Daylight had just torn a pale, ragged wound in the sky.
The narrow alley behind the Zhenbei Estate, choked with slop buckets, was more dead than the middle of the night. A thick, cloying stench of putrefaction hung in the frigid air, so potent that a single breath made one's lungs ache with pain.
Creak—
A side door, just wide enough for a person to slip through sideways, cracked open without a sound.
Qin Lie slid out like a withered leaf blown by the wind, pressing flat against the gap.
His thin, worn hemp tunic hung loosely on his frame, revealing knobby wrists and an unnaturally sallow, sickly skin. A biting, knife-like wind swept past, causing him to hunch his back abruptly and break into a violent fit of coughing.
It was a chest-rending cough, so fierce that his thin shoulder blades jutted out beneath the hemp cloth as if they might pierce the skin. A speck of dark red blood spilled from the corner of his mouth.
He wiped it away carelessly with his sleeve, leaving a dirty, dark brown smear on the cuff.
His face, stained with dust and blood, remained dull and sluggish, his hollow gaze sweeping listlessly toward the far end of the alley. He looked for all the world like a consumptive ghost, the kind about to draw its final breath.
Across the alley, two handymen dozing inside tattered cotton quilts didn't even raise their eyelids. Who would care about a dying stray dog?
Dragging legs that felt as though they were filled with lead, Qin Lie staggered, swaying from side to side, and brushed against the cold, damp wall as he moved out of the alley mouth.
The exact moment he stepped beyond the shadow cast by the estate:
Just diagonally across from the alley mouth, an old charcoal seller was pushing a single-wheeled cart at a leisurely pace. The wheels ground against the stone paving, emitting a monotonous squeak. A few patches of dirty, unmelted snow from the night before seemed to rest upon the pitch-black chunks of charcoal in the bed of the cart.
The old man’s cloudy, aged eyes swept toward Qin Lie as if quite by accident.
Cloudy, yet sharp.
Qin Lie seemed scorched by that gaze; he violently shrank his neck, wrapped his arms tightly around himself, and began to shiver until his teeth chattered. Incoherent mutterings tumbled from his lips:
"Cold... So cold... Mother... Mother... Medicine..."
Acting like a genuine madman with scattered, vacant eyes, he stumbled and blundered out onto the main street, nearly knocking over a woman carrying a vegetable basket.
"Looking to die, you blind consumptive ghost!" the woman's shrill curse pierced the thin morning mist.
Qin Lie acted as though he hadn't heard a thing, only fleeing in terror while clutching his head. With guttural, strange cries, he plunged headfirst into an even narrower, darker side street nearby, his figure vanishing into that thick, unyielding shadow.
Not until the alley mouth was entirely devoid of human presence did the charcoal seller slowly bring his single-wheeled cart to a halt.
He fished half of a hard, coarse-grain pancake from his bosom and squatted in the corner of the wall to gnaw on it. His cloudy eyes stared fixedly at the side alley where Qin Lie had vanished, a trace of an imperceptible, mocking sneer twisting the corner of his mouth.
"Bah, he's truly ruined."
He muttered beneath his breath, spittle mixed with breadcrumbs spraying onto the ice crystals at the base of the wall.
***
Turning several dead-end alleys where foul water flowed, the sour, rotting smell in the air grew so thick it was nearly solid.
The flagstone path beneathfoot was uneven and pitted, its cracks crammed with black, slimy filth of unknown origin. The low, leaning shacks on either side looked like a pile of building blocks ready to topple at any moment. Tattered window paper fluttered wildly in the bitter wind, revealing pair after pair of numb or wary eyes peering from behind.
Qin Lie leaned his back against a mud wall plastered with filthy advertisements.
The violent heaving of his chest slowly subsided. The dull sluggishness and terror on his face melted away like the tide, leaving behind only an ice-hard chill. Deep within his eyes, a flicker of exhaustion flashed past.
Forcibly driving that strand of newly birthed pale golden Qi to circulate through his shattered meridians—simulating the symptoms of a terminal pulmonary consumption—had consumed far more energy than he had imagined. Below his heart, the deep purple venom mark faintly radiated a pinpricking, freezing ache. The heavy shackles woven from three different kinds of deadly poisons remained firmly in place.
He took a deep breath.
The decaying stench of this place actually brought him a twisted sense of safety. Chaos was the best cover.
He rolled his stiff neck, his bones emitting a faint *crack*. His gaze, sharp as a blade, swept silently over this capillary of the slum known as Blackwater Alley.
