A Peaceful Sleep

"Er Gou, give each of them one tael of silver."

She asked, her face full of confusion, "Who's Er Gou?"

"You are. Who else?" Lin Xuan said with a grin.

Lin An's almond eyes immediately widened. She reached out and gave his arm a gentle pinch, chiding him under her breath. "I just helped you come up with a plan and earn great merit, and you turn around and call me names!"

Lin Xuan laughed. "Haha, I was just afraid we'd blow our cover!"

"Even so, you're not allowed to call me that."

Seeing the varied expressions on their faces, Lin Xuan said, "If you don't want to, then forget it. Take the silver and go home, each of you."

The first to speak was the woman from Li Family Village. She wiped away a tear and knocked her head heavily against the ground.

"Young hero is right. We... we're willing to go. It's all work, and it's better than having people point fingers at us every day and being subjected to private punishment."

The others also nodded through their tears, no longer hesitating in the slightest.

"I'll go too..."

"All I ask is enough to eat and somewhere to live..."

After watching Lin An give each woman one tael of silver, Lin Xuan went to the granary opposite the living quarters.

The bandits had stockpiled some grain, though not much. It looked like a little over a thousand jin, enough to feed everyone on this mountain for around twenty to thirty days.

But now they were all dead. Surely he couldn't just leave the grain here to grow mold and rot?

There were handcarts nearby, so Lin Xuan expertly loaded the grain onto two flatbed carts. Then he set fire to all the houses here, corpses and all.

The flames rose high, and the crackling of wood rang out without end. The women who had been abducted huddled nearby, warming themselves by the fire.

Pushing the grain, Lin Xuan called out to the women, "Take care of yourselves."

Then he and Lin An hauled the grain down the mountain together.

With one flatbed cart each, they could carry all the grain in a single trip. There was still a little left in the warehouse, but the carts were already loaded to capacity, so Lin Xuan might as well have thrown the rest away.

It was still the dead of night. The small blaze on Wolf Cave Mountain stood out clearly in the distance.

Lin Xuan had no intention of reporting the bandit chief's death to the authorities to claim a reward. They might twist the truth and accuse him of slaughtering innocent people.

The grain was ownerless now, so naturally he would haul it back home.

The grain amounted to a little over a thousand jin, worth around twenty taels of silver. Added to the cash they had collected earlier, their total haul from wiping out the bandits came to more than fifty taels.

A full fifty taels!

It really proved that killing and arson filled one's belt with gold. They worked themselves to the bone farming at home, with a full twenty mu of land. After paying all kinds of exorbitant taxes and covering food, clothing, and other expenses, how much profit could they make in a year?

Wiping out a bandit den in one night was worth years of hard labor.

In truth, they should have gotten even more. Lin An's tactic of burning down the houses must have destroyed quite a few valuables.

But Lin Xuan didn't feel it was a shame. Without that tactic, he might not have been able to beat the bandits.

When they got home, Lin Xuan shut the gate, dropped the crossbar into place, and lay straight down on the flatbed cart to rest.

"Now we can finally sleep in peace." Lin Xuan glanced sideways at Lin An, who was still unloading grain, and let out a relieved breath.

After the bandits had stopped them in the street, Lin Xuan had been on edge all day, focusing single-mindedly on increasing his strength. Now that their greatest enemy had been wiped out, he could finally breathe a sigh of relief.

Still, he had no intention of slacking off. He was nowhere near strong enough to take it easy.

Lin An nodded, but didn't look very happy. "Yeah. I just don't know how long this peaceful sleep will last."

She could sense that order was growing more and more chaotic. When she had first arrived in Liang City, there hadn't been many bandits. Now, one den after another was popping up.

Would there be more bandits than common folk someday?

She didn't know.

At her words, Lin Xuan grinned. "Don't worry, then. With me around, I'll keep you safe."

With that, he hopped off the cart and began practicing martial arts in the courtyard. The moon hung high and the stars were sparse, moonlight falling on the two of them as they tirelessly trained.

The Eidetic Memory talent he had obtained for killing the bandit's son was well suited to studying.

Yet Lin Xuan had never considered changing his fate through the imperial examinations. They might consume few resources, and he did have some learning under his belt; if he took the exams, he could probably manage to land some minor official post.

But the payoff would take too long, and with chaos on the horizon, it was better to have brute strength enough to shatter all laws with a single blow.

They worked through the night until the eastern sky brightened.

The women on Wolf Cave Mountain who had borne children to the bandits did not take their children down the mountain with them.

It started when one woman left her child behind. She loathed the child from the depths of her heart, seeing him as a mark of humiliation, a symbol of suffering—not her flesh and blood, but a curse, a demon's spawn.

The child had brought her such deep misery. She believed he shouldn't be hers and that she shouldn't have to raise him. Raising a child for someone like that was only creating more sin.

So she abandoned the child, left her past behind, and found a soldier's household to marry into, starting over with a life that had already been shattered to pieces.

Even as the child cried and pleaded, his nose running and tears streaming, "Mother, don't you want me anymore?"

It made no difference.

People tended to follow the crowd. Seeing one woman abandon her child gave the others the same idea, and they soon followed suit.

For them, the children were indeed a burden. Their feelings toward them were tangled with love and hate, and that mix of resentment and pity left them at a loss. Once someone else took the lead, they followed her example.

They wanted to go to the Qin Family and marry into soldiers' households to start new lives. Bringing the children along would only drag them down and weigh them down.

But one older woman, Li Cui, was different from the others.

Seeing those mothers leave their children behind, she couldn't help murmuring, "Amitabha," her heart aching.

"What a terrible sin!"

She thought the children were innocent. She didn't want to go down the mountain, nor could she bear to see them freeze or starve to death out here in the wilderness. Just thinking about it felt sinful.

But she knew she had no right to accuse or blame their mothers.

Their mothers weren't the source of all this sin.

She planned to raise all the abandoned children herself and teach them to turn away from evil and do good. Once they grew up, they could perform more good deeds.

That would help atone for the sins she had committed by caring for bandits just to stay alive, and let the children atone for the sins of their fathers as well.

All the other women had gone down the mountain, but she remained behind.

Once everyone had left, she went to the ruins where the living quarters had burned to ashes and poked through the debris with sticks and whatever else she could find, hoping to uncover some money or valuables.

She actually found something. A moment later, a perfectly intact jade pendant appeared before her eyes.

Li Cui blew the ash off its surface, and the soot scattered at once. She cried out in surprise, "Isn't this... the jade pendant Wang Mazi accidentally found on Rou Mountain?"

Wang Mazi was one of the bandits on Wolf Cave Mountain and Li Cui's "husband." After finding this item, he had shown it to Li Cui before hiding it away. He must have thought it was something extraordinary.