The inner hall of the Demon Suppression Bureau in Nanhe County.
Liu Ying pushed a folded sheet of parchment to the center of the purplewood desk.
Behind the desk.
Captain Lin Xiao held a coarse porcelain teacup without saying a word.
"I'm short of people for this escort of Ghost Shadow Sect remnants to Tiannan Commandery." Liu Ying pressed both hands against the edge of the desk and leaned forward.
Lin Xiao did not respond.
Liu Ying reached out and unfolded the parchment.
Inside lay a banknote worth five hundred taels.
"Su Yu just lost his entire squad. By the rules, he gets three days to rest." Lin Xiao's voice was utterly flat.
"People make the rules. If anything happens, I'll take responsibility." Liu Ying's tone remained steady.
Lin Xiao glanced over the banknote.
Two rough fingers pressed its edge and slid it into his sleeve.
Su Yu had returned alive from the demon cave and had already become a thorn in the Liu Family's side.
Just one squad leader dying.
He grabbed the red-iron seal beside him and stamped it heavily at the bottom of the transfer order.
Seeing this, Liu Ying rose to leave.
"A greenhouse raises no flowers. Whether you can withstand the Liu Family's retaliation, Su Yu, will still depend on you."
Watching Liu Ying's retreating figure, a cold glint flashed through Lin Xiao's eyes.
At the armory.
A heavy cloth bundle was tossed out from behind the counter, and the mingled smell of leather and machine oil spread through the air.
Su Yu untied the coarse cord.
Inside was a brand-new set of fitted black clothing, with the character for "squad" embroidered in gold thread on the chest.
A sheathed saber lay beside it.
He gripped the hilt and pushed against the guard with his thumb.
Clang.
A section of the black-and-gold blade sprang out, its edge reflecting a hard, cold gleam.
The official saber, forged with dark iron, weighed ten pounds more than a trainee Demon Suppression Guard's shabby iron saber.
Su Yu slid the blade back into its sheath.
Several trainee Demon Suppression Guards nearby immediately lowered their heads.
No one dared make a sound.
The occasional glances cast from behind the weapon racks carried unmistakable fear.
The smell of blood had yet to fade completely from Su Yu.
He had barely escaped death before nearly cleaving Wang Tai apart with a single slash. Low-ranking trainee Demon Suppression Guards needed courage just to approach such a ruthless man who cared nothing for his own life.
Su Yu hung the saber at his waist.
Zhao Lei was dead.
But this score had yet to be settled.
The city's rules were strict, and his current strength was insufficient to confront the entire Liu Family head-on.
He needed a legitimate excuse to leave the city.
Once he was beyond Nanhe County's boundaries.
He would kill however many people the Liu Family sent.
The Slaughter Points on his system panel needed human lives to fill them.
A figure blocked the armory entrance.
Liu Ying held the parchment bearing the red seal.
"Squad Leader Su, congratulations on your promotion."
Su Yu stared at her. He knew Liu Ying's identity perfectly well; her surname alone revealed that she belonged to the Liu Family.
For someone from the Liu Family to approach him at a time like this, she might as well have written "death trap" across her face.
"The captain has ordered you to escort the Ghost Shadow Sect remnants to Tiannan Commandery in three days."
"We're shorthanded for this trip, so you've been specially assigned to join the escort."
Liu Ying held out the transfer order.
The journey would take half a month and pass through vast stretches of wilderness.
Su Yu instantly grasped the key points. A pillow had truly arrived just as he was getting sleepy.
The Liu Family could not wait to kill him outside the city.
"Afraid to accept?" Seeing his silence, Liu Ying raised her voice.
Su Yu raised his hand.
He roughly snatched the transfer order from between her fingers.
The force was so great that the paper's edge sliced straight through the pad of Liu Ying's finger.
"The training grounds. Three days from now."
Su Yu stuffed the transfer order into his robes and brushed past her, saber in hand.
Liu Ying looked at the bead of blood seeping from her fingertip, her face livid.
"Once you reach the wilderness, your end will come!"
The Demon Suppression Pavilion.
The three-story octagonal pavilion was built from blue-black stone bricks.
A rattan chair stood beside the entrance.
An old man with thinning hair lay on it, waving a tattered palm-leaf fan.
Su Yu handed over his newly issued waist token.
"Newly promoted squad leader." The old man ran his fingers over the token's engraved characters.
