Butcher

"So it was a person. You scared me half to death."

The burly man opposite him let out a lingeringly frightened voice, apparently startled by Chu Danqing as well.

"I thought you were some mountain ghoul or demon. I was even thinking, it isn't dark yet."

Only then did Chu Danqing get a clear look at the other man.

He was a butcher dressed in a short shirt, with a coarse cloth apron tied around his waist. A carrying pole lay not far away.

Apparently, while Chu Danqing had been gathering the remains, the other man had noticed movement in the haystack and come over with a pig-slaughtering knife in hand.

"Ho, two wolves." The butcher curiously stepped closer, examined the wolf carcasses on Chu Danqing's shoulder, then gave them a critique. "Their looks are a bit lacking."

"Still, they had some nerve. They deserved to die here."

Butchers naturally had no fondness for wolves. The best possible fate for one was to become a pot of meat.

Then he noticed Chu Danqing's appearance and asked, "Little brother, you're not from around here, are you?"

"Passing through." Chu Danqing did not engage in any enthusiastic small talk. He was observing the butcher as well.

The man might have looked broad and careless, but one could not judge a book by its cover.

"Don't be afraid, little brother. I'm no villain. I live in Xianghua Village up ahead."

"People who know me call me Jiang the Butcher. I make my living slaughtering pigs and selling meat. In all the villages around here, anyone who sees the meat I sell has to praise it." The butcher was not overly familiar, merely introducing himself first.

Chu Danqing looked him up and down, suspicion showing in his eyes. "The wolves were killed here. Didn't you run into them when you came out to sell your goods?"

Leaving aside why a butcher would carry meat out to sell, it was strange that he had not encountered them while taking this road.

"What? Here?!" Jiang the Butcher's reaction surprised Chu Danqing. "I only changed routes today because I stopped to rest. Hardly anyone usually takes this road."

In other words, he had decided on a whim rather than following his usual route.

Unless the man was an exceptional actor, his words were quite believable.

"Wait, what is that at your waist?" Jiang the Butcher had noticed something unusual about Chu Danqing as well.

One was always wary of outsiders.

After all, people did not travel much in ancient times. If a stranger entered a place, there was practically no way to avoid notice.

Even someone like Jiang the Butcher, who traveled through streets and lanes, only followed fixed routes.

"A child eaten by wolves. A boy."

"I gathered up what was left and planned to take it to Xianghua Village to ask around."

"You said you're from Xianghua Village. You should know something about this, right?" As Chu Danqing spoke, his eyes remained fixed on Jiang the Butcher. The moment the other man made any strange move, he would strike.

Jiang the Butcher's expression changed as it should have, but out in the wilderness, he could not possibly trust a stranger's one-sided account.

Just as Jiang the Butcher's conversation with Chu Danqing had contained some probing of his own.

"I know. The village chief's youngest grandson, San Niu, went missing seven days ago." Jiang the Butcher looked at the scrap of cloth Chu Danqing took out. It did indeed belong to the village chief's child.

"We searched Back River for two days, but never expected..."

At that point, Jiang the Butcher suddenly shut his mouth and did not continue.

Still, his attitude toward Chu Danqing had changed. Gone was the polite warmth from before.

"Little brother, you've traveled a long way, and it'll be dark soon. Let's go to Xianghua Village and rest awhile."

"You found that old village chief's grandson's remains. He'll definitely have to reward you properly."

"Let's pick up the pace. We'll be there in a quarter of an hour." As Jiang the Butcher spoke, he put away his pig-slaughtering knife, hoisted his carrying pole, and led the way.

"What is your surname, little brother?" Jiang the Butcher's chatter did not stop, and only now did he remember to ask Chu Danqing's name.

Before dying, Chu Danqing naturally would not have cared about giving his name. It was only a name.

But what if?

Better to choose an alias. While traveling, he had no intention of harming others, but a guarded heart was still necessary.

"My surname is Chu. My given name is Mo," Chu Danqing said.

Danqing referred to painting, whose elegant name could be Silent Poem, so he chose the character Mo.

Just like Jiang the Butcher, who had only given his nickname rather than his real name.

That made them even.

"Little brother, your name... is truly distinctive." Jiang the Butcher did not think much of it and simply offered an instinctive compliment.

In business, after all, one spoke human words to humans and ghost words to ghosts.

Yet he found that he truly did not know how to praise it.

Fortunately, he was quite adept at dealing with all kinds of people, and quickly found another topic.

Most of the time, Chu Danqing only listened and rarely interjected.

He was a modern man. The more he said, the more likely he was to make a mistake.

Besides, listening more allowed him to gather information about Xianghua Village from Jiang the Butcher, even if it was only household gossip.

This made Jiang the Butcher feel that Chu Danqing had truly chosen the character Mo well. He really was silent all along the way.

Before nightfall, the two arrived at Xianghua Village without incident.

At the village entrance, a large banyan tree stood out, its branches lush and leafy.

Yet what stood out even more was the person sitting beneath it.

He was a man even more burly than Jiang the Butcher, at least two meters tall, looking immensely strong and powerful.

But his appearance was slovenly and filthy, his clothes tattered and haphazardly put together.

What drew Chu Danqing's attention, however, was not the man's appearance, but his expression, so different from his rough exterior.

Chu Danqing was not one to judge people by appearances, yet when he saw the man, an impolite phrase inevitably surfaced in his mind—intellectually underdeveloped.

One of the Three Scenes—the Village Guardian? Chu Danqing immediately thought of the Xianghua Three Scenes described in the mission introduction.

Jiang the Butcher saw him too and shouted, "Da Bao, whose house are you eating at tonight?"

Only after shouting did he turn to explain to Chu Danqing, "Da Bao is the village's Village Guardian. His mind isn't too sharp, but he has a good heart."

His words sounded like a reminder, but what he really meant was: do not provoke the fool. If he cracked your head open, you would have no grounds to complain.

Hearing Jiang the Butcher, Da Bao answered in a dull, muffled voice, "The village chief's house. Da Dezi hasn't come to call me yet."

"Don't wait for him to call. I'm going to the village chief's house too, so come with me." Jiang the Butcher beckoned, took a handful of pork cracklings from his waist pouch, and handed them to Da Bao.

Da Bao did not stand on ceremony or refuse. He grabbed them and stuffed them into his mouth, chewing away.

Then he asked indistinctly, "Da Jiang, should I chase out the stranger you brought?"

"Just eat. Little Brother Chu is the village chief's guest." Jiang the Butcher did not know whether to laugh or cry. "If you really chased him off, not only would you go hungry tonight, you'd have to sleep with me too."

"I don't want to. You fart and grind your teeth when you sleep." After swallowing the cracklings, Da Bao spoke with disgust.

Hearing that, Chu Danqing secretly let out a breath of relief.

His start had not gone wrong. If he had not run into Jiang the Butcher, a villager of Xianghua Village, Village Guardian Da Bao definitely would not have let him enter.

With Da Bao's way of thinking, there was no reasoning with him.

And Chu Danqing could not use force. Whether he won or lost, he would offend the villagers of Xianghua Village, no different from falling into a vicious cycle.