Beside the gutter, several scrawny children were prodding a rotting dead rat with sharpened wooden sticks, fighting over that tiny, pitiful morsel of "meat." In the corner, a beggar wrapped in tattered rags curled up, his exposed ankles frozen a bruised, bruised-black.
A burly man with his chest bared, revealing a ferocious scar across his torso, was grabbing a thin, gaunt old man by the collar. Spittle sprayed onto the old man's terrified face.
"Old thing! Where's this month's protection money? Are your bones itching for a beating?"
The old man trembled like a withered leaf in the wind, cloudy tears streaming down his face:
"Scarface... Lord Scarface, grant me two more days... This old man truly... truly can't make ends meet..."
"Can't make ends meet?" Scarface grinned hideously, raising a palm as wide as a cattail-leaf fan high into the air. "I'll help you crack your skull open!"
His palm cut through the air with a whistling sound, about to land.
"So damn noisy!"
A hoarse voice thick with heavy impatience rasped against everyone's eardrums like a piece of rusted iron.
The voice wasn't loud, but it seemed to possess a magical quality. Scarface’s raised hand froze abruptly in mid-air. The vicious, protruding flesh on his face twitched a few times, a trace of dread actually surfacing upon it.
He released the old man with a disgruntled huff and spat a thick glob of phlegm toward the source of the voice.
"Damn it, count yourself lucky today, old man!"
Cursing, he turned and ducked into a nearby shack hung with a tattered wine banner.
The old man collapsed limply to the ground, panting heavily as if he had just escaped death.
Qin Lie followed the voice with his gaze.
Deep within the alley, in a sheltered nook, sat an inconspicuous, dilapidated sundry stall. A few rags of unidentifiable color were spread on the ground, cluttered with rusted old iron utensils, chipped pottery bowls, tattered and dog-eared old books, and even a few dried bones from unknown animals.
The stall owner was a shriveled old man wrapped in a greasy, oil-slicked, unidentifiable-colored cotton tunic. Sparse, graying hair sat in a disorderly mess atop his head. His face was a crisscross of ravines, and his drooping eyelids nearly obscured most of his cloudy eyeballs. He was curled up in a broken bamboo chair propped up with bricks where a leg was missing, holding a brass tobacco pipe and puffing leisurely.
*Puff, puff.*
He smoked inferior-grade cut tobacco at a slow, lazy pace. The gray-white smoke curled, blurring his bark-like face even further.
That impatient bark from just moments ago seemed to have exhausted all his energy. At this moment, he had reverted to that half-dead appearance, as though everything that had just happened had nothing to do with him.
This was Old Ghost.
The best-informed and most troublesome intelligence peddler in Blackwater Alley. He recognized only money, not people. His mouth was tighter than the walls of the Imperial Capital.
Qin Lie shifted his feet, drifting like a fallen leaf to approach silently. He stopped in front of the sundry stall, standing only two paces away from the curling smoke.
His gaze rested dully on a muddy, half-broken beast's fang at the corner of the stall. A rattling, strange sound emanated from his throat. His withered fingers trembled neurotically, slowly reaching out toward the beast's fang with a sluggish, foolish stubbornness.
Just as his fingertips were about to touch the mud-stained fang—
*Smack!*
A hand, as withered and steady as an eagle's talon, struck the back of his hand like lightning!
The force was neither heavy nor light, yet it landed precisely on Qin Lie's numbing spot. His entire arm instantly went numb and powerless, drooping limply to his side.
"Dirty hands, stop pawing around."
Old Ghost didn't even raise his eyelids, continuing to suck intently on his tobacco pipe. His hoarse voice sounded like sandpaper rubbing together.
"Go on, get lost if you're begging. You're blocking my sun."
The glow in the tobacco bowl flickered, reflecting an imperceptible glint of sharp insight deep within his cloudy eyes.
Qin Lie acted as though he had been frightened. He shivered violently all over, taking a panicked step backward. His foot happened to step on something slick, causing him to stumble!
Losing his balance, his body lurched straight toward Old Ghost's broken bamboo chair!
"Ah!"
A panicked, frantic cry escaped Qin Lie's mouth as he flailed his limbs, trying to grab onto something to steady himself. In the chaos, his unsmacked left hand made a frantic grab forward—
And quite by coincidence, it pressed squarely against Old Ghost's left leg, which was curled beneath his cotton tunic.
