The Demon-Locking Tower rose nine floors. Having seen the way station that was the first, Li Fei followed the crone up into the second.
Here the firelight blazed bright and the clang of struck metal never stopped. Artisans with knotted, corded muscle swung their arms without pause, forging weapons, sweat and sparks flying together.
One man took a blade fresh from the furnace to a demon trussed hand and foot, stabbing and hacking to test the results.
The third floor held a dozen-odd great cauldrons and reeked of acrid medicine.
Thick liquid burbled and blistered inside them. Pale-faced "physicians" put their heads together, murmuring, adding herbs to the cauldrons now and then; every so often they ladled out a bowl and poured it down the throat of some demon on the spot, one manic, another wasting away, then observed and recorded the reaction.
On the fourth floor stood transparent domes of light shaped like overturned bowls, Runes flickering across their surfaces. Blood-drenched demons were trapped within, killing and devouring one another, as though someone were breeding gu...
Having seen it with her own eyes, Li Fei understood at last why the court went to such trouble to build and maintain the Demon-Locking Tower.
In an age like this, people had no rights. Much less demons.
If there were no other purpose, locking them up would be pure redundancy, far messier than simply cutting them down where they stood.
Now Li Fei understood. This Demon-Locking Tower looked like a prison for demons, but it was in truth the Great Song's highest-grade research institution.
For a thousand years the jailers in this tower had labored tirelessly at the mysteries and essential nature of demons, digging out their weaknesses, seeking more efficient ways to slay them, even taming them for their own use.
Passing the torch from one generation to the next, they had reaped a rich harvest. The Demon Suppression Bureau's standard-issue arms, every last piece stamped with "+??% damage to demons," and all the various magic treasures besides. Those were the fruit.
Thoughtful now, Li Fei followed the crone higher.
Fifth floor: the study of taming demons. A few sprites caught sight of Li Fei and actually knelt with great ceremony, hailing her as my lord.
Sixth floor: specimens of every kind hung on display, a handful of living ones being dissected. So this floor existed to probe the anatomy of demons and hunt for their weak points.
Li Fei's face never changed, not until the seventh floor, when one eyebrow arched.
If she wasn't mistaken, this was the Great Song Imperial Entertainment Bureau, Demon-Locking Tower Branch.
Ghosts and sprites, male and female, every one of them lovely of face, painted in heavy makeup or light; and all around them, implements of a sort not fit to describe.
"If my lord finds them interesting, you might pick a few to be sent to your residence," the crone said with a kindly smile.
"This official keeps herself above reproach. How would I stoop to anything so absurd?" Li Fei gave a cold snort and walked straight on toward the next floor.
Behind her back, her clasped hands quietly pinned down her tailbone so Miss Tail wouldn't come wriggling out and humiliate her. Snuggling was a matter of mood and taste, thank you. One could hardly take all comers.
Only on the eighth floor did Li Fei stop, satisfaction warming her face.
She had found what she wanted at last.
This floor was laid out with jade stones great and small, blue through and through, radiating a ghost-qi that pressed against the skin. Every one was bound in iron chain and pasted over with talisman paper so the ghosts inside could not slip free.
At the center stood a tall, jagged mountain of jade, its ghost-qi thickest of all. Within it, dense swarms of white phantoms drifted, letting out feeble wails.
Li Fei understood. Demons and sprites had to be fed on blood, and between the limits of space and cost, the Demon-Locking Tower could never pen up too many.
Ghosts were another matter. There was no shortage of things that could hold ghosts in bulk, and they were cheap to keep. Feed them a little yin qi and they could drag out a wretched existence for a very long time.
So Li Fei had guessed there would be no small number of female ghosts inside the Demon-Locking Tower, and as it turned out, she was right.
She walked slowly forward and brushed the jade mountain with the pad of her finger.
[Ice Jade]
[Description: Capable of containing a great number of ghosts. However, ghosts placed within will feel a cold that gnaws at the bone, and their life force will steadily weaken.]
Clearly, for the same price, Ice Jade could hold more than ten times the female ghosts the [Myriad Ghost Gourd] could. But the former was a concentration camp, where the longer they stayed the faster they died, while the latter was an oceanfront villa that even nourished their ghost-qi.
Perhaps sensing the breath of the living, the female ghosts sealed in the Ice Jade turned into a dense swarm of white motes and converged madly on the spot her fingertip touched, tangling there, as though craving any chance at escape.
"Old one, what is on the ninth floor?" Li Fei turned to ask.
