Lang to adulthood.

Holding a bundle of cabbages in his arms, Wang Lang gazed toward the rough direction of those distant villages.

"I hope those people can hold on to the fields you gave them."