Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Qing Feng Bu Gui Ke

“Sorry,” Wang Jie said at once. “We’ll find somewhere else.”

He started to back out with the two women.

The man on the sofa flicked his wrist.

A thin metal shard whistled through the air and punched into the door. It pierced straight through the wood and buried itself in the wall several meters beyond, sealing the exit with casual brutality.

Wang Jie stopped. The women froze behind him.

“Come in,” the man said. His voice was low and rasped raw, like sand on stone. “Close the door.”

Flow grabbed Wang Jie’s arm, terrified. The timid woman’s eyes were huge, dagger clenched too hard.

Wang Jie drew a slow breath and walked back into the room, pulling the women with him. He shut the door.

The interior darkened at once.

Sunset bled in through a west-facing window, laying a strip of orange light across the man’s face. Beneath a rough beard, his cracked lips curled. His eyes were cold, predatory. He looked over the two women first, then fixed on Wang Jie.

“You know me.”

Wang Jie forced a confused expression. “Have we met?”

“Didn’t that hunting squad show you my photo?” the man said, smiling wider without warmth. “My name is Hu Guan.”

Wang Jie clenched his hand slowly, shoulder tight, playing the part. “I forgot.”

Hu Guan had been staring at that hunting squad the whole time. The irony was that they thought they were cats hunting mice—when Hu Guan wasn’t prey at all.

“No need to forget,” Hu Guan said. “Where’s the thing they gave you?”

Wang Jie took out the signal device.

“Turn it on.”

Wang Jie’s eyes widened, as if startled. “Here?”

Hu Guan laughed. His split lips opened farther, and fresh blood beaded along the cracks, turning the smile savage. “Not here. Ten kilometers southwest. Supermarket rooftop.”

He leaned forward slightly. “You’re a guide. You understand what I’m saying.”

Before Wang Jie could answer, Hu Guan struck.

A palm shot out and slammed into Wang Jie’s right shoulder.

Wang Jie’s eyes sharpened. He tried to retreat, but he was too slow.

The blow drove him into the wall hard enough to rattle the whole house.

The women cried out and scrambled into the corner.

Hu Guan’s brows lifted in faint surprise. “Not bad. Second Seal strength. No wonder you can make a living as a guide.”

Wang Jie shoved himself upright, gripping his right shoulder. His entire arm had gone numb. He stared at Hu Guan. “What did you do?”

Hu Guan’s smile thinned. “That palm disrupted your imprint power circulation. I left the method to undo it on that supermarket rooftop. You can choose not to go. Then either find someone stronger than me to remove it, or spend the rest of your life unable to use imprint power. Pick.”

He paused, eyes gleaming with disdain.

“And by the way,” Hu Guan said, “I’m Fifth Seal.”

Wang Jie went still. “Fifth Seal?”

In the corner, both women stared, stunned.

In this cultivation era, seals were the measure of strength. The highest known was Seventh Seal. A Fifth Seal cultivator could stand near the top of Jin Ling Base itself.

No wonder a hunting squad could chase him and still fail to catch him.

A guide with Second Seal strength had no chance of finding someone stronger than Hu Guan.

Hu Guan lounged back on the sofa, already impatient. “Get out.”

Wang Jie looked like he wanted to speak, but in the end he bit down on it, opened the door, and left.

He didn’t look back at the women once.

The moment Wang Jie was gone, Hu Guan’s gaze slid to the two women, and his grin returned. He licked his cracked lips, smearing red across them.

“Been too long since I had meat,” he murmured. “That little guide brought me gifts.”

He pointed. “You. Come here.”

Flow’s face drained white. Hu Guan was pointing at her.

She trembled under his hungry stare.

Outside, Wang Jie paused and turned back, eyes deep and unreadable.

Fifth Seal, huh?

Gray energy rolled into his palm, thick and swirling, like the void itself had been laid out flat and stirred into ripples.

From within it, he drew a single sheet of paper.

An ordinary IOU slip. Plain white. No markings.

And yet it always felt wrong in his hands, like it connected to somewhere that wasn’t this world.

Wang Jie stared at it, pulled out a pen, wiped the tip against his clothes, and inhaled slowly. It had been a while since he last borrowed.

How much could he borrow this time?

He signed carefully at the bottom—Qing Feng Bu Gui Ke.

The instant the last stroke landed, the IOU slip curled up on its own, as if alive, and drifted back into the gray current. Then it vanished.

Inside the house, Flow’s voice shook. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll go back and report you to the hunting squad?”

Hu Guan snorted. “To be a guide, you learn human nature first.”

He leaned back, smug. “Even if he betrays me, those hunting squad people won’t help him restore his imprint power. He knows it. The only choice he has is me.”

His eyes flicked to Flow, burning with ugly promise.

“And whether he turns on that signal device once he reaches the rooftop? That won’t be his decision. At night, that place is crawling with monstrous mutated things. He turns it on, the hunting squad comes, and he lives. Otherwise, he dies.”

Hu Guan’s smile widened. “Serve me well. I’ll take you with me. I’ll make sure you live.”

Flow pressed her lips together, forcing a brittle smile, about to respond—

The window exploded inward.

A black shadow crashed through, blotting out the last of the sunset. Darkness slammed over the room like a curtain being yanked shut.

The shadow was already in front of Hu Guan.

