Having reached a consensus and gained the staunch support of Ji Zhenyun and his nephew Ji Rulin, Meng Zhao had more or less achieved his first objective in coming to Hu Mountain.
He now possessed a force independent of both Lingwu City and the Meng Family, even if only temporarily.
This was crucial, directly affecting the success or failure of this journey to Liang Prefecture. Things now looked far better than he had anticipated, and the information he had gathered was much more detailed, allowing him to calmly plot great undertakings and improve his odds of victory.
Ji Zhenyun moved with remarkable speed. After their discussion ended, he brought Meng Zhao and Ji Rulin with him, summoned more than a dozen respected and capable clan elders, then presented Meng Zhao, under the alias Lu Yang, as his son-in-law, saying that he would be living in the mountains for a time.
When he had married off his daughter, it had been rather rushed. Though he had prepared a generous dowry, he had not disclosed the groom's exact identity, and only a handful of trusted confidants knew. Using this to fool these people now was not difficult.
He proposed that his son-in-law Lu Yang possessed superb martial arts and was skilled in battle formations, and therefore five thousand Dan Chi warriors should be drawn out to form a guard unit as a regular fighting force to protect the Dan Chi Clan.
Naturally, this proposal was not approved without a hitch. The dozen-odd old men were split down the middle. It was not impossible to force it through, but doing so would leave too many hidden dangers and require much more time and effort to clean up afterward.
However, after some mediation, they decided to test his mettle through martial arts.
Meng Zhao