Outside, monsters ran rampant. The folk sorcerers shut their doors one after another, wrapped themselves in blankets, and went to sleep.
The Jiao-blackened members of the Li Family walked down the streets. Such an Uncanny sight should have drawn a reaction, yet even the night watchman turned a blind eye to the Jiao corpses.
As the Jiao corpses passed him, the watchman kept striking his wooden clapper. These past few years, the world had known no peace. Daytime was tolerable, but at night, a hundred horrors roamed the streets.
Never mind burned people.
He had seen even stranger things.
As long as the Jiao corpses did not eat him, he would pretend not to see them.
As these Jiao corpses wandered through streets and alleys, people inevitably spotted them.
They passed an alley steeped in a foul stench.
Someone saw him.
And even recognized them.
"Those motherfucking Li Family bastards. Serves them right!"
In the shadows, a Time Demon who had come out to empty a chamber pot saw them and spat out a curse. She splashed the half basin of urine in her hands into the alley, its yellow tinged with red, then slipped back through the half-open doorway.
This was an illicit brothel. Fukou was a place where people from every walk of life gathered. Naturally, alongside its more prestigious brothels, there were clandestine ones.
In the places the light never reached, people struggled to survive everywhere.
As the Time Demon put it, in this world, the officials had black hearts, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas had black hearts, and the Gods had black hearts too. Tiger dens for government offices, wolf dens for temples—big shots and little people alike, not one of them was any good.
She took a dark, fuzzy lump and threw it into a large