"First floor. Choose one Mortal Realm cultivation art or martial art. You have one hour."
The heavy wooden door was pushed open.
Its hinges grated with an ear-piercing creak, and the smell of moldy paper and stale ink rushed into his face.
Su Yu headed straight for the cultivation arts section.
He was currently at the Mortal Realm Fourth Layer.
For martial arts, he had the perfected Vajra Fist and Gale Saber Technique.
What he urgently needed now was a top-tier cultivation art to improve the quality of his Spiritual Qi.
Cultivation arts were like martial arts: each realm had its designated cultivation arts and martial arts, divided into low, middle, high, and supreme grades.
Only a handful of wooden boxes occupied the supreme-grade section.
Su Yu examined them one by one.
The Scarlet Flame Art required scarlet flame grass and could easily damage the meridians.
The Layered Wave True Art required enduring the pounding of waterfalls year after year.
Too many restrictions, and their ceilings were not high enough.
His gaze shifted to a corner of the lowest shelf.
Inside a dust-covered black iron box lay a thin, damaged booklet.
Four characters were written on its cover in dark red cinnabar.
Suppressing Prisons and Subduing Demons.
Su Yu opened the first page.
[Turn the body into a prison and suppress all demons.] [This art is incomparably domineering. Once mastered, Spiritual Qi density will be three times that of others at the same tier, with additional armor-piercing and intimidation effects.] [Note: This cultivation art is extremely domineering, and only the Mortal Realm volume exists. Cultivating it can very easily cause Qi deviation. The slightest carelessness will cause the body to explode, resulting in death.]
Su Yu's fingers paused at the edge of the page.
Three times the Spiritual Qi of the same tier.
Innate armor-piercing.
This is the one.
Cultivating ordinary arts step by step was not only slow; the combat strength they produced was mediocre too.
He had no interest in them.
As for the risk of Qi deviation, it was not worth mentioning before the system panel.
As long as he had enough Slaughter Points.
Any cultivation art could bypass bottlenecks and risks and reach perfection directly.
The more extreme an art was, the less ordinary people could cultivate it, the more terrifying it would become in his hands.
Su Yu closed the booklet, picked up the black iron box, and walked toward the entrance.
The old man stopped waving his palm-leaf fan, his gaze locking onto the box in Su Yu's hands.
"You chose this one?"
The old man sat upright.
"This cultivation art has sat on the first floor for ten years. The last few people who practiced it all ended up with shattered meridians, reduced to cripples."
"Across all of Great Qin, only a few people have barely managed to master it in the past hundred years!"
"Your bones and constitution haven't settled yet. Practicing this is no different from seeking death."
The old man stared hard at Su Yu.
"Switch to the Azure Wood Art, and you can still keep your life."
Su Yu slapped the black iron box onto the table.
"I'm not switching. This one."
The wrinkles on the old man's face twitched. He had seen plenty of doomed fools who refused to heed advice.
He took out a blank sheet of copying paper, gathered Spiritual Qi at his fingertips, and swiftly swept them over the original volume.
Writing instantly filled the paper.
"When the cultivation art backlashes, don't blame this old man for not warning you."
Su Yu picked up the copy.
"Thank you."
He folded the copy, tucked it into his robes, turned, and walked down the stone steps, returning to his quarters.
The doors and windows were tightly shut, leaving the room dim.
Su Yu sat cross-legged on the wooden plank bed and spread out the copy.
His consciousness sank into his mind.
He called up the panel.
[Host: Su Yu] [Cultivation: Mortal Realm Fourth Layer] [Martial arts: Vajra Fist (Mortal), perfected; Gale Saber Technique (Mortal), perfected.] [Cultivation arts not yet initiated: Suppressing Prisons and Subduing Demons (Mortal Realm supreme grade)] [Slaughter Points: 50]
A gray plus sign floated after the words "Suppressing Prisons and Subduing Demons."
[Deriving this art to initiation requires 100 Slaughter Points. Insufficient points.]
100 points for initiation.
The cost of a supreme-grade cultivation art was staggering.
The greater the cost, the more terrifying its power would be once truly mastered.
Su Yu pressed his palm against the black-and-gold saber hilt at his waist.
He would leave the city in three days. The Liu Family's assassins, the demons in the wilderness.
They were all numbers on his panel.
The true hunt had only just begun.