The man looked blankly at Jun Li for a moment before his eyes drifted to scan the surroundings. '...Is he going to respond…?'

  Jun Li was left wondering for more than a few moments, and after a minute of silence, she simply joined him in looking around the burning estate. "You… uh, think there are any more of those puppet things around?"

  "...Move further away. Please." Jun Li almost opened her mouth to question his demand when a pulse of Qi distorted the air around his body. As the Qi focused into his staff, the rings that hovered around it whirred into motion and filled Jun Li's ears with the terrible cry of the air being rent apart.

  Without thought, Jun Li's legs carried her away, her sudden, instinctual sidle being quickly bolstered into a full dash by her conscious will a moment later. 'Time to go…!'

  Within a second, she was pressed up against the wall of a burning building opposite the staff-wielding man, a few hundred steps away. Although she sensed danger, there was no hostility in the man's words or actions.

  The man walked a few steps away from the doorway he was guarding and looked out over the estate. At that time, Jun Li began to hear it too, the sound of rumbling. 'Those are… footsteps?' Echoing through the air, the stone, and even the wood of the building she was leaning against, a deluge of heavy footsteps rapidly grew into a roaring tide of noise.

  "This must mean…" The man began, looking somewhat crestfallen. "...that every other target of yours has been erased." On the horizon, silhouettes could be seen rushing down the streets and over the burning buildings. "...I could only protect so many."

  Glass was shattered, and paper was torn as bound puppets burst out from the windows of the burning buildings, flying towards the staff-wielding man like humanoid projectiles.

  Batting them aside with a shredding force that turned them into clouds of black blood, the man watched as the sputtering invasion of enemies intensified, bodies crowding together as they spilled off the nearby roofs and congested the streets.

  Pressed up against the side of a burning building, Jun Li looked up as the flood of human bodies dimmed her surroundings, obscuring the orange haze that filled the air. 'There were so many here…!? How big is this estate!?'

  The man slammed the butt of his staff against the ground, the intense Qi around it redoubling and distorting into a wholly unique form of energy, the likes of which Jun Li had never seen. "Grind their sins away against the very bedrock beneath Naraka and Diyu! Zhijie Shizhu!"

  At his words, the staff in his hands disintegrated, the toothed rings that surrounded it growing in size and splitting away into mirror images of themselves, shooting into place around him.

  With a hair-raising sound, the rings began to rotate, not cutting the air but pulling and tearing at it with force, distorting the flow of wind so severely that the trajectories of the approaching puppets were thrown off course, their bodies colliding with the ground and being dragged around the gardens. Even Jun Li had to brace herself dozens of steps away.

  The hundreds of puppets that had flooded into the garden completely lost control of their bodies, being flung about the area like ragdolls, until the wind's direction changed. A great force began to pull the puppets, who instinctively resisted, towards the man in the eye of the storm.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  As the first dozen reached the eye of the storm, their bodies collided with the toothed rings that conducted the winds, instantly being ripped apart with the same force that grasped the air itself.

  From Jun Li's perspective, the semi-transparent storm of dust, foliage, and bodies instantly vanished, replaced with an opaque sphere of ruddy black as the puppets were instantly unmade.

  The bodies that flew through the air, totally out of control, were quickly sucked into the impermeable wall of blades, their mass adding to the sphere of black, and slowly sputtering away as a morbid mist and rain.

  Within not even thirty seconds, all that remained was a turbulent sphere of liquid blackness, swirling smoothly, with no sign of its human origin.

  "Release!" The eye of the storm erupted all at once, sending a wave of liquified mass outward, covering the gardens, the buildings, and dispersing into the sky only to fall, mixed with the rain only a moment later.

  The man stood unmoved at the center of it all, untouched by any of the black blood until the befouled rain began to fall.

  The rings, which now sat motionless in the air, slowly began to fall, drifting towards his hand and locking around his wrist, dozens of rings overlapping and contracting, until all that remained was a single toothed bracelet around his arm.

  "Regalia Manifestation…" Jun Li wiped the blackened blood from her face, quietly speaking to herself. "...I need to reach it…!" Standing up, she met the man's eyes.

  Although she wished that her presence as an 'impromptu ally' at this raid was worth some sort of reward, her level of contribution was made starkly apparent as inferior. "Girl, you wished to know about the Alchemist's Association?"

  "There is indeed a sizeable branch here, in Tinglu City." At those words, he turned around, apparently convinced that the raid on the estate was ended.

  When he reached the steps that led to the great stone mansion at the center of the estate, he turned back to Jun Li. "Come along, you're welcome to stay the night. I'll put in a recommendation for you at the Alchemist Association in the morning."

  "I… really?" Jun Li was a bit stunned at his offer. "Why? I was barely able to do anything here."

  Though his expression still seemed grim, the corner of the man's mouth lifted slightly. "Don't overthink it. Regardless of intent or effect, you came to our aid. Speaking well of someone costs nothing; if a simple recommendation helps you, I would be happy to oblige."

  "Then… I will take you up on that offer. Thank you." Still taken aback by the generosity of a man who, by all means, should have been having a terrible day, Jun Li followed along. 'Ah, I wonder where Little Yun is…? It might take them a while to catch up still…'

  Waiting for Jun Li to join him at the entrance to the stone building, the man spoke again. "Right… before anything else, I suppose I should introduce myself. I am Murong Cang, Patriarch of the Murong Clan. Though we are a young clan… it seems we have plenty of enemies in Tinglu City… I hope you don't mind."

  Jun Li scratched the back of her head as she caught up to Murong Cang. "Ahaha… don't worry, I'm used to that sort of thing." Politely nodding his head at Jun Li, Murong Cang knocked on the door to the stone mansion, which opened faster than Jun Li expected. 'I guess they knew he'd be the only one to knock…?'

  As the gloomily lit interior came into view, Jun Li almost winced at the sight of the foyer. Every corner of the room was filled with wheeled tables of Medicinal Plants, alchemical curatives, and mundane medical tools, and every tile of flooring was obscured either by rushing feet or sedentary bodies laid out on beds of thin cloth.

  'It's like an overrun clinic…' Jun Li, noticing she had frozen at the sight, quickly followed in after her host, before a somewhat exhausted-looking servant eagerly closed the door behind them.

  "Welcome to the Murong Clan, such as it is…"