Jiang Shui had noticed her unease when he had mentioned her criminal past and acted to quell get fears of imprisonment again. It seemed to have worked albeit marginally as the girl looked a bit less tense than before despite her eyes still flickering to the nearest exits from the room. Her body sunk back into the bed and she drew the blanket covering her up to just below her chin. "Then again, I suppose it would be a bit difficult to maintain a low profile with hair like that." He offered her the steaming cup in his hands with a disarming smile. "Here, drink this. It'll help with your pain." Liling peered into the cup suspiciously, the black liquid swirling in a misty circle with a small amount of froth on the surface. It had a strong yet surprisingly pleasant scent. Logically she supposed accepting the drink would be a terrible idea, seeing as she knew next than nothing about the young man. But when she remembered the manner they had decimated her guards, Liling decided to
After rescuing their target from their enemy's stronghold, the team had escaped down to an obscure village to throw off any potential pursuers. The village was small and largely self sufficient but the locals were kind enough to have accepted them without asking too many questions. The local innkeeper and his wife had been more than happy to accommodate them in their establishment. Outside the inn, a grass field spread out behind for several dozen meters. No particularly useful crop had been cultivated there. The field's primary duty was the production of pasture for the livestock of the village, as well as hay and silage to be used when the need called for it. It was because for this reason that no one bothered the lone figure standing in the middle of the field. The young man had snow white hair that fell down his back in a neat ponytail, with two locks of hair deliberately left to frame his smooth face. Dressed in a loose red and brown outfit that looked a bit out of place
Mei Daiyu was the name of a woman who had made herself nothing short of a living legend. Such a thing was expected when one considered the fact that she was the single most dangerous individual in all of Eastern China. Also known as the Lady of Death, Mei Daiyu was the first thing many thought of when asked to imagine themselves in a waking nightmare. Very little was known of her past, less so about her source of power, but her methods of obtaining whatever she wanted were common knowledge to all. Any village or town that opposed her rule, she crushed mercilessly under her overwhelming power, leaving what remains that survived her onslaught to be plundered by her ever increasing army of mercenaries. The Lady of Death's influence extended up to the Imperial Palace where the Royal Family resided. Unwilling to attack with his full army and risk mutual destruction with Daiyu's forces, the Emperor had long reached a compromise with the Lady of Death. As long as Mei Daiyu kept her
The change in the atmosphere was instant. A minute ago everywhere had been filled with a soft underlying calmness. But as soon as she made her declaration, a heavy tension settled between them. Liu Han's dark eyes stared heatedly down into her brown ones at her words which threatened to destroy everything he had worked for. Years. He had spent years pursuing the Lady of Death to avenge the crimes she had committed against his family. Not only him, but all four of them held deeply rooted grudges against the evil woman, and now they had come so close to fulfilling their lifelong desires. Only for the main factor in accomplishing their goals to turn out to be a young roguish girl who got into more trouble than she was worth. Thanks to her penchant for getting negatively involved with the law as well as her constant movement from one town to another, it had taken them several months of tracking before they effectually found her. The irony that they found her in the clutches of t
The rest of the day was spent packing up the few things they had in the rented house and they left after paying the nice old landlady. Liu Han had decided that they would move during the night to avoid detection by any spies the Lady of Death might have sent out to find them. The first night saw them having to pass through a village that was celebrating some local holiday that involved a lot of fireworks and boisterous crowds enjoying the night's festivities. Han's initial plan was to go around the village and avoid the celebrations as it would cause them to risk discovery barely two days after setting out. Liling wished otherwise. She wanted to attend the festival, and while normally he would have straight up ignored her request, somehow she had managed to convince the other three as well to plead her cause. That was how Liu Han found himself being led from one colorful stall to another by an over-excited teenager whom he had the misfortune in his opinion, of sharing the same famil
Without taking a moment to think her next actions through, Liling began to speedspeed-walk in an effort to get away from the man. The latter, suspecting foul play, called the two men with him and they pursued her. Liling increased her speed and began to push past people roughly, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to see the men still coming after her determinedly. Panic began to creep into her mind as she realized that she had stolen from the wrong people. If they caught her, there was a very good chance that they would turn her in to the local guards who would in turn hand her over to the Imperial Guard and that would mean either of two things: life imprisonment or execution. Neither of the two were exactly pleasant to her. The man Liling had pickpocketed kept his eyes trained on her rapidly retreating form, his face set in an angry scowl. He had not worked for long hours under his merciless boss only to have his pay stolen by a young thief. Still... the finesse and ease wit
