Chapter 101: Possessed by the Demon Child!

All of a sudden, Zheng Fan felt a chill spreading rapidly outward from the depths of his heart, as though he had been thrown into an icy pool in that very instant.

Along with it came dense waves of disaster, curses, plague, suffering, and every other manner of negative aura.

Zheng Fan had experienced this feeling once before, when he had eaten hotpot with Shatuo Queshi.

Except that back then, Shatuo Queshi had directly suppressed that powerful and terrifying omen.

But clearly, the noblewoman before him did not have that kind of stature.

Nor did she possess that kind of strength!

The floating, feverish, unreal sensation that had enveloped him was swiftly replaced by a bone-piercing cold.

Just as the noblewoman raised Zheng Fan’s long saber, black flames suddenly began to rise within Zheng Fan’s eyes.

“Buzz!”

Before the noblewoman could even turn the blade toward Zheng Fan’s neck, Zheng Fan’s hand had already clamped around hers!

Then Zheng Fan’s entire body rose directly from where he had been lying.

Rigid.

Fast.

Violent.

Like a compass sweeping out an arc—

“Bang!”

The noblewoman was smashed viciously into the ground.

Zheng Fan crouched over her, his right hand still locked around her throat.

Her eyes were filled with disbelief. She had clearly confirmed moments ago that this man had fallen prey to her technique!

The commotion immediately alerted the nearby barbarian soldiers. Until then, they had assumed there was about to be a fine show of tangled limbs over here.

Everyone had tactfully turned their eyes elsewhere. After all, even if they couldn’t watch, listening to a few sounds to sate their appetites wasn’t half bad, was it?

But the instant such a tremendous crash rang out, everyone snapped to attention.

Something was wrong.

Zheng Fan lowered his head slightly and stared at the noblewoman pinned beneath him. His head tilted gently to one side, and a childish laugh emerged from his throat.

“Heh… hehehe…”

You want to kill my dad? I can pretend I didn’t see that.

But you want to be my mom?

Well, now I’m wide awake!

A child’s clear voice should have sounded heavenly. At this moment, however, it was like the whisper of a demon.

The barbarian soldiers who rushed over instinctively retreated several steps, staring in terror at their Master.

The Blind Man’s repeated indoctrination had already planted a subconscious fear of Zheng Fan deep within them. But now, that subconscious terror seemed to have stepped out into reality.

If circumstances had allowed it—if they had been inside Willow Fort at this moment—they might have instinctively dropped to their knees and prostrated themselves in worship.

Unlike the civilizations of the four eastern states, the barbarians’ pantheon was remarkably simple. The supreme Barbarian God was the one and only deity in their hearts. There was no second god. Consequently, every other quasi-divine image that appeared in their mythology existed as an opposing “demonic” figure.

Put simply, the basic thread running through barbarian mythology was the lone Barbarian God battling the demons that filled the heavens. That, in turn, had given the barbarians a certain fascination with and reverence for demons.

Zheng Fan’s eyes flickered back and forth, sometimes lucid, sometimes dark, as though control were constantly changing hands.

“Demon Child!”

Liang Cheng strode over. Behind him, the young girl had been bound and forced to kneel on the ground.

In truth, Zheng Fan and Liang Cheng could hardly be blamed for their carelessness. Who could possibly have imagined that a noblewoman and her daughter, randomly seized during a raid, would possess methods like these?

The odds were about the same as buying hundreds of lottery tickets and somehow hitting the jackpot.

It was almost impossible.

Zheng Fan turned his head toward Liang Cheng.

He smiled.

“You… are… trash…”

“…”

Liang Cheng.

It was a child’s voice. Liang Cheng knew perfectly well that this was the Demon Child voicing his contempt.

Among the Seven Demon Kings, the Demon Child was the laziest and the least willing to do anything, yet his position among them was also the most transcendent.

That was not merely because the Demon Child had been a work personally drawn by Zheng Fan. The real reason was that the Demon Child himself had been created by that pervert Zheng Fan through an extraordinarily twisted, perverse mode of thought—an utterly deranged product of an utterly deranged mind!

Zheng Fan lowered his head and once again looked at the noblewoman beneath him.

Threads of black mist began to seep from his palm.

Terror instantly appeared on the noblewoman’s face. A moment later, her entire body began convulsing violently.

“Ah!”

Zheng Fan opened his mouth and growled at her, as though reveling in the pleasure of tormenting her.

