This tiny flame couldn’t illuminate the Buddha hall. Inside the threshold, it remained dark, and even the appearance of the Buddha statue was unclear.
A small offering table had two plates of fruit covered with incense ashes.
The face of the Buddha statue was hidden in darkness, its knees black and shiny from age. Next to the offering table, a wooden shelf held dozens of memorial tablets neatly, casting long shadows on the wall. There was no sense of solemnity, instead, it seemed eerie and mysterious.
Since no one was in the hall, the meditation cushion was empty.
—Who lit the candle? Where did the person go at this moment?
The temple door was open, two of the three sticks of incense in the burner had broken, leaving only the middle one emitting a wisp of white smoke.
This place was a graveyard to begin with, such a spooky setup was enough to scare away passersby.
“Playing tricks.” Meng Qi sneered.
Playing the “empty city ruse” in front of a man who commanded over 100,000 troops was simply showing off one’s slight skill in front of an expert.
The hall seemed empty, but it didn’t mean there were no mechanisms.
Moreover, people could hide behind the Buddha statue, in the dead angles behind the door, or on the pitch-black beams.
This was the last trap set by Piaoping Pavilion to prevent anyone from really tracking here. Since it wasn’t just one assassin who needed to return, from the first assassin’s return, Piaoping Pavilion had been prepared for the reception.
Unfortunately, these tricks were useless in front of Meng Qi.
—His eyes couldn’t see through the stone-carved Buddha statue or the walls, but the beams were different.
Actually, the method of lighting a candle by Piaoping Pavilion was clever: in total darkness, martial arts experts might discern vague shadows. With a candle, their eyesight would be affected by the light, involuntarily drawn to the source, and where the light couldn’t reach became even darker.
The darkness seemed like a giant mouth ready to devour.
Meng Qi clearly saw the person on the beam yawn.
This person, relying on his advantageous position (the unseen enemy couldn’t see him, and neither could his own people), after squatting for a while, leaned against the main beam and began to doze off.
What’s the use of Piaoping Pavilion doing everything perfectly to maintain mystery? When it came to actual execution, it still depended on people. People are not all the same, but their brains are different. Earlier, there were assassins exposing themselves by robbing ox carts and crawling through fox holes, now there were those who were so careless they even dozed off while ambushing. How could the secrets of an assassin organization be maintained like this?
Thinking of the glorious era of the Chu Dynasty, with countless capable ministers and wise men, even well-established national policies struggled to be implemented continuously and consistently. Every now and then, there would be trouble, governing the country was like a pot mender, constantly patching here and there without a moment’s peace. Could a mere assassin organization like Piaoping Pavilion manage all its people properly?
Ha.
Meng Qi secretly sneered, but his good mood quickly dissipated.
He decided to quickly wrap up matters here and go meet the doctor.
The candle in the Buddha hall suddenly seemed to flicker as if blown by the wind.
In an instant, the ambushers grabbed their weapons and half emerged from hiding, but none of the mechanisms in the hall were triggered, leaving them looking at each other in confusion. The person on the beam bent down to check, a bit late, and finally couldn’t help but shout, “What’s all this fuss about?”
“It seemed like there was a breeze…”
The person speaking was unsure, maybe it was just the wick acting up? But the candle had only been lit for a short while, not long enough for the wick to need trimming.
“Rubbish, it’s so hot that we’re almost cooking, where would a breeze come from?”
The person on the beam, whose face was covered with pockmarks, stretched his head to look at the long banners of scriptures outside the temple.
These things looked ordinary, but the poles had mechanisms that required stepping on specific stone slabs in a particular sequence to pass. The control for the mechanism was inside the Buddha hall; when the first assassin returned earlier, the mechanism had already been activated. Now, with no activity inside or out, it seemed unlikely to be an enemy.
“Tu Tou, what do you think it was?”
“Maybe a bird, or a pheasant.”
The person hiding behind the Buddha statue was a middle-aged monk who looked honest but held a large, curved beheading knife.
“Alright, stay alert,” the person on the beam said impatiently.
“Ma Lao Jiu, what kind of tone is that? Wait until the leader returns, you’ll get it. Don’t think we don’t know you’re slacking off up there.”
The monk glared, getting angry.
The person on the beam didn’t want to argue, so he lay back down with his head lowered.
The monk was about to curse again, but others persuaded him, saying tonight was the “Kite Returns to the Nest” day, and if anything happened, no one could bear the consequences. The monk finally calmed down after hearing this.
Meng Qi stood in the dark outside the Buddha hall window, listening to the entire conversation.
The monks in this family temple were indeed fake.
Piaoping Pavilion operated with “utmost caution,” not leaving any hidden dangers even at a small resting place.
If the monks in the family temple colluded with Piaoping Pavilion for money or other reasons, the monk probably wouldn’t live long. When the old monk in the temple died, the inheritance naturally passed to the disciple, whose true identity was likely known only to Piaoping Pavilion.
More likely, Piaoping Pavilion targeted a family temple, and the monks there “died unexpectedly.”
The local gentry and clans would then “admire” and invite a new master to their family temple, who had already been replaced by someone from Piaoping Pavilion.
