Chapter 35: Golden Belt, A Bountiful Harvest!
After briefly repelling Lin Shou Zhuo and the others, Yang Lu’s face turned ashen, and he quickly rushed to the warehouse iron gate.
Exhaling a mouthful of turbid qi, Yang Lu’s throat filled with a strong taste of rust.
Under the combined efforts of eight second-rate warriors and one divine archer, especially with Lin Shou Zhuo, a freak who had cultivated fist intent and couldn’t be considered an ordinary second-rate warrior.
Yang Lu ultimately sustained minor injuries.
“The door is closed?”
Seeing the tightly shut iron door, Yang Lu frowned.
Then, he noticed a pair of wet footprints, toes pointing inward, disappearing before the iron door.
Yang Lu’s heart sank abruptly.
“Master Yang!”
The man holding the repeating crossbow dismounted and landed in front of Yang Lu.
Then he pointed to the banner pole in the courtyard.
The man’s voice was dry, “The key to the warehouse door is on the top of the pole.”
Yang Lu’s clothes were soaked, water droplets dripping down the edges of his cheeks, merging into the mud beneath his feet.
He looked up at the banner flag in the courtyard, as if he had lost all strength, and remained silent for a long time.
Screams came one after another.
Without his restraint, how could the people from the pounding house stop Lin Shou Zhuo and the others? In just a moment of engagement, there were countless casualties.
Many had already become fearful and were fleeing for their lives.
“These water carriers not only sent over twenty second-rate experts but also had at least one first-rate lightness skill master lurking in the shadows.
With such treacherous cunning and meticulous planning, how could our Wanlong Pounding House defend against it?”
Thinking of this, Yang Lu finally felt fear and quickly shouted, “Retreat!”
With that, Yang Lu took the lead in fleeing, casually sending a water carrier who blocked his path flying, then leaped over the wall into the rain!
With Yang Lu gone, the remaining people from the pounding house posed no further threat.
The screams abruptly stopped. The strong smell of blood, which even the pouring rain couldn’t wash away, left them almost completely annihilated.
A moment later.
Lin Shou Zhuo, Sun Xiao, Huo Yue, and others gathered under the banner pole in the backyard, looking up at the string of copper ring keys in silence.
Even the slowest person would have realized what was happening by now.
Tonight, it seemed a lightness skill master had hidden in the shadows, silently taking the warehouse key Yang Lu was carrying, and then startling him away?
Lin Shou Zhuo’s face was sallow. After taking a healing pill, he looked suspiciously at Tang Jie,
“Was it sent by Landlord Liu?”
Tang Jie looked surprised,
“Wasn’t it sent by Landlord Zhao?”
Then everyone fell silent again.
After a few breaths,
Lin Shou Zhuo said with a wry smile, “Chop down the banner pole and take the key!”
With a crack, the ironwood flagpole, over thirty feet long, snapped and fell.
The group took the key and opened the warehouse door.
In less than a moment, someone discovered scattered tin boxes outside a brick kiln.
“Hibiscus Paste Fire?”
Lin Shou Zhuo looked at the surface of the tin box, his brow furrowed at the strange name.
He opened the tin box and sniffed gently.
Sun Xiao and a few others also crowded around curiously, sticking their heads in.
Unexpectedly, the next moment, Lin Shou Zhuo’s expression changed drastically. He leaped up as if he were on fire, his sallow complexion turning an unnatural flush.
He abruptly closed the tin box, then kicked the approaching Sun Xiao and the others away, one by one. In a blur, he kicked all the scattered tin boxes into a wooden crate.
He hoisted the wooden crate, his expression solemn.
Lin Shou Zhuo vaguely felt that they seemed to have discovered something extraordinary on this trip.
“Take away anything you can. If you can’t take it, scatter this polished rice on the hillside, and someone will come to snatch it!”
Lin Shou Zhuo quickly instructed, “Dismantle, burn, smash, break! In any case, it can’t be left for the pounding house!”
Sun Xiao and the others stood up, clutching their chests and gasping. They didn’t know what Lin Shou Zhuo had discovered that made him shun the Hibiscus Paste Fire like it was a venomous snake.
While they were still in a daze, Tang Jie and the other water carriers from Jinyuan Street had already begun carrying things out in large bags.
“Quick, get to it!”
“Tang Jie, you kidney-loser, you’ve never moved this fast in a fight!”
