Liuzi's little courtyard was gone. All that remained was a heap of shattered bricks and broken tiles.
Lü Bufan crouched down and rummaged through the rubble. Nothing was left. Anything with the slightest value seemed to have been picked clean, right down to the intact bricks and tiles.
Big Black had stayed on the mountain to sleep in, while Lü Bufan slipped into town alone under cover of night.
Lü Bufan glanced back and saw that the little beggar who had eaten one of his roasted mountain rabbits was actually following him at a distance.
Lü Bufan beckoned.
The little beggar hurried over nimbly and stood outside the courtyard, watching Lü Bufan.
"You fled here later, didn't you? Do you know the person who used to live here?"
"No, but the people in Bitterwater Alley were either taken into the mountains to mine or fled to the Southwestern Region... But I heard government men are guarding the Southwestern Region. There's no getting away."
"Where do they keep the fugitives they catch?"
Lü Bufan noticed that the ruined walls of Liuzi's home seemed to have collapsed recently. It probably hadn't been more than a few days since Liuzi fled or was taken away.
"The cells behind the Town Tax Office couldn't hold so many people anymore, so Constable Ma took some men and built a prison in a cave north of town. A lot of people are locked up there."
"Go back to the mountains! Those two little beggars might starve without you..."
The little beggar stared wide-eyed at Lü Bufan. "Are you a heroic knight? Will you kill the tax official and the constable and save us? They took my father away and drove my mother to her death... Can you teach us Martial Dao fighting skills?"
Lü Bufan shook his head. "I'm just a lowly Second Realm Martial Warrior... I can't save many people."
"Oh..."
Lü Bufan reached into his robe, took out a few pieces of silver, and pressed them into the little beggar's hand. "Take these... Buy something to eat, and stay away from the government and rich people."
"Thank you... Thank you, heroic knight!"
The little beggar wiped away tears, put away the silver, and knelt to kowtow before running off like a wisp of smoke.
Lü Bufan sat numbly on the ruins, remembering something his master, Master Ming, had told him...
"Boy, Big Black can intervene for you once! Only once! After that, Big Black has to withdraw to Two Realms Village... Think it through. If your life is on the line, call for help when you need it! But only once..."
"If all I do is rely on Big Black, what the hell am I training for?"
Lü Bufan adjusted his clothes and tightened his straw sandals. Then he put on his bamboo hat and took a long cloth bundle from his pack...
A short sword.
An utterly ordinary short sword. Lü Bufan had only practiced the simple Three Sword Forms... Huang Jiu had taught him when he was bored.
Du Yuan had forged the sword in a blacksmith's forge he had set up later. It hadn't even been sharpened, but it had one advantage... It was heavy enough.
For the past two years, Lü Bufan had done almost nothing but temper his body, so he was much stronger than ordinary people!
He seemed to be a little stronger than other Martial Warriors of the same realm, too...
He had no idea what the cripple had mixed into the refined iron used to forge the short sword. All he knew was that when Lü Bufan first picked it up... it hadn't felt much lighter than that sixty-jin stone ball from back then!
Lü Bufan rested a while and looked up at the sky. It was just past midnight. He slipped away toward a very familiar place...
He needed to carefully sniff out some news, find out just what had happened in Huqi Town over the past two years, and then go rescue Liuzi...
With his clothes and trouser cuffs cinched tight and his straw sandals secured, the youth in the bamboo hat hid his pack among the ruins of Liuzi's home. Then, with the short sword on his back, he darted straight into the thick darkness!
Apart from Constable Ma, who maintained public order, the Tax Office wielded the greatest authority in Huqi Town.
Guangling Commandery was remote. Aside from the commandery seat, only Daqing County was large enough to count as a county town. Everything else was a scattering of towns across the region.
Tax Clerk Zhao presided over Huqi Town's Tax Office, with seven or eight runners beneath him. He was merely a petty clerk of no rank, but in remote Huqi Town, he was practically half a county magistrate.
Tax Clerk Zhao and Constable Ma would often summon a few of Huqi Town's wealthy households, then hold court in the Tax Office's main hall to settle disputes...
The Commandery Governor of Guangling Commandery would have loved nothing more than for every town to handle those tiresome cases with no money to be squeezed from them internally at their Tax Offices, so he turned a blind eye to this overstepping of authority.
The prison occupied the left wing of the Tax Office's rear courtyard. Torches and oil lamps still burned inside, where several jailers were shouting over a gambling game in the gatehouse...
"Come on, come on! Place your bets and hands off! Bet more, lose more!"
The head jailer shaking the dice and running the game had a flushed face. Clearly, he had done well tonight.
A dark figure crouched outside the courtyard wall and listened for a while, then leaped onto the wall with a hint of awkwardness and quietly climbed over.
Lü Bufan slipped beside the prison's main gate under cover of darkness and pricked up his ears...
A jailer on guard glanced back at the gamblers, then turned to the jailer beside him. "Look at those blockheads! Boss Zhao's going to fleece them empty-handed again..."
The skinny man beside him chuckled. "Serves them right! Still... Chief Zhao's pretty decent to us! He even lets us have a taste of those girls and married women in the rear cells... Hehehe..."
