Settling In

Time ambled leisurely onward.

Yang Ge's days were once again filled with life's little chores.

By day, he shuttled between the Welcome Inn and the Iron Fist Martial Hall.

Shopkeeper Liu kept insisting that he wanted to retire, but in the end, he still could not let go of the inn's business. Every day, he arrived on time to get to work. Yang Ge nominally drew a shopkeeper's wages, but still did a waiter's work.

Yang Ge thought this was rather good. Plenty of old men spent most of their lives working without illness or mishap, brimming with vitality, only to decline within two or three years of taking it easy.

With something to occupy him, the old shopkeeper might hold on for a few more years.

Of course, Yang Ge was also happy to have less on his plate...

After marrying, Liu Mang had indeed become much steadier.

Following Yang Ge's advice, he held off on putting up a sign and recruited a batch of apprentices at low fees. On ordinary days, he led them through martial training, then took them around Luting County to repair bridges, pave roads, and help the poor.

Only after the residents of Luting County gradually grew accustomed to their presence did he quietly hang up the "Iron Fist Martial Hall" sign. He did not even set off a single string of firecrackers.

Even so, once the sign went up, several groups of martial drifters looking for handouts still came knocking to challenge the hall.

Seeing that these men bore no great malice, Yang Ge let Liu Mang face their challenges. Win or lose, he gave them travel money afterward, forging a friendly bond.

As time passed, the Iron Fist Martial Hall slowly made a name for itself in Luting County. Liu Mang even earned the fine sobriquet "Little Mengchang," and martial wanderers passing through the county often came to compare notes and make his acquaintance...

At night, Yang Ge did not rest either.

The massacre at the county offices had left him gloomy for a long time. After reflecting on that painful lesson, he began putting serious effort into straightening out the guardsmen under his command.

For tracking and surveillance.

Under the banner of collective discussion and collective improvement, he started the Midnight Training Class.

Every night, he tapped away at a little blackboard, breaking down the traits and characteristics of people in all kinds of trades and slowly teaching them to these men who knew only how to fight and kill.

How did you disguise yourself as a steamed-bread seller?

First, you needed a carrying pole loaded with steamed bread, didn't you? Then you needed to smell a little of smoke and burning firewood, didn't you? And your clothes needed traces of flour, didn't they?

Going a step further, shouldn't you greet people with a hint of a smile? When someone bought your bread, shouldn't you bend slightly at the waist? Shouldn't you be practiced at wrapping it? And when you handed it to a customer, shouldn't you use both hands?

For infiltration and investigation.

He drew diagram after diagram dissecting interpersonal relationships, slowly analyzing things from the perspective of human nature: which identity was best suited to approaching each kind of target, and least likely to put them on their guard.

You wanted to approach a young lady from a prominent family?

Making up an identity on the spot to approach a young lady who spent her days never stepping beyond the outer gate or even the inner door was indeed difficult.

But couldn't you try another angle and start with the people around her? Did she have a maid? Was her maid married? Did you know how to use a handsome man as bait?

What? The maid spent all day beside her mistress and was hard to approach too? Then couldn't you approach the maid's parents? Buy some gifts and visit her home. Chop firewood and carry water for her family for a few days. Whether she fancied you or not, chances were she would sneak out to meet you at least once.

For armed assaults.

He divided the fifty guardsmen of his small-banner units into teams of three. Following the training principle of "as long as it doesn't kill you, train like it will," he put everything into drilling these killers, who came from the border armies and already had solid combat experience.

The strong but slow to react got shields and hammers.

The bold with steady footing got sabers and swords.

The fast with good aim got bows and crossbows.

In each team of three, one drew fire and controlled the battlefield, one attacked head-on and dealt the main damage, and one harried the enemy from a distance and dealt secondary damage.

Once the three-man teams were established, he further refined how they should coordinate in open-field battles, alley fights, and night engagements, as well as how to fight when they outnumbered the enemy and when the enemy outnumbered them.

Then they advanced further still: how to break apart and reorganize into larger formations during mass battles, when to charge hard and strike fiercely, and when to hold their ground and wait for support...

None of this study and practice was merely warfare on paper.

When studying how to sell steamed bread, Yang Ge really did pick men to shoulder carrying poles with portable stoves and go out selling it. If they failed to sell any, everyone worked together to find the reason, until they could sell out.

When studying how to approach a young lady from a prominent family, Yang Ge really did choose one in Luting County and send someone to play the handsome-man lure, until he brought back all her interests and hobbies.