There was no telling how many such safe havens Piaoping Pavilion had.
Meng Qi’s expression was cold and stern; he knew the names Tu Tou and Ma Lao Jiu.
It wasn’t because these two were highly skilled or famously notorious, but because Meng Qi was well-versed in the ways of the martial world. Either he overheard gossip in places where martial artists gathered, like teahouses or taverns, or he saw their names in documents and wanted posters while causing trouble for the Jinyiwei back in the day.
A person with a pockmarked face being the ninth in line and called Ma Lao Jiu could be many, but a fierce man wielding a giant blade with the nickname Tu Tou Gui was rare.
Tu Tou Gui was a notorious bandit known for his brutal crimes, having gathered a band of infamous individuals to rob along waterways.
They specifically targeted wealthy households and government ships, leaving no survivors.
Later, when the Qi Dynasty issued a sea capture warrant, the authorities and Jinyiwei pursued them relentlessly. The water bandits, having internal conflicts over unevenly divided spoils, eventually disbanded and went their separate ways. Five or six years had passed since then, with some bandits caught by the Jinyiwei, some killed in martial conflicts, and some still missing.
Tu Tou Gui was among the missing, and Ma Lao Jiu was another unaccounted-for bandit from the same group.
It seemed that the people of Piaoping Pavilion were not as mysterious as rumors suggested; there were still traces to be found.
As Meng Qi pondered, he suddenly heard the sound of something cutting through the air.
Two farmers dressed in patched clothes arrived in front of the Buddha hall, occasionally looking back.
Seeing the hall lit and the surroundings quiet, they breathed a sigh of relief and walked along the stone path into the hall.
Meng Qi noticed their peculiar stepping pattern—left two steps, right three steps repeatedly—and realized it was a mechanism.
“What’s going on? How did you get in?” Tu Tou Gui, pretending to be a monk, stepped forward and asked impatiently.
“Something went wrong.”
The two assassins looked pale, and one of them said urgently, “We encountered a tough opponent, and the leader is entangled with them. We don’t know what’s happening now.”
“What?”
All four ambushers in the hall revealed themselves, looking shocked.
They knew very well how skilled their blade master was.
If the opponent’s skills were mediocre, how could they hold back such fierce individuals?
“Who is targeting the Si family’s rice shop…”
“Ma Lao Jiu!” Tu Tou Gui hissed angrily, “Is this something you can talk about outside? If our master finds out, we’ll all be dead.”
The pockmarked face on the beam sneered and retorted, “Aren’t you afraid of death talking about our master outside?”
“You!”
“Alright, alright, everyone just calm down.”
The others quickly intervened to defuse the situation.
The two assassins who had just returned composed themselves and asked, “Where’s Jia? He should have taken the proper route. Didn’t he say anything when he returned?”
“According to the rules, he went directly to the ‘house.’ To prevent being followed, the first returning kite isn’t allowed to contact us,” Tu Tou Gui scratched his bald head and asked gruffly, “What kind of tough opponent did you encounter to make you this panicked? Could it be those guys from Fengxing Pavilion again?”
“We did see people from Fengxing Pavilion, but this time it wasn’t about them,” the assassin replied bitterly, holding up three fingers to emphasize, “Three top-notch experts suddenly appeared, each as skilled as the leader. Just hearing about it is terrifying.”
“How do you know they’re as skilled as the leader? Did you fight them?” Ma Lao Jiu quickly asked.
“They were chasing the leader. Just over there on the western mountain, the leader ran back and forth in front of us but couldn’t shake them off. Think about that.”
“……”
Everyone was stunned, the dim candlelight illuminating their bloodless faces.
“That’s impossible. In the martial world, people as skilled as the leader are rare. If we count them all, can we even reach ten fingers? Not counting our master, the Qingwu Ancestor is dead, and the remaining ones are the abbot of Hengchang Temple, the leader of the Tianshan Sect, and that brainless Ning Changyuan. Are you saying the top figures of the two major sects and the best swordsman in the world blocked the leader?”
After Ma Lao Jiu finished, everyone nodded.
The assassin, still looking bitter, continued, “There was indeed an old monk, dressed in rags. I can’t say for sure if he was from Hengchang Temple. But the other two didn’t seem very old; their lightness skill was too high, they flashed past us, and we could only see the shadows of their clothes. One of them might even… be a woman.”
“Oh?”
Tu Tou Gui, obviously knowledgeable about the martial world, tried hard to recall the notable experts and finally said, “Among the elusive experts, the most mysterious one is the Bamboo Knife Guest. Our leader was once interested in this person’s knife skills. But there’s no word of this person being a woman. Some even say he went to work for the government. You didn’t see the face, so how can you be sure it’s a woman?”
“She was wearing pink clothes!”
Outside the window, Meng Qi: “……”
The National Teacher is going to kill someone.
Author’s note:
Mentioning clothes again, Fat Mouse is going to kill someone!
The next chapter will return to Mo Li’s side.
Fat Mouse: Feeling wronged JPG
Will it be like this? No, Meng Qi has his own methods.
(No idea why I couldn’t update today, so I had to resort to sending from the draft box)
