After Zhang Qingxuan returned to his room,
he sat alone on the bed, looking at the gold bracelet in his hand.
His daughter had knelt in the Ancestral Hall, tears on her face.
She had looked at him with eyes exactly like her mother's and spoken the same words her mother had all those years ago.
"Not all monsters are bad."
He had smiled and agreed with those words back then, but now, if asked, he would insist that all monsters were evil.
Zhang Qingxuan had not been like this when he was young.
Back then, he had only been the head of Dragon-Tiger Mountain for a few years. His mastery of Taoist arts was superb, but his temperament had been much gentler than it was now.
Before his master died, he had told him that monsters, too, could be good or evil.
A sword was meant to uphold righteousness and ward off evil, not to slaughter indiscriminately.
So every time he went down the mountain to eliminate a monster, he first made sure whether it had ever harmed anyone.
One year, he had pursued a Fox Demon that had been harming people for days, finally finding it in a village at the foot of a mountain.
The Fox Demon fought desperately. He had used every ounce of his strength to kill it, suffering severe injuries himself in the battle. He could no longer even hold his sword.
Blood seeped from his wounds, staining his Taoist robes red.
As he lost blood, his strength drained away little by little. He remembered that he had not yet passed on the last sword technique his master had taught him to his disciples.
He thought of the thousand-year-old ginkgo on Dragon-Tiger Mountain.
He thought of the familiar stone steps in front of the