Chapter 8 : Chapter 8
Chapter 8: The Strange City Guards!
That patch of lamplight that should have belonged to the mortal world was not in front of him at all.
He turned back toward where Luo Li lay and discovered that the light was actually on his own side—the very direction from which they had originally descended the mountain.
Chen Guan frowned and thought for a moment, then quickly understood the eerie truth behind it.
From the instant Luo Li had been dragged into the rule, the directions of this stretch of heaven and earth had been thrown into disorder. Yin and yang had been reversed.
In other words, even if he had followed the rule and searched for a loophole to break it, he would only have been walking farther and farther down the wrong road, never to return.
“Damn it. It was actually a double-layered rule. Good thing I didn’t bother being polite to that thing.”
Chen Guan lifted his head and looked ahead.
If he had continued following the rule of Do Not Look Back all the way forward... then the end of that road would have led straight into the deepest reaches of the Ten Directions Marsh!
He stared long and hard at the marshlands shrouded in darkness, his brows tightly knotted, and muttered another baffling line to himself.
“A man eats from the earth for a lifetime, and the earth eats a man only once... sure enough, everyone is in business. Even ghosts are no exception.”
Drawing back his gaze, he walked over to the horse-cleaving saber embedded deep in the ground and lightly hooked it up with the tip of his foot.
Shing!
The saber sprang free from the earth at once.
He lifted a hand, and the scabbard he had tossed by the roadside flew into his grasp under the pull of an invisible force.
With a flick of his wrist, the nearly two-meter-long horse-cleaving saber slid back into its sheath with perfect precision, and he slung it once more over his shoulder.
Only after finishing all of that did he walk over to Luo Li and look at her face, which was caked with dust and drained of all color.
He truly wanted to step in and slap her twice across the face.
It was only because it was him—because over the past ten years he had studied all these chaotic and accursed things inside and out, and had found the rule of One Nail Pins Down Heaven and Earth—that he had barely been able to deal with that thing.
Had it been any other escort, with the way this little girl kept courting death, the grass on her grave would already have been three feet high.
“And all for twenty taels. You really got a bargain.”
Chen Guan curled his lip, then grabbed her by the belt with no trace of gentleness, hauled her up like a broken sack, and flung her across the back of the white horse.
Then he struck a palm against her back. A cluster of violet light was driven into Luo Li’s body, and the bloodless pallor of her face gradually gave way to a healthy flush.
After that, Chen Guan tapped lightly off the ground and landed gracefully on the saddle behind her. Unhurriedly, he rode toward the true direction of the lamplight.
He still did not move very quickly.
To him, the deep mountain forests were certainly terrifying, but compared to cities crowded with human habitation, they were relatively far safer.
After all, most of the demons, monsters, and uncanny horrors in the mountains relied on hard power.
And the one thing he lacked least was the overwhelming force to crush everything in his path.
To put it simply, the things mixed in among human cities all played with brains, calculation, and skill.
That roast-chicken peddler one met at random by the roadside might very well be a yellow weasel spirit that had cultivated into human form.
The ones who could not play that game had long since been turned into drinking dishes for cultivators.
As for the brainless demons and monsters, they could not survive in a place packed with cunning human schemers.
Just like that uncanny fiend from before—it had really been playing on disbelief and intelligence, which made it well suited to laying traps in the wilderness for stubborn fools.
If Chen Guan had not grasped, over these last ten years, the rule-defying power of One Nail Pins Down Heaven and Earth—
if he had not used the horse-cleaving saber from the outset to pin down the rule governing that place—
then let alone saving anyone, even he himself would probably have been dragged in and forced to sit down with that uncanny fiend for a proper debate over mystic principles.
...
The sound of hooves swayed through the thin morning mist.
By the time Chen Guan rode beneath the towering city walls of Wangyue City on the white horse, with the unconscious Luo Li draped across it, the sky had already begun to brighten.
By that dim gray morning light, he looked up.
