Ten minutes ago, in the mountain hollow, Jill Young was sneaking along her way.
This place was called Serenity Abbey. It looked a bit old and run-down, but it was actually pretty huge. Nearly a hundred rogue martial artists were scattered throughout the abbey, but it didn’t cause much of a ruckus. After all, being a rogue martial artist meant you were always on the run from heroes and do-gooders, so everyone here had some serious sneaky skills. These pros were masters at ambushes and sneak attacks—sure, there were a lot of them, but they still managed to keep things quiet.
The sound of clothes whipping through the air was unavoidable every now and then, but there weren’t many people in the abbey—just a couple of weirdos here and there, and they weren’t all that tough. It was easy to sneak up, cover their mouths, and knock them out.
“Nope.” “Didn’t find anything.” “No sign of anyone, and nothing worth grabbing.” “Even flipped through the library, but there’s no sign of that Triple Peak Harvest Technique manual.”
Jill Young heard every whisper from all directions, but she didn’t let it faze her. She darted swiftly toward a certain room. She slipped inside, and saw that the two monks who’d been there were already knocked out—Barry Sherman and Jade Hawk Johnson had clearly gotten here first and handled them.
“You showed up too? Guess great minds really do think alike. We figured this room was fishy—there’s gotta be a secret passage or something. The secret technique’s probably stashed in there, but we still can’t find the switch.” Barry Sherman greeted her, while Jade Hawk Johnson was busy rummaging through every drawer and cabinet. He kept picking up bottles and jars, then putting them back down, looking for one of those ‘twist the vase, spin the table, and a secret door pops open behind the bookshelf’ kind of deals.
As he worked, Jade Hawk Johnson kept his voice low: “Less talk, more searching! The sooner we find it, the sooner we’re outta here. I really don’t want every sect in the world to know I was here stealing stuff—talk about a nightmare!”
“True, the sects are full of big shots. Let’s just get this over with. Hey, Jill—Jill?” Barry Sherman turned around, only to find Jill Young kneeling on the floor, pressing her hands against the wooden boards, feeling for something with her skin. Suddenly, she channeled her energy, and with a loud crack, a huge chunk of the floor shattered and collapsed, revealing a stone doorway underneath.
“The doorway was here?” Barry Sherman leaned in for a look, then muttered, “The switch to open this stone door can’t be far. We’d better start looking…”
Before he could finish, Jill Young kicked the stone door. With a dull thud, a ring of dust shot up from the frame, and the whole heavy door—frame and all—flew up from the floor. With a whoosh, Jill chucked the stone door outside with a bang, scaring the daylights out of Barry Sherman and Jade Hawk Johnson.
Crunch. Creak. The sound made their teeth ache—Ann Erle and Uncle Bao broke out in a cold sweat. In the next moment, a flame flickered in the darkness. Jill Young had fashioned a torch out of the priest’s robe.
Wait—where did she get matches? How’d she light that thing? Those little details totally slipped their minds. They just stared dumbly at the torch’s handle—it was the priest’s arm!
"Go... Go! Move it!" Ann Erle jabbed Uncle Bao. The two exchanged a look—yep, running was the only smart move! They spun around and bolted, legs like jelly, hearts pounding under waves of terror. That oppressive feeling? All coming from the woman marching forward with a human-hand torch.
In a daze, Ann Erle thought he saw tiny platinum sparks flicker at the edge of her long black hair. He shook his head, banishing the hallucination, then panicked and yelled at Uncle Bao: "That’s no villain, that’s a demon! Something really bad’s about to go down!"
The blood-soaked night of slaughter began at a time no one could’ve predicted.
Like a demon queen, she strode forward, torch held high with a severed limb. The victims’ twisted screams woke the entire underground sanctum. Chaos erupted—shouts, running, panic echoing off every wall. The guards rushed from the real exit, roaring as they clashed with the unlucky criminals, clueless that the real threat was heading straight toward them.
"So this is the Triple Peak Harvest Technique." Jill’s eyes caught the torchlight, glowing with a hellish red glare.
She moved against the flow, witnessing far too much along the way.
No wonder you couldn’t find the Triple Peak Harvest Technique up in the temple—it’s carved into the walls down here. Every chamber had one. Men. Women. Diagrams.
The diagrams were disturbingly detailed.
The first chamber Jill entered had a diagram labeled: "Ashes Seeking Flame: When the cauldron nears exhaustion, roast it with fire to stir its base essence, allowing the practitioner to harvest quickly." Inside, a giant brazier, a rack like a barbecue spit, several men, and a few unconscious women waiting to be roasted.
"Interesting." Jill gave a twisted compliment, then snapped the priests’ limbs and tossed them into the brazier.
