Chapter 53 of 90
Into Ling Snake Mountain
A day later, near the city gate, Li Yuguo called the people together.
They came. They always came, now, when the King of Soft Rice called; there was usually flour at the end of it. But they did not come happily today. They gathered in the square in front of the gate in a wide, uneasy crowd and stood with their arms folded, and began to whisper.
"I heard bandits came out a while back and killed a lot of people outside the city," said a farmer with a hoe on his shoulder. "So what's this about? Why's the King of Soft Rice calling us all here?"
The man beside him had a square of cloth wrapped around his head. "Maybe he's going to start blaming us. Asking questions. After all, with the dead, there aren't enough hands any more. The canal's already been held up for days."
"I told you," said a third. "This King of Soft Rice—he's up to no good. Whatever he's planning, it's not kind."
Li Yuguo heard every word. He stood on the wooden platform beside the gate and felt very tired.
He coughed.
"Is the family of Zhang Daniu here?"
The crowd shifted. Then a woman came out of it, slowly, holding a little boy by the hand. She had a white paper flower pinned in her hair—the mourning flower—and she kept her head bowed. She did not look up at him.
"Master," she said, very low. "This woman is Zhang Daniu's wife…"
"A few days ago," said Li Yuguo, "Zhang Daniu was killed by bandits by mistake. It's not easy for a widow and an orphan to get by alone. Come here." He turned his head. "Old Guan."
The King of Thieves stepped out from behind the platform.
And the widow went down on her knees in the dust.
"Master—please, master, we're all right, we won't cause you any trouble, we'll never cause trouble for you, we won't go to the City Lord to complain, please, spare us, spare me and my son, please, please…"
She was knocking her forehead on the ground. The little boy stood beside her, clutching her sleeve, staring up at the King of Thieves with terrified eyes.
The crowd turned ugly at once.
"There. There. What did I tell you? Her husband's barely cold, and this King of Soft Rice has seen how pretty the Zhang widow is, and right away—"
"Who's saying otherwise? It's a waste, working for a man like that!"
Li Yuguo jumped down from the platform. He went straight to the widow and took her by the arms and lifted her up off the ground.
"You've misunderstood," he said. "Brother Zhang Daniu died on my land. Working for me. I can't shirk that. So—this is his pension." He nodded. "Please accept it."
The King of Thieves came forward and pressed it into her hands. Fifty taels of white silver, wrapped in red paper.
The widow stared down at it.
"This…"
Li Yuguo raised his voice.
"The fields will go on being worked! From now on, I'll post men to stand guard outside the city, day and night. I won't let the water bandits—or anyone—come at you again." He looked over the crowd. "This time, more than ten people lost their lives. Every family of the dead will receive fifty taels of silver. And I promise everyone—this will never happen again!"
The square exploded.
They stared at him. Every face in that crowd. Blank, open-mouthed, as if they were looking at a madman.
Li Yuguo was confused. "What? Isn't that good?"
People began to kneel.
Not just the widow. Others. All over the square, men and women were going down on their knees and knocking their heads on the ground in front of him, and some of them were crying.
"That's—that's wonderful. The young master gives us work, and we have flour to eat—how many people does that keep alive?"
"The young master's seen the light. He's thinking of the people now. That's… that's good. That's good."
The King of Thieves leaned in close.
"Brother. Fifty taels each. Isn't that too much?"
"It's all right. It's to spur us on. So that nothing like this ever happens again." Li Yuguo watched the widow walking away with her son and the red paper packet clutched against her chest. "They're all the people of Nalan City. My own people. I can't treat them badly."
The King of Thieves rolled his eye. "And the water bandits? What are you going to do with them, brother?"
"Li Yutang has the city garrison," said Li Yuguo. "So we need our own people too. Trained ones. To protect the workers outside the walls. Niu Er and the others—they'll follow you from now on. You train them. Niu Er's men aren't bad, you know. It's mostly that they had nothing to eat. That's why they turned to the river."
He had already worked it all out.
Right now, Li Yutang held the advantage over him in two things: manpower, and cultivation. Cultivation was not something a man could fix in a day or two. But manpower—that was another matter. In manpower, Li Yuguo was not as far behind as he looked. And before he set foot on Ling Snake Mountain, he had two masters at his side. The Poison King and the Thief King. And the Poison King in particular—that man's poisons ignored realms entirely. Even peak powerhouses gave him three steps of distance.
The land outside the city had been cleared now. Li Yuguo opened a sack of seeds and showed them how to plant it. He doubled the workforce. Two hundred, this time.
There was a great deal of wasteland outside Nalan City. If it could be used—all of it—the whole city could be brought back from the edge.
The people were glad to do it. There was work, and there was food. To them, it was the best bargain in the world.
The line to sign up went on and on, like mountains, like the sea. And the story of the King of Soft Rice's pensions spread through every lane of Nalan City by nightfall.
That evening, he opened the halo panel.
He had not looked at it in days. And when he did, it had changed a great deal.
[ Halo ]
Current Villain Halo: 7% — Owner: Li Yuguo Current Protagonist Halo: 96% — Owner: Ye Qiong
He frowned.
