Translator: Transn Editor: Transn
Shangguan Ru opened her eyes to see herself lying on a soft, comfortable bed and wearing a long pale green robe made of lightweight material. She was shocked and immediately sat up. She calmed down slightly upon realizing that the internal energy in her Dantian was already back to normal levels and that her dagger, which she hid close to her body, was still around.
A maid of the same age as Shangguan Ru came running over upon hearing the sounds from her bed. “Master, you’ve woken up,” she said stiffly in Central Plains Chinese.
Shangguan Ru only knew that she was still in the Land of Fragrance. However, the locals were all somewhat weird, and she could not figure them out. “Who’re you? What’s this place?”
“I’m your slave, Master. This is the capital.”
Shangguan Ru leaped off her bed and saw that her belongings were placed on a chair nearby. She walked over and picked up her wooden saber, saying, “Who sent you to me? I want to see him.”
The maid suddenly kneeled down and kept kowtowing uneasily. “Please forgive your lowly slave, Master,” she pleaded.
Shangguan Ru got a shock from the maid’s reaction. “You… what are you doing? Get up quickly,” she replied.
“Please forgive your lowly slave, Master. I cannot carry out Master’s orders.”
Shangguan Ru finally understood why the maid was acting in this manner. “Forget it, I’ll not visit him. I’ll wait for him to come to visit me instead. Where’s my friend? I can see her, right?” she asked.
Maid Lotus was in the adjoining room.
They discovered that they were still residing in a garden, but the vegetation growing outside their rooms looked very normal and would not obstruct their path or give off a fragrance that intoxicated them. Given that, they guessed that they had probably left the Flower Soul Forest.
The two women found their encounter odd. The maid assigned to them was clueless about what was going on and seemed to have never spoken to a normal person in her life before.
Luckily, their questions were soon answered.
The true master of the house was an old man whose hair and beard had already turned white. He carried a white crutch and called himself Shili Molo.
He was the same Shili Molo who would receive the Dragon King and the army of the Great Snow Mountain as the representative of the Land of Fragrance a few months later. During that time, he would pretend to not understand Central Plains Chinese, but right now, he was conversing with Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus fluently in it.
“The Land of Fragrance is a lowly country with a population of fewer than 6000 people. Our people are docile and not fond of conflict; we don’t even have weapons. Every year, a few of us will venture to other lands for business and barter for the daily necessities of our people.”
“Our nation has been isolated from the world for centuries. We don’t wish to have too many foreigners here, and we wish even more for news of our land to not spread too far.”
Shili Molo beat around the bush and started introducing the two women to several local traditions, refusing to make his real intentions clear.
Shangguan Ru could not stand his conversational style which was not to the point. She bluntly cut him off, saying, “We’re both tracking a bad man and entered your country by mistake. After we’ve left, we’ll be sure to keep this place a secret. You don’t have to worry about that.”
Shili Molo smiled gently but still seemed to be a little anxious. Maid Lotus deduced his real intentions correctly. “They didn’t manage to capture Old Man Mu and are waiting for us to help,” she said.
Shili Molo nodded awkwardly. Old Man Mu had already become the nightmare of the people of the Land of Fragrance, and it was a problem he had which needed to be resolved immediately.
It was two days ago since Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus had fainted in the Flower Soul Forest.
Old Man Mu cursed as he fell from the air. He was unexpectedly alright and stood up before leaping onto the flower bed and escaping.
It was a miscalculation on his part. If he had known that the two women had already fainted and that there were no kung fu masters in the Land of Fragrance, he would have immediately begun killing.
He still believed the Chief Priest to be a kung fu master who kept his skills concealed. As such, he did not wish to remain behind in the Flower Soul Forest and put his Nimble Sparrow Lightness Skills to use, sprinting on high ground until he was out of the maze.
“The flowers are actually harmless, but I’ve coated their stems… with a bit of some chemical which can only be found in our country,” Shili Molo said, sounding very sincere.
