An icy hand crawled up over his shoulder, each scarlet claw sharp as a blade slowly piercing Qin Yan's leather armor. The freezing aura flooding across the back of his neck made every hair on his body stand on end.
If it had been any other Black-Clad Envoy, they would probably have been so terrified by now that their legs gave out, leaving them sprawled on the ground begging for their lives. But not Qin Yan. A man who had already died once and clawed his way back from a wretched mass-burial ground had no room for the words “fear” in his dictionary.
Just as the malignant spirit's claws were about to stab into his carotid artery, Qin Yan suddenly bent forward, using the momentum to pivot on his heel. At the same time, he yanked the [Soul-Severing Blade] from his hip and swung it hard behind him in a flawless semicircle.
Slash!
The pitch-black blade tore through the air and sliced into a piece of blazing red silk. The figure that had just been standing behind him had already retreated three zhang away at a ghostly speed, hovering in midair.
Under the ghastly red light of the Ghost Domain, the malignant spirit's features became clear. She was a seductive woman with a lithe figure, dressed in a blood-red robe of translucent silk. Her beauty was so exquisite it seemed demonic—skin white as snow, lips red as rouge, eyes glimmering with allure. But a closer look revealed that the smile on her lips was stiff and forced, like a flawless mask stitched together without a single imperfection.
[Warning! Powerful enemy: Painted-Skin Demon (Skin-Painting Demon)—Level 5.] [Data Analysis: “Painted Skin” (畫皮)—In ancient pictographs, the radical for Skin (皮) originally depicted a hand holding a knife to strip the hide from a beast. This demon is born from the resentment of those who crave beauty, cruelly skinning virgin girls and using illusions and fresh blood to paste the skins onto themselves as disguises. Human skin is their strongest protective armor.]
The system's solemn voice rang out in his mind, decoding the entire history of the monster before him.
Qin Yan tightened his grip on the blade. Level 5. He had only just awakened the system, and his body was still gravely wounded. His current level was probably barely at the bottom rung. The gap in power was enormous; confronting it head-on would be no different from smashing an egg against a rock.
“Officer, you're awfully violent...” The Painted-Skin Demon covered her mouth and giggled, her shrill voice stabbing through his eardrums. “But that's all right. I really like your skin. With a build like yours, it would make a wonderfully warm blanket once I peeled it off!”
Before she had finished speaking, the flirtation vanished from her eye sockets, replaced by frenzied cruelty. Dozens of strips of bloody silk shot from her sleeves like scarlet spirit serpents, ripping through the air straight toward Qin Yan with the intent of binding him tight.
In that space saturated with killing intent, Qin Yan did not panic. He held his breath and pushed the power of the [Netherworld Eye] to its limit.
The world around him sank into black and white once again. In Qin Yan's eyes, the Painted-Skin Demon was no longer a beautiful woman but a colossal mass of resentful energy. The strips of bloody silk rushing toward him were not physical objects, either, but streams of condensed evil energy.
No matter how powerful an attack was, it had to possess a trajectory, a rhythm, and a delay before it could strike. Qin Yan silently repeated the thought to himself. His life-and-death combat experience told him to keep his head as cold as ice.
He began to move. Not by charging forward to attack, but by constantly dodging.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Crack!
The strips of bloody silk lashed down onto the shattered brick floor, blasting deep pits into it. Qin Yan curled up and rolled, using the terrain and the fallen pillars of the abandoned temple as cover. Every time the red silk grazed past him, its icy aura cut painfully into his flesh, but he gritted his teeth and endured it, never taking his eyes off the Painted-Skin Demon's movement patterns.
The probing phase lasted a full ten breaths. Through the [Netherworld Eye], Qin Yan had seen through the demon's attack pattern: three beats of straight, stabbing lashes, one beat of a wide horizontal sweep, and then its resentful energy would stall for roughly one second as it retracted the red silk into its sleeves and prepared the next attack. The perfect human skin covering its body was impervious to blades and spears, but at the groove of its neck, where blood-red threads stitched its head to its body, there was an extremely thin energy gap!
“Now that I've figured out the pattern, it's time to counterattack.”
When the Painted-Skin Demon launched its wide horizontal sweep and smashed the last Buddha statue it had been using as an anchor, Qin Yan stopped retreating. He deliberately bent forward half a beat slower.
Thud!