His hand met with something icy and rigid. Beneath the tunic, the leg was as withered and thin as dry firewood, with almost no flesh to speak of—only hard, cold bone.
Using the contact for leverage, Qin Lie swayed and managed to avoid a complete tumble. He hurriedly withdrew his hand, staring in terror at Old Ghost with a face drained of color, his lips trembling:
"S-Sorry... Old master... I... I didn't mean to..."
Old Ghost finally lifted his eyelids. His cloudy pupils, like two dust-covered glass marbles, fixed steadily on Qin Lie.
There was no warmth in that gaze—it was as though he were looking at an inanimate object.
*Puff.*
He took another vicious drag on his tobacco pipe, and the pungent odor of inferior tobacco, mixed with foul breath, puffed directly into Qin Lie's face.
"Scram."
A single hoarse word, carrying undisguised disgust and dismissal.
Grant, as it were, a pardon, Qin Lie scrambled backward in a panicked scurry. Continuing to mutter neurotically about "cold... mother... medicine," he stumbled and vanished into the turbid, crowded depths of the alley.
Old Ghost withdrew his gaze, lowering his eyelids once more to stare at the spot on his left leg beneath his cotton tunic where he had just been pressed. His withered fingers rubbed against the rough surface of the tunic with extreme slowness. Deep within his cloudy eyes, a very faint, hard-to-catch ripple flashed and vanished.
He lifted his tobacco pipe once more.
*Puff, puff.*
The clamor of the alley, the stench of the gutter, and the numbness of the paupers seemed entirely insulated outside that curling smoke of inferior tobacco.
***
Qin Lie wandered like a true wandering soul through the maze-like passages of Blackwater Alley, his ears filled with the "sounds" of the slums.
"Have you heard? Old Zhang the blacksmith's forge in the West City had its door kicked open by the men of the Imperial Jinwu Guards yesterday! Tsk tsk, talk about ruthless! Pots and pans smashed all over the floor!"
An old woman with a missing front tooth, carrying a tattered basket, was gossiping with a straw-shoe vendor nearby, spittle flying.
"Why's that? Old Zhang is such an honest man..."
"Bah! Honest my ass! Skimping on apprentice wages, passing off pig iron as fine steel! Someone reported him to the prefectural yamen! Word has it that Steward Zhao Gui from the Second Branch is backing him up behind the scenes! The cut he takes is vicious!"
"The Second Branch? The one from the Zhenbei Estate?"
"Of course! Taking advantage of the Prince being away, that Steward Zhao is now the undisputed authority in the estate! Even the Young Lord... cough, that crippled one, is living in the woodshed now!"
Qin Lie walked past with a light, floating gait. His vacant eyes swept over a dilapidated storefront by the street hanging a faded banner with the character for "Gambling." Inside, voices roared, the stench of sweat and cheap liquor mingling together to make one want to vomit.
"Place your bets! Opening—!"
"Leopard! House takes all!"
"Damn it! My luck is truly rotten! The information money I staked out the Chancellor's Estate's back door for three days to get is all gone down the drain!"
A man whose eyes were reddened from losing slammed his empty money pouch onto the greasy table.
"The Chancellor's Estate? What kind of news was worth staking out three days for?" someone nearby chimed in, curious.
"What else could it be? Third Young Master Li Mubai from Lord Li's household, of course! Yesterday he was drinking flower-wine at the Hundred Flowers Pavilion with the Second Prince again! Word has it they even fought over a top courtesan and almost came to blows!"
"Pfft! Is that supposed to be news? Who doesn't know the Chancellor's Estate and the Second Prince are cut from the same cloth?"
"What the hell do you know? The point is..." The man lowered his voice with a trace of covert smugness, "...word has it the Second Prince promised the Third Young Master Li that after the Autumn Hunt, he'll stuff him into the Jinwu Guards! A proper, actual office!"
Qin Lie, acting like a drunkard, staggered and bumped his way through the onlookers gathered at the gambling den's entrance, drawing a string of curses.
He paid them no mind, continuing onward with a vacant stare.
At the alley corner, several ruffians in short garments were surrounding a small stall selling inferior rouge and powder. The stall owner was a sallow-faced woman with a child.
"Little lady, this 'fragrant powder' of yours... doesn't smell right, does it?" The ringleader, a crooked-mouthed brute, pinched a box of cheap rouge and brought it close to the woman's face, his lewd gaze roving over her thin garments.