Ye Qiong's halo has recovered?
It surprised him. But he understood why. Ye Qiong must have finished another of his plot beats somewhere off the page—some adventure, some treasure, some lesson learned on the road. The protagonist's halo fed on that. The two numbers did not have to add up to a hundred, either; they never had. Fate was not a ledger that had to balance.
Still—by the speed his own halo was growing, he was catching up fast. Seven percent. From four and a half. That was something.
But not enough.
He went to Alimama and bought a pile of medicinal pills, and went back to the City Lord's Mansion, and shut himself in the guest room to cultivate. The building work outside the city could be left to the King of Thieves. He did not need to worry about that.
He looked at what he had bought, and winced.
"These pills are precious," he muttered. "A hundred taels of silver for a single Spirit Gathering Pill. Two hundred for one bottle of Bone Refining Spirit Liquid." He shook his head. "No wonder in this world, only the great families ever produce geniuses."
Spiritual energy came into the body from the world outside. In the dantian, it was refined into vitality—Qi—the force that every martial skill and spell ran on. It was something like chakra, or mana, in the games he used to play. Without vitality, a man could not use martial skills or spells at all.
He swallowed a Spirit Gathering Pill and sat, and let his mind sink down into his body.
He saw a blue spider.
It sat at the bottom of his dantian in the dark, small and pale and delicate, with long thin legs folded under it, glowing faintly like frost in moonlight.
He recognized it at once.
My bloodline. A cold water spider. Excellent grade—no more than that. A perfectly respectable bloodline for a noble son of a military family. But his rival, Ye Qiong, carried the legendary Raging Wave Dragon Ape. If Li Yuguo tried to fight that with a little spider, he would be throwing his life away.
"It seems I'll have to go to Ling Snake Mountain early," he said aloud. "Get to the Demon Tomb early. Find a new bloodline early."
He knew the risk. There was a chance—a real one—that a man who replaced his bloodline would simply die on the spot. The body rejected it. The heart stopped.
"But if I don't replace it, I'll never be able to compete with Ye Qiong later on. Not a chance. Let alone stop the catastrophe ten years from now."
He stood up and clenched his fists, and felt the Qi in them.
His cultivation had risen too. He was at the late stage of Martial Teacher now. The gap to Advanced Martial Teacher was closing, day by day. Trading money for resources was very cost-effective, it turned out. As long as you had the money.
Early the next morning, a group of men was waiting at the city gate.
The Poison Emperor and his Poison Guards. When the Poison Emperor saw Li Yuguo coming down the street, he snorted.
"You're too late. This Emperor has been waiting half an hour."
"Didn't you say we'd set out when the sun was three poles high?" Li Yuguo laughed.
"Setting out so late, it'll be noon by the time we reach Ling Snake Mountain!" said the Poison Emperor.
He had barely finished speaking when there was a sound of hooves behind them.
It was Nalan Meng.
She had come prepared. Anyone could see it. She was wearing her silver-white armor—a breastplate, polished to a mirror shine, and greaves, and vambraces—and she held a long spear upright in her hand as she rode. She saw Li Yuguo, and snorted disdainfully, and did not speak to him.
Li Yuguo stared at her.
Under the blazing sun, her face was startlingly fair, pale as new milk. The whole of her shone. The breastplate was molded close over her perfect breasts, and she had not bound them under it today; beneath the plate, through the thin crimson underlayer at its edges, he could see her nipples standing out in two small, hard points against the silk. And below the armor, the long crimson skirt had been slit high on both sides for riding, so that her white thighs flashed in and out of it with every step of the horse.
"Wife," Li Yuguo called. "What are you doing here?"
Nalan Meng turned her head away, irritated.
"You're a Martial Teacher now, so what? Ling Snake Mountain is full of dangers. If you go alone and run into trouble, won't people laugh at me for not even being able to protect my own husband?"
"So you're worried about me," said Li Yuguo slyly.
"A dog can't spit out ivory!" Nalan Meng grumbled. "Who's worried about you?"
She raised her voice to the others.
"Let's go. This time we have two great brothers to help us. If we can really get rid of the bandits, it'll be good fortune for the whole city."
Ling Snake Mountain lay to the north of Nalan City. It was a place ordinary people did not go into lightly.
Its forest covered a radius of twenty li. Even before they had reached the first trees, they could hear birdsong drifting out of it, and the ground at its edge was laced with little springs, so clear you could count the pebbles on the bottom. It looked like a fairyland come down to earth.
It was the first time in his life Li Yuguo had seen anything like it with his own eyes.
In his old world, he had lived in a cramped rented flat in the middle of a city. Outside his window, there had only ever been traffic. In a modern city, even a small patch of woods was hard to find. There were parks, of course. But parks were where couples went, and Li Yuguo had never liked going to them. Couples everywhere, holding hands, kissing on benches. As a single dog, he had always found it very uncomfortable.
So a sight like this—he admired it from the bottom of his heart.
More than twenty strong horses were tethered at the edge of the trees, and everyone went forward on foot. In mountain forest, a horse was not necessarily faster than walking.
Nalan Meng walked in front of Li Yuguo with her bow in her hand. She looked around warily, all the time.
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