Chapter 290: Destruction Brought By Fear
Seeing the Tiger Guards charging over in pursuit, Yun Ce fully understood Huo Wudi’s actions. If it were him, he would chop too.
Yun Ce didn’t want to waste Huo Wudi’s combat power, so he jumped onto the beam. He knew the Tiger Guards’ strengths and weaknesses very well. Tiger Guards couldn’t jump high, which had once troubled Doggy greatly, and he didn’t know if it had been resolved now.
Unable to chop at Yun Ce on the high ground, the Tiger Guards used their heavy bodies to ram the beam pillars. Unfortunately, the beam pillars here were two arms thick, not something one or two two-hundred-jin people could smash through.
Fortunately, upon discovering that the Tiger Guards couldn’t harm Yun Ce, Huo Wudi decisively summoned back the two largest Tiger Guards, positioning one in front and one behind to guard her sides.
Some warriors came down from upstairs, while others came up from downstairs. They showed no excessive surprise and, upon arriving, tangled with the Tiger Guards and those children.
Yun Ce had thought there should be many Tiger Guards, but in total, there were fewer than fifty. They fought bravely, selflessly, without knowing pain or fatigue. This gave them the upper hand at the start of the battle, forcing those warriors to retreat repeatedly.
Huo Wudi’s command of the Tiger Guards grew increasingly mature, and the Tiger Guards’ combat power gradually increased, nearly driving out the warriors coming down from above and up from below from the sixth floor.
At that moment, all the Tiger Guards froze in place like wooden figures, motionless. This was probably the original commander of the Tiger Guards beginning to take command.
Seeing Huo Wudi’s pair of blood-red eyes, it seemed the whistle still had some effect on her, though she had forcibly suppressed it.
In this state, Huo Wudi wouldn’t last long, yet she showed no sign of stopping. With the whistle in her mouth, she continuously issued commands, directing those brainless children and the Tiger Guards to kill anyone they saw.
1 The children held no advantage in battles against adults, especially after encountering those warriors. Even if they went mad like puppies, they were still puppies and were instantly cut down like vegetables.
1 The subsequent battle was between the Tiger Guards and the warriors. The Tiger Guards were clearly interfered with by two sources of information, often freezing, stunning, or showing disjointed movements mid-battle. Under these conditions, the Tiger Guards’ casualty rate rose sharply.
1 Yun Ce looked at the corpses piled up in the corridor and slowly shook his head. Until now, the key figures on the sixth floor still hadn’t appeared. When a burly warrior smashed the head of a Tiger Guard that had frozen again with a single hammer blow, blood began seeping from Huo Wudi’s mouth, nostrils, eyes, and ears. Mustering her courage to blow the final note, the remaining four Tiger Guards let out wolf-like howls, discarded their weapons, spread their arms, and hugged toward the charging warriors, clinging tightly to their opponents no matter the wounds they sustained.
1 After being injured, Huo Wudi clearly sobered from her frenzy. The instant the Tiger Guards charged, she turned and ran. But with too many corpses and blood behind her, she fell heavily to the ground after just a few steps. She didn’t stop; after falling, she crawled outward in the pile of corpses using hands and feet, clearly desperate not to die.
1 After seeing the last standing Tiger Guard dismembered, Yun Ce threw an incendiary bomb over there. As soon as the incendiary bomb hit the ground, it burst into a bright yellow glow. The firelight started gently at first, merely bright and warm, but after the flames shot up two feet, it exploded with a boom. The bright yellow flames turned white-hot in an instant, splashing against the walls like flowing water and spreading to both sides. The narrow corridor instantly became a sea of fire.
1 Huo Wudi, crawling on the ground, had already been pulled to the high ground by Yun Ce with a grappling hook. This little child had just been soaked in blood and water, and now, held in Yun Ce’s hand, strings of blood dripped from her body to the ground.
1 Just as the flames were about to lick the beam pillars, Yun Ce flew out the window, using his grappling hook to latch onto the seventh-floor eaves and rapidly ascend. Passing a window, he tossed in an incendiary bomb. When his body landed on the seventh-floor eaves, he threw the last incendiary bomb into the eighth-floor window.
1 Yun Ce’s body descended rapidly along the grappling hook. By the time he landed, from the second floor to the eighth floor had completely become a world of flames.
1 Yun Ce didn’t linger at Panxing Tower. He quickly passed through those dilapidated houses and returned to the second-floor small building where he had been staying.
1 He sat side by side with Huo Wudi on the roof of the second floor, watching the burning Panxing Tower in the distance, neither speaking.
2 “Cough cough, were they all burned to death?”
2 “Some will burn to death, some will survive.”
2 “Why not burn them all to death?”
2 “Because I don’t have the ability.”
2 “Someone rode a bird and flew away.”
2 “No way around it. Those with power and ability always live longer.”