"M-Milord..." The woman trembled in terror, pulling her equally frightened child tightly against her. "Th-This is homemade... it's not worth anything..."
"Not worth anything?" The crooked-mouthed brute chuckled meanly, stuffing the rouge box into his bosom. "Then we'll take it as a tribute to us brothers! The brothers have been working hard guarding the city and patrolling at night, so your stall... needs to pay protection money!"
"Milord... have mercy... we're a widow and orphan..."
"Cut the crap! Hand over the money!" A ruffian nearby impatiently shoved the woman.
The woman staggered, nearly falling. The child in her arms burst out crying in fright.
"Crying at a funeral, are you?" The crooked-mouthed brute's face darkened as he raised his foot to kick the child!
At the very instant that mud-stained boot was about to touch the child's hem!
A mud-stained, scrawny hand suddenly shot out as if slipping by accident, grabbing the crooked-mouthed brute's calf! Clumsy, entirely devoid of form—yet carrying the fierce momentum of an enraged ox!
*Thud!*
Caught entirely off guard by this sudden grip, the crooked-mouthed brute lost his center of gravity and crashed flat onto the frozen flagstones in a dog-eating-mud posture!
His chin struck the hard stone heavily, knocking out half a front tooth!
"Auuugh—!" A pig-like screech tore through the small alley.
"Boss!"
"Damn it, where did this consumptive ghost come from, looking to die!"
The ruffians were stunned for a split second, then exploded with rage! Their gazes locked squarely onto the "culprit"—none other than the swaying, vacant-eyed "consumptive ghost" Qin Lie!
He seemed frightened witless by the trouble he had caused, staring blankly at the howling, rolling crooked-mouthed brute on the ground, then looking at his own "mischief-making" dirty hand.
A rattling sound came from his throat as he retreated in terror step by step.
"Beat him to death!"
A hot-headed, yellow-haired ruffian couldn't hold back any longer! With a roar, a fist the size of a mallet whistled through the air, smashing fiercely toward Qin Lie's dull, sallow face!
The wind of the fist rushed forward!
Qin Lie looked as though his courage had shattered; he slammed his eyes shut and shrank his body stiffly backward in movements clumsy to the extreme.
Yet at the precise moment that fist was less than an inch from the tip of his nose—
His right hand, which had been instinctively shielding his head and face, rotated inward and pressed down with his forearm at an infinitesimal, defyingly unnatural angle!
The movement was fast as lightning and subtle to the point of being nearly imperceptible, the angle venomous and ruthless!
*Smack!*
A muffled thud!
The yellow-haired ruffian's immensely powerful punch had its direction violently deflected by Qin Lie's seemingly flustered blocking forearm!
The fist grazed past Qin Lie's earlobe!
The enormous momentum caused the yellow-haired ruffian to lose his balance, lunging forward headlong!
And the moment Qin Lie's "blocking" right hand deflected the punch, his elbow struck backward like a striking viper, leveraging the opponent's forward charge with a vicious thrust!
*Bang!*
It landed squarely in the soft, vulnerable ribs below the yellow-haired ruffian's chest!
"Ugh-ah—!"
The yellow-haired ruffian's eyes bulged instantly! Agony caused him to double up like a cooked shrimp, clutching his ribs as he dropped to his knees, in too much pain to even scream!
Lightning-fast and sudden!
The shift in fortune happened in the blink of an eye!
The other two ruffians hadn't even registered what had happened! They had only seen the yellow-haired man charge in aggressively, then collapse as though his bones had been sucked out!
"Yellow-hair?!"
"Damn it! This is weird!"
Exchanging glances, the two were both shocked and furious. Without time to dwell on it, they lunged forward simultaneously from left and right!
One threw a punch aimed at Qin Lie's face; the other viciously raised a foot to kick at his lower body!
Qin Lie looked terrified out of his wits by the pincer attack, standing rigidly in place with a vacant expression reflecting the two viciously lunging figures.
Just as the fists and feet were about to strike home—
His feet suddenly "stumbled," as if slipping on the greasy ice on the ground, and his body listed sharply to the left!
With hair-breadth precision, he dodged the kick aimed at his lower body!
At the same time, his left hand—which had been flailing instinctively as he listed—curled its fingers into a bird-beak shape and pecked with lightning speed directly onto a specific pressure point on the inner wrist of the left-hand ruffian throwing the punch!
That ruffian felt a numbness shoot through his wrist, his entire arm instantly turning sour, weak, and powerless. The punch he had thrown dropped limply down!
