Liang Qu walked into the martial hall carrying an assortment of large and small parcels, most of them boxes of pastries. The sight drew surprised glances from Xiang Changsong and Hu Qi.
He had only been gone for around four hours. Had their junior brother really bought them gifts on his trip out?
"Senior Brother Hu, Senior Brother Xiang, are Senior Brother Lu and Senior Brother Xu back yet?"
"Not yet. What happened?"
Liang Qu pointed toward the quiet room nearby. Catching his drift, the two senior brothers followed him inside and shut the door behind them, cutting off every sound from the outside world.
Liang Qu set all the parcels on the table and spoke in a low, rapid voice. "Someone came looking for me just now and handed me these things. But he reeked of the stench of a mountain ghost."
Xiang Changsong asked immediately, "Who was it?"
"Zheng Xiang, the second steward of the Zhao residence!"
"The Zhao residence?"
Hu Qi frowned. He had an impression of the Zhao family.
Zhao Hongyuan could easily be called the biggest merchant in all of Pingyang Town. He owned shops stretching from Pingyang Town all the way to Chaojiang County. His rise had been remarkably fast, seemingly built up in just four or five years.
Squire Zhao's third son, Zhao Xueyuan, trained right here at their martial hall. If Hu Qi remembered correctly, Zhao Xueyuan really had not shown up for practice over the past few days.
"When Zheng Xiang delivered the goods, he kept shooting me strange looks and winking at me," Liang Qu said. "I couldn't figure out what he meant."
Xiang Changsong let his imagination run wild. "Could it be that the Zhao residence was raising mountain ghosts, and Zheng Xiang found out and had a pang of conscience?"
Hu Qi said, "Let's see what he brought. If nothing was wrong, he wouldn't have approached Little Ninth for no good reason."
The three of them gathered around the table and quickly began unwrapping the boxes.
Liang Qu picked up a box of pastries and slid the lid open. A flurry of folded papers tumbled out.
Xiang Changsong and Hu Qi leaned in at once.
Liang Qu unfolded the sheets one by one, only to discover that they were all land and shop deeds of considerable value. At a rough estimate, they were worth at least a thousand taels of silver!
Not only Liang Qu, but both senior brothers were thoroughly shocked.
"Why are these all deeds?"
"How could a mere steward own so many shops?"
"This has to be Zhao Hongyuan's doing."
"Hurry, see if there's anything else."
They searched through the rest of the wrapping and finally found a sheet covered in fine, dense handwriting. Right at the top were seven specific locations.
Following that, Zhao Hongyuan explained the entire cause and effect in his own voice, laying out the emissary's strength and the backup plans left behind. The more the three read, the more astonished they became.
"These shop and land deeds are worth two thousand three hundred taels of silver. Consider them Zhao's humble apology. I beg you young sirs to show generous forbearance. From here on, our paths diverge across mountains and rivers; may we meet again if fate permits."
Looking through the written words, Liang Qu could almost picture a portly old man bowing with clasped hands, his eyes full of smiles—beaming with geniality on the surface, while underneath lay an insidious cunning.
Xiang Changsong and Hu Qi fell into stunned silence.
They had braced themselves for a bitter final battle, only to discover that a turncoat in the enemy's camp had wanted to bolt long ago, cleanly packaging all of the adversary's intelligence and handing it right to them.
He had bided his time for five years, pocketing every resource the Ghost Mother Cult sent his way and doing whatever they asked.
Yet once he had milked every benefit dry, he kicked his backers aside and slipped away without a trace.
He had even kicked them while they were down, sabotaging the Ghost Mother Cult's plot so that Dashun would not come hunting for his neck.
Just how brazen did a man have to be to pull off something like that?
"Is Zhao Hongyuan afraid we'll go after him later, so he deliberately sent us all these shops?"
Hu Qi crossed his arms. "Whether he gave them to us or not, we wouldn't be able to track him down anyway. The very fact that we're reading this note proves he's already made his escape."
Xiang Changsong frowned. "Then what do we do now? We can't trust everything on this paper blindly. What if it's a trick? It could be a ploy to lure the tiger away from the mountain."
"Whether he tricked us or not, we'll know once we go take a look," Liang Qu said. "The urgent priority is to fetch Senior Brother Lu and Senior Brother Xu back. If this is real, we strike first and kill that emissary and the contact waiting for him. Without the emissary to awaken them, the mountain ghosts won't wake up any time soon, and we can clear them out one by one."
