Catching sight of Zhaos's back as he suddenly threw himself into brick-hauling after just a few vague motivational words, Moye pursed her lips. Then she turned around, voice unable to hide her excitement:

  "You're pretty generous. But hey, painting such a big picture for that kid—what's your real plan? Seriously thinking of settling down in the mortal realm?"

  Ling's consciousness form lounged lazily on the recliner rendered in this Chamber, swinging her legs:

  "Me? This time I pushed Dax because I want to force him into the 'Guangnan Magistrate' position."

  "After all, an Local Earth God's authority is way too limited—can only manage his little patch of the mortal realm, and still has to walk on eggshells. But a Magistrate of the whole Province? That's a proper frontier official of the Underworld, holding the transit keys between yin and yang realms. Once he's in place, I won't have to smuggle myself back to the Abyss for materials—I can just take official channels."

  A glint flashed in Ling's eyes:

  "Once I get my materials back, swap out this body's meridians for indestructible 'super demon-meridians'… core fully unlocked, Merit to burn. Hehe, then life gets good again."

  Moye's brow twitched as she listened. She couldn't help voicing the doubt in her heart:

  "So um… can you level with us? How far are you actually planning to take this?"

  She paused, tone turning serious:

  "You're a hungry ghost, a demon—what do you need all this Merit for? Doesn't your kind cultivate by devouring each other and feeding on resentment? Can you even digest the pure yang energy from the Nine Heavens? What's the point?"

  Ling rolled her eyes dramatically, looking at this former Court chief engineer like she was an idiot:

  "What's with you people who've been in the system too long? Your brains get this rigid? Does everything need a 'point'?"

  Moye: "Well yeah? You're taking such huge risks for this stuff—what's it for? Just tell us straight… don't worry, we definitely won't sell you out…"

  "What if I said I'm just doing whatever the hell I feel like? Is that not allowed?"

  Ling sat up straight, voice carrying arrogance and wild energy:

  "I was a local bully down there for too long. Came up here and saw all this fun, fresh stuff. But I can fucking see it and not eat it! Restrictions here, rules there. My status dropped, I'm pissed off, I wanna stretch my legs—is that not okay?"

  She pointed at the invisible Heavenly Dao above:

  "I don't need any bullshit Merit vouchers to go begging the Court for their watered-down spiritual energy to cultivate. But other people do! This world's full of 'essential users' like Master Bai and Secretary Wang."

  "So there you go. Same deal—borrowing heaven's power. But why bother cultivating honestly when you can leverage your way through the 'secondary market' for kicks?"

  Ling sneered:

  "I don't need to eat rice. I just need to control the grain prices. Besides, I'm a demon—not afraid of margin calls. Why not play?"

  Moye was dumbstruck. This might as well be a Wall Street demon.

  "You really are… as willful as ever." Moye shook her head helplessly. "Whatever. The conditions you're offering—we really can't resist. Turn you down and we'd probably be tormented for generations."

  She thought for a moment, then said: "Don't bother letting me pick. Last time you came, didn't you let Gann rummage through your Pouch? There was a brush in there. I want that."

  "Brush?" Ling thought back. "Oh, you mean that old-looking cinnabar painting brush?"

  "Cinnabar painting brush my ass! It nearly got ruined!"

  Moye looked pained: "Gann cleaned every single hair on that brush head meticulously—almost destroyed a top-tier 'compiler'!"

  "You know we've had our immortal registrations stripped. Our cultivation's shot, and we don't dare practice too openly. But a talisman master without spiritual power is like a programmer trying to code on a kid's game console—nothing runs!"

  Moye's eyes gleamed with longing:

  "This is a 'test prototype' that leaked out of the Myriad Immortals Union's talisman factory. It's got a built-in spiritual energy conversion core—at minimum it lets me debug advanced runes on ordinary objects. With it, picking up my old skills again would be twice as effective…"

  Ling's mind raced, suddenly hitting on a brilliant idea:

  "Since you've got this brush… can you forge Court talismans?"

  "Like that 'Earth Escape Talisman.' It's single-use, but pretty handy. The temple's quota is way too small though, and that profiteer Hoardy hoards them and jacks up the prices like crazy."

  If you could print your own money, why bother robbing banks?

  Moye froze, seriously considering it for two seconds:

  "Technically speaking, it's not that hard. I vaguely remember when I first started, I was basically a production-line grunt drawing spirit talismans for mortal outposts."

