I'm killing nothing but you, this cur
Early morning on the streets of Wei City.
The Flower Children Temple has exploded in popularity across Wei City, practically becoming a household viral check-in spot. Locals will drop by to pay their respects whenever they get the chance, and even when their children are doing the traditional first birthday grab, or their hens lay new eggs, they will ask Lord Flower Child to bestow blessings on them. No one ever stops to wonder if the Flower Children have enough blessings to hand out, or if they would find the locals far too meddlesome.
The next day, before the sky had even begun to lighten, people started arriving one after another.
Shu Fu had stormed the Flower Children Temple deep in the dead of night, splitting the deity statue clean in two with a single sword strike. No one knew the full details of what had happened, but early that morning, a yellow line was strung up around the Flower Children Temple — though calling it a yellow line was a misnomer, as it was actually a barrier formed with spiritual power. The crowd was not allowed to cross into the premises, and they could not help but brim with suspicion. As they turned to head back, they chattered away with each other.
"Hey, why's the Flower Children Temple all sealed off? What on earth happened?"
"Judging by the look of things, someone must have caused trouble here. But who would dare pick a fight at the Flower Children Temple..."
"Don't be so sure. I remember there's a family in the southern part of the city that's always spouting weird nonsense. They say the cities of Yao and Wei have gone absurdly off track, that they've completely forgotten the Dragon God who suppressed the ancient demonic scourge, and that the Flower Children are just ordinary kids who we've hoisted up onto a divine pedestal. You tell me, isn't that a total joke?"
"Yeah yeah, I heard that too. They spin that tale so vividly it's as if they saw the whole thing with their own eyes. But all the history books say is that 'the Dragon God vanished along with the demonic aura' — no one knows what really went down. Maybe the Dragon God just went back to the heavens."
"Besides, what's this talk of 'hoisting them onto a divine pedestal'? Lord Flower Child is a deity who descended to the mortal realm, he saved Wei City from the brink of ruin and put an end to that terrible drought. My father, my grandfather, my great-grandfather... every generation of my family has said so."
"Exactly. Think about it the other way around. If the Flower Children were just ordinary kids with no supernatural powers at all, our ancestors weren't fools — why would they have worshipped them for all these years?"
The man who had just spoken was rather smug about his flawless logic, and was just about to raise his hand to applaud himself when he suddenly felt a cold tingle on his palm.
It was as if a small child had stood right beside him, mischievously stretching out a hand to give his palm a soft little tickle.
Deep in the back of his mind, an ethereal, faint voice rang out —
"They are certainly no fools."
"Perhaps, they were just far too clever, and wanted to cover up the truth of what really happened back then?"
"...Who's there?!"
The man's entire body prickled as if jolted by electricity, every hair on his skin standing on end. He jerked his hand away and spun around to stare at his side.
But there was nothing there beside him.
On the waking early morning street, there was only himself and the other idle folks he had been chatting with, each of them wearing an unconcerned smile on their face.
To them, the claim that "the Flower Children are not deities" was nothing but a ridiculous, absurd joke.
That's right.
How could the Flower Children possibly not be deities?
If the Flower Children were not divine, then for what reason have the people of Yao and Wei cities offered their worship for thousands of years?
What kind of truth could have made the ancestors work so hard to cover it up, that thousands of years later, not a single one of their descendants in the city knows a thing about it?
"You all have forgotten. My little brother might not hold it against you, but I never will. What your ancestors did, your own children will suffer the consequences for."
"It's only fair, isn't it?"
"For a thousand years, the dragon qi that has guarded you all this time has been weakening, while I have been growing stronger..."
That voice kept going, clear and bright with a hint of childishness, its tone lively and lilted at the end. At first listen, it sounded just like a cheeky, mischievous little boy, yet there was a naive, unadulterated malice seeping through it, as if that "mischievous boy" was holding a blood-soaked knife in his hand.
"Who?! Who's there, who's talking!!"
The poor bystander was nearly driven out of his wits. Ignoring the strange stares from the companions around him, he spun around in place several times in a row, craning his neck to peer around in utter bewilderment.
"Who's playing tricks there, come out right now!"
Then, out of the corner of his eye, a figure flashed past all of a sudden.
Tap tap tap.
A light, brisk patter of footsteps drew near then faded away, vanishing in an instant.
Even though it was only a split second, he was certain he had caught a glimpse of a richly dressed young boy with a golden flower pinned to his chest.
Aside from the different color of the flower, he looked almost identical to the statue in the Flower Children Temple in Wei City.
……
Meanwhile, at the Flower Children Temple in Yao City —
"Excuse me, make way please!"
