Strong Wine Warms the Cold Sword

It's night on the first day of the first lunar month of the Gengzi year. The southern border of the human world is thirty thousand miles away, and the falling snow covers the sky and the earth like hemp. In Qingyi Town, the snow as white as jade in the sky turned dark red as soon as it hit the ground. The blood on the ground was still warm, melting the surrounding snow as it flowed out, and then quickly condensed into clumps. In the south of the town, a thin-faced old monk with a white beard held a tin staff in his left hand and his right hand stood on his chest. The tattered robe on his body, which was riddled with holes, looked extremely thin under the heavy snow. The old monk slowly walked through the ruined town, muttering something, and behind him lay the corpse of a seven-foot-long tiger-shaped beast. The ferocious beast appeared at night. By the time the old monk arrived, it was too late. The town was in ruins. Almost no one of the seventy-two families survived, and the ferocious beast was eating the corpse of a common person. The old monk muttered in his mouth, as if he was saving the souls of the dead, and walked to the north gate of the town. The old monk stopped, as if he felt something, and walked towards the ruins. When he came to a water tank, the old monk gently took off the broken straw mat covering it, and saw a thin young man huddled in it and shivering. This novel and its characters are purely fictitious. Any similarity is purely coincidental and should not be imitated.