“Stop!” Li Mo commanded. If they had wanted Qin Jianmei to die, they wouldn’t have prepared such an elaborate scheme—Yun Ruoyan still had a multitude of questions about Lin Yuemei for her!

Li Mo’s guard hesitated and stilled, the blade inches from Qin Jianmei’s face. Sensing an opportunity, she flicked a wrist at the guard’s chest, but he was prepared. He shielded his body with his blade and avoided two of the needles, but the third struck his wrist.

The guard immediately felt a sense of numbness and paralysis; clearly, the needle was poisoned.

“Retreat!” Li Mo commanded, and the guard cradled his injured wrist as he did so.

By then, the red and black mists that the Buddha and Guanyin statues had given off had morphed into a half-red and half-black human-shaped monstrosity. It was over ten feet tall, with two thick, coarse arms and legs. It clumsily strode forward, leaving only broken chairs and tables in its wake.

“Your Highness!” Su Nan and five other guards appeared on the second floor, forming a human wall in front of Li Mo and Yun Ruoyan.

“It’s a demonic puppet!” Li Mo warned, his expression serious. To Su Nan, he quietly added, “Protect Yan’er well.”

“Yes, Your Highness!” Su Nan took a step back and stood by her side.

“A demonic puppet?” Yun Ruoyan asked curiously. This was the first time she had ever heard of such a monstrosity. “Could you explain what a demonic puppet is?”

“My mother brought it up once when I was little: it’s a particularly lethal humanoid-type weapon, and it looks exactly like what’s in front of us,” Li Mo explained. “However, it’s the first time I’ve seen it in person as well.”

“Bodhisattva, heed my commands!” Qin Jianmei commanded the gigantic puppet, a stick of incense in her hand. It was lit, and an unusually intense sandalwood fragrance soon filled the entire room.

The humanoid figure was only vaguely humanlike in shape. Its body had no orifices, but as the fragrance spread through the room, two small cavities appeared approximately where its nose would have been.

When the smoke from Qin Jianmei’s stick of incense wafted into those two cavities, its face cracked open where its mouth would have been. It released a long, low, painful groan in response to Qin Jianmei’s command.

Subsequently, it waved its two gigantic fists at Li Mo and Yun Ruoyan, moving much more quickly than its lumbering form would have suggested. Neither they nor their guards tried to block the blow; instead, everyone jumped aside.

The puppet’s fist punched a hole into the second floor as Yun Ruoyan, Li Mo, and their guards jumped down to the first floor, the guards still forming a protective wall around the two of them. Mimicking their motions, the humanoid puppet also jumped down onto the first floor, two large pits appearing where its feet landed, sending tremors through the entire building.

Li Mo had chosen to meet Qin Jianmei at an abandoned teahouse at the foot of the Minghuang Mountain in the middle of winter. There were almost no tourists in the region during this time of year, and they didn’t have to worry about injuring any innocent bystanders in their fight.

“Bodhisattva!” Qin Jianmei had somehow appeared by the demonic puppet’s side. It leaned down and extended a palm toward Qin Jianmei, who stepped onto it agilely. She lit another stick of incense and held it by the puppet’s nose, causing it to grow even larger, so large that its head was almost poking through the ceiling of the teahouse.

Pacing in a suite on the first floor of the teahouse, Yun Moxiao anxiously watched the scene. Yun Ruoyan had intimated to him that she and Li Mo were the Demonic Duo, and he itched to join the fight and help them.

“Hold it!” Yun Lan shouted. “That’s a demonic puppet, and you’re no match for it! Let’s see how skilled this supposed Demonic Duo is first.”

Back in the hall, when Yun Ruoyan saw that the puppet had grown even larger, she murmured, “We can’t let it ingest any more of that smoke, or it’ll just grow larger and larger.”

“Attack!” Su Nan called out to the five guards in front of him, who split up and dashed toward the puppet, three of them soaring into the air on their swords. The moment they got close, the five guards attacked in unison.

The two guards remaining on the ground swung the blades in their hand at the puppet’s legs. Despite how sturdy they looked, they turned incorporeal as the guards swung their blades, unbalancing them. Before the two guards could react, the puppet raised a leg and kicked both of the guards away.