Though Wei City and Yao City were dozens of miles apart, Shu Fu and Si Fei traveled the whole distance by sword flight, so they did not spend much time on the road.
The moment they entered the city, she stopped an old man out for his morning exercise to ask for directions, then headed straight for the Flower Children Temple.
There were a few spies from Wei City already lying low in Yao City. They could not reveal their identities, so after receiving the message, they all slipped over and hid nearby to watch the situation unfold. They would step in to help immediately if anything went wrong for Shu Fu.
It was just the break of day now. The Flower Children Temple in Yao City was not nearly as bustling with worshippers as the one in Wei City. Standing quietly in the faint, pale dawn light, it looked rather deserted.
A human life was at stake, and Shu Fu was terrified of being even a step too late. She channeled the same burst of strength she once used to hack at scumbags to speed up her sword flight. When the temple gate was almost within reach, a figure darted out from a side path all at once, blocking her path dead without any intention of moving out of the way.
In the split second right before she nearly crashed her sword and got herself killed, she saw a pair of gloomy, icy-cold eyes.
"… What the fuck?!"
Shu Fu swerved sharply to avoid the collision, barely missing the thick ancient tree beside her that could only be encircled by two people's arms. Rage welled up in her along with the curse that burst from her throat:
"What the hell is wrong with you?! You did that on purpose!!"
Right after her words fell.
A gust of harsh wind whistled above her head, and with a great boom, a thunderbolt came crashing down right at her.
The attack came completely out of the blue, but Shu Fu had been struck by villains' thunderbolts many times before. She hopped backward to dodge it instantly, unsheathed her sword with a flick of her wrist, and swiped a streak of sword light right at where the lightning had come from:
"Blocking the path and then lashing out? Where did this wild dog come from? Look at the scare you gave your old dad!"
"You insolent little hussy, how dare you speak so disrespectfully to the Young Master — — ugh?!"
The person who had summoned the thunder was just about to spout a few more grand lines, but he had not expected Shu Fu's hand to move faster than his tongue, and her sword energy to rush out swifter than his voice. The blade nearly sliced his entire head off.
"You, you are — —!!"
Shocked, he stumbled back three steps and barely came to a stop right at the entrance of the Flower Children Temple. But then he realized he had stood in the path of the "Young Master", and a shudder instantly shot from the soles of his feet all the way up to his scalp. His face turned pale with a tinge of blue, and he scurried to the side at once, his spine bent like a shrimp.
"Young, Young Master, after you. This girl's swordplay is uncanny, please be careful around her."
"Stand down, Yao Jian. You know your place better than your father and your sister. That makes you still useful."
The man blocking Shu Fu's path spoke in a cold, sharp voice. He kept his hands clasped behind his back and took a firm step forward, still standing perfectly in the way between her and the temple gate without the slightest gap.
"..."
Shu Fu gripped her sword in hand, lifted her head, and stared right back at him.
This time, she finally got a clear look at the man before her.
He did have a handsome face, with sharp, well-defined features and a cool, aloof temperament, almost the kind of "chiseled, sculpted face" often described in novels. But the edges of his cheekbones and jawline were far too pronounced, making him look more like a lopsided polygon from a distance.
Add to that his drooping outer corners of the eyes, two thin lips pressed tightly into a straight line, and a moderately prominent aquiline nose, and this otherwise good-looking face took on a distinctly sinister, harsh edge.
What drew even more attention, though, was his outfit.
He wore a pale yellow long gown, over which he had draped a black outer robe embroidered all over with gold and silver threads. The patterns featured a fanged, winged white dragon in a rampant pose, and a golden phoenix in mid-flight.
Or rather, the bird should properly be called a yuanchu, the mythical phoenix-like bird of legend.
The yuanchu was positioned above the white dragon, its sharp talons sunk deep into the dragon's body, making for a truly strange, uncanny design. If you looked closely, you could see even more birds stitched along the hem of the robe, all different species, every one of them craning their necks to gaze upward, forming a faint scene of a hundred birds paying homage to the phoenix.
"..."
The man's cold, sharp eyes locked onto Shu Fu. After a moment, he curled his lips into a smirk, and spoke with a tone of condescending disdain.
"So you are Jiang Ruoshui. Tong Yao's daughter, the youngest disciple of Jiang Tan?"
Shu Fu had no trouble reading the look in his eyes.
It was the kind of look you would give to an ant, a rotting corpse, or a half-dead dog lingering by the side of the road.
There might be more than one man in this world capable of stirring a will to kill in Shu Fu with nothing but a single glance. But this one look alone was more than enough for her to confirm exactly who he was.
"..."
She did not answer right away. Instead, just like the man, she slipped her hands behind her back, letting a green snake and a white snake slither out silently.
