Grandpa, Spare My Life!

While Yue Wen was using the demon-revealing mirror, that ball of ghost fire caught the scent of a living person as well. With a whoosh the flame flared up and came charging straight at him. In an instant, Yue Wen brought out his flying-sword bracelet, took the sword in hand, and swept it through the air. Shfft— From several meters away, the sword qi cut the ghost fire down, and two severed pieces of the tattered lantern skin dropped to the ground. "I'm afraid it'll take a dozen or more of these little things to scrape together a single evil-suppressing coin." Yue Wen got a rough sense of it and said carelessly, "I'll just win on volume." With that, he strolled on ahead. Toward the woods, ghost fire drifted out at every turn — you could tell the East City Cemetery truly had let things pile up for a long while before hiring someone this once. Fortunately, Lantern Wraiths all had a territorial streak and kept a fair distance from one another. However many there were, they never swarmed, so they couldn't give Yue Wen any trouble at all. As for dueling Lantern Wraiths one-on-one, his attitude was naturally the more the better. Wherever he passed, nothing stood in his way. Which was why the cemetery's management required only the Second Realm: dealing with Lantern Wraiths truly took no supernatural arts. Even the Lantern Wraiths themselves probably never dreamed that a cultivator at the late stage of the Third Realm would be willing to come spend this much time chopping them up. Talk about coming here to fish with dynamite. Just as Yue Wen was finding the slashing wonderfully stress-relieving, an unusual aura suddenly appeared in the demon-revealing mirror. Amid the fine gray threads of yin energy, a few wisps of faint crimson smoke had suddenly slipped in. Demonic aura? Yue Wen turned cautious at once. A wraith might well arise naturally inside the cemetery, but a demon had to be an outsider. This called for care. He sprang up onto a tree branch, suppressed his aura, and watched carefully for the source of the demonic aura. Three slinking, catlike figures came walking up ahead. All three had human shapes and wore clothes, but the skin they showed was more or less covered in fine fur; cat ears grew from their heads, and a long tail stood up behind each of them. Three cat demons at half-taking form? Yue Wen wondered what they'd come here for in the dead of night. Walking out front was a black cat demon with a young man's face, surveying his surroundings as he went, like he was patrolling his territory. Beside him was a big, fat white cat demon with a simple, honest air about him, a large sack on his back and a pair of sunglasses on his face. Behind the two came a slim, light-footed orange cat demon in the likeness of a human girl — pretty features, eyes tinged blue — glancing about timidly as she walked. Just as they were about to leave the wooded area, the fat white cat with the sunglasses pulled a disc-shaped object out of his jacket and began chanting: "Seek the dragon, divide the gold, watch the coiling hills — each range of hills is one more gate to pass..." Mid-chant, the black cat raised a hand and smacked the back of his head. Smack! "What are you doing?" the black cat asked. "I..." The white cat rubbed the back of his head, the picture of innocence, and said meekly, "I've seen tomb raiders do it this way." "Pitch-black as Mahakala and you put on shades — what are you, a rapper?" The black cat smacked the sunglasses right off his face, then batted the thing out of his hands. "Which car dashboard did you pry this off of?" "I was only scared we'd run into a zongzi — you know, a corpse..." The white cat retreated under the blows. "You look like a great big fat zongzi to me!" The black cat smacked his head again. "Who told you we're here robbing graves?" "Aren't we?" The white cat winced, teeth bared. "We're just here to carry out the Cult Master's task — dig the graves open, find what's inside, and bring it back!" the black cat said. The white cat didn't get it. "Isn't that the very definition of grave robbing?" "Then scram and dig!" the black cat snapped. "Keep it down — what if we startle the grave keeper?" the orange cat girl behind them urged in a whisper. "What's to be scared of?" the black cat swaggered. "How tough can a grave keeper in a place like this be? If anyone dares stop us later, one punch and I'll have him calling me Grandpa!" … [Underage cat demon: strength not yet sufficient for taking full form, but with a tough body, quick and agile. It has awakened no innate supernatural ability — still, mind its sharp fangs and claws. Combat strength