Tragic fates were always astonishingly alike.
After the red fox gained sentience, she had remained in the wilderness, refining qi and cultivating.
The demon race cultivated slowly, more than ten times slower than humans, who were favored by heaven and earth. Only after decades of cultivation had the red fox barely managed to assume human form, naming herself Hu Jiu-Niang.
The turning point in her fate had come ten years earlier.
Feng Zhen, an impoverished scholar, had traveled to the Capital to sit the imperial examinations. Passing through the mountain forests, he had freed Hu Jiu-Niang from a hunting trap and released her.
To repay his kindness, Hu Jiu-Niang had gathered spiritual herbs from the mountains and found gold and silver, secretly helping Feng Zhen through his poverty.
Six years of examinations, three failures.
Disheartened, Feng Zhen had turned to doing business in Luo Capital.
Around three years earlier, Feng Zhen had suffered a disastrous business loss. Hu Jiu-Niang had stolen the Fox Clan's treasure, the Bright Moon Jade, to help him weather the crisis.
Feng Zhen had unexpectedly caught sight of Hu Jiu-Niang and become infatuated with her beauty. With honeyed words and vows sworn to heaven, he had ultimately married her.
Up to that point, things had more or less reached a happy ending. Unfortunately, human hearts changed all too easily.
Su Yun'er, the daughter of the vice minister of rites, had been obsessed with jade. Hearing of the Bright Moon Jade, she had repeatedly visited to admire it.
As their visits grew frequent, Su Yun'er and Feng Zhen had developed feelings for each other.
Hu Jiu-Niang had not minded this at all. Instead, she had borne Feng Zhen a daughter.
The vice minister of rites had looked down on merchants and insisted that Feng Zhen hold an official post before he would give him his daughter's hand.
Officials of the Great Qian Dynasty were no ordinary people, and their positions could not be bestowed lightly. Ranked officials were bound to the court's fortune and also practiced dynasty fortune cultivation.
Feng Zhen himself had passed the provincial examinations and barely met the requirements for office. After exhausting his family fortune, he had finally secured his place for a vacant county magistrate post some days earlier. All he lacked was meritorious service to the court.
For members of the gentry, building bridges and roads, accumulating virtue through good deeds, and aiding the poor all counted as meritorious service.
Once their merits met the standard and an official vacancy arose, the court would give them priority when selecting officials.
Feng Zhen was already over thirty and had no time to accumulate merit bit by bit. Su Yun'er could not wait several more years either. He had to render great service to the court quickly.
Then, a few days earlier, a Daoist had cast a spell to bring down a torrential rain, causing an enormous stir.
The Capital had launched a rigorous investigation into demons and monsters in hiding. The court had promised generous rewards, encouraging the people to report and expose them.
Seeing his chance at becoming county magistrate about to slip away, Feng Zhen had burned with anxiety. Hardening his heart, he had reported Hu Jiu-Niang and her daughter to the Capital Yamen.
Hu Jiu-Niang had been playing with her daughter when immortal masters from the Demon-Slaying Bureau descended from the sky and threw them both into Punishment Office Prison.
With her heart turned to cold ashes and grief tearing her apart, dying beneath Zhou Yi's blade had instead become a release.
"Pitiful, tragic, lamentable."
Zhou Yi had seen many tragedies in the Demon-Slaying Bureau and increasingly understood why the law forbade romances between humans and demons, or humans and ghosts.
Ninety-nine out of a hundred ended in tragedy. Only a scant few reached a happy ending.
Widely circulated love stories let people see only the beauty. In professional terms, this was called survivorship bias.
Most romances between humans and demons that the world accepted ultimately had true immortals or Buddhas intervene.
Hu Jiu-Niang's soul, on the verge of shattering, seemed to hear Zhou Yi's sigh and sent out a faint ripple.
Zhou Yi considered for a moment, then slowly nodded.
"I give you my word."
Hu Jiu-Niang had begged Zhou Yi to save her daughter Feng Yu'er's life, or at least preserve her soul so that she could reincarnate.
The Demon-Slaying Bureau's instruments of punishment could destroy souls, and the prison also had a soul-refining formation. Demons and monsters who died here had their souls utterly scattered.
The demon soul trembled faintly. Unable to hold together any longer, she dissolved into a wisp of pale smoke.
"I'm getting a little sentimental. I hope it isn't too late."
Zhou Yi drew a wisp of blood essence from Hu Jiu-Niang's remains. With a gentle breath, he sent it drifting on the wind, mingling with the air of the Punishment Office.
His nose twitched slightly, catching a similar scent.
He slipped in with the wind, following the scent to trace his quarry.