A hand reached.

Hu Guan’s pupils shrank. He moved with strange footwork, barely twisting aside—only for the attacker to hook him from behind and seize his back.

With a violent jerk, Hu Guan’s gray imprint power scattered.

He screamed. His body lurched forward, but the attacker grabbed his leg, dragged him back, and smashed him down into the floor.

A fist hammered into his chest.

Hu Guan spat blood and glared up, feral and disbelieving.

Who?

The attacker wore a crude clay mask, painted like a clown’s grin. Ridiculous.

Hu Guan opened his mouth. Gray imprint power gathered at his throat—

A second punch drove into his neck.

Bone cracked.

Hu Guan died without getting another breath.

The floor split under the force, fissures spidering outward.

From beginning to end, a Fifth Seal expert hadn’t managed a single real counterattack.

The two women stood frozen, staring at the figure in the tattered black padded coat. The mask looked comical, but neither of them could laugh—not after what they’d just seen.

The masked intruder crouched and searched Hu Guan’s body.

A moment later, he found what he wanted.

A delicate glass bottle.

Hibiscus Tears.

The last thin sunlight glinted through it, turning the liquid inside strangely beautiful. One of the most precious disaster materials in the world—something even the Five Extremes coveted.

Perfect for healing Old Five.

In the corner, the timid woman’s eyes widened in sudden realization.

Flow?

Flow lunged.

A palm-sized, fish-shaped weapon flashed into her hand. She stabbed hard for the masked man’s back—

The strike cut nothing.

Flow’s expression changed. Not good—

The clay mask was suddenly right in front of her. Pain erupted in her abdomen. She gritted her teeth and forced herself back, then snapped her wrist and flung the weapon like a dart.

The masked man caught it easily.

A hand descended.

Bang.

Flow’s vision went black. The world vanished.

The masked man watched her fall, then coughed once and wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.

He’d borrowed too much. An old injury had flared.

But it wasn’t serious.

He flicked a gust of force toward the timid woman. She dropped unconscious without a sound.

Then, still holding Hibiscus Tears, he looked down at Flow.

“Captain of Jin Ling Base’s Windfish Team,” he said quietly. “Disguising yourself and sneaking in three times. Did you really think I wouldn’t recognize you?

“You were after this too, weren’t you?”

He pocketed the Hibiscus Tears. “If not for you, I wouldn’t have needed all this trouble.”

He drove the fish-shaped weapon into Hu Guan’s corpse, then snapped his arm and hurled it. It screamed through the air and buried itself in the wall of another house a hundred meters away.

Only then did he leave.

He headed exactly where Hu Guan had ordered: southwest, ten kilometers.

Less than five minutes after he was gone, something formed out of the void—an eye, hovering over Hu Guan’s body. It blinked once, then dissolved back into nothing.

Night fell.

Alone, Wang Jie moved fast. With his strength, he reached the supermarket rooftop in no time.

By his earlier estimate, he shouldn’t have arrived until deep after midnight.

He waited.

The wilderness at night was a different kind of hell. If daytime belonged to mutated beasts, then night belonged to mutated plants.

In the distance, shadows spread under the moonlight, swallowing the supermarket’s outline.

Wang Jie watched a plant rising near the building—so tall it looked like it could rival dozens of stories.

Had it grown?

A flying mutated beast swept across the sky, wind roaring in its wake.

The plant tore itself out of the ground.

Leaves opened and shut like jaws, revealing rows of teeth. In a single bite, it swallowed the flying beast whole.

For an instant, the plant towered hundreds of meters high—an enormous, impossible nightmare.

So it had grown.

Wang Jie lay back on the rooftop, the night air cool as water against his skin, and stared at the stars.

Before the apocalypse, the air had been filthy. The moonlight had never looked like this.

He stared upward until his gaze sharpened—and then phantom figures began to appear across the sky.

Some stood. Some sat. Some drew swords. Some swung blades. Countless forms, all moving in silent repetition.

This was cultivation on Blue Star after the fall.

Many people could see these projections. They didn’t block the sun or the moon. You could mimic what you saw and cultivate from it. It was humanity’s greatest weapon against the apocalypse.

Some people saw one figure. Some saw two. Rumor said the most anyone had ever seen was ten.

Wang Jie saw far more.

Tonight, his attention kept catching on a finger technique. No special reason.

It looked cool.

He watched until he was absorbed. Around him, chewing and distant howls threaded through the darkness—dense, messy, everywhere. Vines crept along the walls like snakes, swaying in the moonlight as they tightened and carved grooves into concrete.

Wang Jie glanced once and didn’t move.

This was why Hu Guan had been certain Wang Jie would turn on the signal device. With the Second Seal strength he’d shown, the rooftop at night was a death sentence unless he called in help.

Fine.

Wang Jie took out the signal device and activated it.

Far away, the hunting squad’s young man lowered his head, pulled out a matching device, and his eyes lit up. “Found him. Southwest. Move!”

On the rooftop, Wang Jie tossed the signal device into a corner.

Then he sprang up and crossed more than ten meters in a single bound, heading west. Vines snapped toward him, trying to hook and drag him down, but he dodged with ease. His left foot stamped onto his right in midair, his body twisting unnaturally as the void itself seemed to ripple.

An afterimage lingered where he’d been.

Then he was farther away—vanishing into night.