Jiang Yao remembered it so vividly because it was the first time Lu Xingzhi had yelled at her. Even though he had kept his cool, it was the only occasion in their many years of marriage that he had spoken to her in such a harsh tone.
As a result, Jiang Yao would most likely remember it for the rest of her life.
“I traveled to Lanning on the second day after rejoining the army and infiltrated a religious sect that preached heresy. That was when I discovered how backward Lanning’s remote town was. The people there could not even communicate in our language. It was a little village that was almost completely surrounded by desert. Everyone’s faces were filled with despair and ignorance.”
“What happened after that?”
Lu Xingzhi’s recollections tugged at Jiang Yao’s heart.
“What happened after that? Was it extremely dangerous?” Was that why he had such a terrifying scar on his body?
“I was able to conceal myself successfully with an insider’s help. In that organization, I grew to despise some people’s foolishness and ignorance. They used the so-called nonsense of believing in gods and earning eternal life to brainwash everyone in that small community into becoming their slaves. I would have believed there was such a location if I had not seen it with my own eyes. It was hilarious idiocy, but also shocking stupidity.”
Lu Xingzhi rarely lamented something or someone like that. That was the first time he ridiculed someone or something.
However, that was how Jiang Yao became aware of Lu Xingzhi’s helplessness.
“I hid for nearly a month and a half and gathered a lot of information. After about a month, I began to untangle the net. I followed a squad into the strange desert, searching for the guardians. We lost a handful of our people, and we lost more than half of our people after entering the desert. We hunted those people for about ten days, despite having no experience surviving in the desert. They had two hostages in their hands when we caught up with them. They were two young girls from that small town.”
Jiang Yao did not make a sound to disrupt Lu Xingzhi’s recollection but instead sat silently and waited for him to continue speaking.
“One of our men died, and another was critically injured while attempting to save the two girls. We were able to save them, and we also caught the bad guys. They did not say anything when we saved the two girls. They also did not help us out of the desert, no matter how much we begged. We initially thought that they were scared out of their wits. We walked out of the desert with only our intuition. When we saw the small town, when we almost reached those villagers, just as we thought we had survived the ordeal, the two girls took out their weapons and stabbed us. Their weapons were small sickles, a common farming tool.”
Lu Xingzhi gestured to Jiang Yao. “It’s the small sickle used to cut grass. One of the girls stabbed me here. At that time, they looked at us as if we were enemies. They looked like they wanted to die with us. They blamed us for capturing their God’s messenger and depriving them of the opportunity to gain eternal life. They hated us for taking away their chance to walk out of the abyss of poverty and pain.”
