Wait a minute, where is my master?

The moon hung on the branches, stars filled the sky.

In the tranquil night, occasionally the cry of a wild beast would break the silence, making everything seem so primitive, yet natural.

Kao Mountain Town, a small town located on the fringes of Qing State, was home to roughly a thousand people. It was named Kao Mountain because it was built against a mountain.

At this moment, every household had their doors tightly shut, as if hiding from some calamity. In the town, only Mayor Shi, accompanied by a few sturdy young men, was scattering something on the streets.

"Mayor, all the traps we laid around the town and the talismans that needed to be posted are ready,"

Three young men around eighteen or nineteen years old, holding torches, shouted as they ran over from the other end of the street.

"Keep it down, don't you know everyone's asleep!"

The young men's shouts were loud, but Mayor Shi's voice was even louder. His scolding was so thunderous that it made several people nearby cover their ears.

From the homes of nearby residents, the faint sound of children crying could be heard.

No one knew how such a loud noise could come from his thin and lean body.

"...Mayor, it seems like your voice is even louder,"

A muscular young man said in a low voice while covering his ears.

"Is that so?"

The surnamed Shi, the Mayor, knocked his tobacco pipe, and although he had deliberately lowered his voice, it was still as loud as a regular person speaking.

"Alright, don't worry about how loud it is, you guys hurry up and finish scattering this Divine Water we bought from the county, then go to sleep. Hu Zi, since you're done over there, come over and help quickly!"

The latter half of the sentence was directed toward the three men on the other end of the street.

After this shout, the faint crying of children in town became even more prominent.

Next to them, in this household, one could hear through the window a mother consoling her child, "Little one, don't cry, don't be scared, that's Uncle Shi's voice, not a monster howling."

After the mother finished speaking, the child cried even harder.

Mayor Shi: "..."

The several young men beside him couldn't help but snicker. Kao Mountain Town's Mayor Shi was fine in all respects, except that his voice was somewhat extraordinary.

Legend had it that the old man, when he was younger, was a martial artist who practiced the lion's roar technique, but later deviated in his training, which left him with this problem of having a loud voice.

However, this explanation had never been confirmed by the man himself.

"Mayor, speaking of which, why are we suddenly setting up all these things around the town?"

The three men holding torches had run up close, with the one called Hu Zi curiously asking.

Since the beginning of August, Old Man Shi had taken people to the county and spent quite a bit of money to buy these Divine Waters and talismans from those who were said to be immortals, and had also set many traps around the village.

"Little lad, don't ask too much, once you've finished setting up, hurry home to sleep. This month, try not to go out at night. The world is not peaceful,"

Mayor Shi couldn't explain very clearly either; he had read about it in a diary left by a previous, previous, previous, previous Mayor.

It is said that two hundred years ago, Kao Mountain Town was on the verge of a devastating disaster, but at the critical moment, an Immortal, clad in a blue scholar's robe, descended from the sky and saved them. He also left behind a warning that October of two hundred years later could be especially dangerous, and if the town still existed by then, they should take care to ensure their safety.

Originally, Old Man Shi was skeptical, what's this about October being especially dangerous, as if the rest of the year wasn't risky?

Just during the years he had been Mayor, the small villages nearby were like leeks in a field, cropped and grown anew, and countless people had died. Although Kao Mountain Town was a larger settlement, they also encountered incidents with monsters, which they finally "resolved" by scattering black dog blood and making sacrifices. Still, two people died in the town at that time!

However, recently, when he went to the county town to drink with an old buddy, he heard that since August, several neighboring towns had been slaughtered, not to mention those remote mountain villages, sometimes even after the seventh day of death, they might not be discovered.

A shiver ran through Old Man Shi's heart, and he immediately thought of the journal left by his predecessor four times removed. The records in the journal weren't nonsense after all; the prophecy that October would be especially dangerous two hundred years later was true.

Hence, as the Mayor, he began to protect the town in his own way.

Hu Zi, seeing the Mayor too lazy to explain, muttered under his breath and went to help others sprinkle the Divine Water.

After an hour's time.

The main streets of Kao Mountain Town and the doorsteps of every household had been sprinkled with Divine Water.

The skinny Old Man Shi, with his loud voice, sent all these young people back to their homes, while he was the last one to leisurely head home, puffing on his smoking pipe.

In the midst of the night.

A bookish man wearing a precious blue scholar's robe and with a long beard quietly appeared on the street after Old Man Shi had entered his house.

The scholar, named Fan Youzeng, had been teaching in the town for over a decade.

On the surface, he was the private tutor of Kao Mountain Town; secretly, he was the guardian deity protecting Kao Mountain Town!

The monster incident in the town that Mayor Shi thought was solved by black dog blood and sacrifices was, in fact, due to Fan Youzeng's arduous battle with the monster, which was why only two people had died in the town. Otherwise, how could the cattle and sheep offered by the town satisfy the appetite of a Foundation Establishment Realm monster?

Fan Youzeng, who now quietly appeared on the street, bent down, dipped a finger in the Divine Water on the ground, and sniffed it, his brow furrowing.

Then he flashed to the edge of the formation and started to check the Yellow Talismans strung up with red threads that Hu Zi had set up, shaking his head with a light sigh after a long while.

"As I thought, all of them are just tricks to fool people," Fan Youzeng murmured to himself in a tone that suggested he knew it all along.

That so-called "Divine Water," possibly concocted from some animal's fluids, didn't have a trace of Spiritual Power. The Yellow Talisman Papers on the outskirts were nothing special either; out of a few hundred, only one was real, and the real one had the "Rain Making Skill" drawn on it.

This Spell could summon a small cloud and make it rain for a short time, mainly used when planting Spirit Rice. Relying on it to protect the town was even less realistic than hoping for a miracle.

"Alas, it looks like Kao Mountain Town still needs me for protection," he said.

The schoolmaster habitually shook his head and prepared to flash back to his private school.

But then, with a click, a layer of golden light enveloped him. It was the Golden Light Talisman he carried automatically activating.

Fan Youzeng looked down at the animal trap broken into two pieces at his feet and mused,

"The townsfolk's skills at setting traps are still superb..."

With one kick, the schoolmaster sent the cause of his automatic defense far into the dense forest and turned to head towards the private school in town.

Only after he had been gone for a good quarter of an hour.

In the dense forest, at the point where the broken trap had landed, a pair of eyes suddenly snapped open!