In just the time it takes for a few sticks of incense to burn, seven or eight rice barns on both sides were emptied by the group.
The surrounding wasteland and the pathsides were also piled with wheat and rice soaked by the rain, left for the mountain folk nearby.
The pounding house had a fearsome reputation, and if the polished rice wasn’t destroyed or dirtied, the mountain folk wouldn’t dare to take it.
A kerosene lamp was knocked over onto the wooden boards inside the rice barn, and sparks from a flint ignited it with a “poof,” producing a flame.
Although it was raining heavily, the fire couldn’t spread into a raging inferno, but it was enough to burn down the interior of these rice barns.
The leaping flames flickered across Lin Shou Zhuo’s face, casting shifting shadows, and billows of thick smoke choked out a few wisps of green smoke in the wind and rain.
Watching this scene, Lin Shou Zhuo was momentarily lost in thought, his mind drifting to who knew what.
“Let’s go!”
After completing these actions, Lin Shou Zhuo and the others then proceeded along the path they had come.
Descending Rice Barn Mountain, they saw that their horses, with their keen spirituality, were still waiting in the same spot.
In a short while, the pre-prepared saddlebags were stuffed full.
With hooves like the wind, the group soon disappeared into the dust.
…
“Hiccup~ My Golden Head Overlord, at one inch and two fen, is the king of a hundred insects. How dare you little things think you can win against me?”
Zhuang Kun, reeking of alcohol, clutched the purple skin gourd like an ancestral treasure, shielding it from even a drop of rain, for fear of the Golden Head Overlord.
“Little Overlord, Great Overlord, you must grow well and eat heartily. When you reach one inch and six fen, and find the Thousand-Year Green Scorpion hidden in Wuqing County, my son and I will ascend to heaven and no longer be ordinary people!”
Zhuang Kun, returning victorious from the insect fight, laughed heartily all the way, staggering as he walked.
The moon was high in the sky, and the heavy rain had gradually subsided, falling like light gauze under the night breeze.
For some reason, Zhuang Kun felt that the mountain path tonight was exceptionally difficult and muddy, slippery and treacherous, and a misstep could easily lead to a fall.
After walking for a while, the familiar rice barns came into view in the distance.
Familiar?
Wrong!
Looking at the scene of devastation and the lingering smoke, the rice barns were completely unfamiliar.
Zhuang Kun was so startled that he sobered up instantly.
“What’s going on, where are my rice barns?”
“Fire? There’s a fire?”
“Impossible, with Senior Yang in charge, how could there be a fire? Corpses, why are there even corpses…”
“Not good, it’s a night raid!”
After searching among the ruins for a while, Zhuang Kun gradually understood something.
His whole body trembled, his face was ashen, and the purple skin gourd in his arms offered no warmth.
The Heavenly Rice Barn was gone!
Even Senior Yang’s fate was unknown!
Zhuang Kun only wanted to rely on his brother-in-law’s connections to be a beetle, to lie on fragrant polished rice, to exploit the common people, to disgust the water carriers, and to fight grasshoppers.
How could it be that in the blink of an eye, the Heavenly Rice Barn was gone!
Moreover, the celebratory gift and the Hibiscus Paste Fire prepared for that important person were also gone!
Zhuang Kun’s heart turned to ash.
Zhuang Kun muttered to himself, “Go back… no, no, it’s no use, I can’t go back…”
Indeed, he couldn’t go back.
Everyone else was dead, why was Zhuang Kun still alive?
If not everyone was dead, what if someone reported Zhuang Kun for dereliction of duty and slacking off to fight crickets?
Wouldn’t that mean he leaked the news and colluded with outsiders?
For such a major incident, even his brother-in-law couldn’t protect him; he would probably wish him dead more than anyone else!
Thinking this, Zhuang Kun pursed his lips, smeared himself black, and stumbled blindly into Rice Barn Mountain.
…
“We’re rich, we’re rich! Making money isn’t as fast as robbing it!!”
Chen Shun’an climbed over the wall into the house, took off his tight-fitting clothes, wiped the moisture from his body, and changed into clean clothes.
His heart still pounding with lingering fear, he looked at the gold and silver in the small box, his throat dry.
The red was gold, the white was silver, the round ones were pearls, and the shiny ones were treasures…
Chen Shun’an estimated casually and found that this box alone was worth at least five hundred taels of silver!