"You don't know shit! That's because Zhao couldn't agree on a price with the Yanghua Street Brothel Keeper... Now he's sulking and planning to sell those women over in the commandery seat!"
"Brother, with Constable Ma and Tax Clerk Zhao kicking up all this trouble, the rich households in town have lost plenty of money, and the middling ones have nearly been ruined! The poorer households have practically been swept clean! Are the mines really that short of labor?"
"Seems so... I heard the minerals and medicinal herbs the immortals want haven't been meeting the quotas, and the Commandery Governor flew into a rage! Besides, more and more fugitives and refugees have been fleeing to our Southern Borderlands these past two years. This shithole isn't short of people..."
"This world... Ah..."
Lü Bufan searched the surroundings. Relying on his perfected Second Realm Martial Warrior cultivation, which barely let him see in the dark, he made a circuit... but found no sign of Liuzi.
Nor did he find Constable Ma!
That was bad news... It meant Liuzi had probably been taken to the cave prison north of Huqi Town, and Constable Ma was likely stationed there!
Constable Ma... Thinking back now, Lü Bufan suspected he was at least a Third Realm Martial Warrior.
Lü Bufan reached the outer wall of the half-underground prison at the very back and slowly climbed up beside a ventilation window in its roof to peer inside...
Even though Lü Bufan had grown up around brothels, he had never seen women in such a wretched state!
Three or four dying women were tied to wooden posts along the wall. Two more huddled in a corner, sobbing with wooden cangues around their necks. Worst of all were two young women stripped naked and bound to wooden tables...
Lü Bufan vaguely remembered that one of them, a plump woman in her twenties with dimples when she smiled, was the wife from the pastry shop at the entrance to Yanghua Street!
Whenever he had to go out running errands after taking a beating, that woman would shake her head and sigh in pity for him...
One New Year, the kind woman had even given him a packet of leftover Caozi Cake!
To think that even a middling household like hers could be destroyed, its family torn apart, simply for falling behind on taxes!
Lü Bufan knew what these two nearly naked, dying women, covered in filth and wounds, had just endured...
An icy fury brewed in Lü Bufan's heart. These beasts... These inhuman beasts!
Taxes and forced labor-household after household with a little property was squeezed dry, their bones pounded and their marrow sucked out bit by bit! The wealthy might even collude with the Tax Office and government to seize still more riches...
What kind of world was this?
Lü Bufan sat silently on the prison roof and slowly unfastened the short sword from his back...
North of Huqi Town, wooden barriers and cages stood at the mouth of a cave.
Several tax clerks and runners guarded the entrance. Inside the wooden cages were two fugitive men whose flesh had been beaten raw.
A runner with a scab-covered scalp took out a wine flask and drank. He was just about to mock his companion when he suddenly pointed toward the distant town and began to tremble...
"Drink, drink, drink! Drunk yourself half to death, have you? What are you shaking for?"
The scabby-headed man stammered, "F-fire! There's a fire! It's huge..."
"Oh shit, looks like it's over at the Tax Office!"
"Quick! Go... Go tell Constable Ma!"
A short, stocky man rushed out of the cave, his clothes disheveled and his face flushed. It was none other than Constable Ma, the Martial Warrior who lorded over Huqi Town!
"Fuck! What happened? Has anyone come to report?"
"N-no... No!"
"Are you all dead? Get over there and find out what happened!"
"Yes! I'm going right now!"
"Constable Ma! Master Ma! Disaster... Someone attacked the Tax Office!"
A bedraggled man staggered toward Constable Ma, blackened all over by smoke and fire, swaying as though he might collapse at any moment...
"What happened? Who attacked it?"
The drunkard hurried over to support the fellow, who was dressed in a tax runner's uniform, and brought him before Constable Ma.
Constable Ma grabbed him and demanded harshly, "Where's Tax Clerk Zhao? Has anything happened to the tax silver or the prison?"
"Master Zhao... was beaten to death! The silver vault was opened, and the prison was burned..."
"What? How many attackers were there? Who was leading them? Was it a Martial Warrior with exceptional skills? Or a mob? You... How come I've never seen you before? Who are you?"
Just as Constable Ma sensed something amiss, the unfamiliar young man before him suddenly sprang up and hurled his entire body into Constable Ma's chest...
"Ah! You filthy bastard..."
Constable Ma growled, retreating a step as he smashed both arms down!
The attacker raised his arms to block and kicked straight at Constable Ma's lower abdomen...
In the flash of a spark, the two exchanged two moves.
The man disguised as an injured tax clerk was Lü Bufan!
With his Martial Warrior's true qi about to run out, Lü Bufan ignored the searing pain in his arms, drew the short sword from his back, and slashed down!
Constable Ma snatched a wooden post from beside him and desperately blocked...
Crack!
The thick wooden post snapped at once! The short sword plunged down and smashed directly into Constable Ma's shoulder...
Sinking his weight and driving his strength into the blade, Lü Bufan roared and unleashed a chain of thrusts!
Bare-handed, Constable Ma brought every scrap of his Third Realm Martial Warrior cultivation to bear. Gang qi flickered around his fists as he desperately fought off the attacks...