  But then she shook her head:

  "But the brush alone won't cut it. The Court's anti-counterfeiting is really good—'dual authentication' mechanism. The talisman paper is also specially supplied 'spirit-pattern paper.' Only when the brush frequency matches the paper's base pattern does the resulting talisman have permission to affect real-world parameters. Otherwise it's just a virtual preview—only useful for me debugging runes."

  What Moye didn't mention was that privately printing talismans—especially for someone like Ling who was obviously planning mass production for profit—was a first-class felony. But she knew in her heart that saying so would be pointless.

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  "Dual authentication, huh…"

  Ling rubbed her chin, eyes narrowing slightly:

  "Paper… specially supplied paper…"

  She suddenly remembered something:

  "I recall… in that pile of random contracts from Secretary Wang, there was one about a paper mill."

  Ling's lips curved into a wicked smile:

  "Would someone who signs soul contracts with Secretary Wang run an ordinary paper mill? Such a sweet deal… maybe…"

  Just as Ling was about to dump out that pile of ledgers for a thorough search, the work phone on the coffee table suddenly blared. That piercing ringtone sounded especially jarring in the quiet room.

  Ling was already prepared. Seeing the caller ID read "Old Fart Jiang," she immediately held the receiver at arm's length from her ear.

  Pressed answer.

  Sure enough, Dax's trademark voice—like grinding gears—roared through:

  "GHOST WOMAN!!!"

  "Get your ass back here! Big trouble! This is all your fault! Something happened at the Lei house again… Your own mess—you come back and clean it up yourself!!"

  "…"

  "Looks like," Ling put away the phone, shrugging, "my vacation just got cancelled again."

  Yet by dusk, the Lei family's mansion halfway up Mount Paragon was already shrouded in deathly gloom.

  The once meticulously trimmed gardens were now swallowed by shadows of towering ancient trees. Twisted branches cast shadows like countless withered ghost claws, clutching every brick and tile. Even the hardiest weeds by the gate had turned a scorched yellow, wilting as if something had forcibly drained the life from the soil.

  Compared to their last visit—eerie but at least grandly opulent—now, after just a few days, the place had decayed into something like an abandoned tomb.

  The fox Syrie—now "Mrs. Lei"—had been crouching by the gate for who knows how long. When she spotted Dax and Ling's figures at the end of the mountain path, she tried to stand but stumbled from numb legs, practically crawling over to meet them.

  Ling was startled by her appearance.

  "Whoa, what happened to your hair? Reverted to true form? Or going for the white-haired demoness look?"

  The once well-maintained socialite with luxurious seaweed-like curls had gone completely white overnight. That head of lifeless hair sat atop her head like a clump of dull autumn grass, and even her facial wrinkles had deepened.

  For a beauty-obsessed fox yao, this was worse than death.

  Syrie was on the verge of tears, grabbing Ling's hand and refusing to let go:

  "You're finally here! I've hit the worst luck of eight lifetimes!"

  "Some bastard put the most vicious 'Bloodline Curse' on the Lei family—it's affecting the whole clan! I heard even some distant relative in the countryside had their grain storehouse hit by an insect plague last night. I'm bankrupt now, stuck suffering alongside this family of jinxed idiots…"

  She poured out her grievances while leading them inside.

  However, the instant she crossed the threshold—

  The heel of Syrie's stiletto suddenly snapped without warning.

  "Aiyah!"

  She lost her balance and pitched forward, elbow slamming hard against a decorative vase by the door. The vase tipped, and a small gardening trowel that some gardener had left inside was catapulted into the air. It spun three and a half rotations, precisely striking a string of glass wind chimes hanging nearby.

  The wind chimes shattered. One sharp-edged glass shard, like a flying blade, used gravity's acceleration to plunge straight toward the fallen Syrie's left eye!

  This chain of events happened in a flash—coincidences so perfect they seemed like dominoes carefully arranged by Death itself.

  The old Ling could probably only have watched the tragedy unfold.

  But now, Ghost-Eye was different. This time it had been fed a heap of good stuff, and its studying had been genuinely diligent. Calculating physical trajectories like this was now child's play.

  Almost the same instant Syrie's heel snapped, a red warning trajectory lit up before Ling's eyes.

  [Warning: Risk motion detected]

  [Trajectory Prediction: Lethal strike (left eye)]

  [Optimal Intercept Point: Coordinates (850, -120, 430) mm]

  [Time Remaining: 0.65s]

  Since Ling and Ghost-Eye were now spirit-linked, her body actually reacted faster than her eyes.

