Chapter 72: That Little Aunt of Infinite Charm

"No more! No more! It hurts! I'm done!" Amid the shrieking, a fair-skinned body hastily draped itself in a brocade quilt and slipped away.

Li Ruoliu sucked in cold air with a "Hiss—hiss—," wearing the expression of a servant begging her master for mercy.

The pain wasn't really pain, just a kind of numbness. Zhang Zhao also felt this absurdity had gone a bit too far. Wuni City was no place to let loose without a care—how had he lost all self-control?

"I say, Second Young Lord, a woman like me has been long starved of it—years without tasting that flavor, so of course I went a little wild. But you? With your looks and status, how could you be even more... than me?"

Li Ruoliu frowned as she began dressing with her maidservants' help, yet still didn't forget to grumble at Zhang Zhao. Thinking back on the madness from last night until now, even she blushed.

Still hungry for it? A little, actually! Zhang Zhao rubbed his chin and thought it over. Though he hadn't gone five or six years without tasting it, he wasn't far off.

Back in the republic of later ages, it wouldn't have been hard for someone like him to find a girlfriend, but finding one whose heart matched his, someone they each found pleasing to the eye—that truly wasn't easy.

Add to that his busy work, and he'd only just managed to land a long-legged, slim-waisted little beauty right before he transmigrated—yet before they'd even held hands, he'd transmigrated.

But of course he wouldn't tell Li Ruoliu any of this. Right now the two of them had already "gotten deeply acquainted," yet Li Ruoliu still only knew him as Second Young Lord—she didn't know his surname was Zhang, nor where he came from!

"I've never tried holding hands with my aunt before, so I did go a little wild—and it truly was thrilling!" Zhang Zhao lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, deliberately speaking in a dreamy, murmuring tone.

Clang! The bronze mirror in Li Ruoliu's hand dropped to the floor. The two maidservants beside her froze too. The three women looked at one another, each doubting whether she'd misheard.

"What did the Second Young Lord say? Aunt? Who's your aunt? Ahaha! It can't possibly be me!" Li Ruoliu moved a little closer to Zhang Zhao and forced out a few dry laughs, her face wearing a constipated expression.

"Of course it's you. Could it be those two instead?" Zhang Zhao sat up and pointed at the two maidservants, who didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

"My surname is Zhang, and I come from Dunhuang. The White-Clad Son of Heaven Zhang Chengfeng of former years was my elder, and the Fengtian Princess of the Jin Kingdom, of the Li clan, is my legal mother!"

A hint of a wicked smile crept onto Zhang Zhao's lips. He was deliberately frightening Li Ruoliu. In truth, although Li Ruoliu really was his aunt, the two of them shared not a drop of blood, because the Fengtian Princess of the Li clan was only his legal mother, not his birth mother.

And even if she had been his birth mother, the Fengtian Princess of the Li clan and Li Ruoliu were only cousins beyond the five mourning grades—one line had lived in Khotan for generations, the other long settled in Chang'an. Their blood tie had thinned to the point of being almost negligible.

"Ahhh!!!" An eardrum-piercing shriek rang out. Li Ruoliu was utterly stunned.

The thought that she had just spent an entire night of wild lovemaking with her own nephew—and that she had once tried to seduce that nephew, and failed—this extreme mortification instantly shattered this little aunt who had just been dreaming of her future life!

"Beast! Animal!" Li Ruoliu hurled the rouge box in her hand at Zhang Zhao, then ran out screaming! She left the two maidservants kneeling in place, at a complete loss, while Zhang Zhao nearly split his sides laughing on the bed.

Before long—three minutes at most—the clatter of footsteps came from outside, and Li Ruoliu was back. She threw herself onto the bed and began pinching and biting Zhang Zhao, who was still laughing.

"You thieving wretch! You're no son of the Fengtian Princess at all! My eldest sister's son, the Crown Prince of the Jinshan Kingdom, Zhang Geng, died long ago! You've been lying to me—out with it now, who are you really?"

"What I said was that the Fengtian Princess of the Great Treasure Jin Kingdom is my legal mother—I never said the Princess was my birth mother! Who told you to run off after hearing only half of it? Little Aunt!"

