Blood sprayed everywhere as the bear’s jaws were knocked askew.

At that moment, the skinny man came crashing down, landing on the giant bear’s shoulder and back, then slid down along its slick hide and caught hold of the long spear lodged into the bear with one hand.

The spear was buried in the bear’s haunch, already bleeding it badly. Now, with a full-grown man’s weight pressing down on it, the pain made the bear claw wildly at itself.

That brief moment was all the skinny man needed to steady himself. Using both hands and feet, he scrambled down the tree at speed.

He had only just found his footing when the giant bear came crashing down from above and hit the ground with a tremendous thud. Mud and dust exploded up into his face.

“Pah! Pah!” He spat and staggered back a few steps. The massive bear lay prostrate, not moving. Whether it was dead or just out cold, he could not quite tell.

Six or seven people burst out from the trees, the brush, and the sorghum field, circling the fallen beast.

Gasping so hard he could barely string a sentence together, Skinny blurted, “Poison, weren’t you the one who said… that if I lasted twenty breaths, it’d… it’d keel over from the poison?”

He had been chased for about half the time it would take to make a cup of tea, and he had about sweated his gall out. The bear was stubborn as hell, too, ignoring everyone else and locking onto him alone!

“It’s too big. The dose wasn’t enough.” The team’s lone female soldier had a bow slung over her back. “Didn’t you see me put two more arrows in it?”

She had delicate eyebrows and narrow eyes; her face, baked a ruddy brown by the sun of the Chipa Plateau, lent her features a certain hard edge.

Skinny was still fuming. “That’s because your aim stinks! It was Broken Blade who saved my hide.” Otherwise, the bear would have chewed me like a grape, bursting me in its jaws. “Huh? Where’s Broken Blade?”

“Here.”

A man stepped out from behind a tree, just in time to retrieve the saber that had bit into the bear’s jowl.

It was He Lingchuan.

Within this nine-person squad, he had given himself the callsign “Broken Blade.”

The basic unit of the Panlong Patrol Guard was a “fire,” commonly referred to as a squad. There were ten people in a fire, led by a fire chief. This unit had lost two not long ago, then taken in He Lingchuan as a replacement, so they were sitting at nine for the moment.

Fire Chief Liu Tong yanked his spear out of the bear. “Save the chatter. Take care of business first! Willow, take the head.”

Willow was the archer who had loosed those last two arrows. Slender and willowy as her nickname suggested, she took the great axe from a teammate.

Even sprawled out, the bear monster was like a small hill. She planted one boot on its head, gripped the axe in both hands, and hewed down with all her might.

The axe blade had not yet reached the neck when the “unconscious” bear suddenly surged up.

Willow’s footing went out from under her. She had no time to retreat before a swipe from the beast’s paw raked her calf, forcing a scream of pain from her.

The bear slammed her down and moved to tear her apart alive.

Tigers and leopards strangle their prey at the throat and wait for their prey to stop breathing before they eat. Bears often prefer to rip the prey open, gutting them and eating them alive.

However, this giant bear knew that it did not have long to live. All it wanted now was to rip open her chest, tear out her entrails, and vent every last drop of hatred on its enemy.

Its fangs were about to plunge into Willow’s belly when a cold gleam flashed from above.

The bear’s head toppled free. Hot blood from its neck sprayed over Willow’s hair and face, filling her mouth.

Skinny, the man closest to her, had snatched up the axe and taken the bear’s head in one stroke.

The severed head rolled twice across the ground. Its upper and lower fangs snapped together with a hard clack, and its beady crimson eyes were still bulging round.

Pinned beneath the hulking carcass, Willow shuddered at the sight. Had that stroke come a single breath later, there would be a gaping hole in her belly.

This time, the bear fiend was truly dead. Everyone let out the breath that they had been holding.

“Help me…” Willow forced the plea out.

The team heaved the corpse aside. Willow cried out. The bear’s claws were still hooked into her calf, and the wound was a mess of bloody flesh.

Another big man, “Doorboard,” pulled out a salve and started tending her leg. Liu Tong said to the rest, “Go dig graves. We’ll lay the villagers to rest.”

They headed back into the settlement to find hoes and picks.

The place was a wreck. Log huts had gaping holes smashed through them; furniture lay overturned everywhere. Follow the blood trail and you will find the bodies.

The bear monster had killed eight people, but it only ate the children and youths, seeming to have been especially fond of crunching eyeballs. The remains were unspeakably gruesome.

One of the squad members, three months into service, had seen the dead before. But the moment he stepped inside, the corpse he faced had its mouth stretched wide, and two bloody, empty sockets stared straight at him where the eyes should have been.

He could not help it and bent over and retched.

The scene hit He Lingchuan hard as well. He turned away and told himself silently, This is a dream.

They gathered the bodies in heavy silence and carried them to an open patch behind the village for a proper burial.

The bear monster had charged out of the mountains. When the Office of Military Merit received the village’s plea, they dispatched He Lingchuan’s unit to eliminate the monster.

As they dug, they talked. Everyone agreed that the monsters they had been putting down lately were far stronger than those from just a few months back.

In the world of Panlong City, it had been two months since the imperial nectar appeared. Its aftereffects were now impossible to miss. Across the Panlong Wasteland, newly awakened monsters were springing up like bamboo shoots after the rain, and old monsters were growing ever more formidable.