"Locked up there are the demon kings and devil kings above the Heaven Realm," the crone answered honestly.
"Good. This official will go take a look when she has time." Li Fei smiled faintly. "Everyone withdraw. Leave these female ghosts to me... after all, this official has her own unique techniques for subduing female ghosts."
"Sister Immortal Maiden truly does have healing hands and a merciful heart."
Consort Hui let out a long breath, eyes half-lidded, color flooding her fair, delicate face.
She was wrapped in a clean, plain white inner robe, her voice as mild and unhurried as ever. Only her somewhat disheveled hair lent this noble consort, with all her air of a virtuous wife, something languid and bewitching, like a cat with its fur mussed.
"You flatter me, Your Highness." Li Fei, changed now into a white dress, gave a bashful little smile, like a pure white blossom swaying in the wind. Her bare feet stood in a puddle of something sticky, glistening as if dipped in beeswax.
"My turn, my turn." Consort Xiang, off to one side, twisted her slender waist and pressed the point.
She lay on her stomach across the bed, chin propped in her hands, snowy feet crossing and swinging up and down, several loose silver bracelets clinking against one another in a bright little melody.
"What's the hurry? Won't you even let Sister Immortal Maiden drink a mouthful of tea?" Consort Hui sat up lazily, drew out a scented handkerchief and dabbed at the nonexistent sweat on Li Fei's brow, then tipped her chin up with a fingertip and studied that sickly face from one side, then the other.
Over these past days the immortal maiden's complexion had grown more haggard by the day. Even her lips had lost their color, leaving her the picture of pitiable, delicate illness.
"Sister Immortal Maiden, you look worse than you did yesterday. It pains me to see it." Consort Hui traced the line of Li Fei's brows and eyes with her fingertip, tender with sympathy. "I know the saying that a physician cannot heal herself, but you really must look after your own body."
"His Majesty has entrusted to this subject both the most important personages under heaven and the Demon-Locking Tower. Naturally I must bend every effort and exhaust every thought in the court's service." Li Fei smiled, light as a drifting cloud. "It's only that I've overtaxed myself, and the old trouble left by my soul injury has flared up. It's nothing."
"For the realm to have a pillar like the immortal maiden is a blessing for our Great Song." Consort Hui smiled and took two gold notes from the cabinet beside the bed. "Today's consultation fee. Take it."
"Why does Your Highness always use her own private funds? Can it not be claimed from the treasury?" Li Fei asked, all puzzlement, though her hands moved briskly enough, tucking the gold notes away with practiced ease.
"Who'd want the dog emperor's money?" Consort Xiang sneered. "I think nothing of him, and there's no affection between us either, so why put myself in his debt by eating from his hand? If it weren't for Sister Hui, I'd have run back to my tribe the very night we married! All the Great Song wanted was a wedding, so the whole world could see the court and the tribes on stable terms. If I went home to visit my family and stayed away from the palace for a few decades, would the dog emperor really dare send men to drag me back?"
"Besides, the little that's stockpiled in that treasury was all scraped out of the hands of the common folk. When I left the palace I saw plenty of people starved to death by the roadside. Spending that money makes my chest tight."
"Your Highness is quite right..." Li Fei's mouth twitched. She felt rather pointedly implicated.
After all, when she collected her rewards from the dog emperor, she'd been grinning from ear to ear...
Consort Hui caught the faint shift in the imperial physician's expression at once and asked with concern, "Has it flared up again?"
"Mm-hm. But I'm used to it. It's nothing serious." Li Fei smiled it off.
"Come. Lie down." Consort Hui pressed on the imperial physician's shoulders without waiting for consent and drew her down to pillow her head on those soft, porcelain-pale thighs, slender fingertips beginning to work at Li Fei's temples. "My skill doesn't match yours, sister, but I can at least help you relax a little."
"Your Highness, you mustn't, you mustn't..." The imperial physician demurred aloud, yet somehow the Demon Suppression Bureau's own Prison-Warden Chiliarch found herself pinned by two soft, boneless arms, unable to move an inch.
"...Then what about me?" Consort Xiang, who had waited a good while, discovered she'd been left out in the cold and puffed her cheeks in a huff. "It was supposed to be my turn first..."
She called out a few times in complaint, and when no one answered, the exotic little beauty rolled over twice like a sulking child and only stopped when she thumped into the imperial physician, the bracelets on her arms and ankles jangling.
Then Consort Xiang pushed herself up onto her knees, glanced at the two of them steeped in that hushed, therapeutic calm, and, refusing to be outdone, flicked her long hair back behind her ear, scooped up Li Fei's slim, pale ankle in one soft hand, and set to work kneading the tender sole.