A strip of bloody silk pierced through his left shoulder and burst out through his back. Fresh blood gushed forth.
“I've got you now, you little brat!” the Painted-Skin Demon shrieked triumphantly, yanking hard on the silk in an attempt to pull Qin Yan toward her and finish him off.
But she never expected the smile on Qin Yan's lips to be as cold as a life-reaping Asura's. Using the force of her pull, he unleashed all the strength in his right leg, kicked the ground apart, and shot forward like an arrow loosed from a bow. The distance of ten zhang vanished in the blink of an eye.
Within that precise one-second delay as the Painted-Skin Demon retracted its resentful energy, Qin Yan was already right in front of her. He swung up his right hand, pressing a bright yellow talisman marked with the vermilion-red character “Seal” (鎮) directly onto the demon's forehead.
“Evil-Sealing Talisman—form a barrier for me!” Qin Yan roared.
The character “Seal” (鎮), carrying the power of a solemn ritual artifact, erupted with dazzling golden light and shattered every false illusion. The Painted-Skin Demon's body went rigid. Its eyes filled with utter terror when it realized that it could not move—not even a single finger.
Only two seconds of immobilization, but on a battlefield of life and death, that was more than enough!
Despite the holes torn through his shoulder, Qin Yan's left hand still tensed around the hilt of the Soul-Severing Blade. He poured all his strength and Judge power into the pitch-black blade, driving it straight into the deadly gap in the neck—the only weakness sewn into the Painted-Skin Demon's human-skin armor.
Thud!
The sharp blade severed the bloody threads and plunged into the source of yin energy hidden beneath them. The beautiful human skin immediately split apart, shattering into fragments. From within, the Painted-Skin Demon's true body emerged—a rotten, oozing lump of flesh crawling with maggots, releasing a shriek so piercing that it cracked the very space of the Ghost Domain.
“Break for me!” Qin Yan twisted the hilt violently, extinguishing the last spark of its wicked life force.
The oozing lump of flesh exploded into a cloud of dense black mist, dragging the shattered Ghost Domain along with it like shards of glass. The silent, pitch-dark interior of the abandoned temple emerged once more.
Qin Yan braced himself on the blade and dropped to one knee, gasping violently as beads of sweat poured down his forehead.
[Painted-Skin Demon (Level 5) killed while fighting above your level. Received: 500 Judge Points.] [Crimes: Skinning victims and stealing their lives, spreading resentment. Punishment: Soul scattered and spirit dispersed. Execution successful!]
The system's voice rang out like a triumphant anthem. This was an enormous windfall! With 500 points, he had escaped the poverty of a beginner.
Without hesitation, Qin Yan opened the System Shop interface. He skimmed past the active skills, and his gaze stopped on a secret art that cost exactly 500 points: [Soul Inquiry]—allowing him to extract a target's truest fragment of memory from just before death, or from the remnant soul of a malignant spirit.
[Confirm skill exchange: Soul Inquiry. Activate!]
He reached out and seized the faint remnant soul of the Painted-Skin Demon as it gradually dissolved into the air. At once, a fragmented memory flashed across his retinas like an illusionary film.
In the vision, Qin Yan saw the Painted-Skin Demon, still wearing the form of a beautiful woman, standing bent over respectfully in an underground secret chamber. She carefully presented a wooden chest wrapped in golden silk. When the lid opened, more than a dozen completely flayed female skins lay inside, their features still intact and exuding overwhelming resentment.
The man receiving the chest wore a Hundred-Household Commander's uniform trimmed in red. He had a square face and a neatly groomed mustache. He smiled with satisfaction, his deep voice ringing out clearly:
“Well done. These human skins are exceptionally high quality—more than enough to offer to the High Priest in preparation for next month's ritual. Keep searching for targets. As for what happened at the Nightwalker Bureau, I'll cover it up for you.”
It was none other than the current Commander of the East City branch office—Commander Zhao!
The vision faded. Qin Yan stood motionless in the cold, desolate temple, darkness casting a faint veil over his angular profile. Blood still seeped from his shoulder, but the corner of his mouth curled into a vicious, exhilarated smile.
“So that's how it is... The demons aren't merely hiding in the darkness. They've already put on official uniforms and planted themselves right in the halls of the Nightwalker Bureau.” Qin Yan pulled the charred Evil-Sealing Talisman from his pouch and let it drift away on the wind. “Commander Zhao, I've decided to take your head.”