2 Blood kept pouring from Huo Wudi’s small mouth. While spitting it out, she said to Yun Ce, “If I can spit out all the half of the blood that belongs to the Gui Fang people, will you take me in?”
2 Yun Ce shook his head. “You can’t spit it all out. The new blood will still be half Gui Fang blood.”
2 “I’m already this miserable. Can’t you make an exception for me just once?”
2 “No. Making an exception for you once would lead to countless exceptions later, and eventually, we’d see no difference between Gui Fang people and Great Han people.”
3 “Alright, let me down. I’ll find a place to sleep and see if I can pull through.”
3 “You don’t want to watch Panxing Tower collapse?”
3 “No, I feel danger will descend here soon. I need to hide first.”
3 Yun Ce watched Huo Wudi descend from the roof through the broken hole. She took a bundle of food from the food basket Yun Ce had left on the second floor, tied it into a bundle on her back, gripped the short sword tightly in her hand, and staggered away from the second-floor small building.
3 Yun Ce didn’t leave. He still sat on the second-floor roof, braving the light rain to watch the blazing Panxing Tower.
3 Panxing Tower was extremely tall, and it was a wooden and earthen pavilion. Such a pavilion was actually unsuitable for habitation. Building a hundred-meter-high pavilion with wood was an extreme feat in itself. Rather than calling this building a tower, it was more like a pile of elevated firewood. As soon as fire was thrown on it, the hollow firewood pile would ignite immediately.
3 In just a moment, Yun Ce saw the great fire already spurting out from the twelfth-floor windows. He guessed that the people inside the pavilion were now fleeing desperately to the roof, hoping to be picked up by the albatrosses on the roof before the pavilion collapsed.
3 Yun Ce figured they wouldn’t make it, because the fire rose faster in the hollow pavilion than they could climb.
3 Sure enough, people began jumping down from the high building. They feared being burned alive, but they forgot that Panxing Tower was essentially a tower building—wide at the base and narrow at the top. Even jumping from the high building was just leaping from a small fire into a furnace.
3 The fire was so fierce that even Yun Ce, sitting on the second-floor roof, felt his cheeks flushed from the radiant heat of Panxing Tower. The originally fine, dense light rain seemed evaporated by the fire, no longer falling.
4 The albatrosses didn’t dare descend anymore. They only flew at high altitude, tossed wildly by the chaotic air currents below. Finally, one albatross flew off heedlessly, and the rest followed into the darkness.
4 Finding it boring to watch, Yun Ce went downstairs and dove into the tent, falling asleep immediately.
4 In his sleep, he seemed to hear a series of massive booms. He ignored them, wrapped his head in the quilt, and continued sleeping. As long as he didn’t want to see, nothing had happened.
4 Since Wu Tong could live together with He Junnian and share a building, it explained many things. E Ji said Wu Tong invited the High Priest to help him kill He Junnian, yet the cruelest thing in the human world happened right under his nose, and he turned a blind eye.
4 At this point, there was no talk of enduring humiliation for a greater purpose. This was purely cowardice, incompetence, and timidity.
4 Those children driven to their deaths by Huo Wudi were all Han people. For that alone, even Wu Tong deserved to die.
4 By dawn, the area around the second-floor small building was enveloped in the thick smell of charred firewood. Rain still fell from the sky, falling steadily and unhurriedly, with slanting, dense threads interwoven.
4 Panxing Tower had collapsed. Last night’s great fire burned efficiently; it only held for two hours before completely collapsing. The once magnificently carved and painted great building had fallen just like that.
4 It was said that the money to build Panxing Tower came from the business of selling slaves from Chuyun Prefecture. Those blue-eyed slaves were now rare, perhaps only some houseborn slaves in the back courtyards of great clans.
4 Yun Ce’s method of burning Panxing Tower was actually very crude, but there was no choice. He didn’t want He Junnian to live too comfortably, which might lead him to think of harming his two sons.
5 When the black feathered eagle flew over, Yun Ce was making breakfast. There was no one on the eagle’s back, only a letter from E Ji found under its wings.
5 She said that after Panxing Tower caught fire last night, Wu Tong knelt outside Dragon God Hall for an entire night. The old divine official ignored Wu Tong, not even agreeing to his request for Shehuo to summon heavy rain to extinguish the fire.
5 Later, after Panxing Tower collapsed, Wu Tong bit off his own left pinky finger and spat it back at Divine Dragon Hall, declaring that from then on, those belonging to Panxing Tower would no longer worship Divine Dragon Hall.
5 The Crown Princess Consort of the King of Changsha’s palace banquet was on its first day today. Changsha King’s Mansion would welcome some very important guests, who would present gold, eat noodles, and read books—a very meaningful literary gathering to begin.
5 Such a palace banquet literary gathering would last six days to receive all the attendees.
5 E Ji’s letter was straightforward, with no personal opinions, only what she saw, heard, and planned to do, giving Yun Ce an objective angle for consideration.
