Then What the Hell Am I Living For? I'm Jumping, Brothers

The moonlight was bleak and cold.

Jiang Yuechu dragged Pei Changqing's corpse to a relatively flat patch of earth and began digging with her Horizontal Blade.

After digging for ages, she had only made a shallow pit.

Forget it.

Out here in the wilderness, giving him a burial was already more than she owed him.

Only after finishing did she turn and walk toward the corpses of the Demon Suppression Guards.

When a man died, the birds flew skyward; if he did not die, he lived for ten thousand years.

But even if people were dead, the things on them could still be useful.

Suppressing her nausea, she searched the bodies.

A few bits of broken silver, hard dried meat, and a leather waterskin.

At last, her gaze fell upon a corpse roughly her own size.

The person was very young, with traces of childishness still lingering on his face.

Jiang Yuechu fell silent for a moment.

"...Forgive me, brother."

She murmured it softly, then stripped the black, red-patterned fitted uniform from his body.

She definitely could not keep wearing prison clothes. That thing made her a living target wherever she went.

Putting on Demon Suppression Bureau attire was equally dangerous.

But when weighing the lesser of two evils, she would rather choose the identity that looked harder to provoke.

At least it could bluff people.

The clothes were stained with blood and riddled with tears. They felt cold and stiff against her skin.

She tied up her long hair, haphazardly making a ponytail as she remembered, then hung the Horizontal Blade at her waist.

There was no mirror, but she could imagine how she looked right now.

Neither fish nor fowl.

Yet when her hand closed around the hilt, an inexplicable sense of calm surged through her.

She did not linger. After determining her direction, she set foot upon the main road.

Demon Suppression Bureau uniform—black clothes, red patterns.

The main road was deserted, with only the lone moon for company.

Jiang Yuechu walked silently, her mind racing.

Fortunately, Great Tang's territory and geography in this world were not too different from the history she remembered.

According to her memories, Longyou Circuit, where she now was, roughly corresponded to the Gansu region of later generations.

Since ancient times, Longyou had been known for its fierce folkways. Bordering the nations of the Western Regions and the grassland tribes, it had always been ground every military power fought to possess.

Great Tang stationed heavy troops here and established protectorates to intimidate all directions.

But even so, mounted bandits and roaming outlaws still ran rampant. Coupled with demons and monsters causing trouble, ordinary people did not live well.

Her most urgent problem now was resolving the issue of household registration and a Travel Permit.

According to the fragmented memories of this body, Great Tang's household registration system was called the Household Register.

They were issued uniformly by the Ministry of Revenue under the Department of State Affairs, then distributed layer by layer through prefectures, counties, and townships.

One register per household, recording the head of household, family members, ages, landholdings, and even brief descriptions of their appearance.

This was one's registration.

Only with household registration could one apply to the authorities for a Travel Permit.

With a Travel Permit, one could travel freely within Great Tang, enter cities, pass checkpoints, and stay at inns.

Those without registration were unregistered people.

Those without permits were drifters.

If either was caught by the authorities, their fate would not be pleasant.

The original owner of this body had been the only daughter of a high-ranking official in the Capital City, so naturally she had household registration.

But that was precisely where the problem lay.

After the Jiang Family was convicted, her registration had also been branded as lowborn.

Before he died, Pei Changqing had promised to restore her freedom.

What he meant was that he would erase this lowborn status for her.

Jiang Yuechu rubbed her brow, feeling a headache coming on.

Tch...

What kind of mess was this?

She had just resolved her survival crisis, only to fall headfirst into a dead end over her identity.

How could she solve it?

With this golden finger at her side, killing wild beasts and demons in this wilderness to exchange for Dao Cultivation, grow stronger, and scrape together a living—or even live freely and happily—would not be difficult.

But she did not want to be a wild woman for the rest of her life.

Find some remote village and hide her name and identity?

Too risky.

Great Tang scrutinized household registration strictly. A stranger of unknown origin would sooner or later be questioned.

Forge a Household Register and Travel Permit?

That was even more fantastical.

Where was a penniless weak woman like her supposed to find such connections?

No matter how she thought about it, every path led to death.

Jiang Yuechu stopped and looked up at the lone moon in the sky.

Forget it...

What else could she do?

She would take one step at a time.

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Just as she was thinking this, a burst of urgent hoofbeats suddenly approached from afar.

Clatter, clatter, clatter—

More than ten riders came charging toward her in a cloud of dust.

Jiang Yuechu's pupils contracted, and she instinctively tightened her grip on the hilt at her waist.

