Chapter 170.2

Runsheng forced Cui Hao to sit down. Tan Wenbin came over gripping a dagger. Before Cui Hao could react, Tan Wenbin grabbed his hand and sliced one of his fingers.

“Ah!”

After drawing blood, Tan Wenbin checked it, then nodded to indicate he was a real living person.

“What are you trying to do?”

Li Zhuiyuan reminded them, “Talk business. Tell us everything that happened while you and Li Ren were left behind. Give him something to eat so he can talk while he eats.”

Yin Meng handed half a bag of preserved plums to Cui Hao.

Tan Wenbin blocked her hand with his arm. “If you give him that, he’ll just get hungrier the more he eats.”

Then Tan Wenbin tossed Cui Hao a pack of compressed biscuits and poured him a bowl of brown sugar tea.

The moment he saw food, Cui Hao began devouring it. Only after stuffing himself with a good amount did he finally let out a breath and start recounting what he and Li Ren had gone through during this period.

Their leader had chosen to promote a democratic style and had everyone anonymously vote for two people to take on the great duty of staying behind.

It was basically no different from voting for “the two people you can’t stand the most.”

Cui Hao won by an overwhelming margin, and Li Ren came in second. Their vote totals completely crushed whoever came in third from the bottom.

Everyone else had gone home for the New Year while the two of them were left behind. To say they felt no resentment would have been impossible.

But very soon, the resentment in their hearts was swept away, because it had to make room for fear.

The night Cui Hao recorded, when “they” came back, was actually only the beginning.

Because after that, all the people in the yard downstairs came up into the building, and from that moment on, the consciousness of the two of them began to grow hazy.

It was like they had fallen into a dream. In their dazed state, they somehow joined those people and started attending a meeting.

At the meeting, their leader and coworkers repeatedly asked questions, and Cui Hao and Li Ren were the ones answering them.

The meeting went on for a long time. By the time it ended, the sky was already bright.

When Cui Hao and Li Ren woke up, they found themselves lying in the courtyard.

The two of them thought they had run into mountain spirits, so they immediately rushed out to seek help. But every person they met in the village, after hearing their story, would let out a dark, eerie laugh.

The whole damned village was full of ghosts!

The two of them were so terrified that they ran out of the village and hid directly in the mountains.

From before the New Year until after it, they had basically been living in a Zhao Jun Temple in the hills.

But their survival skills in the wild were truly awful, and when they fled the village, they had no time to bring supplies. In the end, they could only sneak back into the village under cover of night to steal a little food, then hide again in the Zhao Jun Temple in the mountains before dawn.

Originally, when sneaking into the village to steal things, the two of them had not dared go near this earthen building again. After all, this was where the nightmare had begun.

But Li Ren had accidentally stepped into an animal trap set by a hunter in the mountains. Although he had pried it open and escaped, the wound had started to become infected because it wasn’t treated properly.

Cui Hao had found some herbs, mashed them up, and applied them to Li Ren’s wound. The effect was very obvious: the wound swelled high and began to suppurate.

With no other choice, when Cui Hao sneaked into the village tonight, he made his way toward the earthen building, because he knew there was medicine here.

And then he was caught.

Li Zhuiyuan rubbed at his brow while analyzing Cui Hao’s account.

Cui Hao wasn’t lying, but what he said might not actually have been the truth.

The village definitely wasn’t full of ghosts. The two of them had simply been singled out for special attention.

Li Zhuiyuan suspected that what happened that night was likely the old crone’s way of trying to find out the construction team’s true intentions and whether they planned to give up building the hydropower station.

The villagers with the sinister smiles that Cui Hao and Li Ren encountered later were probably all fake.

There was only one thing that did not make sense. Either you question them and leave it at that, or you question them and then silence them forever. But if you question them and then keep tormenting them afterward, what was the point? Was she really that bored?

Li Zhuiyuan asked, “What kind of place is the Zhao Jun Temple?”

Cui Hao said, “It’s just a run-down old temple up in the mountains. It’s been there a long time. We went there while surveying the area. At the time, one of the guys on our team said it was a temple of merit, and he even led a few of us in paying our respects. Each of us took a roof tile as a protective charm.”

“Do you still have that tile on you?”

“I’ve kept it with me the whole time.”

“Let me see it.”

Somewhat unwillingly, Cui Hao took a tile shard from his pocket and handed it to Li Zhuiyuan.

The tile was very small. It bore three patterns above and three vertical lines below, symbolizing obedience to Heaven’s will above and accord with the people’s hearts below, with immeasurable merit between them.

It really was a merit tile, but it had no actual power to ward off evil.

There truly was a folk tradition of collecting merit tiles or merit bricks, not as antiques, but because people believed that if they took one home and built it into their own house, it could protect the residence and drive away evil.

It was even said that the real Leifeng Pagoda had collapsed because the nearby townsfolk had taken too many bricks from it.

Li Zhuiyuan suspected that if the tile itself had no effect, then what mattered might be the temple behind the tile.

Zhao Jun Temple... Li Zhuiyuan had never heard of such a temple. He had heard of temples to the Stove God, though.

Yet this Zhao Jun was clearly someone the old crone feared. Even if the two men only carried a single tile from his temple in their pockets, she still did not dare truly kill them.

Li Zhuiyuan clapped his hands, stood up, and said to Cui Hao:

“Come on. We’re going to save your coworker.”

...

The Zhao Jun Temple had already fallen into a half-abandoned state. Or rather, perhaps the real purpose behind its construction had never been to maintain incense offerings and worship in the first place, because its location was simply too remote and too hard to reach.

