The burly man with the full beard smirked wickedly and reached out, about to grab at Jiang Zirou’s chest.

The people around them hooted and jeered along with him.

Jiang Zirou did not even turn her head. She simply waved her hand lightly and the man flew into the air, crashing through the door and window. A north wind whooshed in, icy to the bone.

Another round of stunned silence followed. Only after a long while did someone mutter under their breath, eyes filled with horror.

“A Grandmaster expert… so terrifying.”

“Warm up two bowls of wine and slice a plate of beef.”

Flicking a few bits of broken silver onto the table, Jiang Zirou spoke calmly.

“We’ve got wine, no beef!”

The shopkeeper put down what he was doing and grinned, revealing a mouthful of yellow teeth.

“If there’s no beef, pork or mutton will do as well,” Jiang Zirou said, frowning slightly.

“There’s no pork or mutton either.”

“Then what meat do you have?”

“Only white meat… if you don’t mind, my lady, I can slice you three taels.”

“White meat?”

Jiang Zirou froze. With all her knowledge, even she did not know what kind of meat this “white meat” was supposed to be.

She turned her head and saw a pile of white bones casually tossed in a corner, still stained with threads of blood. When she glanced back at the ill-intentioned smiles around her, understanding dawned in a daze as to what the shopkeeper meant by “white meat.”

“Then just the two bowls of wine…”

She downed one bowl of yellow wine in a single swallow and poured the other into her wine gourd.

After paying, she asked, “Do you know where Youzhou is?”

The shopkeeper’s hands froze mid-motion. He studied her carefully for a while before speaking in a low voice.

“Let me offer you some advice, don’t ask about this anymore. Leaving Liangzhou would be better for you and for us.”

“So you do know where Youzhou is then?”

Jiang Zirou did not accept his kindness. Instead, she drew the Great Xia Dragon Sparrow halfway from its sheath.

The snowy blade flashed dazzlingly.

“To tell the truth, I really don’t know.” Seeing this, the shopkeeper sighed, “But if you go out from here and head south, there’s a Beacon Fire Mountain. On that mountain is the Fiery Blade Sect, the overlord of this area for a hundred li around. If you ask them, you might gain something.”

After a brief pause in thought, she turned and left.

Only after Jiang Zirou had gone far away did the man who had been sent flying earlier get up off the ground, clutching his chest and spitting out a mouthful of bloody foam.

“Yet another one going off to die. What a waste of such a pretty body, though.”

* * *

‘So this is Beacon Fire Mountain?’

She looked up.

Towering, steep peaks rose straight from the earth. Watchtowers crowded the mountainside and sturdy disciples patrolled back and forth, the defenses extremely tight.

‘Interesting… it doesn’t look like a sect, more like a fortress instead. Hmph, just who are these people guarding against?’

Jiang Zirou let out a cold laugh.

She shook her head, took a single step forward and vanished from where she stood in an instant.

* * *

Inside a secret chamber on Beacon Fire Mountain.

A young man in fitted clothes was bowing his head as he reported to a middle-aged man seated on a tiger-skin throne.

The middle-aged man was tall and burly, with a stern, square face and temples dusted with white. He had a natural air of authority that did not require anger to inspire fear and his aura was as deep as an abyss, clearly a Grandmaster expert rarely seen in the jianghu.

“Master, that man needs a thousand people as blood food and the sect disciples cultivating demonic arts also need large amounts of blood food. But the several hundred li around us have already been scoured clean. Where are we supposed to find the missing blood food?”

“If we must, we can continue raiding further out… Three hundred li to the north, isn’t there Liuzhou City? Hundreds of thousands of people. Heh, if they could all be used for my purposes, then the Great Grandmaster realm wouldn’t be impossible for me~”

“Master, you mustn’t!”

The young man cried out in shock.

“If we act like that and draw the attention of the imperial court, wouldn’t all our previous efforts be wasted… It’s better to proceed slowly and steadily, we must not be hasty.”

The stern man snorted coldly and was about to rebuke him.

But at that moment, blood light flickered in his eyes as he stared in disbelief at the graceful figure in white that had appeared before him.

“Pardon me, it seems I’ve interrupted your little chat.”

Jiang Zirou took off her bamboo hat and nodded slightly, counting it as having greeted the two men.

“Who are you?”

The sect master of the Fiery Blade Sect straightened in his seat, his eyes full of suspicion and unease. He could not fathom that someone in this world could possess qi of such a level.

She had clearly appeared right in front of him, yet he had not sensed a thing.

‘If she wanted to take my life…’

He did not dare finish the thought. Plastering a smile onto his face, he ordered his disciple, “A guest is a guest. Hurry and serve tea for our guest.”

“No need!” Jiang Zirou waved her hand, “I only want to ask where Youzhou is.”

His breath caught in his throat.

The middle-aged man laughed instead.

“I’ve lived here in Liangzhou for over forty years, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard the name Youzhou… Perhaps it would be better if you asked someone else?”

“You don’t know? Then I suppose you at least know about the blood food and the demonic arts you cultivate.”

Jiang Zirou smiled pleasantly, but her eyes were ice-cold.

“You heard all of that!”

The Fiery Blade Sect’s sect master’s muscles swelled as he pulled a long blade from beneath his seat.

Blood and flame surged, the temperature in the room soaring in an instant. Blade qi howled, like a blood phoenix dropping from the void.

“A paltry trick.”

The Great Xia Dragon Sparrow flashed from its sheath then, after a single arc, was calmly resheathed.

Jiang Zirou turned, pressing the fleeing young man to the floor and pinning his throat under her foot.

Only then did the Fiery Blade Sect sect master’s corpse finally topple to the ground. His broken blade and his wide-eyed head rolled together and happened to stop right in front of his disciple.

Master and disciple stared at each other. In just three brief seconds, they were separated by life and death.

“Where is Youzhou? And where did your demonic arts come from?”

The spiritual pressure of the Great Grandmaster realm descended like heavenly wrath. Seeing his master dead, the young man broke completely, wailing loudly.

“Three months ago, a black-robed man came to the sect and started a massacre. He then forced us to cultivate a certain technique. We never imagined that by cultivating with the corpses of our fellow disciples, our strength would skyrocket. After a mix of grace and terror, under his coercion we ended up committing these unforgivable deeds.

As for Youzhou… that was a name used back in the ancient Zhou Dynasty. At the border where Great Xia, Nanyue and the Yan Kingdom meet, it’s an underground haven where refugees, assassins and fugitives gather. After that black-robed man appeared, it became the main stronghold of demonic cultivators.”

After speaking in terror, the young man prostrated himself on the ground and quietly begged for his life.

“I can spare your life, but how could the innocent commoners who died at your hands possibly spare you… Besides, once a ferocious beast has tasted blood, no matter how harmless it pretends to be, it is still dangerous.”

The clash of swords rang out like a boundless sea. The young man looked up in despair as the roof was blasted away by waves of force. In the sky above, amidst vast Buddhist chanting, a towering golden giant gripped a sword in both hands and drove it down.

Boom!

Jiang Zirou’s figure vanished, then reappeared on a desolate stretch of grassland, continuing southward.

Behind her, Beacon Fire Mountain collapsed with a roar, thunder rumbling, smoke and dust billowing, wild winds surging as even the Eight Desolations trembled!