Along the blackened battlements, a soldier in black armor stood every ten paces.
Each of those black-armored soldiers held a long spear upright at his side, rigid as a stake.
Yet strangely, every last one of them had his back to the outside of the city and faced inward, as though all of them were idly admiring some marvelous performance within the city walls, standing there without moving at all.
Chen Guan frowned.
“What sort of nonsense is this?”
He cleared his throat and shouted toward the battlements.
“I am Chen Guan of Sanhua Town, an escort passing through on official duty. I wish to enter the city and rest my feet. I ask the honored officers to grant a convenience and open the gates. Chen Guan would be most grateful!”
The row of black-armored soldiers atop the wall immediately straightened in unison at the sound of his voice.
Right after that came a burst of frantic whispering they could not suppress.
“Do not look back, do not look back! Whatever happens, do not look back!”
“Yesterday, at this very hour, the squad leader heard a disturbance and could not resist turning around. He froze to death right here on the spot. His corpse is still stiff as a board!”
“That’s right, that’s right! For half a month now, no one has been able to enter the city alive in this cursed place!”
“This man... how could he possibly have ridden through the night from Sanhua Town at the edge of the Ten Directions Marsh?!”
At those words, the whole group of armored soldiers began trembling like sieves, cold sweat streaming down their foreheads.
Chen Guan waited below the city for a moment, only to discover that the men on the battlements seemed deaf. Not only did they fail to respond, they had actually begun chatting away among themselves.
“Damn it. Don’t tell me they’re trying to charge me a toll?”
Chen Guan’s face darkened.
The identity of an escort was an officially recognized one. It had been certified by the Great Yun Imperial Dynasty itself and counted as a licensed profession.
By the rules, no escort passing through any city could be charged a toll, nor could he be obstructed without cause.
More importantly, in order to guarantee the absolute authority of escort work, the imperial court had specially granted escorts the right to execute first and report later while carrying out their missions.
At certain critical moments, their status could even rank above the local Demon Suppression Bureau.
When they encountered demons or monsters blocking the road, even an ordinary county magistrate had to obey their deployment.
Because in this world, where demons, monsters, ghosts, and uncanny fiends ran rampant, the flow of wealth, power, and information—all of it—depended upon escorting.
Without escorts like them, who traded their lives for money, even the richest and most powerful people might never step beyond the gates of their own homes in all their lives.
What they lived on was not merely their strength, but the professional skill they had carved out with their lives.
Most unique of all, their status was recognized across national borders. They could travel freely and pass unhindered.
That was why Luo Li’s grandfather had insisted on hiring an escort rather than some private martial outfit.
A private martial outfit, let alone crossing into another country, could not even leave its own commandery without first filing for permission. Otherwise, if it ran into local troops, it would be treated as a rebellion and cut down on the spot.
Chen Guan could only endure it and call out once more, his voice rising a few degrees.
“I am Chen Guan of Sanhua Town, and I have old ties with your city lord, Liu De. I ask that you report my arrival!”
“City Lord Liu De?”
Atop the battlements, the soldiers who had been shaking like leaves visibly let out a collective breath of relief when they heard that name.
Uncanny fiends were mysterious beyond measure, but people had still managed to sum up one identifying principle.
The most authoritative one was this—uncanny fiends could only imitate the voices of living people, but they could not speak the names of the living!
As long as one could accurately call out the name of anyone the other party knew, that was enough to prove beyond doubt that he was not some uncanny fiend in disguise.
One of the men on the wall, a middle-aged soldier of about forty in regulation armor, relaxed his grip on his spear.
His name was Wang Song, the newly appointed Guard Captain.
He turned around with great caution and looked down from the battlements.
His eyes first swept across Chen Guan’s somewhat dark face, then shifted to Luo Li slumped before him, sleeping like a dead pig.
At once, a sincere look of admiration appeared in his eyes.
“As expected of an escort! You actually dared to travel under escort through the dead of night!”