That snowfall fifteen years ago was colder than a knife's edge.
Qingfeng Temple was sealed tight under three feet of snow, mountain paths cut off, not a bird or beast stirring.
The high officials and nobles who usually wore down the threshold had all retreated to their warm inner chambers in the capital, where the under-floor heating glowed red. None of them had the leisure now to climb the mountain to burn incense and pray.
Which, at least, gave Qingfeng Temple a rare moment of winter stillness.
A row of icicles hung from the eaves of the rear hall, sharp as a wolf's fangs.
This corner of the world radiated a kind of heartlessness, a cold that allowed no room for mercy.
Inside the hall, an eternal lamp burned. The white-haired old temple master sat cross-legged on a faded cushion, idly poking at the coals in the brazier with a pair of wrought-iron tongs. The charcoal glowed fierce red, spitting the occasional spark.
Sitting across from the old Daoist was Chen Henian, still a boy then.
He wore an old robe stripped from some portly Daoist priest, hanging loose and shapeless on his thin frame, making his skinny body look even more pitiful. He clenched his jaw tightly, sitting straight-backed, his eyes still raw with fear and bloodshot veins.
Every time he closed his eyes, the stench of rot from the death cells of the Dali Temple — the blood-soaked cells of the Grand Court — and the sight of heads rolling across the execution ground at Caishikou came crashing back into his skull.
Just then, a gust of ill wind slammed open one of the unlatched window shutters.
A gray, shapeless thing tumbled in with snow and wind, landing with a smack on the windowsill.
It was a half-frozen sparrow.
Its feathers were soaked through with melted snow, plastered flat against its flesh. Its thin little legs were curled up, and only one wing was still weakly flapping on the sill. It couldn't even manage a chirp.
Chen Henian stared at the bird, his gaze wavering.
This sparrow, with no home in the frozen wilderness, waiting only to die — it looked exactly like himself.
A pang of shared misery rose sharply in his chest.
Without thinking, his fingertips slipped out from his wide sleeve, reaching to cup the dying creature in his palm, to warm it a little and ease its suffering.
But the moment he was about to touch its feathers —
A pair of fire tongs, blackened with soot and still glowing dull red at the tips, jabbed forward.
The Old Temple Master's face was impassive. The tongs clamped around the sparrow's neck.
Never giving Chen Henian a chance to cry out, the old Daoist dragged the little creature straight into the roaring hot brazier.
The bird didn't struggle. It didn't even manage a single cry.
There was only a faint sizzle — the sparrow was instantly seared into a lump of smoking, charred flesh and bone. In less than half an incense stick's time, it shrank into a black cinder, indistinguishable from the dead ash in the stove.
Chen Henian's outstretched hand froze in midair.
"Master!" His eyes were bloodshot, his voice cracking with youthful disbelief. "This defies all heavenly principle! It was just a life — how can we not save it!"
"To move the pieces on the board, you cannot treat men as men," the Old Temple Master said, his tone colder than the blizzard outside.
"Seventy-four members of the Chen family lost their heads on the Caishikou execution ground. A family of loyal martyrs, repaid with a house-wide slaughter."
"Now — are those bloody lessons not enough?"
"If you still carry such useless compassion in your heart, then you might as well roll down this mountain right now, put the shackles of the Daqian court back around your own neck, and go die with your father."
Those words pierced Chen Henian's skull like icicles.
He stared at the gray ashes in the stove, his chest heaving for a long moment.
At last, the left hand suspended in midair slowly closed, tightened into a fist, and withdrew silently back into his sleeve.
The Old Temple Master released the tongs, letting the iron tool clatter to the floor, still coated in bone ash.
"Heaven and earth are without mercy, treating all things as straw dogs. If you want revenge, you cannot be the blade that cuts."
The Old Temple Master finally lifted his head, his murky yet keen eyes fixed mercilessly on the boy before him.
"The one who wields the blade will always dull his edge, break his point, and die one day. What you need to be is the maker of the game. The heaven itself. Make those wild dogs down below tear each other apart fighting over a single piece of meat!"
The memory churned, and the scene flipped.
It was six months later. The alchemy chamber on the rear mountain of Qingfeng Temple, perpetually locked.