Zhang Zhao couldn't resist cheekily calling Li Ruoliu "Little Aunt." Though there was no blood relation, it did sound rather thrilling.

"So you're a son of the Song clan. But... no matter how it's reckoned, I'm still your aunt!"

Li Ruoliu now knew who Zhang Zhao was, but she was still furious. She pummeled him wildly, tears streaming down her face.

"Enough! First, there's no blood relation. Second, you and my legal mother are merely cousins separated beyond the five mourning grades for over a hundred years. Why cling to this?

What you should be thinking about is this: once I go to Khotan, how are you going to deal with my grand and brilliant uncle—your cousin—the Great Sage Son of Heaven of the Jin Kingdom!"

Why had Zhang Zhao deliberately pointed out that Li Ruoliu was his nominal cousin-aunt? To make Li Ruoliu trust him more, and thereby transform their relationship from bedfellows using each other into quasi-allies bound by kinship.

Regarding the Zhongyun Kingdom, Zhang Zhao had thought long and hard. First, he certainly couldn't replace Sanpoba—he wasn't a Zhongyun man. Grabbing what he could and leaving in the short term was fine, but over time, the remaining tens of thousands of Zhongyun people would never submit to him.

Nor did he have time to sink his precious hundred-odd armored soldiers into a tribal micro-state of fewer than a hundred thousand people. Hurrying to Khotan to borrow Li Shengtian's strength and gather up the descendants of the Tang people scattered across Anxi—that was the real task.

However, having no chance to control the Zhongyun Kingdom now didn't mean there would be none in the future. If he could gather two or three thousand troops and tens of thousands of Tang-descended civilians in the Western Regions, then after returning to Dunhuang, seizing the chance to control the Zhongyun Kingdom would no longer be impossible.

If, after his departure, Li Ruoliu could hold Wuni City and thereby influence the whole Zhongyun Kingdom, this place could very likely become his foundation in the future.

At the very least, when he schemed to seize power in the Guiyi Army and faced the Cao family, he, Zhang Erlang, would not be water without a source or a tree without roots.

Likewise, Li Ruoliu's pinching and biting of Zhang Zhao right now, her endless little tantrums under the pretext that he'd deceived her, were also meant to close the distance between them.

Beating is affection and scolding is love—such little moods could very easily draw the two of them closer.

Now that the two of them had slept in the same bed and gained the bond of kinship, they could finally set aside most of their wariness and talk about the future.

Li Ruoliu furrowed her brow. Khotan, which Zhang Zhao had mentioned, was indeed something she had to treat with great caution, because as soon as Zhang Zhao went to Khotan, her cousin Li Shengtian would surely learn that Sanpoba had been killed.

As a neighbor of Zhongyun, with such a fine opportunity, even if Li Shengtian felt he couldn't use it to directly control Zhongyun, he would certainly send people over—nominally to back her up, but in reality to influence the Zhongyun Kingdom.

And she, after Zhang Zhao left, would certainly need Khotan's support to secure her position.

One had to understand that the former King of Zhongyun, Sanpoba, had only secured his position with three hundred armored soldiers. She, Li Ruoliu, currently had only ninety.

Armored soldiers were a strategic armament—not something you could simply pull men off the city streets to create. Physique, nerve, valor, and inherited training: not one could be lacking.

Of the seventy warriors Zhang Zhao had gotten her so far, the thirty promoted from the southern city could only count as half an armored soldier each.

So this bit of armed force could only guarantee Li Ruoliu could barely protect herself. To truly become the regent queen of Zhongyun, she would need at least fifty more armored soldiers.

And that many armored soldiers could certainly not be scraped together anywhere else—they could only come from her mother country, Khotan.

But that brought another problem: she, Li Ruoliu, had to grasp the right measure of it.

If Khotanese warriors came and meddled too much in Zhongyun's affairs, or if what they embodied was Li Shengtian's will rather than hers, the Zhongyun people would distance themselves from her.

If the Khotanese warriors were too few, she would find it hard to hold her position. The balance between the two was exceedingly difficult to strike.

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