A group of children wielding wooden swords ran around the streets and swung swords at each other. Wu Huan gulped. He wondered whether he had been a little too alert or not, but at a closer glance, he was surprised. As it turned out, the children were not merely messing around. Their swordsmanship was very orderly. Despite each move and stroke still being extremely undeveloped, it was clearly extremely profound swordsmanship.
This particularly applied to the boy running at the front with a darker complexion. He was not exactly large or small among the group of kids. For some reason, he had angered them all, such that they all chased after him to give him a beating.
He seemed to have grown accustomed to this a long time ago. His small face was filled with a sense of maturity, fighting and retreating as he went. Every time he swung his wooden sword, a child would fall on the ground with a cry.
“Hold your swords! Surround him first!” an older kid called out, and the other children stopped attacking him rashly. They assumed a defensive stance and pressed closer until they cornered him against a wall and surrounded him.
The older kid laughed. “Tiedan, let’s see where you run off to this time. We’re going to give you a thorough beating today!”
“With just you sons of bitches, you can forget about even touching a hair on your daddy Tiedan!”
“Get him!” “Beat him up!”
A farmer’s wife called out from within the village, “Tiedan, your mother is telling you to go home and eat!”
“Understood!” The boy called out, “Sweeping all away!” Suddenly, he bent over and swept along the ground, immediately filling the air with dust and sand. Right when the other children were blinded, he leapt backwards and rose a metre off the ground, climbing up the earthen wall and flipping over the top.
Standing atop the wall, he raised his wooden sword high into the air and laughed aloud. “I’m the hero king!”
Afterwards, he dropped his pants, fished out his willy, and began peeing. The other children all tried to dodge.
“Throw our swords at him!”
Around seven or eight wooden swords flew into the air. The boy wielded his wooden sword in one hand and clutched his willy in the other. After dodging a few swords with difficulty, he was still hit by one in the head, falling off the wall with an ouch. A stream of translucent pee even sailed through the air under the glow of the setting sun. He had ended up wetting himself.
Loud crying rang out from behind the wall. The other children laughed so hard that they began rolling around on the ground. They had gotten their revenge.
The crying gradually vanished off into the distance, and the laughter gradually vanished. They each went home to find their mums.
Wu Huan stood where he was in a daze for quite a good while. The boy called Tiedan had clearly produced inner force already, and he even knew techniques to control his movements and breathing. Not only was he a martial arts prodigy, but he was a prodigy of the sword too. Even rarer, he was familiar with practical battles and knew how to adjust to situations. If he joined a sect, any sect, he would definitely stand out very quickly.
The other children were not the same level of genius as him, but they all knew swordsmanship and knew the basics of how to respond in battle. In particular, the older child who led the others was a talent of his own. In the end, he had even used their combined efforts to defeat a proud, complacent genius.
The spiteless fighting among children resembled a clash of life and death in the eyes of someone experienced with the jianghu like him, like a battle between a pack of wolves and a tiger.
However, this was no clan or sect, but a regular village in the northern region!
If they had another sixteen years, who knew how many more masters would appear? How was the martial arts alliance supposed to stand a chance against them? The ambitions of the demon were far too terrifying!
I’m bound to die on this journey. If I can leave behind a legacy before my death and plant a seed of resistance in the northern region, at least the martial arts I learnt wouldn’t have gone to waste.
As a result, he made his way around the earthen wall and followed the small footprints, arriving before a farmer’s home. The curling smoke merged with the night sky as the smell of food permeated the air. Even the child’s crying and the woman’s scolding did not seem to break this peace.
A certain feeling suddenly became caught in his throat, which made him stop.
“Who’s lurking outside?”
“I’m a traveller from a distant place. I want to join the World’s society. Could you sell me something to eat, as well as some water?”
Wu Huan returned to his senses and made his way into the courtyard, only to see a woman pressing the child called Tiedan against a chair with his pants pulled down and his buttocks bright red from the spanking. However, the child had already changed his clothes, and the wound on his head had stopped swelling too.
The woman was in her early thirties with a handkerchief tied up in her hair. She was actually extremely beautiful with a very graceful figure, nowhere near as bulky as regular farmer’s wives. She clearly possessed martial arts. He had already grown accustomed to the strange sights with his journey here. Basically every single person of this age in the north practised martial arts. However, her martial arts was not particularly powerful, nowhere close to the innate realm, which only proved that the child’s talent was not hereditary.
An old man crouched on one side, smoking a pipe. He grinned. “You’ve specially come to join the World’s society, haven’t you? Come on in and take a seat! Buy what food? It’s just a matter of adding a pair of chopsticks!”
The old man did not know martial arts, which brought Wu Huan ease. “Ma’am, I saw it earlier. This child is very powerful. He fought so many of them alone. He’s a prodigy when it comes to martial arts.”
“Sigh, all he knows is getting into fights every moment of the day. He’s made a fool of himself before you.”
The woman smacked the child’s head, but she could not help but smile.
Without the spanking, the child immediately stopped crying. He pulled up his pants and ran over to the dining table.
“Tiedan, why did you fight with them?” Wu Huan rubbed the child’s head.
“They said my father is part of the opposition!”
“Where’s his father?”
“Dead.” The woman’s face sank.
“How did he die? Don’t tell me the World’s society…” Wu Huan halted quickly, just in case he gave himself away again.
“Sigh, how did you know?” The woman glanced at him curiously.
“I’ve come to join the World’s society. I also wanted to know what the World’s society does, so I investigated along the way. Their reputation can be regarded as very good. I never expected something like this.”
“Then you might as well forget about it. His father was originally a member of the World’s society. Afterwards, he went out and took a woman by force. He was sentenced to death.”
Wu Huan said nothing. He hated something like that the most in his life. He studied the woman. “Don’t tell me…”
“Yeah, I’m that woman. Hurry up and eat. The dishes are getting cold.” The woman rubbed the boy’s head. “Tiedan, if they tease you in the future, just say you have no father.”
Tiedan wolfed away at the food and replied with a full mouth.
Wu Huan was unable to describe his feelings, but it made him think of that beautiful face again. Li Qingshan, oh Li Qingshan, you absolute hypocrite. You can sentence others to death, but you can’t sentence yourself. Even now, she’s still suffering because of you!
However, this was an opportunity. The grievance from killing a father was completely unforgivable, even worse than stealing a wife. It was the will of the heavens!
The dishes were very plentiful, with both meat and fish. The old man even brought out a jar of alcohol. The liquid was clear, unlike the unfiltered moonshine normally made in villages.
“I heard that the northern region suffers disasters every year. I didn’t expect everything to still be quite well.”
“It’s all due to the society leader and the king’s graces. They built many reservoirs and canals, so we’re basically impervious to all droughts. They don’t collect tax either, so our days have never been better. The seeds are different from the past too. The amount of grain we harvest is always in surplu and the meat is very cheap, or how else would Tiedan be so healthy and vigorous? Sigh, when I was young, we couldn’t even feed ourselves properly, let alone practise martial arts…”
“Dad, you’re starting to ramble again. Didn’t you just make it onto the news once? And you just can’t forget about that saying now, can you?”
The old man ran out of patience. “That was the network news broadcast. My portrait occupied an entire page.”
