Extracting confessions through torture was easy in concept, but far from simple in practice.
Against someone with copper skin and iron bones, most conventional methods became a joke.
Fang Shuwen gave it a try as well. With his internal force, inflicting harm on the man was not difficult.
Getting him to talk, however, was another matter entirely.
Fang Shuwen even resorted to rather cruel measures, snapping his fingers one by one, prying his eyelid open, and gouging out an eye.
The agony was undeniable, yet the man refused to utter a word.
In the end, having exhausted his options, Fang Shuwen could only spread his hands toward Zhou Qingmei.
Zhou Qingmei sighed helplessly. "Just kill him, then."
Even if they could learn nothing from such a menace, he had to be eliminated to prevent future trouble.
Fang Shuwen nodded. The Black Fiend cultist split his mouth into a grin.
His face was slick with blood, one eye wide open while the other socket sat empty and hollow, making his smile look grotesque beyond measure.
"You… you will all die sooner or later!
"Our Black Fiend Cult… will inevitably… rise again!"
Before the words had finished echoing, Fang Shuwen brought a palm down onto the man's head, shattering his life on the spot.
After finding a place outside to bury the two corpses, Fang Shuwen returned to the room to find Zhou Qingmei clutching her longsword, leaning against the corner of the kang with her face scrunched up into a tight frown.
"Is the Eldest Young Miss engaged in her daily self-reflection?"
Fang Shuwen smiled, pulled off his boots, and climbed onto the kang.
"I keep feeling that whatever grand scheme they are planning is no small affair.
"Brother Fang, I am worried. If we cannot get to the bottom of this soon, I fear it will lead to a catastrophe."
A trace of gloom clouded Zhou Qingmei's face.
Even when she had realized she was being pursued and hunted, she had never worn an expression like this.
Fang Shuwen sighed. "Unfortunately, our interrogation methods are far too unrefined.
"Do you know anyone with real expertise? Once we reach Guangning City, we'll have at least two leads that might trace the Black Fiend Cult's trail.
"One is the money house, and the other is that lecher.
"Yet even after we track them down, if we still can't pry anything from their mouths, it will all amount to wasted effort."
Zhou Qingmei shook her head.
"You don't understand. The jianghu is home to all sorts of people from every walk of life.
"Some are cowardly and dread death; scare them a little, and they will spill everything you ask.
"Yet others are stubborn to the bone. No matter what torment they endure, they will bite down and never relent.
"Among them, cultists have the hardest mouths to pry open.
"These people possess both faith and purpose. To achieve their ambitions, they can set life and death aside entirely.
"Mere physical pain cannot sway them in the slightest.
"Sigh, if only I knew the Classic of Agony."
"The Classic of Agony? What is that?"
To Fang Shuwen's ears, the name sounded rather bizarre.
"I only came across it by chance in an ancient record. There used to be a martial art in the jianghu that inflicted pure pain without causing physical injury.
"The sheer extremity of that agony was something no human being could endure.
"The text claimed that anyone subjected to this technique suffered an ordeal no different from cycling through the eighteen levels of hell, tormented for thousands of years, only to open their eyes and find that merely a fleeting moment had passed.
"Unfortunately, the martial art was lost to time."
Regret was written across Zhou Qingmei's face.
Fang Shuwen grimaced as he listened. Putting himself in the victim's shoes for even a moment made it easy to imagine the sheer despair of anyone trapped under such a method.
"What kind of demonic, unorthodox heretic invented a martial art like that?"
"Don't speak nonsense. A grandmaster created it to guide people toward goodness.
"He used that martial art to reform many heinous villains and set them on the righteous path."
"…"
Fang Shuwen fell silent for a long moment.
"Well… that grandmaster certainly had a unique way of thinking."
After everything that had transpired that night, neither of them felt much inclined to sleep.
They simply lay down and chatted idly about whatever came to mind.
Zhou Qingmei hailed from a merchant clan and had entered a reputable orthodox sect like Zhujige Pavilion; her breadth of knowledge and worldly experience far exceeded Fang Shuwen's.
Fang Shuwen seized the opportunity to question her about all sorts of curious anecdotes and lore of the jianghu.
Zhou Qingmei spoke with great enthusiasm at first, but her voice grew fainter and fainter. Finally, when Fang Shuwen asked how many sects in the jianghu could rival Zhujige Pavilion, the girl drifted completely into deep sleep, leaving his question unanswered.
Fang Shuwen sighed. Traveling together this far, the young miss was letting her guard down around him more and more.
"I honestly can't tell whether she's just careless or doesn't see me as a man at all."
He rolled over, sat up, and crossed his legs.
His thoughts turned back to the Classic of Agony. According to Zhou Qingmei, the ancient texts only spared a few brief strokes to record it.
They never explained the underlying principle of how it inflicted pain without physical harm.
Yet thinking it over himself, Fang Shuwen reasoned that the human body was filled with all kinds of nerves beneath the skin.
If one stimulated them with internal force, could that achieve pain without injury?
Pondering further, he recalled that during his past days doing odd jobs at a medicine shop, he had casually browsed a few medical books. One of them recorded certain acupuncture points on the human body.
If those points were stimulated, they would trigger immense, unbearable agony.
However, doing so required silver needles.
"If I use internal force as a needle to thread through those acupuncture points, could I achieve the same effect?"
In that moment, Fang Shuwen felt a sudden flash of inspiration.
A flood of ideas surged into his mind, though he lacked a suitable opportunity to test them for now.
Pressing his index and middle fingers together, he attempted to condense his internal force into a fine thread and extend it outside his body.
This demanded extraordinary control over internal force.
Fang Shuwen happened to possess just such control. Even so, the initial attempt was far from smooth; his internal breath slipped from his grasp and shot out with a sharp hiss, punching a pinhole-sized puncture into the wall.
After more than a dozen attempts, he finally managed to gather his true qi at his fingertips, condensing it without dispersing.
Yet he could not make it as rigid as a silver needle.
Instead, it was like a limp, pliable thread, wavering at his fingertips in rhythm with the circulation of his internal breath.
The shifting of this thread was invisible to the naked eye, but as its creator, Fang Shuwen could sense it clearly.
After a moment's thought, he directed the thread toward the wall.
The thread sank into the plaster, leaving the wall completely undamaged.
Yet that raised another question: did this thing possess any real offensive power?
Fang Shuwen was not deranged enough to test it on himself, though his gaze wandered toward Zhou Qingmei with a flicker of temptation.
Upon careful consideration, however, he decided he could not commit such an inhumane act against his own employer.
With a quiet sigh, he dispersed his true qi, and the thread vanished without a trace.
"I'll test it the next time we catch someone from the Black Fiend Cult.
"Who knows? It might yield miraculous results.
"If someone else could create a martial art like the Classic of Agony, why can't I?"
Chapter 19