The surroundings of the temple had already collapsed into ruin, overgrown with wild grass and creeping roots. Only the main shrine building still had a broken roof, barely enough to keep out the wind and rain.

For the past several days, Cui Hao and Li Ren had been hiding here, struggling to survive in the wilderness.

Li Ren was in very bad shape. His wound was already infected, he was burning with fever, and his mind was drifting in and out of clarity.

Li Zhuiyuan pointed at him, and Yin Meng immediately crouched down and began treating his wound.

The others, meanwhile, began inspecting the Zhao Jun Temple.

Inside the temple stood a stone statue. But after long exposure to wind and sun, the carving had become extremely rough. Of course, the weather could not take all the blame. The main reason was that the statue had already been carved rather crudely from the start, with very little care put into it.

Behind the statue stood a merit stele.

The writing on it was weathered and mottled, but still faintly legible.

It mainly recounted Zhao Jun’s achievements. After coming here, he had helped the mountain people control the waters and repair canals, and had also driven out the monstrous and evil things that had plagued the mountains.

Li Zhuiyuan frowned slightly. The contents of the stele were vague as well. It did not even clearly record Zhao Jun’s actual name. Zhao Jun was probably an honorific title.

Driven out evil things?

So this Zhao Jun had once dealt with the old crone?

Li Zhuiyuan walked out of the dilapidated temple, then turned back to look at the direction the stone statue faced. He shifted his body and, following the map in his memory, realized that this direction pointed straight toward the lake.

The boy suddenly understood. This was a subsidiary temple, or perhaps an attendant shrine.

The true main temple of Zhao Jun was not here.

But judging from the position of this subsidiary shrine, it should not have been built exactly here either. It should have stood a bit higher up the slope.

Li Zhuiyuan raised his head and looked above the Zhao Jun Temple, where several large stones were piled together.

“Brother Runsheng, try prying one of those stones loose.”

“Got it!”

Runsheng inserted the Yellow River Spade into a crack and began levering with force.

Very soon, the stones gradually loosened, and one of them was pried open.

Inside, a stone stele was revealed. It had been steeped in the passage of time, and on it, words had been written in blood, vigorous and powerful.

When Li Zhuiyuan saw what was written on the stele, his gaze sharpened.

“The Holy Maiden of Miao Territory strayed onto an evil path and willingly fell into corruption, slaughtering infants in all directions and consuming them to replenish her own belly, hoping to use herself as a furnace to nurture a gu child.

Heaven and man alike were enraged. Gods and mortals alike were outraged.

Thus I, here and now, kill the gu child and suppress the Holy Maiden.

The years are long, and human strength is finite. If the suppression should fail and this fiend appear again,

then on the day she resumes her slaughter, let my descendants of later generations uphold my will, come again to this place, and once more suppress this evil thing.

— Zhao Wuyang of Jiujiang.”

The Zhao Family of Jiujiang.

Zhao Yi’s ancestor.

Zhao Wuyang was Zhao Jun. Li Zhuiyuan guessed that this man was, in all likelihood, the Dragon King in the history of the Zhao Family of Jiujiang, and the only one they had ever produced.

By rights, this opportunity should have belonged to Zhao Yi. He too was walking the river.

This wave of fortune should have gone to Zhao Yi.

And yet, it had somehow ended up in his own hands.

Li Zhuiyuan could not help but look at Xue Liangliang, who was standing in front of him, also reading the words on the stone stele.

The first thought that came to the boy’s mind at that moment was actually this: this was a perfect chance to set the board and snuff Zhao Yi out.

It was an instinctive reaction.

Because Zhao Yi was worthy of respect, and worthy of being killed.

But very soon, Li Zhuiyuan erased that thought from his own mind, because doing that would be rather pointless.

Under ordinary circumstances, if the two of them met and relied on their own abilities, digging pits for each other and trying to bury the other ahead of time, that would have been one thing.

But standing beneath the personally inscribed words of a Zhao Family Dragon King and still plotting that sort of thing felt like a child throwing a petty tantrum in front of an elder. It was dull and immature.

After all, no matter what, every generation’s Dragon King was worthy of respect.

Li Zhuiyuan reached out, gently pushed Xue Liangliang aside, and walked alone to stand before the stone stele. Calmly and openly, he said:

“What a pity. Up to now, your Zhao Family of Jiujiang has only ever produced one generation of Dragon King.”

He carried the inheritances of two Dragon Kings. Even when facing the Dragon Kings of other families, the very first thing he said, at the very least, could not sound timid. In other words, he could not be too polite.

Every family had its own pride, and each led the age in its own way.

Then Li Zhuiyuan bowed to the stone stele and performed the formal rites of the Qin Clan and Liu Clan.

What he honored was not the Zhao Family of Jiujiang, but that senior who had once suppressed the evil things of the world.

After completing the rites, Li Zhuiyuan straightened and said:

“The task of your Zhao Family Dragon King, I, the Qin Clan Dragon King and Liu, the Dragon King, accept!”

Crack!

The instant his words fell, the stele split in two. In the middle was a rusted copper coin sword.

Li Zhuiyuan blinked.

He had not expected the Zhao Family Dragon King to be so generous.

The inscription said that his descendants were to come suppress it. But even if descendants of another family came here willing to suppress this fiend, he would still gift them a weapon to aid them.

That, perhaps, was the breadth of heart of a Dragon King.

Li Zhuiyuan reached out and grasped the copper coin sword. The instant he touched it, a cool sensation flowed straight through his palm, clearing his mind at once.

A fine treasure.

Li Zhuiyuan drew out the copper coin sword. As he examined the precious patina on it, he sighed inwardly:

“My apologies, Zhao Yi.”