Every individual had something that they valued above all others. Sometimes it could be material, an item or a family heirloom. Or it could be a concept, a moral code to guide them by. For Liu Han, it was a promise. To him, once a promise was made, it was never to be broken no matter the cost. His very existence was based on a promise, the very first he had ever made back as a child when he had watched his father and mother die, alongside everyone he had ever loved in the ruins of their destroyed hometown. His parents had taught him never to make a promise that he could not keep. Once he made one, he ought to walk through fire and storm to fulfill it. Even his life now revolved around the conjoined pactpact he had with his 'brothers'. He regarded them so because they had all gone through the same ordeal he had, had suffered the same pain and had the same life goal. So he carried them along with him to face any and every obstacle in their path to avenging what they had lost. As far
Wherever crows went, death and misfortune were often not very far behind. The pitch black birds were regarded as harbingers of ill, symbols of evil that knew no boundaries. Abhorred and feared by all those who did not wish to suffer a painful, violent death, it was only fitting that they accompany someone who was seen as the physical incarnation of death itself. Flocks of the accursed birds descended to join their compatriots to feast on the bodies strewn across the ruins of a village. One that had been a bustling hive of cheerful life and civility only mere hours ago. Now it had joined the ranks of the settlements that had been completely destroyed by an army of blood thirsty mercenaries, led by an individual whose mere presence brought terrible sorrow and suffering. Black smoke streamed up from the funeral pyres where the bodies of innocent victims had been piled up and burnt. Houses lay in smoldering ruins. Hundreds of dead corpses that had abandoned littered the streets, their i
By morning, life in the monastery had returned to normal. The cleanup had even occurred sometime during the night, leaving no evidence that any sort of celebration had ever happened. Everyone went about their usual activities, paying little attention to the newly arrived group. As it was, the group might have arrived recently but this was definitely not their first time here. By the time Liling moved to seek out the other members of their little party, Jiang and the others had already left to attend to their matters, inadvertently leaving Liling on her own in an extremely unfamiliar place. Deciding to make the most of her 'abandonment', Liling headed out to explore the rest of the the temple where the welcome-back party had been thrown. On her way she made several observations about the place, the most apparent being the shockingly large amount of affluence around her. There had been no chance to look around the previous night but now that she really paid attention, she was more t
It took the greater part of TFW evening for Liu Han to finish with the greetings. Apparently he was in very good terms with pretty much every monk in the monastery, evident by the literal crowd that swarmed him as soon as word of his return spread. All the while though, Liling was content with standing on the sidelines and watching the whole thing unfold. If she were to be totally honest with herself,a part of her was a bit envious of the warm welcome her new guardian was receiving. Having lacked a normal upbringing available to most children, she had never had the opportunity to establish deeper familial connections with anybody. The gang that had taken her in did not count. That group had been full of thieves and criminals who did nothing but take advantage of her skills every chance they got. And besides, if she were to return to them now after all she'd done, there was no doubt that they would slit her throat immediately. Later that night, a small scale celebratory party was
Daoxi Province was exactly how Liu Liling had imagined it. It stretched out for several kilometers in each direction, and had quite bountiful flora and fauna. Many multi-storeyed buildings populated the main town, designed to reflect the affluence of the capital. With a population of over ten thousand people with a majority of them being traders, Daoxi, the capital town of the province was a thriving merchant town. Hundreds of traveling merchants moved in and out of the town daily through huge steel gates, bringing in various goods and articles from foreign lands to sell at largely affordable prices to the locals. Most of the town's houses were painted a dark brown that was just a shade shy of red. That seemed to be the town's color as a good portion of the population wore clothing of a similar color. There were more eye-catching things about Daoxi though, one of which was the local dishes of the natives. Some were exotic and exquisite to both sight and taste, while some looked li