Suddenly, Zheng Fan’s body shuddered.

The aura around him descended into chaos.

Liang Cheng, standing nearby, understood what was happening. Zheng Fan had begun fighting to regain control of his own body.

What surprised Liang Cheng, however, was that after that brief “disorder,” Zheng Fan’s aura was once again flooded by dense negative energy.

“Crack!”

Zheng Fan twisted the noblewoman’s neck and broke it with one hand, then rose to his feet.

The torture had been forcibly cut short.

“Mother…”

The girl had barely begun to cry out when the barbarian soldier beside her smashed the hilt of his saber into the back of her head, knocking her unconscious on the spot.

Zheng Fan rolled his neck. He spread both arms, then slowly lowered them again. His legs also seemed somewhat uncoordinated. As he walked toward Liang Cheng, his feet splayed outward at a bizarre angle.

He seemed to be adapting to this body, like a child familiarizing himself with a new toy.

At last, he stopped in front of Liang Cheng.

Liang Cheng stared gravely at Zheng Fan.

“Get out of Master’s body!”

Zheng Fan’s lips split into a grin.

He seemed to be smiling.

At the same time, a trembling voice emerged from his throat.

“Trash…”

Liang Cheng’s fingernails slowly began to lengthen.

Fine.

Give you an inch and you want the whole damned dyehouse, is that it?

They were all Demon Kings. Every one of them was proud to the bone. Did this little bastard really think he alone stood supreme above all the rest?

In any company, ordinary employees might flatter a coworker who had connections to the boss, but no matter how ingratiating they acted on the surface, deep down they were bound to look down on him.

Just then, the pitch-black color in Zheng Fan’s eyes began to recede.

The aura around him abruptly trembled.

Liang Cheng paused.

Again?

“Ah Cheng, I trust him.”

Zheng Fan spoke.

This time, it was Zheng Fan’s own voice.

Liang Cheng frowned slightly. That sentence proved Zheng Fan was capable of taking back control of his body, yet he had chosen to do nothing.

Trust him?

Trust him to do what?

The next instant, blackness swallowed Zheng Fan’s eyes once more.

In Zheng Fan’s vision, the world had become gray and white.

It was like looking through an old black-and-white photograph.

The scenery, the people, even the wind itself carried the aura of decay. Through his eyes, there was nothing in this world worth clinging to.

The eyes were the windows to the soul.

This was, in fact, the truest reflection of the Demon Child’s heart.

Zheng Fan slowly raised a trembling hand.

He pointed at Liang Cheng.

His fingertip nearly touched the tip of Liang Cheng’s nose.

At the same time, the childish voice sounded once more from his throat.

“Traaaaaash…”

This time, Liang Cheng merely looked calmly at Zheng Fan.

He did not get angry.

He only said, “Then prove it to me.”

Zheng Fan’s mouth split open again, stretching almost to the absolute limit a normal human face could endure.

His hands slowly dropped, hanging limply at his sides.

His knees bent slightly.

Then—

“Whoosh!”

His body twisted sideways.

He faced south.

And immediately after—

Both legs slammed against the ground!

“Bang!”

Like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, he shot straight south!

After sprinting two hundred meters, Zheng Fan suddenly stopped. His entire body sprang upward from the ground.

His right arm swung through half a circle with the stiff, mechanical motion of a puppet.

Then, His fist smashed into the earth.

“Bang!”

A muffled impact rang out.

A crater appeared in the ground.

What exploded outward was not merely dirt.

There was also an enormous cloud of… blood mist!

The moment Liang Cheng saw that bloody mist, his expression changed drastically. He immediately roared, “Everyone, mount up!”

Someone had already found them.

Someone had been lurking nearby, watching them.

And despite the sentry riders and hidden pickets Liang Cheng had deployed, none of them had noticed a thing!

Beside the crater, Zheng Fan stood in a strangely forlorn pose.

His arms still hung at his sides.

He tilted his head and looked back.

Behind him, Liang Cheng and all the barbarian soldiers had mounted their horses.

Zheng Fan grinned.

His lips exaggeratedly formed a silent word.

“Traaaaaash…”

This time, not only did Liang Cheng fail to get angry, he even felt a lingering chill of fear.

He had always prided himself on knowing how to command troops. Among the Seven Demon Kings, he alone had genuine experience leading soldiers.

