Chapter 249: He Ran

Su Ying: "You... you read faces while fighting and killing people?"

"Yes," Pan Yun nodded. "What a fine habit. His face — a classic fate that harms his master. And right now I'm going against his master, so when he harms his master, isn't that benefiting me?"

"I love people like this — open enemies but secret friends — and they don't even know they're benefiting me." Pan Yun said: "I just gave him a few chances to benefit me a little, that's all. See? He led out Songpu for me, the one I couldn't find."

Su Ying's expression went blank: "Yes, Daoist Priest Sanzhu's heart is in the right place."

No wonder, when he was small, his parents wouldn't let him offend monks or Daoists. Even when the family was so poor they could only drink thin porridge, if a Daoist Priest showed up at the door in a tattered sack begging for food, they'd still set aside a day's rations to give him a bowl of thick porridge.

His parents said: first, to earn merit; second, not to offend anyone.

He used to think his parents were simply kind-hearted, and never imagined his family needed to fear a Daoist Priest so down on his luck he had to beg. But looking at it now...

He had been too hasty.

Daoist Priests really do seem to know a bit of everything — and it's pretty terrifying.

The two were still shouting back and forth at each other when Pan Yun hugged her sword and played waiting game, expecting that Lord Songpu to come find her.

But after waiting half a day, Lord Songpu never showed — instead she got a bloodcurdling "Aaagh!"

The Japanese pirates, who had been running around trying to protect Lord Songpu, heard it and shouted: "Lord Songpu! Lord Songpu, what's wrong?!"

From not far away, Seeing Miao Zhen, utterly fed up, went *pfft* and drove her blade a little deeper, telling the agonized youth coldly: "Make him shut up. One more shout out of him, and I'll give you another stab."

Miao He said: "He probably can't understand."

Hearing that, Seeing Miao Zhen went *pfft* and yanked the blade out. This time she aimed straight for his heart and was about to drive it down, and Songpu Hideo immediately blurted: "I understand! I understand! I'll shout right now, please don't kill me!"

He clapped a hand over the wound in his belly and looked up to see that all three samurai at his side had been killed in the fight. He didn't dare defy Seeing Miao Zhen any longer, and said in awkward Chinese: "I'll make him stop shouting right now."

Songpu rattled off a string of words, and the constant thundering in their ears finally stopped.

Just then, two Japanese pirates came around the corner, eyes going wide in an instant. Before they could react, a tremendous crack split the sky and two bolts of lightning struck them straight on the head.

Their eyes rolled back and they dropped to the ground.

Right — Seeing Miao Zhen and the others were holding a thunder zone, so not only did it thunder here off and on, the sound was also enormous, as if every sound in the world had gathered here.

The screams, the shrieks, the calls for help inside the talisman array — here they came at you from every direction, three hundred and sixty degrees. Seeing Miao Zhen's patience was being worn away bit by bit. She was already irritable, and now there were two idiots shouting their heads off inside the talisman array. If she didn't stab them to death, she'd be doing those blockheads a disservice.

Knowing full well the talisman array doesn't block sound, they didn't sneak away quietly — they shouted at the top of their lungs. Wasn't that just inviting the enemy up to kill them?

Miao He dragged the named-and-known Songpu Hideo aside, still sighing regretfully: "I thought it was their 'invite the lord into the urn' trap. Turns out they're just genuinely stupid."

Seeing Miao Zhen: "There are thousands and thousands of ways to make a living in this world, and they chose armed robbery. You can see they don't have enough brains to earn money through proper channels — how could you possibly think they have any brains?"

Hu Jing and the Green-Clad Guards beside him:...

Seeing Miao Zhen seemed to notice too. She turned to the Green-Clad Guards and said: "You're different. You ordinary folk really can't match them in brains, but turning to banditry at least has real-world reasons behind it. This one, look at him — clearly born rich. Having money and still running off to be a pirate — either he's stupid, or he's vicious, or maybe both stupid and vicious."

Miao He nodded rapidly and comforted them too: "After this, you lot should take the chance to go straight."

The Green-Clad Guards seemed to feel their goodwill, and said with a bitter laugh: "It's not that easy. The soldiers probably won't let us off."

"And even if we go straight, what would we do?"

"No money, no land — living is just waiting to die..." So they might as well take one last gamble and go back to being pirates.

Seeing Miao Zhen frowned. "You lot really are dim. Forgotten what he does for a living?"

Hu Jing, seeing her point at him, pointed at himself and said: "Me?"

Seeing Miao Zhen shot him a sideways glance.

Hu Jing caught on at once and said: "I'm not a pirate. I'm a guard — an escort guard. How about you lot become escort guards too?"

Seeing Miao Zhen and Miao He both snorted at the same time. Although Hu Jing had never taken part in raids, knowingly serving as a guard for pirates made him, if not a pirate himself, at least a pirate's ally.

The Green-Clad Guards had been picked out of the pirate rabble to serve as guards — they hadn't started out as guards — so they didn't know the going rates for escort guards.

The moment Hu Jing mentioned it, they immediately started asking: "Is being an escort guard easy? How much can you make in a month? If you die, how do they calculate the compensation?"

Hu Jing said: "Pretty easy, actually. Especially around Jiangnan — there's a lot of demand for escort guards. An ordinary one can make around two taels a month. If you die, it counts as seniority, and the compensation ranges from twenty to a hundred taels."

"Is that compensation guaranteed?"

"Yes," Hu Jing said. "An escort house has to keep operating — it can't afford to chill its guards' hearts. And to stop guards from stealing the cargo, the families of regular guards generally have to live around the escort house. The relationships are close; an escort house would never dare to cheat on the compensation."

