Hu Yue of Green Mound

The matter of Bright Moon, the courtesan queen, had no effect on Zhou Yi.

Subduing demons and exorcising monsters was the business of the immortal masters of the Demon-Slaying Bureau.

Even if the sky over Great Qian fell, he could not be bothered to care unless it landed on his head.

When his salary was paid in the second month, he received two pills and one string of cash.

Through Zhang Cheng, he met a merchant who bought pills. The man looked utterly unremarkable, and his accent did not seem native to the Capital.

Each pill fetched three hundred taels, making his monthly string of cash merely symbolic. No wonder everyone said transferring Zhou Yi to the Ministry of Works had been a favor.

As soon as he had money, he invited his colleagues from the Nine Divisions to the Spring Breeze Pavilion and spent it all in one night. Their relationships immediately grew closer.

Among them, a clerk named Li Xun was the most easygoing and generous. Apart from Zhang Cheng, he seemed to hold the highest standing.

He lost to Zhou Yi at finger-guessing and competitive drinking, then began boasting once drunk. His ancestor had been the Prince of Zhongshan, the seventh son of Great Qian's Founding Emperor. He was genuine Great Qian imperial blood.

Unfortunately, after who knew how many generations, he no longer even counted as a collateral member of the imperial clan. The only imperial favor left to him was a position in the Ministry of Works.

With illustrious ancestors but mediocre descendants, frustration and gloom were inevitable.

The other colleagues either had powerful connections or formidable strength and could not be bothered to listen to Li Xun ramble. Only Zhou Yi had no reason to turn him away.

Using the Qi-Reading Technique, Zhou Yi observed that Li Xun's fortune was unremarkable. Without some heaven-sent opportunity, he would struggle to accomplish much.

A person's fortune was not set in stone.

The moon waxed and waned, clouded over and shone clear; people had their spells of decline and prosperity. Fortune shifted like waves upon the sea, rising at times and falling at others.

The two most fundamental factors influencing fortune were strength and external things.

Strength was easy enough to understand: knowledge, martial prowess, official position, authority, and so on.

Across the nine grades of cultivation, every advance increased one's fortune. Zhang Cheng, who belonged to the upper third grade, had fortune hundreds or thousands of times stronger than an ordinary person's.

External things encompassed a broader range: money, connections, background, treasures, and so on could all increase one's fortune.

The Demon and Monster Compendium could be classified as an external thing that anchored fortune.

Jingtai Year 49 of Great Qian passed in the blink of an eye, with neither wind and rain nor sunshine.

Every day, Zhou Yi sorted books, went drinking with his colleagues, and learned calligraphy and the art of tea from Zhang Cheng. Fewer and fewer habits remained from his previous life, and he gradually became a perfectly ordinary minor clerk in Great Qian's Capital.

The only thing he persisted in was diligent cultivation.

Whenever Zhang Cheng stayed out all night, Zhou Yi quietly visited the Punishment Office Prison, transformed into an executioner, and selected a demon or monster from the Earth-Class Prison to kill.

His Dao attainment increased far more slowly than when he had been an executioner, but this was much more discreet.

If Zhou Yi wished, he could remain in the Ministry of Works until the Demon-Slaying Bureau disbanded. No one would care about a mere minor clerk.

Dawn was just breaking.

The Punishment Office.

Zhou Yi transformed into an unfamiliar figure, dressed in an executioner's uniform, and made his way into the depths of the prison with practiced ease.

Executioners, old and new, came and went rapidly. Even a Demon-Slaying Commandant knew only the executioners under his own command, not even how many the other divisions had.

Lately, Zhang Cheng had become infatuated with Qingmei of the Spring Breeze Pavilion and arrived at the Ministry of Works later and later.

Zhou Yi had advised him not to push himself so hard at his age. In response, Zhang Cheng shattered a ten-foot-tall ornamental rockery with a single punch right before his eyes.

Upon reaching the Earth-Class Prison area, he happened to find a lone executioner ahead, preparing to open the Earth-Class Seventeenth Prison.

A glimmer of spiritual light flashed, and the executioner fell into an illusion.

"Just one more year of Dao attainment before I reach my small goal. A thousand years greatly increased my strength. I wonder what ten thousand years will change."

Zhou Yi assumed the executioner's appearance, took the keys, and opened both prison doors. Inside, he saw a beautiful woman bound in instruments of torture and chains.

She was actually someone he knew.

Just a month earlier, he had watched her dance as a wealthy patron lavished a fortune on her for the chance to become her intimate guest.

Zhou Yi, Zhang Cheng, and the others had been there too. According to Li Xun, the patron was his grandnephew, the Heir of Prince Huai.