Xue San was an assassin who had always operated alone. A’Ming was a vampire who cared only about amusing himself. Fan Li was a simple-minded brute, and so on.

Yet this time, Liang Cheng had made a mistake precisely where he could least afford one.

The enemy had somehow hidden underground. They had clearly used some special technique, but the fact remained that Liang Cheng had failed to detect them.

That was his mistake.

He should have remembered that this was a… special world.

Yet when arranging his defenses, he had simply copied his old experience wholesale.

He really was trash.

But now was not the time for self-reproach. Liang Cheng looked at Zheng Fan—or, more precisely, at the Demon Child currently occupying Zheng Fan’s body.

Thinking about it, the Demon Child’s complete awakening this time was probably not entirely because the noblewoman had tried to attack Zheng Fan. In fact, judging from what A’Ming had previously said about the incident at the former Commander-in-Chief’s residence in Nanwang City, the Demon Child could easily have used his stone body to smash the noblewoman’s head apart from a short distance away.

But he had not chosen to do that.

Because he had already sensed the real danger.

A danger that might bury every last one of them here.

Because the rest of them had been so useless, Lord Demon Child had been forced to wake from his lazy slumber.

If that didn’t make them trash, what did?

No wonder he was in such a foul mood.

The next instant, Zheng Fan’s body sprang forward again and began charging south.

Liang Cheng raised his saber.

With a roar, he shouted, “Charge!”

Several hundred barbarian cavalrymen spurred their horses into a gallop, following the direction in which Zheng Fan had charged.

……

“Lieutenant, why haven’t those troops arrived yet?”

“Don’t rush them. It should still be a little while.”

A somewhat thin man sat on a small chair.

Beside him was a little tea table holding a plate of cloud-slice cakes and a pot of cold tea.

The man wore silver light armor. The armor was thin, light, and supple.

The Great Yan Dynasty revered black.

The State of Qian revered red.

Originally, however, the State of Qian’s armor had primarily been silver. In his early years under the previous dynasty, the founding emperor of Qian had been known as the Silver-Armored General, and every soldier under his command had worn silver armor. Naturally, after he founded his own state, his Imperial Guards continued to wear silver.

And so, after that disastrous defeat a century ago, the first Marquis of Zhenbei had left behind these lines:

Whip raised, horse urged, I chase the silver tide;
Past clear-running streams, the peach blossoms lie.

Afterward, the armies of Qian gradually stopped using silver armor as their standard. At some ancestral rite, a later emperor of Qian claimed to have received a dream declaring that Qian was destined to rule by the Virtue of Fire. One convoluted excuse followed another, and eventually the armies of Qian came to favor red.

Silver armor survived only among the emperor’s personal troops in Shangjing, who were known as the Silver-Armored Guard.

Their function was actually not so different from the State of Yan’s Secret Intelligence Department. They were extremely close to the Embroidered Uniform Guard Zheng Fan knew from his original world.

“Lieutenant, after we earn such a great merit this time, surely our superiors will reward us?”

Chu Fengjiu pinched up a piece of cloud-slice cake and popped it into his mouth, then took a swallow of cold tea. He shot the young man standing beside him an irritated glance.

“Your father is the Commander of our Silver-Armored Guard. Why are you more obsessed with earning merit than poor military bastards like us who have no background at all?”

“There’s nothing I can do about it, is there? My father is my father, but I’m under plenty of pressure myself. Who knows how many pairs of eyes are watching me? I heard you had real ability, Lieutenant, so I pulled a few strings to get assigned under you. I was hoping to ride your coattails and scrape up some merit.”

“Tsk. At least you’re honest, brat. But this time, you may be disappointed. Our Silver-Armored Guard spent twenty years laying its network in Yinlang Commandery of the State of Yan. It took us all that time to finally reach an understanding with Nanwang City’s Commander-in-Chief, Prefect, and a whole faction of aristocratic clans.

“It wasn’t enough to make them raise the banner of rebellion, defect to us, and break away from the State of Yan, but at the very least, they could serve as a barrier for us.

“Great clans and aristocratic houses never truly care about the fortunes of a state. What they care about is whether their own clan survives.”

“Ah.” Hearing this, the young man sighed as well.

“But who could have guessed what madness seized the Marquis of Jingnan? He actually dared to lead his army on a killing spree through Yinlang Commandery, then publicly declare that the Commander-in-Chief and Prefect of Nanwang City had been murdered by spies from Qian. Heh.”