Old Man Mu had already killed at least eight people over the previous two days, and they were all nobles from the city.
The benefit of isolation was that the country was never invaded, but the disadvantage was that once it was, its natives had already lost the ability to defend themselves. The most skilled ‘kung fu masters’ amongst them were all paper tigers like the Chief Priest of the Flower Soul Forest.
It also happened that these paper tigers were the ones who volunteered to subdue the demonic old man high-spiritedly, and were also the first casualties.
In reality, there were 6,000 nobles and ten times that of slaves in the Land of Fragrance. Even though they vastly outnumbered the nobles, the slaves had been living in isolation and were trained to be obedient and act as tools for the nobles. They were even proud of their subservience, and when their masters were at a loss, they would only get more panicky.
Being in a national crisis forced the people sent into the Flower Soul Forest to capture Old Man Mu to think of all sorts of solutions. They managed to recollect that he was extremely wary of Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus, therefore when the two women woke up, they found themselves change from captives into honored guests.
Shangguan Ru had made a blunder that was not too serious yet not negligible as well; she had divulged her real intentions much too early to Shili Molo. Once he heard that the two women had trespassed into the Land of Fragrance by accident to ‘capture the evil man’, he had some measure of how to handle them.
Shili Molo had seen the outside world before and was different from the obedient slaves and simple-minded nobles in his nation. He was the most important merchant of the Land of Fragrance and had established contact with the outside world multiple times in the past. As such, he had cultivated a slick nature.
Shangguan Ru felt guilty because Old Man Mu had regained his powers due to her mistake. He could kill at will again, and as of now, he had already taken dozens of lives. She felt that their death was her burden to bear.
Luckily, she did not express her guilt in Shili Molo’s presence. If she had done so, the Land of Fragrance would not have pleaded with her for help; he would have manipulated her guilt and made her proactively seek to atone for her blunder.
Both women did not bear any grudge against Shili Molo and agreed to help him to capture Old Man Mu within the borders of the Land of Fragrance.
Old Man Mu loved the game of hide-and-seek he was playing with his pursuers. Even so, he was more cautious than before and spent most of his time in hiding while trying to regain more of his powers. He surfaced occasionally but made sure he was far from the two women, taking the opportunity to kill one or two nobles before going into hiding again.
Shangguan Ru gathered all the disciples previously trained by the Chief Priest, and there were more than a hundred of them. She planned to give them some training and let them join in the hunt for Old Man Mu, but it ended up terribly bad.
The disciples were composed mostly of offspring of the slaves and they were extremely obedient; they would even not hesitate to take their own lives should they be ordered to do so. This was their weakness too, however. Without any orders, they dared not act, and no matter how hard Shangguan Ru tried to motivate or stimulate them, she could not get them to be more proactive.
As such, Shangguan Ru went to Shili Molo for help.
The old slick businessman was perturbed by Shangguan Ru’s request. “Since they’re slaves, how can they act on their own accord? Wouldn’t that be rebellion? As long as you two heroines can get rid of this problem plaguing our country, we’re willing to offer 10000 taels of gold as a reward.”
This incident sowed the seeds of discord which led to huge differences between the two of them.
The longer Shangguan Ru stayed in the Land of Fragrance, the more she felt that there was something not quite right with the country. All of the nation’s wealth was concentrated in the hands of the nobles. There were only about 6000 of them, but they ruled over the tens of thousands of slaves like gods. The slaves were taught to be obedient the moment they entered this world, and were extremely subservient to their masters; they dared not even mention their masters’ names casually.
Most of the locals, including many of the nobles, were not even aware that there were people of different ethnicities and nations living in this world. They treated Old Man Mu as a demon who had emerged from the forest and the two heroines as woodland fairies.
Only about two to three hundred merchants, who had traveled out of the Land of Fragrance before, knew the true identities of the three visitors, but they kept it a strict secret amongst themselves, refusing to speak a word of it to their fellow countrymen.