Consort Hui glanced at her like-minded lover, indulgence in her eyes, and pressed her lips together in a way that carried meaning.
Consort Xiang's face cleared from cloud to sun in an instant. She beamed at her beloved, showing snow-white little fangs, with something faintly silly about it. This noble lady, born radiant and bewitching, willful and imperious by nature, who ordinarily didn't hold even the emperor in her eyes, became something like a mischievous, guileless younger sister before Consort Hui. A daughter, even.
"Now that I think of it, Sister Immortal Maiden and Her Majesty the Empress might well be called fellow sufferers." Consort Hui nodded, her soft southern water-country accent curling around the imperial physician's ear, easing her further still.
"Mm, that's true..." Li Fei mumbled her reply.
"Though only days ago Her Majesty kept you under such close watch. How is it that lately she's willing to let you tend other noble ladies?" Consort Hui said with a smile.
"'Her Majesty the Empress Is Off Visiting an Old Acquaintance.'" Li Fei produced the joke etched into her very bones without a moment's thought.
"Since Her Majesty is so burdened with affairs, better not to disturb her. When you have time, come to Weiyang Palace more often and keep your elder sister company," Consort Hui said gently.
"Mm-hmm," the imperial physician said obediently.
"Good girl." Consort Hui gave the praise with satisfaction, her smooth hair brushing the tip of Li Fei's nose as if by accident, ticklish, giving off its fragrance. In those warm, close eyes flowed a maternal tenderness like water, enough to nearly melt Li Fei's thoughts.
That mature, knowing charm unique to an older married woman disarmed Miss Warlord in no time at all and had her lower every last guard.
"Oh! What's this?" Consort Xiang exclaimed, examining with curiosity the Miss Tail that had just slapped her across the face.
Damn it, the succubus tail was out!
Li Fei's expression froze. She shot Miss Tail a glare and said in her nastiest voice, "Behave yourself!"
But Miss Tail paid her no mind at all, wagging and swaying to her own rhythm, the very picture of doing as she pleased.
In truth, every movement Miss Tail made was a projection of Li Fei's subconscious, the most childish, most chaotic, most unfiltered side of her.
Li Fei cared about taste; Miss Tail didn't. Li Fei knew how to play hard to get; Miss Tail only wanted to snuggle.
You could even say Miss Tail was Li Fei in her rebellious phase, drunk.
"She's so cute." Consort Xiang poked Miss Tail with a fingertip, and rather than showing any hostility, Miss Tail nestled affectionately into that sweet-smelling, soft embrace like a clingy little pet.
What ill intent could Miss Tail possibly have?
"N-no, no! Don't touch that!" Li Fei tried in alarm to sit up, but Consort Hui caught her wrist.
"Relax. Be good..." Consort Hui's voice was as gentle as ever, only now threaded with an authority that brooked no refusal. "A dignified Chiliarch of the Demon Suppression Bureau, and she has a sprite's tail? Consort Xiang and I will have to examine you very thoroughly..."
"Guh..."
Facing noble ladies so far above her, the lowly imperial physician turned her head away, humiliated and unwilling, and said coldly:
"I never imagined you were this sort of Consort Hui... Kill me, flay me, do as you please. But if I let out so much as one whimper, then I'm no good girl!"
When the wicked lady from her little black book peeled off that mask of dignified virtue, the imperial physician, whimpering very loudly indeed, came to understand exactly how Her Majesty the Empress had felt.
It must be said that Consort Hui and Consort Xiang, that pair of flower-faced, moon-lovely lovers who kept nothing between them, worked in perfect concert. Three minutes was all it took to make the imperial physician surrender.
Yet they threw the principle of "spare others where you can" clean out of their heads and went on to do things considerably more excessive.
When Li Fei walked out of Weiyang Palace her face was paler still, and she muttered without stopping:
"A whole flock of consorts in the deep palace, bullying me for being young and weak... Hmph. If I weren't so busy breaking in my subordinates these past days, would I let them ride on my head and crow about it?"
The more she thought about it the angrier she got. She turned, seized Miss Tail by the neck, and said furiously, "You've gone and spoiled the doctor-patient relationship. How am I supposed to charge them fees after this?!"
Faced with Li Fei's scolding, Miss Tail looked entirely unbothered. Far from bowing her head and admitting fault, she gave Li Fei the back of her head instead, an appalling attitude.
Li Fei raged impotently for a while, found there truly was nothing she could do about Miss Tail, and let go with poor grace.