Right before Jiang Xuesheng had left, she had stared intently at the opulent black robe for a long moment, then sent a single, disgusted "ptooey" sound directly into Shu Fu's mind.
[That's it? He doesn't deserve any of this.]
Shu Fu could not have agreed more. [He doesn't deserve jack shit.]
Then she lifted her head again, met his arrogant gaze head-on, and returned exactly the same kind of look he had given her—the look you reserve for a dead body.
"You're Ling Fengqing, aren't you? Ling Big Dog?"
"That's right, it is I," the harsh man replied readily, before a moment of confusion hit him. "Wait a second, what did you just call me?"
Shu Fu ignored his question entirely. She shifted her gaze to Yao Jian, who was bowing and scraping behind him, and curled her lip in disdain. "That one there is the dog you keep, right? I was going to call you the 'dog owner,' but then I thought—if you walk a dog without a leash, that means the dog is walking you. And on top of that, you're just a dog yourself. So I decided not to stand on ceremony, and just call you by your real nickname, Big Dog."
"You—" Ling Fengqing's face darkened, and he almost lost his temper right then and there. But he quickly suppressed his rage under a cold smirk. "Truly sharp-tongued. No wonder you were trained by Jiang Tan. But Miss Jiang, you wouldn't have come all the way to Yao City just to waste time spouting petty insults, would you?"
Of course not. I came here to scatter your ashes to mix into my mother Tong Yao's food. I know she would love nothing more than to tear your flesh apart, skin you to sleep on your pelt, and drink every last drop of your rotten, stupid brain. Shu Fu thought to herself silently.
"I have important business to attend to. I must go into the Flower Children Temple to see what is inside."
She took an unhesitating step forward, gesturing for him to move aside with a clear "after you" motion. "Or is it that you've been up to some shady business in there, something you can't let me see?"
"Me? I haven't done a thing. I simply followed local custom and left a few offerings, that's all."
Ling Fengqing stood perfectly composed, his light, easy steps carrying him directly into her path again, infuriatingly blocking her way. "But Miss Jiang, you look so ready to kill someone. I can't very well let you barge in there. I'm a guest of Lord Yao, and if you went and caused some trouble in there, I'd never be able to explain it to him."
Yao Jian, who was standing right behind him, nodded so hard his neck almost cricked. "The Young Master is absolutely right. On behalf of my father, I thank the Young Master for his great kindness."
- As if I give a single rotten watermelon about your dad!
Shu Fu's only priority was to save the person they'd come for, and she had no patience to waste tangling with him. She lifted her gaze, and the longsword in her hand shot out like a dragon leaping from the waves. "I hate unnecessary trouble. When I run into a snappish dog that won't stop barking, the only solution is to geld it first, no questions asked."
"Ooh, someone's got quite the temper."
Ling Fengqing was a spell cultivator, well-versed in all five elemental arts. He flicked his folding fan in a quick twist, summoning a solid earthen wall out of thin air right in front of him to block her path.
Seeing that her opponent was a long-range spell caster, Shu Fu kept her sword in one hand, and with the other, summoned the Po Yue Qin. Her fingers moved deftly across the strings, playing a tune that sent every listener's mind reeling -
*Twinkle Twinkle Little Star*.
To be perfectly honest, Shu Fu had zero natural talent for music.
Back in her past life in the modern world, she'd signed up for no end of instrument classes, but the only thing she'd ever managed to learn passably was the recorder. Even when she sang, not a single note came out on key.
But with the Po Yue Qin in her hands, the power of her rendition of *Twinkle Twinkle Little Star* was nothing short of devastating, no less mighty than the ancient masterpieces *High Mountain and Flowing Water* or *Three Variations on the Plum Blossom*.
As she liked to put it: Sure, I only know one song, Little Star. But every single little star I pluck out of those strings will turn straight into a nail driven right through your skull.
Go on, test me. Try it, and you'll be dead before you can blink.
"Wh-what the hell? You-!"
Ling Fengqing was no top-tier elder with sycophants fawning all over him, but he was still a half-step Nascent Soul cultivator, a whole major level above Shu Fu. He'd heard she devoted all her time exclusively to sword cultivation, and had arrogantly assumed he could toy with her however he liked, never even sparing a thought for the qin at her side.
He'd been careless, deliberately dragging his feet to tease the girl for his own amusement, and had only put a fraction of his power into that earthen wall. The barrage of notes from her *Twinkle Twinkle Little Star* shattered it instantly, and loose shards of dirt and rock flew everywhere, nearly smacking him straight in the face.
"Now!"
Si Fei, who had been tensed and ready this whole time, flung his hands apart. Dozens of sharp ice cones condensed out of the air from the surrounding water vapor, shooting straight for all the major pressure points around Ling Fengqing's body.