  Amid Syrie's terrified scream, Ling simply executed an elegant turn, casually kicking out like swatting a fly.

  "Ding."

  The sharp fragment that nearly took out the fox's eye was lightly flicked away by Ling's toe, embedding itself deep into a nearby wooden pillar—three inches in.

  Syrie sat collapsed on the ground, trembling all over, patting her chest, unable to speak for a long while.

  Ling narrowed her eyes, staring hard at the aura surrounding Syrie.

  Through Ghost-Eye's vision, strange black energy rippled around Syrie. It didn't look like smoke—more like dense iron filings with magnetic properties, being frantically agitated by an invisible force field.

  Ling raised her head, gaze piercing through the villa's roof to the sky—to an unnaturally shaped dark cloud hovering directly above the mansion.

  The cloud hung oppressively low, exuding a suffocating sense of doom.

  Ling had seen it clearly just now—the instant Syrie fell, an extremely thin, extremely fast bolt of lightning, almost imperceptible to the naked eye, had shot down from that cloud and precisely "poked" Syrie.

  That one "poke" was like dropping a meteor into a calm lake.

  Syrie's previously stable aura instantly erupted into violent ripples, forming tiny gravitational vortexes.

  These vortexes spread outward, greedily capturing every potential "danger variable" in the vicinity. The loose heel, the fragile vase, the sharp shard… every object harboring negative energy was activated in that moment, wielded like Death's scythe, slashing toward the signal-emitting vortex center.

  Ling pondered.

  Could this be how so-called "karmic retribution" actually worked?

  "Ghost-Eye," Ling asked, "could you see clearly how that moment actually operated?"

  The temple arm grew slightly warm. Ghost-Eye's somewhat disappointed voice echoed in her mind:

  "No can do, Boss. Too fast, frequency too high. Even my highest-frequency scan could only catch afterimages."

  Ghost-Eye paused, tone becoming hesitant:

  "But I did catch a bit of the tail end… might've seen wrong. Seemed like when that lightning struck the fox, something else… wrapped up pretty tight, got stuffed in along with it."

  "Smuggling contraband?" Ling's brow furrowed.

  Just then, Dax interrupted Ling's thoughts. He'd also sensed something off in the air:

  "Did you notice something?"

  Ling didn't plan to hide it from him this time. She raised her hand and pointed at the sky: "That—doesn't it seem weird to you?"

  Dax followed Ling's fingertip and looked up.

  To mortal eyes it was just a dark cloud, but under an Earth God's dharma sight, the cloud displayed a standard, assembly-line industrial regularity.

  He mulled it over, pulled out his phone, and started digging through the backend system. A moment later, he drew a sharp breath and told Ling honestly:

  "That… should be the Thunder Department's 'Targeted Cleaning Cloud.'"

  "Cleaning Cloud?"

  "Yeah. Only when a location has an untraceable yet abnormally stubborn 'entropy stain'—basically karma too heavy, miasma sky-high, potentially contaminating surrounding Ley Lines—will the Court deploy these heavy-duty cleaning crews for physical-level 'sublimation purification.'"

  Dax pointed at the cloud and explained:

  "Because cleanup causes some degree of spirit-signal anomalies and magnetic field disruption, even triggering small-scale natural disasters, regulations require a three-day advance notice in the 'Celestial Court Gazette.'"

  Dax turned his phone screen toward Ling. It showed an empty schedule:

  "But… I just checked the Guangnan branch's roster announcements. This one isn't listed at all!"

  "This is an unauthorized operation. Someone privately deployed Thunder Department equipment—who knows what they're really after…"

  Ling sneered: "Well, looking at this setup, they're definitely not here as Good Samaritans to 'clean up' for the Lei family."

  Before she finished speaking, the thick dark cloud overhead suddenly churned, like water about to boil.

  Just before reaching boiling point, another silent bolt of lightning fell like a poison-tipped silver needle, soundlessly descending.

  This time, it plunged directly into the depths of the mansion.

  Almost the same second—

  "Madam! Madam!"

  Terrified screams from servants erupted inside, accompanied by the shrill alarms of medical equipment:

  "Something's wrong! The old master… the old master is dying!!"

  Ling and Dax exchanged glances.

  "Go!"

  Without another word, the two stepped over the still-trembling Syrie on the ground and rushed into the mansion that had become a "misfortune sandbox"…