The burly man chuckled quietly, saying nothing. Looked at from this perspective, Wu Youren was not wrong in the slightest.
Otherwise, he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to keep an eye on him.
Viscount Jingmo's household had two grand knights, but he also had dozens of children, and there was more than just one or two such viscounts in Liang.
When it came to scarcity of status, the youth before him was indeed a cut above.
He pondered for a moment, then chuckled softly. "So does this count as... a refusal?"
Wu Youren detected a hint of a threat in his tone, but as far as he was concerned, he had no room to choose.
Still, he had no intention of driving the man into a corner, so he simply kept quiet.
To be able to dodge and counter within reason today was already unprecedented progress for him.
He needed to know when to be satisfied; he absolutely could not let it go to his head.
Probing an opponent was necessary in the process of growing, but who was the person standing before him?
When it came to reading faces and sensing shifts in mood, the man was probably sharper than ancient sages—after all, specialization was the name of the game.
"Fine, you chose this yourself." The burly man gave a low chuckle, turned, and melted into the night.
Wu Youren was certain the man was bound to stir up trouble again, just like after the last warning, when his identity had been leaked.
If they didn't mount an effective response, wouldn't the deterrent power of the Life-and-Death Knot take a massive hit?
Yet what choice did he have? Taking the initiative to strike back was truly beyond his power.
Could he only accept it passively, though? A glint of cold light flashed through his eyes...
For the next ten days or so, things were surprisingly quiet. No one came knocking again—until Cynthia showed up.
She said the situation had mostly settled down. After all, with the Guizu crisis running rampant, petty friction among academy students really didn't amount to much.
Two days later, Wu Youren tried leaving his quarters. When he returned, the vegetable plot was intact, and nothing had happened.
Then he tested the waters by going to the dining hall to eat; shockingly, no one paid him any mind either. It seemed the matter truly had blown over.
On this day, he even walked out of the Martial Academy on his own, with a saber and a sword strapped to his back. The guard glanced at his pass and waved him through without a fuss.
Outside the academy, however, things had changed considerably: military camps had actually sprung up.
These weren't just tent encampments either, but prefabricated buildings, with a single camp covering well over a hundred thousand square meters.
He spotted three such camps, with no telling how many more lay out of sight.
As he passed a quarantine checkpoint, a patrol team from Red Pine actually stopped him, wanting to requisition him to help manage it.
Wu Youren produced his pass, but they said they were truly short-handed, and not many Red Pine martial artists dared to venture outside voluntarily.
He then showed his perfect mission rating, yet the other side still insisted, "Your annual requirement is fulfilled, so we won't force you—how about treating it as a favor?"
He was only an apprentice knight, yet carried two knight-grade weapons, not to mention having completed a perfect mission, so it was only natural for people to ask for his help.
Wu Youren paid them no heed at all. He simply wanted to see for himself how far the Guizu situation had developed.
Rumors abounded within the academy, but versions conflicted, and he hoped to see it with his own eyes.
If an opportunity presented itself to slay a few Guizu and harvest some experience points, that would be even better.
To his surprise, after walking a dozen kilometers or so, he couldn't find a single decent cloud of Guizu aura.
Faint traces of Guizu aura were everywhere, but nowhere had it gathered into anything substantial.
He walked along the side of the highway; though badly broken up, the road was reasonably flat.
Now and then, a motorcycle or automobile would pass by, but seeing his Red Pine student uniform, nobody usually bothered with him.
At most, they tossed him a few curious glances—after all, a lone apprentice knight traveling on foot was a rare sight indeed.
About a dozen kilometers from the mountain pass, a motorcyclist finally pulled over. "Little fellow, want a lift?"
This rider was at the knight level and didn't seem very old, appearing quite enthusiastic.
Wu Youren thought about it, then shook his head. "No thanks, I just wanted to ask about the situation."
"I only finished up at Red Pine the year before last," the knight said, noticing his hesitation and chuckling amiably. "Same cohort as Ge Dazui."
Ge Dazui had made quite a name for himself recently, renowned for his impressive record against the Guizu, and Red Pine had made an exception to hire him as a teaching assistant.
Though he didn't command as much attention as Keli, he was well ahead of Rossi, who envied him intensely.
"Then I'll trouble Senior," Wu Youren said, knowing when to be adaptable.
At the very least, he didn't want to make it obvious how guarded he was, which would easily invite needless suspicion.
In this area, unless facing Guizu, Red Pine students had little to worry about.
Even if they ran into military requisitioning, they could bargain with complete justification.
This senior was exceedingly warm, even asking which instructor he wanted news about.
Little did he know that Wu Youren, seated on the back of the bike and staring at his exposed neck, was suppressing the urge to strike him from behind.
A walking heap of experience points like that—to say he wasn't tempted at all would be a lie.
Seeing that he didn't answer, the senior wasn't offended and continued chatting idly about the fighting ahead.
It turned out the military had intervened and forcibly compressed the Guizu aura back into the mountains, with only an occasional stray Guizu slipping out into the surrounding area.
Even so, the current battle remained locked in a stalemate.
Once the Guizu were in the mountains, they became even harder to fight; the military was reluctant to force a head-on purge, as the cost would be far too steep.