She was none other than Bright Moon, the courtesan queen of the Spring Breeze Pavilion.

Yet compared with her former breathtaking beauty and graceful dancing, her present condition was utterly wretched.

A heavy cangue pressed against her neck, forcing her to strain it forward. Iron chains pierced the joints of her limbs, pinning her firmly to the torture frame, while five nails of different colors pierced her five internal organs.

The Soul-Sealing Cangue, the Bone-Piercing Chain, and the Heart-Piercing Nails.

Zhou Yi had slain countless demons and monsters. The last to suffer such torture had been the Black Baleful Demon Venerable, who had nearly slaughtered an entire city.

Generally, the Demon-Slaying Bureau did not torture members of the Demon Race who were about to die. Even the most detestable condemned criminal received a full meal before execution. There was no reason to make things so difficult for a mere fox demon who drained people's yang energy.

Hearing the noise, Hu Yue struggled to lift her head and look toward him. Her right eye had already become a black hole.

"You? The minor clerk from the Ministry of Works. I remember your surname is Zhou!"

"Hmm?"

Zhou Yi said in surprise, "You can actually see through my illusion!"

"I bear the bloodline of a fox immortal and was born with spirit eyes. How could your contemptible human race compare!"

Hu Yue's voice was hoarse and her words slurred. Half her tongue had been cut off, and nearly all her teeth had been pulled out, yet her mouth remained as defiant as ever.

"Did that bitch, Princess Consort Huai, send you to kill me? Tell her the Green Mound Fox Clan will avenge me. Every last member of Prince Huai's Residence is doomed!"

"No one sent me. This is purely a coincidence."

Zhou Yi shook his sleeve, and Feng Ling'er fell to the ground, taking the form of a three-foot-long white fox.

"Ying, ying, ying... Brother Yi is a good person. The Demon-Slaying Bureau caught me, and he saved me."

Feng Ling'er circled Hu Yue, sniffing here and there, faintly sensing a connection between their bloodlines.

"A spirit fox soul! Cough, cough, cough..."

Hu Yue coughed violently in her excitement, hope flashing in her eye. "Have you come to save me?"

Zhou Yi shook his head. "No! I've come to kill you, but I'll spare you some suffering."

"The Fox Clan always repays kindness. If you save my life, I could even offer myself to you."

"Sorry, I have higher aspirations."

Zhou Yi fetched the execution implements and asked, "Do you have any last words?"

"..."

Hu Yue fell silent for a moment. Once she was certain the man before her was not joking, she looked at Feng Ling'er. "I want to teach her the Heavenly Fox Cultivation Method. With such a pure and powerful spirit fox soul, she is certain to become a prodigy of the Fox Clan."

"Fine."

"This is an utmost secret of the Fox Clan. Please step away."

"If you're teaching her, teach me too."

Zhou Yi was not being shameless without reason. Even now, he did not possess a single cultivation manual and did not even know his own realm.

He certainly had the strength of the upper three realms, but he could not quite tell whether he was first grade or second grade.

Although the cultivation methods of humans and demons differed, neither fundamentally strayed beyond essence, qi, and spirit. He did not need to practice the Heavenly Fox method. Using it as a reference for the realms and to understand himself would be more than enough.

Hu Yue's spirit eye flickered. She had never met anyone so brazenly shameless. After a brief silence, she threatened, "You had better not divulge it, or Green Mound will hunt you down to the bitter end!"

Then she slowly recited a cultivation method, fully twelve thousand words long, leading from the first steps straight to first grade.

The Heavenly Fox Secret Canon was divided into nine stages. Each completed stage produced another tail, and full mastery brought transformation into a Heavenly Demon Nine-Tailed Fox.

Feng Ling'er cultivated as she listened. By the time Hu Yue finished reciting, her single tail had split into two. A short while later, there were three.

Hu Yue stared, dumbstruck, and murmured, "Extraordinary talent! The makings of a fox immortal!"

Zhou Yi could not help curling his lip. Half-human, half-demon cultivation aptitude ranked among the lowest because of the conflicting bloodlines.

Feng Ling'er had developed three tails so quickly because her long accumulation was finally bearing fruit, unlocking a portion of the soul power within her.

Over five years, Zhou Yi had slain far more than five thousand demons and monsters, most of them in the middle third grade. The soul power refined from them was vast enough that even feeding it to a pig would have turned it into a great demon.

Now that she had the Heavenly Fox Secret Canon, Feng Ling'er would advance by leaps and bounds for a time, until she exhausted the ocean of soul power within her.