And the tilting motion of Qin Lie's body hadn't stopped!
Leveraging the momentum of his fall, his right shoulder slammed forward like an ox charging its horns, striking heavily into the chest of the right-hand ruffian who was leaning slightly forward after missing his kick!
*Bang!*
A muffled thud!
That ruffian felt as though he had been struck by a battering ram, his chest erupting in agony as his vision went black! Both feet left the ground as he flew backward through the air!
*Crash!*
He smashed heavily into a pile of broken baskets and jars beside them, filth splashing over his head and face.
"Cough, cough... cough, cough, cough..."
A fit of violent coughing sounded.
Qin Lie staggered up from the ground, his face frighteningly pale, a trace of blood slipping from the corner of his mouth once more. He looked in terror at the howling crooked-mouthed brute on the ground, the yellow-haired man kneeling and unable to rise, and the companion struggling in the garbage pile.
As though frightened to death by the "huge disaster" he had caused, he clutched his head and screamed in panic:
"D-Don't hit me! I didn't mean to! Mother... Mother save me!"
Screaming, he turned and bolted in a clumsy, wretched scramble, nearly falling several times.
His figure quickly vanished into the murky depths of Blackwater Alley's narrow side paths, leaving three ruffians groaning in agony on the ground.
Onlookers pointed and whispered among themselves.
"That consumptive ghost... packs quite a punch, doesn't he?"
"Strange! He looked like he was about to die, how did he take down three street enforcers?"
"Bad luck! Truly bad luck!"
No one noticed.
Old Ghost, curled up in the broken bamboo chair as though fast asleep, twitched his cloudy pupils beneath drooping eyelids.
His gaze swept over the alley where Qin Lie had vanished with an ambiguous casualness, then dropped back to the three groaning ruffians on the ground. The shriveled corners of his mouth seemed to twitch upward in the tiniest, most microscopic fraction of a second—so fast it felt like an illusion.
He closed his eyes once more.
*Puff.*
*Puff.*
The stench of inferior tobacco filled the air once more.
Amidst the curling smoke, his withered hand gave a gentle rub to the spot on his left leg beneath the cotton tunic where Qin Lie had pressed. The rough fingertips seemed to be savoring something.
Deep within the alley:
Qin Lie pressed his back against a cold mud wall plastered with filthy, profane graffiti, breathing heavily.
Every inhalation tugged at the freezing, aching venom mark near his heart.
Forcibly channeling that strand of pale golden Qi during that split-second melee to explode, guide, and dissipate force had consumed a massive amount of energy, nearly draining the sliver of strength he had just recovered.
A sweet, coppery taste rose in his throat. He forcefully suppressed it, wiping away the blood at the corner of his mouth.
His gaze grew cold and sharp, devoid of any lingering dullness.
His consciousness sank inward. The Ancient Mirror Fragment in his bosom transmitted a faint, cool sensation.
The moment he had touched Old Ghost's left leg during the chaos just now...
That cold, rigid, lifeless, iron-cast feel...
And the trace of an extremely faint yet exceptionally refined aura of death transmitted back through his fingertips?
That wasn't a living person's leg.
It was a prosthetic limb.
And an exceptionally refined one, containing profound internal mechanisms.
This Old Ghost... truly was not simple.
Qin Lie slowly straightened up, casting one final glance at the shadow interwoven with clamor and filth deep within Blackwater Alley. Old Ghost's sundry stall was swallowed within it like an inconspicuous stone.
He turned.
Dragging footsteps that remained somewhat buoyant, he moved like a genuine wandering soul, blending into the flow of people in the Imperial Capital as it awoke to dawn, already beginning to exhale the scent of decay.
His figure grew gradually indistinct in the grayish daylight.
Deep within Blackwater Alley:
On the broken bamboo chair, Old Ghost leisurely tapped the ash out of his tobacco bowl.
His cloudy gaze pierced through the curling, dissipating inferior smoke, casting toward the direction of the alley where Qin Lie had vanished.
His shriveled lips twitched soundlessly in a silent sigh—or perhaps some form of confirmation.
He reloaded his pipe with tobacco leaves, struck a slightly damp flint tinder, and watched the orange flame leap into life, illuminating the flash of all-knowing insight that flickered deep within his cloudy pupils.
"Interesting..."
His hoarse voice was so low only he could hear it.
Smoke rose once more, shrouding his bark-like face back into chaos.