The cavalry drew closer and closer. The leader seemed to spot the lone figure standing in the middle of the road and suddenly yanked hard on his reins.

"Whoa—"

More than a dozen fine horses came to a stop together.

Torchlight drove back some of the darkness and illuminated the newcomers' faces.

They were a group of martial men in fitted clothes, each covered in travel dust and wearing anxious expressions, blades and swords hanging at their waists.

Their leader was a middle-aged man with a square face, a thick beard, and sharp eyes.

He had been full of vigilance, but when the firelight revealed the black uniform patterned with red on Jiang Yuechu's body, his expression abruptly changed.

The man dismounted, strode forward several paces, cupped his fists, and bowed.

"May I ask... are you an esteemed officer of the Demon Suppression Bureau?"

Jiang Yuechu's heart skipped a beat.

What she feared had truly come.

She had planned to use this skin as a temporary measure, then find a safe place and look for a chance to change out of it.

Yet she had not expected to run into people in the middle of the night in this godforsaken wilderness.

And from the looks of it, they had mistaken her for an officer of the Demon Suppression Bureau.

Her gaze swiftly swept across the group before her.

Every one of them was brimming with vigor. Clearly, they were no ordinary people.

They all rode tall horses. If she tried to kill them to silence them, there was no guarantee even one would not escape.

Her thoughts spun rapidly, but Jiang Yuechu's face remained expressionless.

She had to keep up the act!

The more she said, the more likely she was to slip. The highest level of cool was saying nothing!

She did not answer, merely looked coldly at the man.

That silent pressure indeed made him even more respectful.

Only after a long while did Jiang Yuechu finally say in a muffled voice, "What is it?"

Though she deliberately lowered her voice, she was still a young girl in the bloom of youth, and it came out rather comical.

The man was also somewhat startled.

So young?

And a woman?

Besides, why would someone from the Demon Suppression Bureau appear alone in such desolate wilderness?

One had to know that every circuit had a Regional Command under the Demon Suppression Bureau, but there were no branches in its subordinate prefectures or counties.

And the nearest Demon-Suppressing Regional Command was far away in Liangzhou.

Could it be...

He shook his head, dismissing the distracting thoughts.

"My lady, please hear me out! I am Chen Qingyuan, sect master of Guangwu County's Flying Eagle Sect. We received an order from the Guangwu County magistrate and rushed through the night to reinforce Shangpan Village."

"Shangpan Village?"

"Yes!" Chen Qingyuan's face was filled with urgency. "Three days ago, a group of Wolf Demons broke into the village, slaughtered the villagers, and occupied the place! After receiving the magistrate's request for aid, we intended to go and eliminate them, but those demons were numerous and exceptionally vicious. My Flying Eagle Sect lost seven or eight skilled men..."

As he spoke, a trace of shame surfaced on his face.

"We truly had no way to deal with them. We were preparing to return to the county seat and report to the magistrate, then seek another solution... Never did we expect to encounter you here, my lady!"

"The Demon Suppression Bureau's renown shakes the land. Since you are here, you must be pursuing an important case. But the hundred or so villagers of Shangpan Village are in mortal danger. I beg you to lend us your aid and save them from fire and water!"

As he spoke, Chen Qingyuan actually dropped to one knee.

"I beg you to act, my lady!"

Behind him, the dozen or so men of the Flying Eagle Sect also dismounted in unison and knelt on one knee, an imposing sight.

"I beg you to act, my lady!"

Jiang Yuechu: "..."

She was completely numb.

Fine, fine, fine...

Heavens, this was how You wanted to mess with her?

Then what the hell was she still living for?

She was jumping, brothers.

Seeing that she remained silent for so long, Chen Qingyuan could not help growing anxious.

He knew that most people from the Demon Suppression Bureau had strange temperaments.

But the horrific situation in Shangpan Village left him no time to speculate about this lady's thoughts.

At first, they had thought it was merely ordinary demons passing through and harassing the villagers.

But when they charged in headlong, they discovered that things were far more complicated.

Those beasts had actually occupied the village and refused to leave!

They penned up the survivors in the ancestral hall like pigs and sheep, dragging out several every day to devour them alive before everyone's eyes.

The men were disemboweled, while the women and children were reduced to playthings.

The county magistrate had barely more than a hundred soldiers under his command. They could suppress bandits, but facing such demons would be no different from marching to their deaths.

And the nearest prefecture to Guangwu County was Lanzhou Prefecture.

Even riding at full speed, a round trip would take at least ten days to half a month.

By then, Shangpan Village would already have become a village of the dead.

Which meant...

The esteemed officer of the Demon Suppression Bureau before them was their only hope.