If she actually thrashed her, who would be the one hurting?
Fortunately, over these few days in the post of Prison-Warden Chiliarch, the imperial physician spent her days shuttling between deep palace walls earning consultation fees, leaving the [Qian] and [Kun] Divisions at the Demon-Locking Tower to gather in new subordinates; her nights went to grand initiation ceremonies for the new members of the [Kun] Division, trading pointers, breaking one another in, cultivating loyalty.
Busy it certainly was, but the yield was rich. Not only did her ranks swell by the day, the consultation fees came pouring in by the bucket.
Counting today's take, the imperial physician had saved up enough to cover the cost of the fourth layer of Furnace Battle-Qi.
Wealth Points: 1031582
"I'd guess the noble ladies' private purses are just about scraped clean... I'll leave them a little. Hollowing them out entirely would be bad form." At last Li Fei let out a soft sigh.
In truth, if she hadn't judged the water warm enough herself and let the doctor-patient relationship curdle with only token resistance, could Miss Tail really have turned heaven upside down?
Whether to snuggle, when to snuggle, and with whom, in the end it was Li Fei's own call, and Miss Tail was nothing more than another of her personalities: chaotic, unknowing, hidden.
It was late by the time she returned to the Prime Minister's Residence. She watched the stars a while with Miss Stepdaughter, chatted a while with Qiao'er, who had only just parted from Her Majesty the Empress, and finally, attended by Eva and Sasha, changed out of her dress. Li "Master of Time Management" Fei transformed in a blink into the Prison-Warden Chiliarch, killing intent boiling off her, her python robe dark red as clotted blood.
She mounted her broom rather than wait for a carriage and flew straight for the Demon-Locking Tower, a blood-colored phantom beneath the night sky, and before long she hung above the nine-story pagoda.
The ghastly white moonlight lit up the iron chains scattered below like stars on a board. Li Fei looked down at the figures shuttling back and forth and nodded, gratified.
As the saying goes, a new official lights three fires. The first fire Miss Prison-Warden Chiliarch lit had burned away every trace of the old slack, easygoing habits and set the place blazing with activity.
She had organized a "Great Demon-Catching Contest," running seven days.
Every member of the Demon Suppression Bureau was entered automatically. The premise: haul demons and ghosts of every stripe into the Demon-Locking Tower. The more you caught and the higher their quality, the greater your merit, all of it entered in the register and redeemable for hard gold and silver, even for rare treasures of every kind. When the seven days ended, the standouts would receive heavy rewards; promotions and titles went without saying, plus medals of pure gold and commendation before the whole Bureau... Li Fei even promised she would personally petition His Majesty and the Nine Thousand Years to have merit recorded for the "Demon-Catching Champion."
With rank, fame and riches dangled right in front of them, how could the Bureau's hands not go red-eyed? These past days they hadn't even found time to bully men and prey on women. Every one of them threw himself into the grind as though his life depended on it, racing all over to arrest demons, sweeping the already thin population around Lin'an utterly clean.
As for why the term was fixed at seven days, recruiting the female ghosts was expected to take five or six, and Li Fei meant to scrape up one last brutal haul of merit and then run.
She circled the Demon-Locking Tower once and flew over to hover above a freshly dug pit alongside it.
The pit was deep, the soil scorched black as if it had been burned. Inside, demons packed shoulder to shoulder howled, shoved, and gnawed at one another.
Space in the Demon-Locking Tower was limited and could hardly hold the flood of demons swarming in, so the living King Yamas of the Demon Suppression Bureau had forced certain demons, the ones afraid of pain and afraid of death, to dig a pit nearby. Every demon brought in afterward was registered first, the captor's merit entered in the book, and only then sorted.
The rare ones, those of research or commercial value, went into the Demon-Locking Tower. The great mass of small fry left over were shoved into the pit to await processing.
"My lord has come!"
A Small Banner Officer of the Demon Suppression Bureau felt a bone-shivering presence come pressing down from the vault of the sky. His heart clenched and he lifted his head.
He wasn't alone. Bureau men shouldering blood-soaked sacks, hauling metal prison carts, dragging long iron chains, driving demons toward the registration desk by whatever means each had, all stopped in the same moment, their eyes turning as one to the sky.
Under the stark white moonlight, the red-robed witch on her broom hung across the night, chanting ancient syllables, five fingers upholding a mass of blazing lava that rose and sank without pattern and gave off a boundless pressure.
