Chapter 658: Isn’t It Because of You?
The few burly men looked at Ling Chuxi hesitantly. Compared to ordinary people, their cultivation level could be considered on par with experts, but before Ling Chuxi, they had the feeling of being unable to raise their heads.
“An expert! Furthermore, no ordinary expert!” exclaimed a few people very quickly, coming to an accurate judgement of Ling Chuxi’s abilities.
“You terrible brat, consider yourself lucky today. I will not be calculative against you this time. But the next time we meet, I will beat you until even your old mother will not be able to recognize you,” said the burly men who were cheated by Jiang Wuhen. They did not dare to provoke Ling Chuxi and they simply took a few silver notes and stuffed them amongst their other belongings after they spoke. Under Ling Chuxi’s invisible might, they actually did not even dare to take any extra money.
“Miss Ling, it’s you! You’re okay!” exclaimed Jiang Wuhen and Li Shaoqiu, surprised and delighted as they raised their heads to look at Ling Chuxi. Where was there a need for the burly men to fulfill their promise the next time? The two of them had already been beaten until their faces were so swollen that their old mothers probably wouldn’t recognize them.
“My lady, these two are not good people. You have to be careful not to be cheated by them,” the sturdy aunty kindly advised Ling Chuxi as she took back her own silver.
“I will be careful. Many thanks,aunty,” replied Ling Chuxi with a nod.
Very quickly, everyone who was cheated took back their own money. Then, Ling Chuxi brought Jiang Wuhen and Li Shaoqiu with her and speedily left this place of trouble. Once Zhou Zhidong saw Ling Chuxi dragging those two troublemakers away, he shrunk his neck back and secretly trailed after them with a red face.
“Ah, that’s right. What about me? You said that you would give me twelve taels for each kowtow. I did eight kowtows but you still haven’t paid me… Hey! Wait up, wait up! You owe me money! You owe me money!” called out Old Man Zhang loudly from behind, seeming to have awakened from a dream just at this moment. Ling Chuxi nonchalantly threw a piece of silver note in his direction and just as Old Man Zhang picked it up and shoved it into his sleeve, he noticed that his situation wasn’t too good. A group of people surrounded him, enclosing him within a circle.
“That’s right. There is still this old cheat to deal with. He was in it together with them too. Let’s get him.” Everyone surrounding Old Man Zhang responded to this call of action. The main characters had left, but weren’t the accomplices still here?
From behind Ling Chuxi’s little posse, Old Man Zhang’s miserable wails, howls, and rebukes that rose up one after the other came transmitting over. Zhou Zhidong wiped his forehead in relief. Good thing for him. Luckily, he had left the scene quickly.
Sigh. Thinking about how he had gone from being a heavily weighted minister and a famed general of a country to actually falling into such a low field of work, Great General Zhou’s face bore an expression of sadness and innocence.
“How did all of you fall to such a level?” asked Ling Chuxi to Jiang Wuhen, Li Shaoqiu and Great General Zhou as they sat resting in a small and rundown teahouse by the streets.
“Sigh. Isn’t this all because of you?” said Jiang Wuhen and Li Shaoqiu, pressing cloths drenched in cold snow water against their pig-headed faces as they aired their woes sadly.
“Because of me?” asked Ling Chuxi, looking at them curiously. Suppressing her laughter was truly a difficult thing. The two of them had truly turned into actual big pig heads.
“Back then, when we were in Ding Lin’s capital city, you all left to go to Silver Ancient Mountain Range without even notifying us. By the time we found out on the second day of your absence, it was already too late. Just as we wanted to return to the posthouse to await your return, who would have known that we were instead met by an ambush by people from Wu Feng Hall? Lucky for us, General Zhou’s cultivation and abilities were strong enough to fight them off, and only after a battle resulting in over ten deaths of the soldiers with us, did we manage to escape,” recounted Jiang Wuhen.
“You don’t have to stick gold on my face. In the past, it was my duty to guard the borders in the Northwest, and during my time there, I thought that my cultivation was not bad. But during this trip away from the borders, I learnt that I was merely a frog in a well. The ones who ambushed us were merely secondary combatants of Wu Feng Hall and yet, if it wasn’t for the soldiers who desperately protected us at the cost of their lives, we wouldn’t even have been able to escape Ding Lin’s capital city,” lamented Zhou Zhidong while sighing. His tone was filled with sourness, astringency and the bitterness of suffering.
He was not wrong either. If it were not for the fact that all of the Wu Feng Hall elites were with Chu Fengyun dealing with Mo Kongyuan, Ling Chuxi and the rest of the guardians instead of ambushing the Nan Xia troupe, none of them would have survived as Zhou Zhidong’s cultivation was indeed not strong enough to have dealt with such an attack. If Wu Feng Hall had really struck the troupe with all its might, even if all of them had ten lives, all of those lives would have been lost in Ding Lin Country. How could there have even been a chance of escape if that was the case?