Three nights passed.
The border wilds beyond the Moon Sect's cliffs were a ruin of bramble forests, forgotten shrines, and half-buried bones. Here, the Qi flowed thick but wild — streams of life and decay weaving through gnarled trees and mist-choked hollows.
Li Shen moved like smoke through this wilderness. Sometimes he walked under moonlight, bare feet stirring dead leaves. Sometimes he sat for hours beside a river, eyes closed, listening to the Codex whisper like a tide behind his heartbeat.
His wounds were gone. The Codex's hunger curled low inside him — waiting, patient. Ku Mo's voice drifted in and out of his thoughts like a serpent in reeds.
You tasted power and held the leash. How long until the leash frays?
Li Shen ignored him. He had learned not to argue with the demon's voice. Silence was its own blade.
On the fourth dawn, word of him reached the living.
At the border of the wilds, where a broken shrine to some forgotten river god crumbled into moss and root, a bounty hunter waited.
She leaned against the shrine's stone gate — a woman in battered copper armor, broad-shouldered and sharp-eyed, her twin blades strapped across her back like a pair of crossed wings.
When Li Shen stepped into the clearing, she did not flinch. Her Qi flared — green and gold, tight as a coiled spring.
"So it's true," she said. Her voice was low, amused. "The Bloodbound walks the border. The Moon Sect wants your head. The Lotus Clan too, now. Seems they've claimed your mother's debt."
Li Shen's eyes narrowed. "You know my name?"
She shrugged. "Everyone does now. You're the ghost who slaughtered Ashvale's wolves, the butcher of Zhen Wu, the demon boy who spat in the Saintess's hand."
She pushed off the stone, boots crunching frost. Her eyes were flint and shadow.
"They put ten thousand spirit stones on your skull," she said. "That's worth more than any sect's inner court robe."
Li Shen's hand brushed his blade. The Codex's runes stirred under his skin — embers under paper.
"You can try," he said.
The bounty hunter grinned — a wolf's grin. She unslung her blades, twin arcs of cold iron that sang when they kissed the air.
"I was hoping you'd say that."
She lunged — faster than a striking hawk. Steel hissed for Li Shen's throat.
But Li Shen was not the boy who fled Ashvale's burning gates. He moved like a shadow slipping off wet stone. Her first strike missed by a finger's width — his counter came low and sudden, the flat of his blade ringing off her shin guard.
She pivoted, spun, slashed crosswise. Sparks spat where steel scraped steel. The shrine's moss-draped gate rang with each clash, old stone echoing a new war.
She pressed him hard — each step a calculated feint, each blow searching for weakness. But Li Shen's power was more than speed now. The Codex fed him a hunter's sight — the pulse of her Qi, the slip of her footwork, the ragged edge of her breath.
She overcommitted. He caught her wrist, twisting. Her second blade hissed up — but too slow. Li Shen slammed her into the shrine's stone, the breath punched from her lungs.
Her helmet clattered away. He saw her eyes — sharp, amber like a hunting cat's, glittering with something that wasn't fear.
"Well?" she rasped.
Li Shen's blade hovered at her throat. "Why didn't you run?"
Her grin split bloody lips. "Because you're not the only hungry thing in this world, boy."
From the trees behind him, the shadows moved. Ten more bounty hunters stepped out — rough armor, crooked talismans, borrowed sect blades. Their leader's Qi pulsed like a signal fire.
Li Shen didn't curse. He didn't flinch.
He only smiled — cold, red-eyed, the Codex's whisper curling behind his teeth.
"Good," he murmured. "I needed more."
The wilds echoed with steel and blood.
Above, the sky blackened with drifting clouds. Somewhere beyond, in a spire of marble and moonlight, Yue Lan felt the ripples of his power and closed her eyes — torn between the oath in her blood and the wound in her heart.
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⚡ End of Chapter Eleven
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