Wu Youren forced himself to shift his focus. "Since military formations can't be deployed properly, wouldn't bringing in a few more grand knights be enough?"
"The number of grand knights has already exceeded twenty," the knight shouted back over the noise, "and at least one of them has been severely injured!"
"Holy crap!" Wu Youren blurted out in shock. "A grand knight, severely injured?"
"Is that so rare?" the senior remarked nonchalantly. "More than one ability master has been injured too!"
"An ability master..." The corner of Wu Youren's mouth twitched. He was genuinely tempted to ask whether it was that fellow from the Office of Supervision.
Yet back then, both the academy and the military had issued gag orders; no matter how curious he was, he couldn't violate a double ban.
"A Divine Might Knight should be arriving soon," the knight said calmly. "They have no choice but to bring in top-tier combat power."
A knight's cultivation made them a match for a hundred men, a grand knight could match a thousand, and by rights, a Divine Might Knight was a match for ten thousand.
Still, those were only theoretical values—upper limits—and nobody truly converted them into practice quite like that.
Wu Youren chuckled. "You may dare to say it, Senior, but I dare not listen."
"Grand knights can't take back Suotu anymore," the senior dared to speak plainly. "I'd wager a single Divine Might Knight won't be enough either."
"Just drop me off at the mountain pass," Wu Youren said, a shiver running down his spine. "I'm not heading into the mountains."
The knight chuckled softly. "The place you were stationed before is reasonably safe!"
Wu Youren fell silent. Only after a long while did he sigh. "I fucking knew it... The military?"
"The military cooperates with us too..." The knight cut himself off midway, suddenly freezing. "What the fuck?"
He truly had not expected that the youth would dart sideways and leap straight off the motorcycle to flee.
The move wasn't especially difficult, nor particularly dangerous even for an apprentice knight—the key was courage!
"I really can't afford to play games with you," Wu Youren gave a bitter smile and cupped his hands in a parting salute before wheeling around into a sprint. "Milords! My family only ever had a baronet's title, and the man's already dead... You're wasting Great Liang's state treasury! The people's hard-earned sweat and blood!"
Suddenly, a figure flashed into view with incredible speed, blocking his path dead ahead.
Right behind it, an even swifter, phantom-like blade shadow flickered past.
"What a fast blade," Wu Youren darted aside with blinding speed, dodging by a hair's breadth. "Sister Hua, long time no see!"
"Good boy!" The figure materialized. It was none other than the female knight from the Intelligence Bureau whom he had met at the mountain supply post.
She said with a faint half-smile, "A knight already? Quite sneaky, aren't you!"
"Yeah, a knight," Wu Youren released the aura of a knight.
Though unstable, it clearly surpassed the realm of an apprentice knight.
Then, his expression turning solemn, he asked in a deep voice, "Did I offend your Intelligence Bureau?"
"Turns out you're not a knight after all," Sister Hua chuckled. "This fake aura... who did you learn it from?"
"I'm... half-step knight, almost there," Wu Youren said, a picture of false bravado. "Did I cross you people somehow?"
"Your crossbow bolt wounded an operative of our Intelligence Bureau." Another figure flashed into view, plugging the gap at Sister Hua's flank.
Together with the knight on the motorcycle behind him, the three formed a triangle, trapping the apprentice knight securely in place.
"A Guizu-transformed knight?" Wu Youren gazed at the newcomer with a grave expression, slowly unsheathing the long saber from his back.
This time, he wasn't speaking carelessly; the figure's form was extraordinarily hazy, with no clear outlines.
Never mind the face—even the edges of the clothes were indistinct, resembling a mass of yellowish-brown mist.
Fortunate that it wasn't black or gray; otherwise, it would have been a Guizu through and through.
"You can try," Sister Hua said, holding her blade in one hand with the tip resting against the ground, looking at the youth with a half-smile. "If you can kill this Guizu, the two of us will let you walk away."
Wu Youren froze for a moment, then raised his hand to slide the saber back onto his back, letting out a dry laugh. "Aren't you three pulling my leg?"
Then he said in all seriousness, "The trap outside my room was set up to guard against potential Guizu. It was for self-defense."
"The key point is that the trap was inside the Red Pine Martial Academy."
"What makes you think we're here to reason with you?" the yellowish-brown mist replied coldly.
Almost simultaneously, the mist expanded in an instant, sweeping toward the Jin youth with startling speed.
Wu Youren darted aside, shifting a full ten meters laterally with astonishing speed before spinning around and sprinting for dear life.
In Hostage Manor, in the Martial Academy, he had to endure trouble head-on. But whenever the opportunity presented itself, he wasn't someone who only knew how to submit meekly.
Not only did the youth run fast, he also moved erratically rather than in a straight line—darting left, leaping right, and sometimes bending low to shove off the ground in a lateral dive.
Sheerly through this, he broke through the trio's encirclement.
The three were taken aback. They had kept roughly twenty to thirty meters between them, an interval that usually made cornering a target fairly relaxed.
From what they knew, the youth was relatively timid and averse to trouble. They had never imagined he would actually make a break for it just like that.
Even so, the three reacted swiftly, giving chase at breakneck speed. Daring to resist in a desperate corner? He really had another thing coming.
Chapter 93