When studying armed assaults, he took the field himself, using his overwhelming martial strength, a full major realm above these guardsmen, to let them experience the pressure of facing an expert firsthand.

Under his tireless goading, everyone improved.

When the guardsmen went out again, pedestrians gradually stopped instinctively steering clear of them.

When they went to tow boats along the Bian River, cargo owners finally dared to bark orders at them to move goods.

Even when playing the handsome-man lure, they genuinely began to look like innocent sons of respectable families: simple, honest, and dependable.

And during sparring, unless Yang Ge used killing moves, he gradually became unable to break through the encirclement and harassment of two teams...

As for Yang Ge's own improvement, it was naturally even greater!

All the meridians throughout his body were open, resilient, and broad. Circulating inner qi at his current level was as easy as spreading his fingers to pluck a snail from a field. Unlike other inner qi martial artists, he had no need to calm his mind and focus before he could control its circulation.

In other words, whenever he wished, whether he was waiting tables at the inn or tapping the blackboard at the Embroidered Uniform Guard's base in Gong and Drum Lane, he could keep the inner qi throughout his body running through the greater celestial circuit, without the slightest worry of disrupting his qi or suffering cultivation deviation...

And he truly took Shen Fa's words to heart. Rather than trying to grow fat in a single bite, he steadily honed his inner qi, personally feeling every inch and fraction of its improvement.

Yet compared with the daily growth of his cultivation, what truly advanced by leaps and bounds was his combat technique!

People said actual combat was the best teacher, and there was not a shred of falsehood in that.

When he trained hard alone behind closed doors, he often imagined how he should respond if an enemy attacked from this direction or that.

But such imagined scenarios naturally came with their own solutions. However rich one man's imagination was, he could never imagine every killing move ten martial fighters might devise.

Moreover, in actual combat, his opponents' techniques were often nowhere near as honorable as he imagined... Once the forest was big enough, every kind of bird appeared: gouging eyes and jabbing nostrils, stabbing kidneys and hammering balls, clouds of lime powder, deadly poisoned hidden weapons-he could run into anything!

Hadn't someone bitten him in the lower back last time?

That time, it was only because the man's night clothes were so tight they pinched his crotch that he had nowhere to carry a second weapon, while Yang Ge had knocked the saber from his hand with a table... Otherwise, those two big kidneys of his would have suffered terribly that day.

And this fatal weakness was finally, slowly being patched through his day-after-day drills with the guardsmen under his command.

Shield charges and knife thrusts, with surprise arrows shooting at his ass from afar.

Waist grabs and groin kicks, black bears clawing hearts and monkeys stealing peaches.

Trip ropes and iron nets, quicklime mixed with knockout powder...

Under Yang Ge's tireless battering, these bastards truly stopped at nothing to beat him even once, combining relentless attacks with every dirty trick in the book.

If Yang Ge's concentration slipped for even a second, he would take several vicious hits!

More than once, on his way home from Gong and Drum Lane, he strutted grandly out through the gate, only to clamp his thighs together, tuck his backside in, and fly into a thunderous rage the next moment.

For Yang Ge, a puffed-up fighter with the martial rank but neither the execution nor the combat awareness to match, these intense, fast-paced drills in fighting many opponents alone...

Were just like taking a novice driver accustomed to a tiny old folks' runabout, putting him straight into a beastly GT-R, and chasing him onto a highway with no speed limit.

Never mind how much driving skill he learned.

First, weld the accelerator to the floor and let him experience the allure of top speed!

And once a novice driver grew accustomed to speeds above 250 kilometers an hour, even if his driving still had plenty of flaws, he would inevitably feel utterly at ease when he returned to an ordinary family car!

At the very least, the next time he faced three opponents alone, he would never again lack the confidence to do anything but say, "Running away happens to be another specialty of mine..."

During this time...

Shen Fa seemed to have vanished without a sound or trace, never showing his face in Luting County again.

But the intelligence sent from the Upper Capital to Yang Ge never stopped.

On the sixth day of the ninth month, a band of outlaw martial fighters stormed the imperial prison. One hundred and seven were captured, and nationwide arrest warrants were issued for thirty-six, known in the martial world as the Thirty-Six Heavenly Gang Heroes.

On the ninth day of the ninth month, all one hundred and eighty-six members of the Xie Clan of Marquis Zhaowu were beheaded outside the Upper Capital's Vermilion Bird Gate, their blood staining the Luo River.

On the eighteenth day of the ninth month, the imperial troops of the Three Metropolitan Commands underwent a major redeployment...