Chapter 2: Decapitation

The next day.

Macha Bend on South Street was the most bustling place in Lueyang County, home to the most peddlers and laborers, and thus also one of the few execution grounds.

Just past noon, the yamen runners cleared the way. Because there were many to be executed, they chose the Macha Bend at the south street intersection, and a group of strong-armed men had already set up tables and desks at the main street entrance.

The County Magistrate, the Assistant Prefect, the Garrison Commander, and others had already taken their seats, while the scholar Li Youyin, who provided the strategies, stood by in his golden Chengzi robe, looking quite pleased with himself.

By now, the crowd was growing larger; they were mostly dressed in rags, with sallow complexions and a foul odor emanating from their bodies.

Among them were some young, strong men with the look of accomplices, holding woven baskets for meat as they walked to the very front of the crowd, their eyes roaming over the prisoners in the open carts.

They pointed and gestured as if selecting the fat and lean of livestock, and the police inspectors maintaining order did not stop them, merely laughing and joking along with them.

There were eleven people in the open carts, all stripped of their clothes, each wearing neck, foot, and hand shackles, with additional thumb-locks.

Naturally, this included Li You, who had been arrested the day before.

Li You felt like a massive victim of injustice; how could the plots he often saw in movies be playing out for real on him?

Because they were mostly "roving bandits," the step of having family members verify their identities was skipped, so they were taken directly to the street corner, where two executioners had already prepared their tools.

After receiving a signal from the County Magistrate, Jail Warden Wang Chong sneered at Li You and Wu Dading, then loudly announced their "crimes" to the crowd...

These "charges" were baseless to begin with, consisting only of "colluding with bandits" and "remnant rebels," and after a few sentences, the executions began.

Two executioners, one tall and one short, stepped forward. The short one made the prisoner kneel with both legs together in the center of the execution ground, removed the three sets of shackles, and tied his hands behind a wooden stake.

With the body's center of gravity leaning outward, the prisoner's upper body naturally tilted forward, revealing a dark, rough face.

Rather than looking like a roving bandit, he looked more like an honest farmer, trembling incessantly, his neck retracted like a turtle's.

"Old brother, Brother Wang is skilled at this, don't worry, you won't feel any pain..." The short executioner said to the prisoner, then grabbed the prisoner's hair fiercely, fully exposing his neck.

The tall executioner, known as Brother Wang, did not raise his axe; he first licked his left palm, then reached out and felt the prisoner's neck.

Then, with a sway of his waist, in a flash of lightning, his right hand swung the axe in a circle, his left hand quickly retracted, and he gripped it with both hands to strike down...

"Clang... thud..."

After two sounds, the short one was holding a head. The head's face was still grimacing and blinking, its eyes looking at its own body in terror as blood sprayed onto the two men like a fountain.

At this moment, the farmer still had consciousness, not knowing if his head had fallen off or his body had fallen away.

The crowd's noise suddenly fell silent, followed by various gasps and giggles. Only the heavy corpse fell with a crash, while many more stared with numb expressions at the severed neck bubbling with blood.

Just like that, the duo executed five people in a row. By the sixth, it was the victim Li You. Li You's face was slightly pale, and he felt he had disgraced all transmigrators.

However, having already experienced life and death, his heart was relatively calm; he only regretted having eaten too much yesterday, failing to fight to the death.

He noticed that during the execution, they would remove the foot and hand shackles and use hemp rope to tie them to the post; this might be his only chance to resist.

The short executioner removed the shackles for Li You. Li You's gaze remained fixed on the large ghost-head axe in the tall man's hand. A sharp glint flashed in his eyes, and just as he was about to act, a tooth-aching sound of wind-breaking reached his ears...

"Swish, swish, swish..."

A sky full of arrows and flying spears fell indiscriminately onto the Macha Bend. Before they could find where the archers were, the sound of horse hooves thundered like a storm from the West Gate, and a green-clad cavalry force poured in from the city gate like a landslide.

"The roving bandits are here..."

"Zhang Xianzhong? It's the rebel Xian..."

"Ah, the Eight Great Kings are here... It really is the Eight Great Kings of the Western Camp! Has he raised the banner of righteousness again?"

Some in the crowd wailed and groaned, some were in a panic, some stood frozen, and some even shouted and ran to greet them.

As for the County Magistrate, the Jail Warden, and the other officials at the table, they had fled in a chaotic scramble the moment Li Youyin was shot dead!

"South Street! South Street! These noble folks are all holed up on South Street."

Leading the cavalry was a square-faced, sturdy man wearing a six-petal iron helmet and a willow-leaf armor with a front opening. The iron helmet had a black tassel, and the neck guard rested on his pauldrons.

Below his waist, he wore an iron-mesh skirt and mesh trousers, with a bow-and-arrow case hanging on his back, and a tiger spear laid across the victory hook on his saddle.

While on horseback, he fired left and right at the fleeing County Magistrate and Garrison Commander, while roaring for his brothers behind to keep up.

"Damn their mothers, acting all high and mighty here, playing with the heads of us laborers. Today, your daddy here... will make sure your whole family's heads hang from my horse's tail!"

A horse bandit following behind him looked at the five headless corpses at the Macha Bend, spat, and cursed viciously.

The other cavalry members also began to shout wantonly and crudely...

"These fat-headed fools are probably going to hide under their wives' beds... I'll make their whole family wail in mourning later..."

"Heh heh, today we'll let these high-and-mighty official wives and little noble ladies have a good time... let them see... ga ga..."