The second chamber’s diagram read: "Harvest by Poison: Gouge out the eyes, rip out the tongue, pierce the ears, then flood the cauldron’s seven orifices with deadly poison. The poison runs from the head down, forcing the essence to the lower aperture for rapid extraction." The room looked like a pharmacy—bottles everywhere, all labeled. Priests. Women about to be poisoned.
"Clever idea." Jill snarked, then shoved poison bottles into the priests’ eye sockets and jammed a fist-sized jar down a priest’s throat.
The third chamber was a slaughterhouse—blades everywhere.
The fourth chamber was an operating room—needles.
The fifth chamber...
The sixth chamber...
Jill pressed forward, visiting each chamber that looked straight out of a folk legend or a hellscape—just like the Eighteen Levels of Hell. The Triple Peak Harvest Technique? Every step was a manual for draining a woman’s life force. The first ones were almost gentle. The later ones—pure madness. It was a nightmare assembly line, and at the end of it waited the cruelest pit of all.
And from the deepest pit, from this sunless underground sanctum, Jill emerged—torch held high, striding through hell itself.
No resistance could slow her down—not an ambush, not a sneak attack, not even a full-on brawl. The bloodbath in the sanctum never stopped. Jill kept moving, painting the walls red, but the rage inside her never really got out.
These priests were tough—some had sixty years of cultivation—but Jill knew none of them were the real boss. She kept pushing forward, panic spreading in her wake, until she reached a stone door.
Someone was inside. Powerful. For some reason, they hadn’t moved—even with the carnage raging outside.
Not moving, huh? Good. I like that.
She grabbed the door handle. "Hey, you in there, you really are—" Crunch. Jill ripped the stone door right out of its frame. The heavy slab, the size of a bank vault door, went flying inside with a crash. "—the patient type, huh!"
[Smash-the-door divider line]
"Run, run, run! Move it!" Ann Erle and Uncle Bao burst out of the tunnel, yelling for everyone: "Cover your faces! Don’t let anyone see you! Now’s our chance—get outta Greenridge Mountain!"
The criminals fighting the priests heard the call and faked a few moves to break free. Ann Erle and Uncle Bao weren’t totally heartless—they threw out a few air-splitting palm strikes to help. The crooks scattered, rushing for the mountain gate, when a huge boom echoed behind them.
Boom! Something exploded underground. The crooks glanced back—Greenridge Mountain’s tallest hall had just blown open two gaping holes. Two figures shot out: "Jade Hawk Johnson" and an old priest.
The old priest wore a black robe, face gaunt and ancient, three-foot white beard, snowy hair, looking every inch the mystical immortal. Facing him, "Jade Hawk Johnson" looked like the end of the world—a demon queen with a torch burning down to bone, human fat sizzling and sparking, enough to make your skin crawl.
From a distance, it really did look like a wise immortal battling a demon queen.
The demon queen’s smile was pure mischief: "You shouldn’t just sit around all day—it’s bad for your health. Come on, get up and move!"
Looking down through the hole they’d punched in the floor, the old priest’s chamber looked like something from a nightmare. The women’s heads—every last one—had been stacked neatly inside, piled into a grisly altar. The old priest had just been sitting on a mat of severed heads, lost in some twisted ritual.
Well, that ritual was definitely over now.
"You—you little brat, how dare—!" The old priest clutched his chest, coughed weakly, and couldn’t finish the sentence. A weird gray-blue aura rippled across his face.
"Told you so—spending all your time in a dank cave, you’re bound to get sick. And at times like this, you gotta roast yourself to get better." With a flick, Jill lobbed the human-hand torch into the library.
Whoosh—flames roared up. Jill cracked her knuckles, beckoning to the old priest: "Come on, roasting’s not enough—you gotta move, get your blood pumping. Someone like you shouldn’t go out so easy—" Boom! The roof exploded. Jill vanished, fist already smashing toward the priest’s face. "Die!"
Boom—the hall’s roof blew apart, tiles flying everywhere. Rain started falling. Flames spread. Hot and cold clashed as wind howled and smoke billowed. The last priests just stood frozen, watching. Suddenly, shards of tile shot through the air like bullets, shattering legs and bones. All they could do was lie there and scream, unable to crawl away.
"You brat! How dare you!" The old priest, wreathed in flames, leapt back into the courtyard, gasping and furious, roaring at the top of his lungs: "You villain! How dare you come to Greenridge Mountain, murdering and burning, committing every crime in the book—heaven itself won’t allow it!" His inner force carried his voice far and wide, echoing through the mountains—clearly, he was up to something.
"Ha! Scream all you want, play it up—what do I care? Yeah, I’m the murderer, I’m the arsonist, I’m every kind of villain—so what? Justice is just a fist, and if your ‘heaven’ can’t stand me—ha!" Jill strode out of the flames, aura blazing, eyes burning red as a demon. "Then I’ll just kill your ‘heaven.’"
[End of chapter]