Suyuan Town was small, with only around seven hundred people in all. Most of its houses were made of earth, giving the whole place a dusty yellow cast. Looking out across it, one could see a little color only at the entrance to a large compound in the town center.
The compound was a residence undergoing renovation, near the ruins of the old escort agency. Craftsmen hired from the town at no cost were whitewashing its outer walls. A flagpole stood at the entrance, flying a piece of yellow cloth embroidered with a multicolored horse.
Such a shabby residence could not even match the grandeur of a minor sect's branch in Yunzhou, but daring to settle down in a fixed location already marked a formidable force in Liangzhou's martial world. After all, however beautifully a residence was furnished, if its owner could not defend it, he was merely sewing another man's wedding gown. Ordinary horse bandits with no fixed abode never thought of dressing up their premises.
As the residence neared completion, Ma Rulong, who had drifted across Liangzhou's Gobi Desert for half his life, felt a little more contentment in his heart. Every day, he stayed in the residence to supervise the work and watch its progress.
To martial artists from elsewhere, it seemed laughable that the leader of a Horse Gang with over a hundred blades under him should care so much about a small residence. But outsiders simply did not understand what a home meant to a horse bandit.
Liangzhou was an utterly savage land. Great Wei's iron laws lost all their binding force across thousands of miles of Gobi Desert. To survive here, one either became a docile sheep, trading wool and flesh for a place to shelter beneath the meat-eaters' feet.
Those unwilling to be