The city of Maple-Leaf was bathed in the glow of ten thousand red lanterns, their flickering light reflecting off the polished cobblestones like droplets of fresh blood. Tonight was the grand wedding of Liu Feng, a prominent Inner Disciple of the Black-Tiger Sect and a favored nephew of Elder Mang. The "Golden Tiger Manor" was packed with the province's elite—corrupt officials, greedy merchants, and arrogant cultivators—all gathered to curry favor with the sect that held their lives in its predatory claws.
Inside the Great Hall, the air was thick with the scent of expensive wine, roasted meats, and the overwhelming, almost suffocating perfume of jasmine. Music from traditional flutes and drums echoed through the rafters, a celebratory symphony for a man who had spent his adult life stepping on the necks of the weak.
Liu Feng sat at the head table, his bloated face flushed deep red from high-grade spiritual alcohol. He wore robes of heavy crimson silk, embroidered with golden threads that shimmered under the torchlight. Beside him sat his bride-to-be, a girl barely eighteen, her eyes red from crying behind her translucent veil. She was the daughter of a local merchant who had been "taxed" into giving her away to settle a debt.
"Hahaha! Today, we drink until the sun rises!" Liu Feng roared, his hand gripping the bride's arm with bruising force, his nails digging into her pale skin. "Elder Mang himself will arrive shortly to bless this union! Any man who doesn't finish his jar of wine today is an enemy of the Black-Tiger Sect!"
The guests laughed nervously, clinking their cups. But in the shadows of a large decorative pillar at the far end of the hall, a young man stood in absolute silence.
He wore a clean, simple scholar's robe of moon-white, a color usually reserved for mourning in Eastern traditions. His presence was so ethereal and calm that he seemed to vanish into the background, even though his face was more beautiful than any ornament in the room.
This was Li Wei.
He watched the festivities with the detached curiosity of a surgeon looking at a petri dish. His "Dead Heart" did not beat faster. He felt no righteous fury for the crying bride. He only felt the cold, rhythmic vibration of his Void-Qi Threads, coiled around his fingers like sleeping vipers, ready to strike at the slightest twitch of his hand.
The Presentation of the Gift
As the ceremony reached its peak, the announcer stepped forward, his voice booming, "Gifts for the Groom! Let the tributes be presented!"
A line of servants began to bring forth heavy chests filled with spirit stones, rare medicinal herbs, and jade artifacts. Li Wei stepped out from the shadows, a medium-sized wooden box wrapped in exquisite red silk in his hands.
His appearance caused a ripple of silence to spread through the hall like a wave. His beauty was so striking, so divine, that for a moment, the musicians faltered. Even the most arrogant cultivators felt a strange, instinctive shiver down their spines.
Li Wei walked toward the stage. His steps made no sound, his white robes swaying with a grace that felt unnatural. Liu Feng squinted at him, his drunken eyes struggling to focus on the intruder.
"Who are you?" Liu Feng asked, his voice slurred and heavy. "I don't remember inviting a scholar this handsome. Are you a poet sent by the city governor?"
"I am an old acquaintance from the mountains," Li Wei said. His voice was melodic, carrying a strange, resonant chill that seemed to dampen the heat of the room. "I heard of your joy and couldn't bear to arrive empty-handed. This is a one-of-a-kind artifact, prepared with my own hands over the last three days."
Li Wei placed the box on the central table, right in front of the wedding cake. "A tribute to your 'achievements' in the Mist-Veil Village ten years ago. I believe you were fond of collecting... souvenirs."
At the mention of the village, Liu Feng's smile flickered. A memory of smoke and screams surfaced for a fraction of a second before being drowned by his arrogance. He reached out and tore away the silk wrapping, laughing. "A souvenir? Let's see what this brat has brought!"
He opened the lid.
The scream that left Liu Feng's throat was not human. It was a high-pitched, rattling sound—the sound of a man whose soul had just been doused in ice water.
Inside the box was the head of Zhang Bao.
But it wasn't just a severed head. Li Wei had used his Qi-threads to "reconstruct" the face. The skin had been peeled back with surgical precision to reveal the underlying musculature, then stitched back with gold wire into a permanent, horrific grin. The eyes had been replaced with two polished black stones, and in the mouth was Zhang Bao's own crushed Sect Token, forced so deep into the throat that it had shattered the jaw.
The Butcher's Etiquette
"ASSASSIN!" Liu Feng shrieked, falling backward off his chair and knocking over a jar of wine.
"Kill him! Tear him to pieces!" the Sect Guards screamed, drawing their curved sabers and surging forward from all sides of the hall.