The Green-Clad Guards' eyes lit up at this, but before they could express their joy, they heard a *pfft*. Everyone turned to look and saw Seeing Miao Zhen had stabbed another Japanese pirate who'd appeared, and Miao He had stabbed one too.

The group only felt a twinge in their own bellies, and silently raised their blades to go kill.

Sigh — if you think about it carefully, these Japanese pirates are also guards, also escort guards, so... they died pretty easily. So: escort guard = guard = pirate. The job is the same — one prevents being robbed, the other goes out to rob. Both involve fighting and killing.

The only difference is one is legal, the other isn't.

Thinking it through this way, every Green-Clad Guard felt a quiet kinship.

Seeing Miao Zhen and Miao He, still oblivious, finished off or maimed the newly arrived Japanese pirates, then stood there with their blades planted, waiting. "This talisman array won't hold much longer. How many have we killed?"

A Green-Clad Guard said: "Twenty-eight. Counting the one on the ground who isn't dead yet, twenty-nine."

Seeing Miao Zhen: "Little Xiao Shishu's side will only have more. I don't know how the other two squads are doing. Now we're waiting forever just for one pirate to show. How about we drop the array and have a real fight with them, blade to blade — finish it sooner."

"Did you eat gunpowder? Why so impatient?" Pan Yun appeared suddenly, Su Ying at her side, dragging a half-dead Japanese pirate by the hand.

She'd wandered around for ages before finding her way to Seeing Miao Zhen.

Seeing her, Miao He got excited and ran up at once: "Little Xiao Shishu, the medicine I gave Seeing Miao Zhen had a nerve-acting ingredient, so she was very worked up just now. You don't know — out of our twenty-nine, she stabbed thirteen of them."

Good lord — she alone nearly hit half of five people's KPI. That is pretty worked up.

Pan Yun looked Seeing Miao Zhen up and down, saw her face was expressionless, and asked: "And now..."

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"The excited rush passed, now she's getting drowsy," Miao He said. "How about letting her go out to rest, and I'll take over running the array?"

Seeing Miao Zhen: "No. Either we both stay, or we both go out."

Pan Yun silently calculated the situation of each squad she'd just checked, and said crisply: "There aren't many left. We can drop the talisman array and round them all up at once."

Pan Yun turned to look at the youth lying on the ground playing dead, and asked: "So this is the Lord Songpu who was shouting his head off earlier?"

Seeing Miao Zhen: "Couldn't understand the gibberish he was shouting, but he can speak Chinese. Later I told him to call out and not make any more noise."

Pan Yun's lips curved up slightly. "Your two's job now is to keep a close eye on them. These are important prisoners — don't let them run."

Seeing Miao Zhen and Miao He agreed.

Pan Yun: "After this is over, we'll learn Japanese. They can speak Chinese, but we can't understand what they're saying."

Seeing Miao Zhen nodded solemnly. "I think the same."

Pan Yun raised her sword upright, lifted her chin, and called out loudly: "From this moment, ten breaths later, the talisman array breaks!"

Her voice carried to every corner, signaling everyone to prepare.

Pan Yun silently counted down. When she reached one, she slashed her sword—five spirit dots shot out, striking the five array points. The talisman array shattered with a sharp crack.

The lightning vanished. The wind vanished. The blades vanished. The great trees and vines along the path vanished instantly. The darkness before them lifted, and a faint moonlight poured down from the sky, glinting off swords and knives with a colder radiance than the moon itself.

Four squads held the four corners. Once everything became clear, they saw twenty-odd Japanese pirates scattered among them, postured defensively, furious yet trembling with fear.

Almost the instant the illusion vanished and clarity returned, the Japanese pirate standing at the front roared in fury and charged straight at Pan Yun in the center.

Pan Yun also coldly shouted: "Kill—"

She lunged forward with her sword. Blade met blade—clang, clang, three exchanges in an instant. On the next strike, her opponent's knife was knocked from his hand. Pan Yun slit his throat and spun past him, charging toward the other Japanese pirates behind him…

Hu Jing, Su Ying, Zhang Weiliang, and others surged forward with cries of "Ah!" the moment Pan Yun spoke.

Pan Yun took one step, struck once—each step, one kill. So fast that not a drop of blood touched her blade. When she stopped, Hu Jing and the others had finished too. Less than a quarter-hour had passed; all visible Japanese pirates were annihilated. Along the narrow road, blood soaked the trees on both sides and piled over the graves.

Zhang Weiliang wiped blood from his face and walked over. "We only used one talisman array? They're not that strong."

Pan Yun said: "They have no one who can break arrays. They don't understand our Huaxia formations. Otherwise, someone like Zhu Zixun might have broken it."

"Besides, the other talisman array wasn't useless either."

Pan Yun ordered Miao He to collect all the talisman papers. She was about to prod that Songpu and chat with him when the black cat suddenly screamed inside her dantian: "He's running! Someone's really running!"

Pan Yun paused only a moment, turned on her heel, and called to the group: "I'm going for a drink. You handle the battlefield."

She passed through the talisman array, activated her lightness technique, and sprinted swiftly toward the carriage.

Li Ji was excitedly talking to two young men. Song Bei lay at his feet. The other gray-robed guards lay nearby—all still, none gone.

Sensing the wind, Li Ji turned and froze at the sight of Pan Yun. "Third Bamboo Daoist, is the battle over? Oh, Lin Young Master and Yu Young Master have woken up—they…"

Pan Yun asked: "Where's Zhu Zixun?"

Good night

(End of Chapter)