I'm Tainted

East Willow Village.

As the wolfish, tigerish soldiers ransacked house after house, the entire village looked as though bandits had swept through it, with not a single grain left.

The villagers were driven from their homes into an open space in the village. Like a flock of docile sheep, they dared neither rage nor speak.

Cries and pleas rang out from several houses: soldiers were violating the women of the village.

But the Company Officer in charge acted as though he hadn't heard them, utterly indifferent.

The Company Officer was powerfully built, clad in armor and mounted on a tall horse, with a saber at his waist and a vicious look in his eyes.

This remote backwater had nothing but coarse peasant women. Only his rough-handed men, who had never seen women before, would take whatever they could get. He had no eye for these country girls.

Besides, they'd come all this way in the middle of the night to plunder grain and supplies. What was wrong with letting the brothers have some fun?

They were just a bunch of lowborn commoners. They were all going to die anyway, so they might as well reward his men before they did.

"Boss, there's too little grain in this village. I'm afraid it won't be enough to complete our assignment."

One of his men gave a rough count of the grain the soldiers had brought back and reported with a deep frown.

"Fuck, I knew it."

The Company Officer's face darkened the instant he heard his subordinate's words.

"Wang Laoliu was up to no good, all right, sending me to a poor place like this. Just wait till I get back and settle the score with him."

"Boss, put settling scores aside for now. If we can't complete tonight's mission, General Shao will surely punish us severely."

The Company Officer's pupils narrowed slightly. General Shao governed his troops harshly, showed no regard for personal ties, and cared only about results, not how they were achieved.

If they failed tonight's mission, he would get dozens of strokes with a military rod at best and a demotion at worst.

He had struggled to climb to the position of Company Officer. How could he willingly go back to being an ordinary soldier?

Suddenly, the Company Officer seemed to hit on an idea. He turned his gaze toward the flock of sheep huddled together, heads bowed and bodies trembling.

A vicious gleam appeared in his eyes.

His subordinate seemed to guess what the Company Officer had in mind, and his face immediately went pale with fright.

"Boss, no, absolutely not. We'd never get it past the warehouse inspectors."

"Then what do you suggest?"

The Company Officer was visibly annoyed that the good idea he'd struggled to come up with had been rejected.

"There should be other villages nearby. As long as we're quick about it, we should be able to finish the mission before daybreak."

The subordinate hurriedly offered his solution.

The Company Officer stroked his chin, thinking it seemed a little more reliable than the method he'd thought of himself.

"All right, we'll do it your way."

Clang—

The Company Officer suddenly drew the steel saber at his waist, his face full of cruelty and malice.

"First, I'll butcher that old bastard. He's been buzzing in my ear like a fly, making so much noise my head's about to burst."

Ever since the village head saw all the grain stored in the villagers' homes being plundered and heard the sounds of the women being violated,

he had abandoned all hope of being spared and had been screaming nonstop:

"Animals... beasts... you're not human..."

Even after the soldiers kicked him down and pinned him to the ground, his furious curses and roars never stopped.

The only reason the Company Officer had held off ordering his death was that he feared it would provoke the villagers into a revolt.

It wasn't that he couldn't suppress these unarmed villagers, but that he worried a few fish might slip through the net in the chaos and reveal their whereabouts and identities.

Their mission this time had to remain secret; it absolutely could not be leaked or exposed.

But when all the grain had been stripped clean, when all the villagers had been driven together,

and when he found that they were all sheep without a shred of spirit or courage,

the Company Officer no longer had any misgivings.

The village head was covered in dirt and dust. Old and feeble, he was no match for the young, strong soldiers.

Pinned to the ground in a sorry state, he couldn't move.

"You're not government soldiers at all. You're even more deranged than bandits and robbers! Who are you? Aren't you afraid the imperial court will put out a warrant and send troops to wipe you out for this?"

Seeing the Company Officer approach him with a steel saber, the village head showed no fear in his eyes. He craned his neck and roared in anger.

"Old bastard, you've got some pretty hard bones. I just wonder whether your neck is as hard as your bones."

The Company Officer had put up with this old bastard's incessant yammering for a long time.

The mission should have been finished in one go, but because this village was so poor, they had to make another trip.

Being poor was one thing, but the bastard was fucking defiant, too.

Couldn't he just quietly be a sheep waiting for slaughter like the other villagers?

The steel saber rose, the Company Officer's face full of malice and brutality.

Seventy or eighty villagers had been driven together and penned in like sheep by a dozen or so soldiers.

They hadn't resisted when they were driven together and confined,

they hadn't resisted when the grain in their homes was plundered,

and when their wives and daughters were dragged out of the houses by soldiers with satisfied looks on their faces,

they hadn't resisted then either.

Even now, when their village head was about to lose his head, they still showed no intention of resisting.

Like a flock of quails, they kept their heads bowed low and their necks tucked in, their bodies trembling as they huddled together.

It was as if they were telling the soldiers: You've taken the grain and played with our wives and daughters, so after you kill the village head, you can't kill us, okay?

But what they didn't know was that

the Company Officer's mission involved more than plundering grain from the villages.

It also involved—

silencing witnesses,

and slaughtering the villages.

The moment their village head's head hit the ground, it would be time to kill every last one of them.

"Hahaha... want to know who we are? Go ask King Yama in the underworld."

With a burst of mocking, arrogant laughter from the Company Officer, the raised steel saber came slashing down.

Boom—

It wasn't the sound of the village head's head hitting the ground, but the tremendous crash of a wall collapsing and shattering.

Amid flying rubble and broken bricks, with dust and powder billowing,

two pieces of something that looked human came flying out as well.

One was buried in the rubble and broken bricks,

and the other landed at the Company Officer's feet.

"What the hell is that?"

The Company Officer was startled by the thing that had suddenly come flying toward him, and the steel saber in his hand came to an abrupt stop in midair.

When he looked closely by the faint light of the torches and the moon, his expression froze.

It was a corpse with only its upper half left,

staring at him with eyes that hadn't closed in death.

He knew the man. He was one of the ordinary soldiers under his command.

"Who killed Wang Er? Who was it?"

The Company Officer flew into a rage, his vicious, brutal face twisting into a hideous grimace.

He looked up and glared in the direction Wang Er's body had come from, only to see a figure in green slowly emerge from the gaping hole in the wall.

Gao Yunyi walked out at a leisurely pace,

his face expressionless, but his eyes

were as cold as ice.

What he hated most in this life was gay men.

And just now,

a gay man had actually eye-fucked him.

He...

was tainted.