Freshly enlightened monsters were like fourteen or fifteen-year-old adolescents, surging with strength, swelling with confidence. They had come to have an “I’m king of the world” delusion. Their wits had only just opened, so they were still a bit dazed, but their tempers turned particularly edgy and exceptionally violent. It would take months for that to settle.

At such times, their threat to humans was severe. Reports of monster attacks poured in from both the Panlong Wasteland and the Chipa Plateau. The population was one of Panlong City’s most precious resources, so the authorities would never let man-eating monsters roam free.

Since joining the patrol, He Lingchuan had already gone out on seven monster-hunting missions. The veterans said that before the imperial nectar, the Chipa Plateau had been tranquil. One might not rack up that many cases in half a year.

Before they covered the graves, He Lingchuan reached out and closed the dead’s eyes.

This was the trial he was bound to endure.

Battle and killing were the best whetstones for one’s blade and will.

And yet it showed just how fragile life was, whether in the Panlong Dreamscape or in the waking world.

Doorboard set a few sticks of incense at the mounds, recited a eulogy, and wished the souls safe passage to the divine kingdom.

He Lingchuan had heard the rite many times and knew that it invoked “Lady Mitian,” the goddess who had bestowed the Generous Pot and the Red General and had long watched over Panlong City.

With the villagers’ affairs seen to, the squad found a hay cart for the bear’s corpse, hitched a horse, and set off toward Panlong City.

The carcass was their spoils. The head would serve as proof to be delivered to the Office of Military Merit for the record. As for the rest, the fire captain would allot among the members—the more merit, the bigger the share.

They had just finished loading the bear when a massive sika deer stepped out of the trees. Moss draped its splendid crown, and two tiny flowers bloomed upon it. Showing no fear of people, it walked up and spoke in human tongue, “The guardian spirit of Qianling asked me to pass this on: near Mount Baitou, several unfamiliar monsters have appeared—some winged, some four-footed.”

Fire Captain Liu Tong took a step forward. “Newborn monsters, you mean?”

“No.” The sika deer shook its head. “They showed up alongside the post–imperial nectar monster tide, trying to slip by unnoticed. But the guardian spirit has judged them to be outsiders.”

“Thanks for the warning. We’ll report it at once.”

Ever since the imperial nectar descended, trouble had been popping up everywhere—some of it Heaven’s doing, some of it man’s.

The sika deer dipped its head and sauntered back into the trees.

As the overlord of the wasteland, Panlong City held the entire Chipa Plateau tight in its grip. The nearby guardian spirits were all enfeoffed by the city and served in a co-management role.

Otherwise, with a plateau so vast and open, enemy scouts would slip in sooner or later. Panlong City’s manpower alone could never hope to drive them all out.

Just then, the far slopes of the Chipa Plateau blazed with autumn color. The ridgelines showed their rugged majesty; rivers ran clear as jade belts, winding through fields of gold.

Such grandeur was enough to sweep away the grief and anger everyone had just tasted.

He Lingchuan drew a long breath. Even the air here seemed sweet.

But he had seen the Chipa Plateau two centuries from now.

What kind of power could turn these lively, graceful mountains and rivers into a barren, monotonous sea of sand?

Right now, he was likely walking inside a world shaped by that very power.

The thought alone sent a small thrill through him.

Before long, the squad returned to Panlong City and headed straight for the Office of Military Merit.

Turn in the mission first, then they could divide the spoils.

Panlong City bustled with every trade, each finely specialized. There were even professional game-houses that handled whatever the patrols brought back from the field. Bear monsters were among the most sought-after, as their claws and fangs could be forged into weapons, their pelt could be made into soft armor or greatcoats, and their gall, eyes, and inner core could be refined into medicines; they were a treasure trove from nose to tail.

He Lingchuan did his own calculations. With the merit from this run, he should have enough merit to redeem another divine technique.

He already had his eye on one: a substitution technique.

The description of the technique was brutally simple. It allowed the user to swap positions instantly with a designated “cicada shell,” on the condition that both were within the same space and no more than seventeen meters apart, and it could be used once every six hours.

One line, and the use cases write themselves. Beyond making He Lingchuan’s fighting style more fluid, it would be one more life-saving trick.

As for the spoils, He Lingchuan received half a bear’s paw, one bear kidney, and—courtesy of Skinny—an eyeball.

This was custom. If someone saved your life, you thanked them with something tangible. So He Lingchuan did not stand on ceremony and accepted it cheerfully.

Hardly anyone gulped down such potent tonics raw. He could ask A’Luo to turn them into pills, trade them in at the Office of Military Merit for additional merit, or sell them outright. He had plenty of good options.

Skinny, meanwhile, looked deflated.

He had spent the day as bait, sprinting the bear in circles only to get swatted into a tree and ruin a protective talisman in the process. Without it, that single swipe might have punched a hole through his back.

Those life-savers were not cheap. Just thinking about it made his heart ache, and his back still throbbed.

At that moment, Willow came over and, without fuss, handed him the most valuable piece of the lot: the bear gall, in thanks for saving her life.

His resentment vanished like smoke. He grinned so wide you could see all his teeth and none of his eyes.