Panic swallowed the village whole like a great flood was upon them. Fathers scrambled in absolute terror, dragging their weeping daughters inside their small houses and frantically barricading the doors with wooden planks.
The terrifying request had arrived just hours ago like a sudden death sentence from the heavens. Ji Ma Ko, the dreaded demonic cultivator, had demanded ten beautiful girls from the village.
Outside his humble home, Village Head Fei Fei was sweating buckets. The cold sweat completely soaked his grey robe as he stared at the dusty road leading out of their peaceful home.
It was not long ago that Fei Fei had heard the gruesome, chilling tales of Mao Village.
That entire neighboring settlement had been completely massacred by this exact same demonic cultivator when they bravely tried to refuse his wicked demands. Blood had painted their streets, and not a single soul survived the slaughter.
"Why is the mighty Lin Clan not doing anything about this matter?" a frantic villager had cried out earlier in the day, gripping his pitchfork until his knuckles turned white.
The answer was a very bitter pill to swallow for the helpless mortals. Ji Ma Ko was extremely cunning in his evil ways. He only aimed at mortals as the targets of his harassment.
He had never touched a single spirit master from the great clan yet. So, the incredibly busy Lin Clan saw absolutely no reason to put any of their precious resources to find this mysterious demonic cultivator.
Doing so would take a lot of spirit masters away from their daily cultivation and duties, and to them, mortal lives were as cheap as the dirt on the ground.
Fei Fei violently clenched his rough fists.
Now that the messenger Fei Fei had sent toward the Lin Clan had been found killed on the main road, he knew there was no way they could ever send another messenger without this demonic cultivator immediately attacking that one too. And in the worst case scenario, he would just lose his patience and attack the village directly today.
Fei Fei looked slowly at his precious daughter, Cui Cui. She stood quietly in the corner of the house with a very gloomy look on her beautiful face. Her eyes were dark, but they held a heavy, painful resolution as if she had already taken the firm decision about what she must do.
Outside the front of Fei Fei’s house, the adults of the village had hastily gathered. All of them possessed dark, despairing faces. The air itself was thick with suffocating tension and raw fear.
"We cannot send these girls to that monster!" one elder shouted loudly, his voice trembling with immense fury. "They are the treasures of this village! We raised them! We must pick up our farming tools and fight!"
"Fight with what exactly? A spirit master?" another younger man argued back aggressively, throwing his hands up in the air. "If we do not do anything, Ji Ma Ko will attack the village tonight! Then all of us will be killed in an instant, and he would take the girls by force anyway! Do you want us all to die for nothing?"
She raised her voice over the noisy crowd as she muttered, "I will go. I will try to convince him to take only me somehow. Maybe I can bargain with him."
Fei Fei felt his very heart shatter into tiny pieces. He knew the sickening truth.
The reason Ji Ma Ko was asking for girls from the village was not to simply to look at them. He would impregnate them and send them back to the villages ruined and discarded, only after having his twisted fun with them to fuel his lust and in some cases if they offend him, he would feed the girls to his wolves.
Fei Fei and her brother Qing Qing both wore hard, agonizing looks on their faces as they were about to violently object to this pure madness.
But looking at her pale, scared face, and her looking at them and giving a slow nod as if saying this is the only way to save everyone, they froze. They bit their tongues in absolute anger, swallowing the metallic blood in their mouths.
"Don’t be naive, Dong villagers." a new, commanding voice echoed.
The crowd parted immediately as a young man walked through the wooden doorway. He was a man only wearing a few strands of sheets covering his shoulders and his lower body. He had long black hair flowing down his back and a heavily toned body covered in faint battle scars he got from the mole rats.
He stepped forward and looked directly at Cui Cui with sharp eyes.
"I heard about your resolution," the young man said calmly. "What guarantee do you mortals have that he will only do this one time? Sooner or later, every single girl in this village will be impregnated by him. Is that truly what you want for your village? Your daughters to give birth to children of a demon?"
He asked the harsh question while looking at the gathered adults. Fei Fei, Qing Qing, and the rest of the villagers were all looking totally dumbfounded by this development.
This young master, a heavily injured spirit master they had saved from the river days ago, was speaking to them as if he actually cared about their fates.
Hua Ke looked back at Cui Cui and muttered, "You people have a third option available. Collect everything you can carry right now and run away. Do not stay here waiting for slaughter."
It was a suggestion that nobody thought about. The elders gasped in sheer shock.
"How could we do that?" an old farmer cried out in distress. "Our fertile farms are here. Our livestock and animals are here. We were born here! How could we possibly leave this village behind?" Get faster updates on novelping(.)com.
"You know the easiest path to the Lin Clan is exactly where this Ji Ma Ko is observing and waiting to take his victims," Hua Ke explained. "So, you must run away by taking an alternative, hidden route through the mountains to the Lin Clan. Dong village is the people, not your livestock or farms."
"But the clan..." Fei Fei hesitated deeply.
"Yes, they do not value mortal lives at all," Hua Ke interrupted smoothly. "But even they will not dare to kill a whole village of refugees arriving at their gates. Because you mortals are what is feeding them every day. You bring the rice and food to their table. They might act like they do not need mortals, but in fact, they do need you desperately to survive and cultivate in peace."
Which is the absolute truth. Hua Ke was not lying to them.
As much as cultivators openly despised the weakness of the mortals, the mortals were the ones sweating in the fields bringing the food they eat to their tables. So every major clan secretly valued their mortals despite hating their weakness.
Cui Cui looked at Hua Ke with wide, glistening eyes.
Fei Fei looked down at the dirt, muttering, "But we cannot fight like you spirit masters. There will be a lot of vicious beasts in those mountains that we will not be able to face head on."
Hua Ke then shocked all of them as he muttered his next powerful words.
"I will protect all of you on the journey. And for that, I need you to do one simple thing. Act like you have never seen me or heard about me when you finally reach the clan. I know this might be stupid of me asking something like this from a massive group of people, but... I trust the same village that rescued me would not dare to deceive me."
Hua Ke crossed his arms. "So, what do you say about this deal, village?"
Fei Fei looked at everyone around him, and all of them seemed rather surprised by this sudden development. But if there is a real spirit master willing to help them escape certain doom, why would they ever refuse the offer?
Fei Fei nodded his head firmly.
"Then, I, Wang Ke, promise with my name, I shall protect this village until we get there,"
Seeing the agreement, a limping Hua Ke turned around and goes back into the house. Before vanishing into the shadows, he glanced at Cui Cui who is looking at him with a deeply grateful look but also with a blossoming feeling of pure admiration.
While Hua Ke is thinking inside his mind.
*I am not stupid enough to trust that none of them would tell about me to the Lin Clan,* Hua Ke thought with a hard look. *But luckily, none of them knows my real name, including Cui Cui. So even if they tell about me by the time they reach the Lin Clan gates, I will be just a nameless shadow for all of them, after all, from what I know, no Wang Clan exists in this mountain region.*