Thirty guards, all at the Qi Condensation stage, charged at once. Li Wei didn't even move his feet. He didn't draw a sword. He simply exhaled a breath of cold Qi, and his fingers danced in the air like he was playing an invisible zither.
Zip. Zip. Zip.
The first guard reached within three paces of Li Wei before his head simply slid off his shoulders. There was no sound of a blade, only the soft whistle of air. Li Wei's Void-Qi Threads were sharpened to a molecular level, invisible to anyone below the Core Formation stage.
"The carotid artery," Li Wei murmured, his voice calm amidst the chaos of blood and screaming guests. "If severed with a clean edge, the brain loses consciousness in exactly four seconds. It is far too merciful for a dog like you."
Li Wei began to walk toward the stage. Every step he took resulted in a spray of blood. He moved like a ghost, his white robes untouched by a single drop of crimson. He didn't use brute force; he used Physics and Anatomy.
He caught a guard's saber between two fingers, diverted the momentum with a flick of his wrist, and used his own Qi-thread to guide the guard's hand so that he pierced his own throat.
Squelch.
"The fifth intercostal space," Li Wei whispered as another guard fell at his feet, his heart punctured from within. "The direct path to the left ventricle. Efficient. Clean."
The Unmaking of the Groom
Li Wei reached the stage. Liu Feng tried to crawl away, his heavy, gold-embroidered wedding robes tripping him. Li Wei stepped on the trailing silk, pinning the man to the floorboards.
"Please... I'll give you anything! Money! Women! My cultivation manuals!" Liu Feng begged, his face covered in a mixture of wine, snot, and tears.
Li Wei knelt beside him, his face a mask of angelic indifference. "Do you remember the girl from the village, Liu Feng? The one whose arm you broke because she wouldn't stop crying for her mother? She was five. You were twenty. You called it 'disciplining the livestock.'"
"I... I don't remember! There were so many villages! Elder Mang ordered it!"
"I know," Li Wei said softly, his voice almost a caress. "That is why I will make sure you remember this for as long as your heart continues to beat. Which, according to my calculations, will be exactly three more hours."
Li Wei pulled out his Star-Iron Scalpel.
With a speed that defied the mortal eye, Li Wei made a series of shallow incisions along Liu Feng's spine. He wasn't killing him. He was performing a "Nerve-Isolation Technique." He used his threads to hook into the major nerve clusters of the spinal cord, bypassing the brain's ability to trigger shock.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!"
Liu Feng's scream hit a pitch that shattered the porcelain on the tables.
Li Wei didn't stop. He dislocated both of Liu Feng's shoulders, then used the Qi-threads to keep the bones suspended in mid-air, preventing them from slipping back into the sockets. He then began to slowly "unzip" the skin from Liu Feng's torso. He worked with the grace of a master tailor, revealing the pulsing, wet organs beneath the muscle wall.
"The human heart is surprisingly resilient," Li Wei noted, watching the organ beat frantically behind the cage of ribs. "It can survive even when the body is stripped of its shell, provided the Qi flow is maintained through the primary meridians."
He injected a burst of Vitality-Locking Qi—a technique he had perfected by keeping dying mountain bears alive for weeks just to study their nervous systems—into Liu Feng's chest. The man's eyes bulged, the blood vessels in his whites bursting until his eyes were solid red. He couldn't die. He couldn't even pass out. He was forced to feel every single nerve ending being exposed to the cold, jasmine-scented air of the hall.
The Final Decoration
Li Wei stood up. The banquet hall was now a tomb of silence. The guests were frozen in terror, watching the "Angel" in white robes stand over a masterpiece of gore.
Li Wei took the red silk from the gift box and used it to hang Liu Feng from the central chandelier. The groom, now a skinless sculpture of raw muscle and exposed nerves, twitched rhythmically, his blood dripping onto the wedding cake below.
Using Liu Feng's own blood as ink, Li Wei wrote four massive characters on the white wall behind the stage:
"DEBT DECLARED. ASH RETURNED."
Li Wei wiped a microscopic speck of blood from his porcelain forehead with a clean silk cloth. He looked at the terrified bride, who was staring at him in a state of catatonic shock. He reached out and gently patted her head, the same way he used to pat his sister, Xiao, before the world turned to ash.
"Run," he whispered. "The fire is coming, and it does not distinguish between the guilty and the witnesses."
By the time the elite "Iron-Claw" reinforcements from the Black-Tiger Sect crashed through the heavy oak doors, the hall was empty of the Butcher. Only the "Gift" remained, hanging from the ceiling—a living, screaming reminder that the past had come to collect its interest.