Ling Fengqing's expression hardened at once. He snapped his fan upward, sending a gust of fierce wind that smashed every last one of the incoming ice cones to bits, then snapped his head around to yell at the hidden guards in the shadows.
"What are you all standing around for? These two are trespassing in Yao City with malicious intent. Seize them at once!"
He was confident his own strength outmatched Shu Fu and Si Fei combined, and didn't actually need anyone else's help to fight them. But if he let them slip past and break into the Flower Children Temple to smash the golden statue of Lord Flower Child, all the plans after that would fall apart.
After all, that "someone" hidden in the Flower Children Temple, while mad as a hatter and burning with centuries of deep hatred, was no real god. It was just a thousand-year-old fierce ghost, and almost all of its power came from the statue it was bound to.
If the statue was destroyed, the ghost's power would crumble to almost nothing, and it would never be able to step outside the borders of Yao City again.
If he could help it, Ling Fengqing wanted to subdue the Yao and Wei forces without a full fight, to avoid drawing the wrath of the imperial dragon's aura that would backfire on him, wasting the hard-earned strength that Lingxiao City had spent years building up.
Yao City had already surrendered. The only one left now was Wei City.
Seize these two fortresses, and taking Central Province will be as easy as reaching into your pocket for an item.
Once Central Province is under control, the next step will be to march straight for the three great sects of Tianyan, Jiuhua and Xuanyu, before going on to dominate the realm and unify the Eight Wastelands.
That was why he needed the Flower Children to keep causing trouble —
Right at that moment.
A deafening explosion suddenly erupted from the Flower Children Temple right behind Ling Fengqing, and flames shot high into the sky immediately after!
"What on earth is happening!!"
The sudden twist of events caught him completely off guard. Ling Fengqing spun around sharply, and his usual haughty, self-assured expression twisted for a split second. "Who is —"
At the same time, the water currents controlled by Si Fei coiled around his limbs, while Shu Fu thrust her sword out like a swift, diving dragon, piercing straight through the jade crown on top of his head. Then —
She tilted her wrist, channeling all her strength to yank that jade crown right off Ling Fengqing's head, along with a whole tuft of his dark hair, and shattered the whole mess mid-air.
"…………?!"
Strands of dark hair drifted down and scattered across the ground, no different from Ling Fengqing's own completely shattered pride.
This time, not only was he left with his hair loose and wild in front of a whole crowd of people, he was also left with a shiny, balding patch on the top of his head, barely a step away from being fully bald on the crown.
This humiliation was far worse than the one he had suffered at the hands of Tong Yao all those years ago.
"You — you. Fine. Jiang Ruoshui, you've done wonderfully."
Ling Fengqing was so furious he wanted to grind Shu Fu's bones to dust, his face turning as cold as frozen ice, his drooping eyes glinting with venomous malice.
By this point he had already guessed that Shu Fu had only been fighting him to drag things out, and that her accomplices must have already rescued whoever they came for.
With the golden statue of the Flower Children destroyed, the plan that was supposed to work without losing a single soldier was completely ruined.
Even though the people from Lingxiao City outnumbered everyone else there, everyone knew full well that the lone Guangguang Sword carried a sharp, blazing edge, its tip stained with the blood of countless wicked men. If Shu Fu truly wanted to force her way out, no one there could stop her.
Yao Cheng was not the Ling family's main stronghold after all. No matter how arrogant and overbearing Ling Fengqing was, he was still just the "Big Dog Young Master", not the actual "Big Dog" himself. If he had been prepared earlier, and set up all his traps properly, taking down Shu Fu would not have been difficult — but who the hell could have expected that this girl would just charge in out of nowhere like that?!
The net hadn't even been fully cast out yet, and a torpedo had already blown the whole tower to bits!
Ling Fengqing knew he had no choice but to admit defeat today, but he refused to lose all face in public. He gathered his loose hair back with one hand, stared straight at Shu Fu with piercing eyes, and sneered:
"Jiang Ruoshui, if you truly have the guts, then on the day of the Flower Festival Arena, you will face Lingxiao City fair and square. Such underhanded, reckless behavior hardly seems like something a respectable sect would do."
"Hey, come on now, don't put it that way. It's not like Yaofeng Peak ever cared about having a good reputation anyway."
Shu Fu grinned nonchalantly, rolled her shoulders to loosen them up, then lifted her gaze and locked eyes with Ling Fengqing coldly. "But since you brought up the Flower Festival, I do have one piece of advice for you."
"...What is it?"
"Make sure you send your father a funeral notice ahead of time. The day of the Flower Festival Arena will be the day his son dies."
