NOVEL NEXT Chapter 275: The Net Tightens
The pilgrim road before dawn was a different kind of beast.
Lanterns swung low, their light weak against the gray breath of winter. Incense smoke clung to cloaks and hair, sweet and stale at once. Vendors dragged carts into place, some already shouting about millet cakes, others whispering prayers as if the day might not let them pass without the right words.
Yan Luo walked through it as though it all parted for him.
And it did.
The crowd didn't know why their shoulders shifted aside, why their eyes slid to the ground, but fear recognized its own kind.
Gaoyu was at his back, jaw tight, eyes cutting over the pilgrims who had begun to cluster at the gate. His men had already moved into position—dozens of them, too many to be coincidence, not enough to look like an army. They were gamblers, lantern-carriers, a woman with a bundle of herbs.
All threads in a net no one could see until it closed.
The incense stall stood crooked, shutters half-drawn though its owner was very much awake. No one in this market could afford to truly sleep. Smoke drifted from a brazier in front, thin as a vein.
Yan Luo didn't stop. He didn't look at the stallkeeper. He simply flicked his fingers, and Gaoyu peeled off to murmur the orders. The stall would open. The beads would be counted. Anyone who thought they could fold a child into the press of pilgrims would find themselves stripped bare in the middle of the road.
Yan Luo's eyes slid over the crowd.
A woman with three children too clean to be hers. A man with a pack heavier than his spine should allow. A boy holding his uncle's hand, except the grip was wrong—the boy clung like he feared being dropped, not like he trusted the hold.
"Shoes," Yan Luo said quietly.
Gaoyu glanced at him. "Shoes?"
Yan Luo's smile was small, sharp. "A pilgrim wears shoes down to threads. New leather squeaks. A child's foot doesn't match a cobbler's guess."
They moved. His men fanned wider, circling the line where pilgrims waited to be admitted past the gate. A pair of guards in Daiyu colors stood there, yawning like the hour belonged to them. They straightened fast enough when they saw Gaoyu's hand flash the token of the underworld.
The guards would play along. They always did.
Yan Luo stopped in front of the woman with three children. They were scrubbed too clean, their hands raw from water, not dirt. He crouched, meeting the eyes of the smallest girl.
"Where is your home?" he asked softly.
She blinked, then whispered, "Here."
A lie. A rehearsed one.
He reached out, brushed her sleeve back. No scar on her wrist where a cooking pot should have burned. No calluses where a girl her age would carry kindling.
"Pretty children," he said to the woman. His smile never touched his eyes. "Almost as if someone traded for them fresh."
The woman stiffened. Gaoyu stepped in, seized her basket. Inside were not offerings but packets of dye, the same red-brown smear he had seen in the bathhouse.
The woman opened her mouth. Yan Luo closed it with a look. "Not yet," he said. "Later." His men pulled her from the line.
The pilgrims were shifting now, unease running through them like a current. Mules stamped their hooves. Someone muttered a prayer too loud. The smell of fear carried sharp under the incense.
Yan Luo moved on.
His gaze caught the boy with the uncle. The boy's hair was newly shorn, the edge too clean. He stumbled when the man tugged him forward, and the man's eyes flicked sideways, not down—checking for witnesses, not for harm.
Yan Luo's smile returned, colder.
"Uncle," he said.
The man froze.
"What's your nephew's name?"
The boy's lip trembled. He stayed silent. The man stammered, "Lin."
Yan Luo's hand shot out, not to the man but to the boy. He lifted the child's chin with two fingers, staring into his wide, dazed eyes. Drugged. He could see it in the sluggish blink, the way his pupils fought the lantern light.
It wasn't Lin Wei. Not yet. But it was proof of the trail.
"Wrong nephew," Yan Luo said. His voice cut like frost.
The man tried to run. He didn't make it three steps before Gaoyu's knife pinned his sleeve to the gatepost. Yan Luo didn't bother to watch him struggle.
Instead, he crouched by the boy, easing him free of the man's grasp. "Sleep," he murmured, touching the child's head. "You'll wake somewhere better." His men took the boy, gentle in a way no one would expect from the King of Hell's crew.
The crowd rippled. Whispers turned sharp.
Yan Luo straightened, his hand brushing his sleeve where the crane's head still rested, hidden but present. A reminder. A vow.
"Net the rest," he said.
Gaoyu hesitated. "There are too many. If we press, the whole square will riot."
Yan Luo turned his head slowly. "Then let them riot. Let them bleed on each other until the one carrying what I want is forced to run. I will see him. And when I see him, I will break him."
Gaoyu's mouth thinned, but he didn't argue again.
The incense stall opened. The bead counter's hand shook as he began to tally each pilgrim's prayer tokens. A mule screamed as someone tried to push it forward. The line buckled under the pressure of men who suddenly feared what might be seen.
Yan Luo stood in the center of it, unmoving, watching with eyes that missed nothing. He had promised her—though not in words, never in words—that nothing would touch what she claimed as hers. That meant nothing would touch the boy.
And since he had called the boy his son, nothing would touch him, either.
He let the thought curl in his chest, not soft but sharp. He had taken the title of King of Hell for himself. Let them believe it again. Let them remember.
"Every cart. Every bundle. Every child. Every hand," he said softly. His men heard. The crowd heard. Even the stones heard.
And the net began to close.