Qi Yanxuan hurriedly pulled Shen Yanqing to a stop, raising his left hand with palm flat a prearranged signal for danger.
“Shen, someone’s coming,” Qi Yanxuan whispered.
The group quickly found places to hide. Just as they concealed themselves, a crowd of people came walking from the village’s rear entrance.
They were the bandits hiding in the mountains thirty-some of them.
The mountain behind Kaoshan Village stretched for a hundred li, with ridges upon ridges; there was no telling which peak these bandits had been hiding on. But judging by their clothing and the weapons in their hands, they were bandits made up of refugees, armed with hoes, hatchets, sticks, and the like. Some of their clothes didn’t fit properly probably looted from Zhao Family Village.
Once it was confirmed they were bandits, Gousheng, who was on alert duty, immediately sounded the gong, and everyone else swarmed forward to attack.
Before long, bandits were also spotted at the village’s front entrance, and gongs rang out there too. The numbers on both ends were about equal. Then everyone who heard the gongs sounded their own to alert their neighbors. The elderly, the women, and the children hid at once, while the men grabbed whatever they could find and stayed on guard to keep bandits from breaking into their homes. In households with several able-bodied men, one stayed behind while the rest took up weapons and went out in times like these, everyone had to stick together.
At the rear of the village
Qi Yanxuan, a short blade in hand, went to meet the bandit leader.
The leader’s hair was a tangled mess, his face covered in stubble, his eyes fierce, a hatchet gripped in his hand.
Qi Yanxuan dodged the chopping hatchet and drove his short blade into the leader’s right shoulder. The hatchet instantly fell from the bandit’s hand.
Giving him no chance to recover, Qi Yanxuan pulled out the blade and slashed the leader’s throat. The bandit collapsed to the ground, lifeless.
Qi Yanxuan fought his way forward, killing as he went, his short blade drenched in blood. Just as he finished off the bandit before him, he looked up and saw a bandit behind Shen Yanqing raising his blade to strike him down.
Qi Yanxuan hastily flung his short blade, striking the bandit square in the chest.
Shen Yanqing had just finished off the bandit in front of him and turned around just in time to see the blade buried in that man’s chest.
Knowing Qi Yanxuan had saved him, he nodded his thanks. With the situation so dire, there was no time for more words before he plunged back into the fight.
Qi Yanxuan stepped forward, pulled out his blade, and continued battling the bandits.
In all, only the time it takes to brew a cup of tea had passed before the other villagers arrived, and with their superior numbers, the slaughter was quickly brought to an end.
Qi Yanxuan also dislocated the jaw of the bandit in his hands and severed the tendons in his arms and legs.
Then two villagers dragged the bandit toward the front of the village, where the fighting had just ended as well.
The village chief’s eldest son, Shen Wenxiang, ran back to fetch the village chief.
Everyone held torches as the villagers threw the bandit in their grasp onto the ground.
A short while later
The village chief arrived at the village entrance and looked down at the bandit on the ground.
“Which mountain are you bandits from? How many are there in total?” the chief demanded furiously.
The bandit looked at the crowd in terror, his eyes pleading.
Qi Yanxuan stepped forward and reset the bandit’s jaw.
His gaze was a warning: “Tell us everything you know, or else…”
Shen Yanqing looked at Qi Yanxuan’s fierce expression, a flicker of amusement passing through his eyes. He hadn’t expected that someone who usually looked so meek and well-behaved could have such a ruthless side.
“I’ll talk, I’ll talk! We fled here from Pingcheng on the border. Our area was already short of water, and then it didn’t rain for months. The crops all withered in the drought, so the harvest was meager to begin with, and what little grain we had stored went to taxes. So we fled here—but who knew this place was suffering a drought too? The soldiers guarding the city saw we were refugees and wouldn’t let us in, so all we could do was hide in the mountains. We didn’t dare go deep into the mountains, so we took to robbing nearby villages at night while everyone was asleep.” The bandit wept bitterly.
“Then how many of you are left? Where are you hiding?”
“None left. We originally left as a whole village, more than two hundred people. Along the way we kept running into other refugees, and with the water shortage, the old, the weak, the sick, and the disabled all died. Only the seventy-some of us in better health are left. Please, I beg you, spare me!” The bandit pleaded as he spoke.
“We definitely can’t spare you. What does everyone think we should do with him?” The village chief’s eyes swept over the crowd.
Shen Wenxuan stepped out from the crowd. “Father, why not escort him to the authorities at daybreak? These people are the very ones who slaughtered Zhao Family Village, so the authorities won’t give us any trouble over it.”
Shen Fugui said, “Right. And while we’re at it, we can find out whether there are any other refugee groups. If refugees keep gathering, all the nearby villages will be in danger. If anything happens, we won’t hear about it in the village it’d be a good chance to get some information in the county town.”
Qi Yanxuan suddenly recalled that the opening of the book described this world as divided into four kingdoms: East Chen, West Yuan, South Li, and North Yuan. In the twenty-eighth year of East Chen, a great drought struck, lasting a full two years. The book hadn’t specified exactly which month it began so it had already started?
And half a year into the drought, storms and earthquakes would follow one after another. After they ravaged the land, the entire world’s terrain would change, and the rivers would be cut off. The Huai River, once the largest river, located in the southern region of East Chen, would shrink into a small stream that would be humanity’s last remaining water source.
After the earthquakes, the massive number of corpses exposed to the air would cause plague to spread, and great numbers of people would fall.
Then heavenly fire would descend, burning the corpse-strewn earth, and the world would plunge into eternal night.
After the first rain at the end of the great drought, plants and animals would begin to mutate.
The author had stopped updating right at that point, so Qi Yanxuan had no way of knowing humanity’s final fate.
End of recollection.
***
Afterwards, the three Shen brothers tied the bandit to the great camphor tree at the village entrance he surely couldn’t escape from there.
Once they had settled matters, the village chief began checking everyone’s injuries. The third squad, with Qi Yanxuan and Shen Yanqing, a seasoned hunter, had quite a few wounded but no deaths.
The fourth squad wasn’t as strong as the third; one man had died an old bachelor who had no family, only himself.
The village chief’s heart was heavy. “Wenxiang, you three brothers carry Laifu home first. Tomorrow morning, go to the county town and buy a coffin to bury him. He has no one else.”
With that, everyone went home.