“Alright.”
Li Hai nodded and sighed, “There’s no saving a person whose heart is dead, so I won’t stop you anymore.”
With that, he pulled out a large piece of previously bought but uneaten braised beef from his Arms, along with two bottles of wine, and handed them all to the Old Woodcutter, then said:
“I don’t have anything to give you. Eat and drink well on your journey.”
“Hey!” The Old Woodcutter, holding the beef and wine, smiled and bowed to Li Hai, “Thank you, great hero—we’ll meet again.”
With that, he turned and walked towards the mountain path ahead, drinking wine and singing mountain songs as he went, gradually fading into the distance and finally disappearing into the vast forest.
After Li Hai gazed at his retreating figure for a while, he sighed and soared into the sky, flying rapidly towards the southeast.
Nestled amidst the encircling green mountains, a village lay peacefully.
The village comprised about a hundred yellow mud houses, artfully clustered at the foot of the surrounding mountains, some high, some low, as if whispering to the mountains and forest.
Around this village, large tracts of cultivated fields were spread out, where several farmers, wearing straw hats, were bending over, toiling in the fields.
However, the ages of these farmers were generally quite advanced.
Just at this moment, Li Hai’s figure suddenly appeared outside this village, in the middle of a field.
He looked at an old farmer busy in the field not far away and called out loudly:
“Old man, may I ask if this is within the Sword Emperor Dynasty?”
The old farmer heard the call, looked up at Li Hai, and said in a muffled voice: “It’s the Sword Emperor Dynasty. Outsider, what are you doing here?”
“Heh heh~” Li Hai chuckled, “I’m here to investigate, to see if there’s any business to be done.”
As he spoke, he took out a gold leaf from his Arms and said with a smile: “Old sir, do you have time to chat?”
“Huh?” The inattentive old farmer, upon seeing the gold leaf in Li Hai’s hand, immediately straightened up and stammered, “Is this, is this for me?”
Li Hai smiled: “It’s for you. Chat with me for a bit, just about this Sword Emperor Dynasty.”
“Alright!” The old farmer immediately came to Li Hai with his yellow teeth, bowing and scraping, “Sir, whatever you want to talk about, I’ll talk about anything.”
“Mm.” Li Hai nodded, “I want to know—”
Subsequently, he began to chat with the other party, sentence by sentence.
And through the casual conversation with this old farmer, Li Hai gradually came to know.
The country he stood upon, named the Sword Emperor Dynasty, indeed had the name Sword Emperor Manor, but very few people used such a designation.
According to the other party’s description, this Sword Emperor Dynasty had a history of a thousand years, with a vast territory spanning tens of thousands of miles, occupying half of the Martial World’s Central Plains and Eastern Wilderness.
However, the old farmer did not know the name of this Imperial Dynasty’s Emperor, only that he seemed to have lived for a very long time.
At least from the generation of the old farmer’s grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather, he had always been the Emperor.
Moreover, this Emperor was extremely lecherous, so much so that every ten years, he would conscript one hundred thousand concubines from the common people to fill his harem.
At the same time, this Emperor was also extremely cruel, so cruel that almost none of those one hundred thousand concubines could survive beyond ten years; almost all of them would be toyed with and tormented to death within that decade.
From this, Li Hai thought that if the Emperor of this Sword Emperor Dynasty was Wu Tianshi.
Then, if he had been Emperor for a thousand years, wouldn’t that mean he had conscripted concubines over a hundred times, and also cruelly killed hundreds of millions of young women?
If this were truly the case, then this Martial Arts Myth could truly be called the ultimate demon.
And just as Li Hai was chatting with the old farmer, an old man suddenly came running from a distance, huffing and puffing.
While running, he shouted towards them: “Old Hu, why are you still digging there? Your wife has been kidnapped, hurry up and think of something!”
As soon as he said this, the farmers working in the surrounding fields immediately turned their heads in surprise.
As for the old farmer, upon hearing this, he jumped three feet high and urgently asked: “Huzi, what did you say? My wife was kidnapped?!”
“Yes, yes.”
The old man ran up to him, panting, and said, “It’s at Ox Head Mountain, twenty li away. Your wife met bandits while collecting firewood on the mountain, and now, she’s been tied up.”
“Who knew there could be bandits on Ox Head Mountain? There never used to be any. If I had known, I wouldn’t have let that woman go collect firewood!”
The old farmer spoke quickly for a bit, then worriedly asked, “So, what ransom do they want? I can’t afford too much.”
“They want quite a lot.”
The old man said, “That group of bandits said they want fifteen pairs of cloth shoes and fifty steamed buns.”
Upon hearing that the ransom was this, Li Hai, who had been silent all along, couldn’t hold back and immediately said with a mix of laughter and tears:
“This can be considered ransom? Those bandits are too ridiculous.”
“It’s a lot!” The old man corrected, “Which ordinary family would have that many things?”
Then he sighed: “We are a poor place here. Every household basically only has a few pairs of cloth shoes. Where can we spare fifteen pairs?”
As he spoke, he looked at the old farmer and asked, “Old Hu, what do you say? Should the villagers chip in?”
“No need!” The old farmer waved his hand, “I have money now, I can afford it!”
With that, he pulled out the gold leaf Li Hai had just given him.
The old man immediately exclaimed upon seeing it: “Whoa! Old Hu, how did you get rich?”
Not only was he surprised, but several farmers working nearby, whether close or far, also quickly left their fields and walked over, shouting as they went:
“Old Hu, where did you pick up this gold?”
“Tsk, tsk, this gold leaf is so beautiful.”
“Old Hu is just lucky.”
Seeing this, the old farmer surnamed Hu immediately put away the gold leaf and said with a stern face, “This was sent by my seventh son from the front line. Don’t you all get any wrong ideas.”
Then he spoke again: “Hmm~ No, I’ll go to the county town right now and exchange this gold leaf for copper coins,
to prepare the ransom for those bandits.”
With that, Old Hu was about to set off for the county town he spoke of.
But just then, Li Hai spoke: “Old sir, don’t go. Don’t pay the ransom to the bandits; that would be letting them off easy. I’ll go bring the old lady back.”
“You?” Old Hu paused, then looked at Li Hai and said, “Do you, do you have that ability?”
The surrounding farmers didn’t voice any doubts, but merely looked at Li Hai blankly, with some disbelief in their eyes.
Li Hai, however, shook his head and chuckled, then slowly flew into the sky under the increasingly surprised gazes of these farmers.
Then he released his spiritual perception, distantly ‘looking’ towards the continuous mountains twenty li away,
And in just an instant, he discovered the group of bandits and a white-haired old woman deep within the dense mountain forest.
So, with a thought from Li Hai, those bandits and the old woman, more than twenty li away, rose into the air and flew rapidly towards this village amidst their terrified screams.
However, unlike before, this time Li Hai did not deliberately torment the group of bandits.