Meanwhile, the three soaring guards found themselves struggling in a similar fashion. Their attacks passed through the puppet as though it were air, but its attacks hit them solidly. Despite being eighth-rank blademasters, even they couldn’t hold on much longer against the puppet’s onslaught.

With a muted cry, one guard fell from his blade—Qin Jianmei, sitting on the puppet’s shoulder, had thrown a silver needle in his direction. One of the remaining guards swooped down toward his companion and brought him away, leaving a single guard against the puppet.

“Your Highness, if we can’t attack that woman, we won’t be able to win!” Su Nan muttered anxiously.

“Yan’er, wait here. Su Nan, take good care of her!” Li Mo flew toward the puppet, deciding to step in as the lone guard facing off against the puppet swiftly retreated.

“Madam Qin, do you intend on becoming a demon yourself?” Li Mo asked coldly. “The demonic ways have been sealed for millennia, and yet I see traces of them in your attacks!”

Qin Jianmei snorted. “My shamanic tribe descended from the great demons of yore! It was only because of you humans that we had to hide up in the mountains, that we had to betray our own heritage and ancestry.”

After a thousand years, the shamanic tribe had split into two: one half, the conservatives, continued to live deep within the mountains of the Yue kingdom, whereas the other half, the extremists, began living among humans and tried to revitalize the demon race.

A schism developed between the two factions of the shamanic tribe, one which culminated in a great battle, killing a large fraction of the tribe. Of the lucky ones who remained alive, some chose to remain in the mountains, and others began to intermingle with humans once more.

Qin Jianmei was among those who chose to return to living with humans. Because the shamanic tribe was skilled with medicine, most members of the tribe would make a living as wandering physicians. Generation after generation, many such members of the tribe had deliberately chosen to forget their own identity in order to better assimilate into human society.

Indeed, Physician Ceng was very likely also a descendant of the shamanic tribe, but he had likely not found out about his true bloodline.

“We members of the Qin clan have always inherited the shamanic bloodline—no, more accurately, the demonic bloodline,” Qin Jianmei began. “When the pure demonic energy accessible through our bloodline was sealed off, we developed another approach: by refining a demonic puppet.

However, for a demonic puppet to reach the peak of its power required sacrificing the heart of a person with the demonic bloodline, followed by a long, continuous period of prayer with sandalwood incense steeped in one’s own blood. As a result, despite the long history of the shamanic tribe, there had been no recorded instance of a demonic puppet that had reached its true potential.

Ever since she was little, Qin Jianmei had been captivated by the puppetry that her father had described, but she had been unable to carry out her plans without the rare, precious heart of one with the demonic bloodline. However, fifteen years ago, when her father suddenly passed away, Qin Jianmei dug out his heart with her own hands and began refining a demonic puppet.

“There were only eighty-one days left before this puppet would have attained greater heights—but you had to wreck my plans!” Qin Jianmei’s face contorted into a mask of fury as she turned to Li Mo. “But even as it is now, it’s far more than sufficient to deal with the likes of you mortals. Bodhisattva, kill these insolent fools!”

The demonic puppet opened its maws wide and let out a dull, grating whine. Its fists swung at Li Mo with the force of a missile, and even from a distance, Yun Ruoyan could hear the whooshing of the wind as its fists approached.

Yun Ruoyan glanced anxiously at Li Mo, hovering in midair, as she summoned the Scarlet Eye. It was only because she still hadn’t learned how to soar on her sword that she hadn’t rushed to help Li Mo out.

“Mistress, you don’t have to worry too much,” Qiuqiu advised. “Even if Li Mo’s unable to subdue this demonic puppet, it won’t be too hard for him to escape unscathed.”

Just as Qiuqiu predicted, Li Mo moved even more swiftly than the puppet’s fists. No matter how the puppet swung at him, its attacks couldn’t connect with his body.

“Bodhisattva, kill him!” Qin Jianmei seemed rather anxious. On her command, the demonic puppet opened its mouth wide and shot out a huge gust of black smoke, which seemed as though it would smother Li Mo...