Then the witch smiled sweetly, turned her pale wrist over and pressed her palm down, and a wicked dragon burning with demon-flame from snout to tail roared as it dove.
BOOM.
In the violent crossing of light and shadow, waves of heat rolled outward and the stench of sulfur struck the nose.
A long while later, the firelight drew in. In the pit, deeper now, only a few severed limbs bobbed in the black-red magma. Even the soil had turned to orange-red crystal, giving off fierce white smoke. It would not cool and blacken until dawn.
"Why is the experience less every single day?" Li Fei glanced at the experience that had barely pushed her over into Level 32 and snorted coldly. "A pack of useless mouths."
Seeing every man of the Demon Suppression Bureau struck as silent as a cicada in winter, she pressed them on. "What are you standing around for? Move!"
"Yes!"
The Bureau's people woke as if from a dream, hands moving twice as briskly, shouted orders and the crack of whips filling the air.
Li Fei looked down on the scene with a trace of melancholy.
Past Level 30 the experience needed to advance had jumped another large step. She had been on the Demon-Sealing Continent less than a month; even fighting her way across the land, killing demons day and night without rest, she might not have reached Level 32 this fast.
But with a pack of vicious brutes under her, all Li Fei had to do was drop a single Abyssal Lava on the target to scoop up a mountain of experience in one pot. The efficiency was absurd.
If she could make Commander, she could skip even the reaping. One order given, and every demon the Bureau's members butchered would become Li Fei's experience. The leveling speed hardly bore imagining.
A pity...
Li Fei cast a dark, lingering glance at the Demon-Locking Tower.
If she dropped one Abyssal Lava on it before she left and blew it apart, maybe she could squeeze out one more haul?
She sighed, dropped from low altitude in a single leap, and walked straight into the Demon-Locking Tower.
The moment she was through the door she found Huang Zhenzhen waiting there for her, a certain urgency in her face.
After several days, the Bureau's hands understood that the female ghosts were the Prison-Warden Chiliarch's subordinates, and they turned a blind eye to their presence.
"Sister Zhenzhen, what is it?" Li Fei asked, coming forward.
Huang Zhenzhen said nothing. She took Li Fei by the wrist and pulled her past the hurrying Bureau members, and only once they reached the eighth floor, now held by the female ghosts, did she let out a breath.
Li Fei followed her gaze and saw an unfamiliar female ghost with disheveled hair, ringed by a crowd of the others, looking ill at ease.
The sight of the python robe on Li Fei made her shrink back further, alarm plain on her face. Only the soothing of the other ghosts settled her.
Huang Zhenzhen drifted over to the stranger and said softly, "Come. Tell our Mistress what happened to you, and let her win you justice."
Though she had no idea what this was about, Li Fei still came forward with a graceful smile and gently took the strange ghost's hand, her voice soft and encouraging. "Trust me."
"I, I was in a scholarly household..." The strange ghost hesitated, but under Li Fei's sincere, steady gaze she began at last to tell what had befallen her in life. "That day, he seized me without warning, and he, he... He gripped my throat. It hurt so much... When I opened my eyes again I was outside Lin'an, and I saw my own corpse... Yesterday the Demon Suppression Bureau's people caught me and brought me here."
Li Fei's brows drew together.
An innocent woman abused and then silenced by murder. In a world like this, that was hardly news.
But for the ordinarily mature and level-headed Huang Zhenzhen to look this tense, she must have heard something crucial from the stranger's mouth.
Don't tell me some great personage was behind it?
A pity. This girl's combat strength still isn't enough to crush anyone, and the road of the fawning courtier has come to its end...
Li Fei mocked herself in silence and lost whatever interest she'd had in the intelligence this ghost might offer.
She understood that even if the true culprit were the dog emperor himself, it would change nothing about the situation.
Still, so as not to douse the female ghosts' enthusiasm for their work, she kept the smile on her face and asked patiently, "Then do you still remember who it was that harmed you?"
The strange ghost lowered her head. Her voice sounded as delicate as before, only with threads of rancor seeping through it.
"He wore a python robe like yours... only his was bright red. And he was very beautiful..."
BOOM.
Li Fei's pupils blew wide. That frail woman's voice detonated beside her ear like muffled thunder.
How could it be him?
How could it possibly be him?!
Li Fei stood rooted where she was, astonishment, shock and confusion crowding her face, her pitch-black pupils trembling without pause.
"Heh heh... hahaha, hahahaha..."
Li Fei began to laugh, the laughter swelling little by little until she shook like a spray of blossoms in the wind, tears glinting at the corners of her eyes.
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