No incense of immortal sages here — only a stench so thick it could curdle last night's dinner.
The white-haired Old Temple Master held the half-bald whisk in one hand, facing a black iron alchemy furnace that stood waist-high.
The fire beneath it burned fierce, and inside bubbled a thick, roiling black liquid.
It stewed like mud, with huge bubbles swelling at the surface, growing, then bursting apart.
Chen Henian stood three steps from the furnace, holding his breath, enduring the foul odor that clawed at his guts, his brow twisted into a knot.
"Master, what is this?" he asked in a low voice.
The Old Temple Master didn't even glance back. A flick of his whisk swept half a bowl of pulverized gray-white powder — fresh from the stone mortar beside him — into the vat of boiling black water.
"Human bones, dug up from a grave not three years in the ground, mixed with the seven-poisons miasma brought back from the southern border."
As the powder hit the water, a dense green vapor burst from the furnace's mouth.
The Old Temple Master turned slowly, meeting Chen Henian's gaze, who was already two steps back.
"Military killers rely on formations, maneuvers, and days of planning. One miscalculated move, and you wound your own foundation."
"Fengshui killers rely on the veins of mountains and rivers to corrupt a city's fate. A stable method, but painfully slow."
The black water boiled more violently.
The Old Temple Master's face twisted and warped in the rising green mist, taking on a grim, demonic cast.
"This temple has passed down its lineage for centuries, and its highest art was never ascension, immortality, or sacred pills. It is to harness the death-essence of heaven and earth — to deliver the doom of a family, a line, a future."
He flicked his wrist, pointing the whisk straight at the furnace.
"Ha! Let hundreds and thousands of living souls, without knowing it, catch the plague — flesh rotting, oozing pus, until they melt into a putrid pool. That is the true skill of killing without ever drawing blood."
Every frame of that past was sunk deep in Chen Changfeng's mind.
His thoughts wound through fifteen long years, finally settling on his last visit to the capital, and that same rear hall of Qingfeng Temple, unchanged to this day.
BANG.
The adult Chen Changfeng stood in a plain blue robe. He swung his arm and swept a heavy slap across the old wooden table beside him.
The tea set on it — pot and cups — shattered into pieces, porcelain shards scattering all over the floor.
"You're the one who changed my registry, who sent me to Yinshan to seek strength from the Helian tribe, wasn't it!" Chen Changfeng stepped forward, his finger nearly poking the old temple master's nose.
"You taught me not to be the blade, but to be the heaven itself. You taught me to kill without showing blood!"
The Old Temple Master slumped back in his grand wooden chair, his cloudy eyes reflecting the overcast light through the window.
His lips trembled uncontrollably, but not a single word escaped them.
He closed his eyes, his face drained of all vitality, yet there was no hint of regret in his expression.
The heavenly backlash from divining the fate of the nation, combined with the disciple standing before him—one he had personally molded into something colder and more merciless than any vengeful ghost—had utterly shattered the last shred of his resolve.
The Old Temple Master was afraid.
The older he grew, the more he dreaded the karmic wheel spinning above his head.
The ruthless Daoist of years past now only wished for a dignified, peaceful end.
Chen Changfeng let out a cold laugh.
That laughter rang especially harsh against the muffled thunder rolling overhead, the brutality churning in his eyes dissolving entirely into a look of lofty contempt.
“You taught me to play the game and be a monster. Now that I’ve become one, you suddenly want to play the merciful living bodhisattva?”
He withdrew his hand, no longer bothering to spare another glance at the trembling old wreck, and strode toward the half-open temple doors.
Just as Chen Changfeng was about to cross the tall wooden threshold—
The Old Temple Master finally caved.
He hunched his back, seeming to have aged ten years in an instant.
With withered hands, he pried open the secret compartment at the very bottom of the writing desk.
Trembling violently, he pulled out from it a clay jar wrapped in black cloth.
The jar was no larger than two adult fists, wrapped in three whole layers of thick oil-soaked fabric, its mouth sealed with a hardened lump of bright red beeswax, and over that, several yellowed, faded suppression talismans pasted on top.
The Old Temple Master held it as if he were cradling a man-eating King of Hell.
He shuffled unsteadily to stand behind Chen Changfeng, and with shaking hands, thrust the jar toward him.