"Then I'll go find our senior brothers right away!"
***
Huang Zejun stepped into the courtyard, his brow furrowed in annoyance.
He had intended to eat dinner before setting out to handle business. But after waiting on and on with no one coming to summon him, he got up to press the servants. When he walked outside, he found that the courtyard held only a few elderly washerwomen, and no meal had been cooked at all.
Zhao Hongyuan had really pushed his luck.
Taking his wife and children was one thing, but taking the servants along too? Did he have no concept of keeping things quiet?
The man had seemed quite sensible just a couple of days ago.
Huang Zejun rubbed his belly, feeling the empty gnawing in his gut. Yet there was no time to order the servants to start a fire and cook.
He could not afford to wait for a meal. He had to hurry and use the secret technique to awaken the mountain ghosts and carry out the blood sacrifice.
Over so many years of development, the cult's apothecaries had not sat idle. They had long since improved the Fetal Pearl Pill, greatly increasing the blood-qi fusion rate and absorption efficiency.
Now, only five to six hundred robust men were needed to refine a single Wolf Smoke realm Fetal Pearl Pill.
Even the mountain ghosts had been bred into distinct strains. Once stimulated by the secret art, they would dig out the embryos themselves and hand them over to their controller, sparing the handlers the tedious chore of carving them out one by one afterward.
In the areas around Pingyang Town, more than three hundred mountain ghosts had been raised. Even though the largest nest had been wiped out, more than two hundred still remained.
Each mountain ghost could lay five to six eggs, which altogether would be enough to yield two greater Wolf Smoke pills or over a dozen lesser Galloping Steed pills.
An Ascendant Dragon was a Martial Sage who could safeguard an entire nation.
An Attaining Elephant could serve as a Great General, guarding a province.
Four Gates martial masters could already draw an imperial stipend.
Galloping Steed and Wolf Smoke martial masters were the absolute backbone of martial strength.
The cult suffered from a lack of successors and was in desperate need of fresh blood.
Two Wolf Smoke Fetal Pearl Pills meant two Wolf Smoke martial practitioners. Even if consuming the pills brought mental instability and trapped them in a nightmare of blood, that state only made them easier to control.
Nothing could be allowed to go wrong.
Huang Zejun strode briskly through the covered veranda, rounded the screen wall, and reached out to push open the main gates.
A terrifying sense of dread suddenly seized his mind and body. Goosebumps erupted across his skin in an instant.
*Damn it! Danger!*
*Boom!*
A scarlet pillar smashed violently through the wooden doors, slamming straight into his chest.
A surging, overwhelming force compressed Huang Zejun's entire skeletal frame, eliciting a sickening crunch of fracturing bone.
The front end of the pillar shattered completely, yet the momentum hurled Huang Zejun through the screen wall and sent him flying into the main hall.
The carved wooden doors tore apart like scraps of paper. The massive central pillar snapped on the spot, causing the eaves of the entire main hall to tilt downward as heavy roof tiles rained down in a clattering cascade, shattering to dust.
Shrill, terrified screams echoed all around.
Lu Gang crushed the threshold beneath his boot and stepped forward through the billowing clouds of dust.
Fine ash drifted in his wake, flowing along every curve of his robes like long ribbons trailing behind him.
At the entrance, stripped of its supporting pillar, the inner hanging-flower gate collapsed with a deafening crash.
***
Pingyang Wharf.
The water's surface rippled with gleaming light, reflecting patches of the starry sky.
An inconspicuous, large black-awning boat was moored near the bank. A man wearing a conical bamboo hat chewed on a stalk of grass, glancing up at the sky every now and then. Seeing the moon had already risen high, his impatience grew by the minute.
They had clearly agreed to ferry Zhao Hongyuan and his party away as soon as darkness fell. Yet after waiting half the night, not a single one had shown up. What was going on?
Rural populations were close-knit, with little outside traffic. Bringing such a large black-awning boat here had already drawn attention, and sitting by the shore for this long had attracted more than a few suspicious looks.
He would give them another three quarters of an hour. If they didn't show, he was leaving!
"Are you waiting for someone?"
"None of your damn business."
Thinking it was just another nosy villager looking for trouble, the man under the conical hat tilted his head up to snap back.
A sudden flash of sword light blazed through the dark, illuminating his violently constricting pupils.
Chapter 85