The heroines were soon placed under surveillance, and every person they met or spoke to had to report their encounter in detail after that. As such, Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus became unwelcome visitors. Wherever they went, the locals would scatter away, avoiding them like the plague.
This made the hunt for Old Man Mu increasingly difficult.
Old Man Mu regained all of his powers after 20 days, and he began to satiate his bloodlust.
Even so, he did not move against the two women for the time being. He changed his mind about killing them and decided to take them as his disciples instead. He did not know why, but Shangguan Ru, who was completely void of killing desire was to his liking, and he kept feeling that she would be suited to take over his mantle. As for Maid Lotus, well, he felt that she was his female soulmate.
To this end, every time he killed, Old Man Mu would leave a note behind. There were a few times whereby he wrote it down on paper, but most of the time, he would scribble it on walls and the surrounding grass with the blood of his victims.
The contents of his notes were about the same—it spoke of ‘the Way of Evil’.
Occasionally he would even appear very close to their location while attempting to persuade the women to surrender to him, using his Seven Magical Tones skill to broadcast his speech. “There’s a limit to my patience. I’ll only wait for seven days. After that, I’ll kill you as well. To be honest, I’ve never thought of taking in female disciples at all in the past. I was even hesitant to receive male ones; I rejected all of Wildhorse’s requests. Therefore, be secretly pleased, you two. Imagine if the three of us join forces, who could take us on? We’ll kill whoever we wish to. The Supreme King, the old Khan of Norland, the Emperor of the Central Plains will all be easy pickings.”
He did not manage to convince Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus with his Seven Magical Tones but successfully won over many of the nobles in the city.
A plot was thus building up behind the back of the two heroines.
Maid Lotus would normally not have fallen for such a trap, but her pride and aloofness made her underestimate the citizens of the Land of Fragrance, who seemed to be weak and easily bullied to her. That night, as she and Shangguan Ru tracked Old Man Mu to the old royal palace, neither of them were suspicious in the least.
The royal palace was already uninhabited and the former royal garden had been converted into a maze very similar to the Flower Soul Forests, except that it was bigger in scale and there was no Chief Priest residing in it.
The Land of Fragrance, under the leadership of Shili Molo, surrendered to Old Man Mu. They were willing to accept his Way of Evil and lusted after world dominance upon becoming strong, as this would allow them to forcibly enslave more people.
On the second day after Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus were imprisoned, a suspicious piece of news came from the forest. After Shili Molo checked its credibility a few times, he finally confirmed that it was true—an army, a few thousand strong, was drawing near to the border of the Land of Fragrance.
Old Man Mu was eager to meet the Dragon King again and was ready for a titanic clash. “He’s caught up with me again, this time with an army of a few thousand men. It was he who caused all my recent fragility and humiliation. If I don’t get my revenge, what sort of evil person am I?” he thought.
The Dragon King had the numerical advantage and the Land of Fragrance, which he had just subdued, was useless in an actual fight. As such, Old Man Mu decided to go into retreat—he wanted to master the Five Hole Earth Punch until it was flawless. If he managed to do that, he would have nothing to fear even if Gu Shenwei brought 10,000 men along with him.
“If the Dragon King arrives, you must keep him and his Great Snowmountain army here by hook or by crook. Anyway, I will need to kill to master my technique. If it’s not their lives I take, it shall be yours,” Old Man Mu ordered Shili Molo. He then prepared to find a place unknown to anyone else for his retreat.
Shili Molo was entirely captivated by the unshackled and bloodthirsty demon. He received his orders like a slave, repeatedly saying “Yes”. He then asked Old Man Mu, “What about the two women, how should we deal with them?”
The seven day grace period was already over, and Old Man Mu had lost his passion of trying to take Shangguan Ru and Maid Lotus as his disciples. “As you wish,” he replied, without even a little regret in his heart.
Shili Molo decided to sacrifice the two women. Their acts and words had infected a considerable number of people, and he felt that it would be a good opportunity to let the indecisive slaves observe their fate.