The terms "mother" and "father" were already in use in some regions during the Three Kingdoms period, and by the Ming Dynasty, they were prevalent in the Shanbei area. For example, after Zhang Xianzhong established the Daxi regime in Chengdu, he issued an imperial decree to his third son, Zhang Nengdi:

"By the grace of Heaven, the Emperor decrees: 'Your father told you not to go to Hanzhong, but you insisted on going to Hanzhong, and now you have indeed lost many troops and horses. You donkey-ball, into your mother's hair! Respect this.'"

This burst of noise blew past like the wind, leaving many more corpses on the ground—those were the commoners who had run up to greet them, only to be knocked down and trampled by the cavalry.

The once-crowded Macha Bend now had hardly any figures left.

The tall executioner had his belly torn open by a knife-chain attached to a javelin. He knelt on the ground, crying loudly while using both hands to hold his intestines in; the ghost-head axe had long since fallen by his feet.

Li You was overjoyed. He twisted his waist violently, and the thumb-thick hemp rope binding his back snapped into several pieces. He stood up, picked up the long axe from the ground, and walked toward Wu Dading.

"Brother You, you..."

Wu Dading was startled by Li You snapping the hemp rope. Seeing him holding a bloody axe and swinging it toward his own neck, he was startled again—a total of two shocks.

But how could Li You give him time to react?

With three "bang, bang, bang" axe strikes, he helped him remove the three shackles.

"Hurry... run! These bandits... will definitely come back to collect their arrows later!" Wu Dading said indistinctly, his mouth full of blood foam.

In the Song Dynasty, a dozen arrows cost one guan of cash; adding a few more could buy an ox, so they were clearly not cheap.

The Ming Dynasty's industrial level had improved, but in these chaotic times, the cost of a single arrow shaft was still nearly a hundred wen, so the arrows fired would certainly be recovered.

"Mm."

Li You, bare-chested, ran to the desk, stripped the clothes off a victim, quickly put them on, and turned to leave with Wu Dading, but he heard a series of "wailing" sounds behind him.

A sturdy man with high cheekbones and a pointed chin had also struggled to spit out the wooden ball in his mouth and said urgently: "Little brother, save my life. My name is Yuan Kaitai, and my uncle is Yuan Shizhong..."

Only then did Li You realize there were four other prisoners.

Li You didn't know these people, but he didn't hesitate. He picked up the axe with one hand, turned back, and with a flurry of chopping, freed them.

The sturdy man named Yuan Kaitai wanted to say something more to Li You, but the other three were clearly his accomplices; they dragged him away quickly.

Li You's flurry of chopping left Wu Dading with his mouth agape. This ghost-head axe weighed over twenty catties; the executioner had basically used both hands to hold it and was panting after five strikes, and he had used a clever technique to specifically avoid the cervical vertebrae.

Yet Li You had chopped a dozen times in just a few breaths, and with one hand at that—how could he not be astonished?

"Let's go!"

After chopping, Li You held the axe in one hand and came over to pull Wu Dading to leave. After taking only two steps, he discovered Wu Dading's left foot was as swollen as a pig's backside.

It turned out his ankle had been twisted by the foot shackles. Li You hoisted him onto his back and asked, "Where to?"

"East Gate, East Gate!"

Li You didn't speak again. Even with Wu Dading on his back and the ghost-head axe in his hand, he still moved as fast as flying. In less than a quarter of an hour, they reached Dongyi Street. As soon as they arrived, the street was a mess; there were even scattered bandits here, wantonly plundering.

"They must be local thugs, swordsmen, and petty thieves taking advantage of the chaos to loot."

Wu Dading judged this at a glance from their clothing and hats. This group clearly lacked the ferocity of the previous cavalry, and the jackets they wore were tattered—where was there even half a piece of armor?

"Should we hide and avoid them?"

"Good."

Li You replied, tightened his grip on the ghost-head axe, and bypassed the alley, continuing toward the East Gate.

"Ah ah... kill me... kill me..."

At the East Gate tea shed, a woman of about twenty had her hands and feet nailed to a door panel with long spikes. Her clothes had long been torn away, and blood flowed down her legs to the ground.

Already on the verge of death, she seemed to hear footsteps and suddenly screamed sharply, causing Li You and Wu Dading to look over. At this sight, both were struck as if by a heavy blow...

Li You felt as if his chest had been struck by a heavy hammer; his vision darkened, making it impossible to breathe.

While he was stunned, a man with a bushy beard and pockmarked black face walked out of the shed. As he exited, he tossed a few pieces of silver in his hand and carried a young girl on his shoulder who appeared to be unconscious.

Behind him was a skinny youth with messy, curly hair, wearing a tattered short shirt and holding a board-knife with a broken tip.

As soon as he stepped out, the skinny youth stabbed the broken knife into the woman's throat, silencing her forever. The woman convulsed for a moment and then breathed her last.

The bearded man then looked at Li You and the other, stunned, his gaze focusing mostly on Li You.

Li You was currently dressed in a golden-brown Cheng robe, well-fitted, with no wrinkles or disarray in his sleeves or waist robe. His sallow, haggard cheeks could not hide his handsome features, giving him an indescribable air of a wealthy young master.

Only the giant axe he held was still dripping with blood...

The bearded man raised the silver in his hand, smiled, and used underworld jargon to probe: "...A highwayman? A newcomer to the plank? If we're all friends on the same path, then let's share a bowl of water together."

[Note]: A bow-and-arrow case is a container for storing arrows and bows.