The Heavenly Gang spell for summoning wind and rain had brought Zhou Yi's understanding of wind and water magic to a realm where he could transform them at will.
This Wind-Breath Technique was extremely low-grade, obtained from a renegade of the Wind-Thunder Sect. Its original purpose had been to blow poisonous powder into the wind, poisoning people without a sound or trace.
After comprehending the spell for summoning wind and rain, Zhou Yi had combined it with the Tracking Spell to develop a new application.
He left an illusion formed from magical power where he stood. His figure flashed, and his true body had already slipped out of the cell.
Cell C-93.
The scent of her bloodline indicated that Feng Ling'er was inside.
Zhou Yi remembered the assignments the captain had handed out that morning. Cell C-93 had not been assigned to Section A, so the executioner inside should belong to another section.
He inserted his operative token into the keyhole, and the cell door slowly opened.
Wang Erniu, an executioner from Section D, was coaxing the child to stop crying. He simply could not bring himself to use his blade.
Hearing the cell door, he turned and saw a monster with a fox's head and a human body walking in. Instinctively, he pulled the brass alarm bell, then went limp and fainted.
A little girl of three or four was imprisoned in the cell. She was sweet and adorable, with two trails of tears on her rosy cheeks. Anyone who saw her would have felt their heart ache.
"Fortunately, he's a newcomer. Otherwise, I never would have made it in time."
Zhou Yi saw no little girl, only a small white-furred fox. He touched a finger to the white fox's forehead.
Soul extraction!
The white fox's soul was drawn out of her body little by little, wrapped in magical power to protect her from the corrosive assault of killing intent.
"This is all I can do. Secretly releasing a demon from prison is absolutely out of the question."
Zhou Yi hid the demon soul in his sleeve, swept his magical power through the unconscious executioner several times to clear the killing intent from his body, and silently returned to Cell B-7.
Wang Erniu regained consciousness, feeling an indescribable lightness throughout his body. He had suffered no harm at all.
Discovering that the fox demon was dead and her body remained, he abandoned the idea of reporting the incident to the captain.
Cell B-7.
Zhou Yi released the white fox's soul.
Seeing Hu Jiu-Niang, Feng Ling'er immediately pounced toward her, only to pass through empty air.
Yip, yip, yip-
Feng Ling'er's cries were piercing and mournful as she passed through her mother's body again and again.
"You and she are already dead. Once my ten years are up, you can leave Punishment Office Prison with me."
Zhou Yi had saved Feng Ling'er's soul for three reasons.
First, Hu Jiu-Niang's experiences had moved him. The Demon and Monster Compendium had shown no reaction, clearly indicating that she had never harmed anyone.
Second, Feng Ling'er was young, and half her bloodline was human.
Third, the day of the torrential rain in the Capital had been the very day Zhou Yi cast his spell to summon wind and rain. To some extent, he had hastened Hu Jiu-Niang's tragic end.
Yip, yip, yip-
After such a devastating upheaval, Feng Ling'er could not take in anything Zhou Yi said. She kept crying out, trying to wake Hu Jiu-Niang.
"Seal!"
Zhou Yi sealed Feng Ling'er's soul and hid her in his sleeve. His bearing changed in an instant, and he once again became a stooped old executioner.
He had lived in the Punishment Office for seven years. Ordinarily, Zhou Yi always looked half-dead, his breath feeble, his body decrepit, as though he had already reached the end of his life.
New executioners all thought that one day Zhou Yi would fail to get out of bed. Little did they know that he had already seen off more than a dozen batches of colleagues.
Cycle after cycle, beginning after beginning, in the end, Zhou Yi was still barely clinging to life.
More than a dozen Demon-Slaying Commandants had rotated through the post. Under the influence of his concealment spell, they could no longer remember how long Zhou Yi had been there, recalling only that he was an executioner with superb skills.
The appearance of the little fox Feng Ling'er brought few ripples to life in the Punishment Office.
Each day, Zhou Yi allowed Feng Ling'er out for some air only when he was inside a cell.
After her initial grief, Feng Ling'er gradually returned to her lively nature. She circled Zhou Yi, asking all sorts of strange questions, adding a little pleasure to his dull, monotonous life.
To keep the demon soul stable, Zhou Yi killed demons and monsters every day, refining their souls into pure soul power for Feng Ling'er to consume and refine.
Hundreds or thousands of demons and monsters died in the Demon-Slaying Bureau's prison each day. A difference of one or two demon souls was entirely negligible.
As she consumed pure soul power each day, Feng Ling'er's demon soul grew increasingly solid.
One year later.
Feng Ling'er's soul body had become almost tangible. The naked eye could scarcely distinguish her from a physical being, and her snow-white fur felt soft and smooth to the touch.
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