“The year I sent you out through the pass into the grasslands, I cast a hexagram and foresaw that this great calamity would one day come.” The Old Temple Master’s voice was a hundred times hoarser and drier than it had been fifteen years ago.
“What’s inside this jar—the bone and blood residue of victims from seven devastating plagues collected over a hundred years by generations of masters from Qingfeng Temple, scoured across the length and breadth of the Great Qian Empire, sealed in a place of extreme yin, then enhanced with ten thousand poisons and miasmas from the southern borderlands and the western regions.”
“Refined through the painstaking efforts of three generations of temple masters—this is the Plague Mother.”
This was true ultimate poison.
Chen Changfeng turned around and took the jar with one hand.
It was deceptively heavy. Even through the thick oilcloth, it felt like grabbing a block of ice in a blizzard—a bone-piercing chill seeping straight through his palm and into his flesh.
“Simply break the wax seal and cast what’s inside into the headwaters of a flowing spring.”
The Old Temple Master raised his head, his face marked with a rare terror. “Carried downstream by the current, within a hundred li, whether man or beast, any who drinks the water will die without fail! Nothing will grow! Those infected with this plague poison—within seven days, their organs will rot into a pool of pus and blood inside their bellies.”
“Never mind those quack doctors of the northern frontier—even if Bian Que were reborn or Hua Tuo returned to life, they could only stand by and watch the victims melt into yellow fluid!”
The Old Temple Master’s withered hands shook in the air like dead leaves in autumn wind.
“Take it, and you hold the lives of hundreds of thousands in your palm. Chen Henian! This sin is too heavy—this old bag of bones of mine cannot bear it for you! If you insist on using it, then from this point on, you walk straight into the endless hell of no redemption!”
This was the very source of the Old Temple Master’s earlier divination, when he declared that the blood aura around Chen Changfeng was too thick.
This Han Chinese man had not even drawn a single blade, yet hidden within his sleeve had long been the means to wipe out an entire city, an entire nation.
Chen Changfeng paid no heed to the Old Temple Master’s belated warning.
He simply weighed the jar in his hand, then calmly tucked it deep into the folds of his wide sleeve.
Without wasting a single word, he stepped straight out of the temple gate and into the torrential rain that was about to drown the entire Shu Prefecture.
...
The afterimages of memory shattered into fragments.
A gust of northern frontier wind, thick with the grit of sand, slammed into his face, jerking Chen Changfeng’s thoughts back to reality.
Outside Zhenbei Pass, within the camp of Helian Zhonglu’s main army.
Hundreds of flaming torches lit up the area around the central command tent, the air heavy with restlessness and unease.
Chen Changfeng steadied his mind, and the scene before him sharpened back into focus, loud and chaotic.
Before the great tent, the Left Lu King Ashina Dubi sat astride a tall Ferghana horse.
Deep-set eye sockets held nothing but undisguised suspicion and the cold scrutiny of a viper.
Around him, a mob of furious Hu commanders, their eyes bloodshot with rage.
A quarter of an hour earlier, word had come back from the mule-and-horse market tunnel—a devastating report of heavy losses among their elite troops.
That tunnel, which was supposed to lead straight to the Zhenbei Pass garrison commander’s mansion, had instead become a furnace that roasted Helian’s bravest warriors alive.
This crushing defeat had brought these starving grassland wolves to the very edge of losing control.
They were shouting, howling, aching to draw their blades and gnaw a chunk out of the walls of Tielan Mountain.
But Chen Changfeng knew better than anyone.
Among the tens of thousands camped here, not a single Helian man knew—that the disaster at the mule-and-horse market had been a bleeding chunk of meat he had personally delivered straight into the jaws of Zhenbei Pass!
“My lord! The chieftains are waiting for your decision!” his close attendant urged in a low voice.
Chen Changfeng saw Ashina Dubi swallow all his suspicion and doubt, and inwardly praised the man: the Left King was still clever.
So he clasped his hands and performed a meticulously correct Great Qian ceremonial bow.
“Reporting to the Lu King.”
“I have a scheme—ruthless, heaven-defying, and steeped in sin—it only remains to be seen whether the Lu King has the stomach to use it.”