equal to one hundred healthy human grannies.] Yue Wen probed the three cat demons' strength once more with the demon-revealing mirror. All of them fell within the range the mirror could observe, and even the strongest, the black cat, was only hundred-granny class in combat strength, so he relaxed a little. He stayed hidden up in the tree, wanting to see what these three little demons were up to. By rights his task was to clear out evil entities; usually only Lantern Wraiths appeared here, but if anything else turned up, that would be his to handle too. At most he'd charge extra afterward. And if these little demons behaved viciously, Yue Wen wouldn't mind stepping in for free — a few more evil-suppressing coins for the pile. Below, the three cat demons reached a stretch of graves with newer headstones. The black cat eyed them over. "The bodies that came in the last few days should all be buried in this section. Start digging." The sacks they'd brought were stuffed with pickaxes. The black and white cats set to swinging, clanging away until the concrete cracked open, and dug the corpses up out of the ground. The orange cat girl kept lookout off to one side, glancing around with a trace of fear. For a demon, what she feared was of course neither corpses nor ghosts, but human cultivators. In all their time surviving in the city, they had never dared show themselves openly, for fear of being found by powerful cultivators. No law would protect innocent little demons, after all, so they lived each day in trembling dread. And even so, it was still far better than life out in the wasteland zones. The black and white cats threw themselves into it and broke open three graves in a row. Each time one came open, the black cat searched it over carefully, and only when it wasn't the target did they dig up the next. Yue Wen watched a while longer and confirmed that no other demons lurked nearby. Only then did he decide to act. Let them keep digging like this, and by tomorrow the graveyard would be a shambles — awkward for him to explain. The orange cat girl was peering left and right when Yue Wen dropped out of the air right behind her. "And what are you looking at?" "Of course — I'm afraid there might be—" The orange cat answered by reflex and turned her head, and there before her stood a human of superb make, without a speck of demonic aura on him — show-grade, no less. Her pupils quaked. "A human—!" Yue Wen's knife-hand flashed and chopped her across the neck in one strike, knocking the little orange cat senseless. At the scream, the black and white cats whipped around at once. A human had appeared out of nowhere — and knocked out their companion. The black cat's face went vicious in an instant, ferocious and twisted; he crouched low and hissed at Yue Wen. The white cat was more direct: pickaxe swung up, he came charging, shouting at the top of his lungs, "Let her go!" Against little demons like these, Yue Wen didn't unleash his sword-control art — that would make it far too easy to cut one dead with a single stroke. Cultivators generally trained three kinds of cultivation methods: mental cultivation methods, martial cultivation methods, and supernatural arts. Compared with supernatural arts, martial cultivation methods had a lower threshold. Back when his cultivation level was still weak, Yue Wen had bought one such method, called the Wandering Dragon Freehand. More than enough for a few little demons. Facing the white cat bearing down on him, pickaxe raised, Yue Wen moved like lightning — one step out, left hand parrying, right hand chopping — bam! A head-slap swift and supple as a wandering dragon! Heavy and full of force, it knocked even the big, fat white cat out in a single blow. "Hrah!" In the same instant, the black cat sprang forward, fierce and blindingly fast, his figure nearly smearing into an afterimage! Judging by that charge, he really was far stronger than the white cat. But before so vast a gap in cultivation level, it still hardly counted. Yue Wen twisted at the waist and blasted out a backhand punch, square into the black cat's face — as if the cat had thrown himself onto the fist. Bam— The punch drove the black cat back a good five meters, two threads of blood jetting from his nostrils! Yet this black cat had real spirit — not one cry of pain! He fiercely wiped the blood from his nose, staring straight at Yue Wen, eyes blazing bright, both claws raised high — and then, with a plop! He knelt down... Having slid into that kneel at the speed of light, he still held his head high and proud, his face set fierce, and shouted at the top of his voice: "Grandpa, spare my life!"