At the last two words, Gui's normally cheerful face became strangely shrouded in contained rage and what seemed like disgust, as if the words left a sour taste in his mouth. Liling nearly asked him what had irritated him so much before she put two and two together in her head. Her own expression sobered up immediately when she realized who Gui had meant. "Mei Daiyu came to your village, didn't she?" The burly man simply nodded and she turned her eyes back to the crackling fire morbidly. She had heard enough about the Lady of Death to know what must have happened afterwards. "I'll leave the description of the things that followed to your imagination," Gui said grimly. The flames of the fire cast his face in different tones of light. "By the time I regained myself, everything had been destroyed and everyone was dead. My father I found pinned to the wall by an arrow through his chest. He lived long enough to hand over the staff and pass on his last wishes for me to fulfill on his
"How much farther do we have to walk? My feet are getting really sore." The sound of her voice was the only thing that kept breaking TFW unspoken treaty of silence that existed between the quintet group as they moved steadily on a worn path through a thick forest. The question, like the others before it, had been directed at Liu Han. After the incident at the festival, the relationship between the two had improved considerably, to the point where Liling would intentionally throw superfluous statements at Liu Han just to break the white haired man's stoic expression. They had spent the next few days traveling and trekking across mostly empty land with only a few human settlements scattered here and there. The way they moved was designed to place Liling in a position where they would be perfectly capable of protecting her in an event that their little group got ambushed. Jiang Shui led the way because of the fact that he possessed the sharpest eyesight among them all, therefore
Wherever crows went, death and misfortune were often not very far behind. The pitch black birds were regarded as harbingers of ill, symbols of evil that knew no boundaries. Abhorred and feared by all those who did not wish to suffer a painful, violent death, it was only fitting that they accompany someone who was seen as the physical incarnation of death itself. Flocks of the accursed birds descended to join their compatriots to feast on the bodies strewn across the ruins of a village. One that had been a bustling hive of cheerful life and civility only mere hours ago. Now it had joined the ranks of the settlements that had been completely destroyed by an army of blood thirsty mercenaries, led by an individual whose mere presence brought terrible sorrow and suffering. Black smoke streamed up from the funeral pyres where the bodies of innocent victims had been piled up and burnt. Houses lay in smoldering ruins. Hundreds of dead corpses that had abandoned littered the streets, their i
Every individual had something that they valued above all others. Sometimes it could be material, an item or a family heirloom. Or it could be a concept, a moral code to guide them by. For Liu Han, it was a promise. To him, once a promise was made, it was never to be broken no matter the cost. His very existence was based on a promise, the very first he had ever made back as a child when he had watched his father and mother die, alongside everyone he had ever loved in the ruins of their destroyed hometown. His parents had taught him never to make a promise that he could not keep. Once he made one, he ought to walk through fire and storm to fulfill it. Even his life now revolved around the conjoined pactpact he had with his 'brothers'. He regarded them so because they had all gone through the same ordeal he had, had suffered the same pain and had the same life goal. So he carried them along with him to face any and every obstacle in their path to avenging what they had lost. As far
Without taking a moment to think her next actions through, Liling began to speedspeed-walk in an effort to get away from the man. The latter, suspecting foul play, called the two men with him and they pursued her. Liling increased her speed and began to push past people roughly, occasionally glancing over her shoulder to see the men still coming after her determinedly. Panic began to creep into her mind as she realized that she had stolen from the wrong people. If they caught her, there was a very good chance that they would turn her in to the local guards who would in turn hand her over to the Imperial Guard and that would mean either of two things: life imprisonment or execution. Neither of the two were exactly pleasant to her. The man Liling had pickpocketed kept his eyes trained on her rapidly retreating form, his face set in an angry scowl. He had not worked for long hours under his merciless boss only to have his pay stolen by a young thief. Still... the finesse and ease wit
The rest of the day was spent packing up the few things they had in the rented house and they left after paying the nice old landlady. Liu Han had decided that they would move during the night to avoid detection by any spies the Lady of Death might have sent out to find them. The first night saw them having to pass through a village that was celebrating some local holiday that involved a lot of fireworks and boisterous crowds enjoying the night's festivities. Han's initial plan was to go around the village and avoid the celebrations as it would cause them to risk discovery barely two days after setting out. Liling wished otherwise. She wanted to attend the festival, and while normally he would have straight up ignored her request, somehow she had managed to convince the other three as well to plead her cause. That was how Liu Han found himself being led from one colorful stall to another by an over-excited teenager whom he had the misfortune in his opinion, of sharing the same famil