Chapter Ninety-Six: The Curious Elm Bay

After finishing his meal in the canteen, Zhao Hengyi returned home, worn to the bone.

In the quiet house, only Lu Jiu-niang remained, still nursing her wounds.

“Your village is actually this prosperous?”

Though her injuries were still far from healed, Lu Jiu-niang’s caution had led her to take a good look around Elm Tree Bay. “So many enterprises, and all of them belong to you alone?”

“The chicken farm has a share from someone else. Everything else is mine.”

After a night of frantic labor, Zhao Hengyi was exhausted, yet the delight of successfully forging tungsten steel kept his spirits strangely high. “When it comes to making money, I do have a few tricks.”

Faced with Zhao Hengyi’s shameless self-praise, Lu Jiu-niang fell into thought.

“Rest well and recover. In this village, aside from the places you are not allowed to enter, you may look wherever you like. There are plenty of curious things to see.”

Without waiting for a reply, Zhao Hengyi headed back to the bedroom. “If you have questions, ask Erhu. If you’re hungry, go to the canteen. With a guard token, you can eat whatever you like. I’m going to sleep.”

Watching Zhao Hengyi’s back, Lu Jiu-niang tilted her head in curiosity. This master Zhao was full of mysteries.

At first, she had taken him for some bandit with unclear motives. After all, anyone who had dared to save her in Jiangling City that night could never have been an honest man in the official sense.

Later, after she had come into contact with the guards at the inn, her suspicions only deepened.

No ordinary merchant would equip his guards with such fearsome weapons. Those hand crossbows the guards carried could easily have caught even her off guard.

More than that, every one of those guards was a hard, battle-tested killer. Of that, Lu Jiu-niang was absolutely certain.

To keep so many well-armed veterans, men seasoned by slaughter on the battlefield, as guards—however one looked at it, Master Zhao seemed nothing less than a remarkable bandit chief.

By the rules of the martial world, since she had been saved by one of her own kind, there was nothing more to say. She had to think of some way to repay the favor. Whether it meant killing someone or doing some other deed, Lu Jiu-niang had already made her preparations in secret.

Yet Zhao Hengyi’s subsequent actions overturned everything she had ever believed.

He bought so many women, found work for them, and even promised that once their wages had accumulated enough, they could be freed from servile status.

What, exactly, was he after by doing all this?

Others said he was kind-hearted. Lu Jiu-niang could not fathom it, so she had no choice but to take him at his word.

An Inner Breath Art was such a precious thing; she had been willing to pass it on, yet that fellow, knowing that children would have to begin practicing from a young age and that the process was terribly agonizing, had actually refused to take it, saying it would be unfair to those children...

In this world, only the living were entitled to speak of fairness. He had built such a vast fortune—did he truly not understand even this simple truth?

What astonished Lu Jiu-niang most was Elm Tree Bay itself.

She had roamed far and wide and was no stranger to prosperous villages, but those places all had powerful backers; they were the private property of some noble or great clan, and the people there lived well only by feeding on the blood of others.

Elm Tree Bay was different.

Here, whether adult or child, everyone could find suitable work and earn a living by their own skill.

With the help of the guard token, Lu Jiu-niang had also learned that a few months ago Elm Tree Bay had been no different from any other village. Everyone had been so poor they could not even eat their fill. Each day, all they sought was to dig up a little more wild greens and gather a few more grass seeds, merely to fill the bellies that were forever empty.

All of it had changed because of Zhao Hengyi.

Lu Jiu-niang was envious of the people of Elm Tree Bay. If she had any choice, she would gladly surrender this body of skills of hers and remain here as an ordinary person...

In the Taihang Mountains, people lived worse than ghosts. If there were someone like Zhao Hengyi leading everyone, would life become a little easier?

A thought rose in Lu Jiu-niang’s heart, one that made her feel ashamed: should she tie this Master Zhao up and carry him back to the Taihang Mountains?

The Daughter Army, too, was astonished by everything in Elm Tree Bay, every bit as much as Lu Jiu-niang had been.

Those spirited young women were far more eye-catching than Lu Jiu-niang, who was hiding her identity.

The people of Elm Tree Bay had never seen women dressed in hunting garb, armed with long sabers and bows, riding tall horses.

There were not so many rules in the poor countryside. The villagers of Elm Tree Bay, all of whom worked for a living, did not think women ought to stay hidden away. Still, the Daughter Army, which looked even more formidable than the guard force, truly shook their understanding to the core.

The girls of the Daughter Army found Elm Tree Bay equally full of novelty.

The whole village was bustling with activity. Everyone seemed to be working without pause, yet no one complained. Instead, every single one of them was brimming with energy.

After asking around, they learned that labor earned work points, and work points could be exchanged with the stewards for silver, grain, and cloth.

What was more, anyone who worked could show proof of that day’s labor and eat as much as they liked in the canteen. No one would stop them, as long as they wasted nothing.

Even the elderly and the children were not idle. The chicken farm needed a constant supply of earthworms, and the workshops had light tasks that could be done as well. In any case, they could all earn work points.

The girls of the Daughter Army were astonished to discover that there was not a single person in all of Elm Tree Bay who had no work to do.

What amazed them most of all was the night school they had seen the previous evening.

Though only one teacher was giving lessons, the listeners were packed into three large tiled houses until there was hardly room to breathe.

They had never heard of teaching done in such a way. Yet both adults and children listened earnestly and studied hard, even to the point of being mocked by others if they learned too slowly.

That fellow Xiaotao’s sister was seeing, Wang Erhu, told everyone that any child under ten who learned quickly and well would receive a reward from the master, something called a scholarship, and it was very generous indeed.

As for the adults, they studied literacy and arithmetic with all their might in hopes of earning a better-paying position.

By now, in Elm Tree Bay, being able to read more and calculate better meant earning more work points. That had already become a rule known to everyone. Even in prized places like the guard force and the hunting teams, if one could not meet the master’s standards, one would lose one’s position.

Work and even guard duty required literacy and arithmetic. Such a thing had never been heard of before.

The girls still remembered how Wang Erhu, because he read too slowly, had been tugged at by several children who mocked him as soon as he arrived at night school, leaving him utterly humiliated.

Still, the man was shrewd enough. He went to Xiaotao and begged her to teach him privately. Xiaotao, seeing how pitifully he spoke, finally agreed, though only reluctantly.

This time, Wang Erhu had truly hit the jackpot. Who did not know that Xiaotao, having grown up beside the county princess, was famous for being able to write and draw, brilliant and capable?

As for the Daughter Army, Zhao Hengyi had left their reception entirely to Wang Erhu, and there would be many more surprises waiting for them in Elm Tree Bay.

Zhao Hengyi had slept until well into the afternoon before getting up, only for the old village head to come looking for him, saying that someone from the Zhou family was there to see him.

“The Zhou family?”

The Zhou family had been in league with the web behind Su Shenchang, the prefect of Jiangling. They had previously been shipping defeated soldiers to Dangyang County to turn them into mountain bandits, and Zhao Hengyi had wiped them out in one stroke. So what were they after now? Had word somehow leaked?

“Where are they? I’ll go meet them.”