"Uncle Sully, what the hell is wrong with Danny? You've been staring at him for half an hour, say something already!""Sigh... there's nothing wrong with the kid's body. No wounds, no poison, his pulse is steady as a rock.""Then why's he been fading like a candle these past two days? He just cracked his skull open on the pavement!""He's... tangled up with something that shouldn't exist. The Phantom Bride is choosing herself a husband. Danny's on her list now. Sigh. Somebody ought to start thinking about a funeral."Glass bottles clinked as the old man packed up his bag, his voice trailing off into the dark."I'll head out. Send Gimpy over later for a few doses, won't cure him, but it might ease things for the time he's got left..."The voices faded down the hallway.Danny Reyes's mind slowly clawed its way back to consciousness.His throat felt like it had been dragged over broken glass.He forced his eyes open, and what he saw made him go rigid.Cracked plaster walls. A rotting mat

Crash!Something heavy toppled inside the house.Danny cursed under his breath, no point worrying about noise now.He plowed straight through the courtyard gate, booted the black dog out of his path, and charged for the inner house.Bang!One kick shattered the wooden door into splinters.Danny stepped through without slowing, scanned left and right, then pushed into the bedroom.Pitch dark, but he could still see everything clearly.Just a tangle of sheets on the bed. No one in sight.Moved that fast?Danny's brow furrowed. Then his eyes landed on a water barrel tucked in the corner.He flipped his grip on the knife and crossed the room slowly.Scratch...A faint sound came from behind the barrel.He stepped around it and found a hidden passage cut into the wall.A pair of bare feet twitched inside it, inching along as quietly as possible.With Danny's sharpened senses, it might as well have been a marching band.He grabbed the ankles and hauled the person out bodily.A curvy woman t

Cultivation techniques could be equipped too?Danny froze for a second, then snatched the manual out of Gloria's hands.He almost equipped it on instinct, then caught himself and looked up at her, something calculating flickering behind his eyes.Gloria shuddered, all color draining from her face.She understood exactly what that look meant. Her former lover was weighing whether or not to kill her.Squint and Gimpy had known this new Danny longer, but neither of them had quite clocked how much he'd changed. Gloria, though, as a woman, she noticed things. And in this one moment, she knew with total certainty: the man in front of her wasn't the Danny she used to know.Cold. Composed. Killed without blinking.Was he possessed? Had almost dying flipped some switch in him? It didn't matter why.What mattered was staying alive.She dropped to her knees without a second's hesitation. "Danny, I know Vince did this to you, but I swear I had nothing to do with it! For everything we used to have

Danny, self-proclaimed master fighter, bent down and started rifling through the corpses.Sure, some part of him wanted to walk away clean, no trace, disappear into the night after a kill. But survival didn't leave much room for style points.Spirit herbs cost money. Unlocking equipment slots cost money. Looting the two dead Kessler men was the fastest option on the table.Luckily, these two had been carrying a lot more than Vince ever had. By the time he finished, Danny's take topped a hundred silver coins. Add what he'd already pulled off Vince, and the total came to one hundred and twenty-three.He hesitated for a moment, then gritted his teeth and dumped the full hundred straight into the equipment system.【Second slot unlocked. Spend 1,000 silver to unlock the third slot?】Danny shook his head immediately, like he could somehow conjure another thousand coins out of thin air.By all logic, his top priority right now should've been sinking every coin into rare spirit herbs to buy h

"We're rich! We're rich! Danny, we're gonna be living large!"The second they stepped outside, Gimpy couldn't hold it in anymore, whooping and hopping around like a kid.Over a hundred dollars, when had either of them ever seen that kind of money?"Danny, now that we've got cash, what's the plan? How about we hit up a brothel, get some drinks in?"Squint watched Gimpy rubbing his hands together and couldn't help but snap, "Are you out of your mind? A drink and a girl at those places runs tens of dollars a pop, and finding an actual wife costs hundreds. What are you thinking?""Fine, genius, what's your plan then?" Gimpy grumbled."If you ask me..." Squint swallowed hard, wiping his mouth. "I say we hit a restaurant. Get some roast duck. Back when I was begging outside one, some old man tossed me a piece of duck tail once, best thing I ever tasted""All you ever think about is food. Money in, straight into the toilet the next morning. What a waste."Gimpy huffed and turned to Danny. "D