“Lieutenant, does that mean the State of Yan truly intends to go to war against our Great Qian?”

Chu Fengjiu shook his head.

“The Marquis of Zhenbei’s estate has already become an overwhelmingly powerful fief, and the Yan Emperor has openly fallen out with the Marquis of Zhenbei’s estate. The Marquis of Jingnan probably acted this way because the Yan Emperor fears that when civil war erupts inside Yan, our Great Qian will launch another northern expedition.”

“Brilliant, Lieutenant.”

“Brilliant, my ass!”

Chu Fengjiu threw the cloud-slice cake in his hand straight onto the ground.

He cursed, “A few hundred Yan cavalrymen broke straight through our Mianzhou City. They strutted around the northern frontier of our Great Qian for two whole days, and our frontier army couldn’t do a damned thing about them.

“Little Ding, tell me—if you were the Yan Emperor and you learned about this, what would you think?”

“Well…”

Ding Xiang did not dare answer.

“Too scared to say it, huh? You count as one of Shangjing’s young masters too. Why are you so timid? Stop worrying about every little thing. Show some backbone.”

“Your criticism is deserved, Lieutenant.”

“This Yan cavalry force absolutely cannot be allowed to leave. Once they return to the State of Yan and report what they’ve done over the past few days, let me put it this way:

“If I were the Yan Emperor, instead of worrying about whether Great Qian might launch a northern expedition, I’d be tempted to grit my teeth and march south first!”

“Would he dare?”

“Why wouldn’t he? Respect is something you earn yourself. If you’re useless, don’t blame other people for bullying you!”

Chu Fengjiu let out a long sigh.

“So, for the sake of Great Qian’s frontier, this Yan force absolutely cannot be allowed to leave our territory alive. That is precisely why I stayed behind to assist the frontier army in encircling and destroying them.

“Otherwise, considering the quality of that bunch we call a frontier army, they might genuinely let this Yan cavalry force fight its way back home!”

“Lieutenant, there’s something I’ve always wondered. How were you able to determine their location?”

“That band of Yan cavalry abducted the wife and daughter of Meng Changqi, Military Commissioner of Liangzhen.”

“I know that. Commissioner Meng has practically gone mad. He’s sent nearly all the Liangzhen cavalry out searching for them.”

“Commissioner Meng’s wife is one of our Silver-Armored Guard.”

“…”

Ding Xiang.

“Many of the important civil and military officials at court have wives who belong to the Silver-Armored Guard. Some of those men know perfectly well and simply pretend they don’t. Others genuinely have no idea whatsoever.”

“Then…”

“Relax. Your mother isn’t one of us.”

“…”

Ding Xiang.

“Your mother really isn’t one of ours. Your father rose all the way from Battalion Commander to Commander, one promotion at a time. He married your mother back when he was still a Battalion Commander. Even the Silver-Armored Guard doesn’t have so many women to spare that we’d lavish one on every Battalion Commander getting married, right?

“Of course, if your father ever took a concubine or remar—”

Chu Fengjiu thought better of finishing the word “remarried.”

“So now you understand why your father never takes concubines. He’s the Commander of the Silver-Armored Guard, after all. Did you really think it was because he had no interest in women?”

“So that’s how it is.”

“Heh. Anyway, she left markers along the entire route. We followed them, and that’s how we found this place. The problem is that we have too few men. All we can do is keep watch on them for now. We still have to wait for the frontier army to arrive, close the sack around them, and then swallow them in one bite.”

As he spoke, Chu Fengjiu picked up the teapot and rose to his feet. Walking forward, he said, “Winter in the north really is damned unpleasant. I hear Yan is even colder, and Beifeng Commandery near the desert is so cold it’s barely fit for human habitation.”

“That’s what the merchant caravans say too,” Ding Xiang agreed.

“Mm. So think about it. Just how much do you suppose the Yan people must adore the splendid lands of our Great Qian? Heh.”

“Lieutenant, I feel that if Great Qian’s frontier army continues like this, then…”

“Don’t. Whatever you’re about to say, don’t say it to me. Go tell your father.”

“Yes.”

Chu Fengjiu walked over to Ding Xiang and patted him on the shoulder.

“Little Ding, you’re a good one. Young men should have thoughts like these. Me? I’m old. I don’t have that kind of ambition anymore. If I can muddle through, I’ll muddle through. The grand ministers at court aren’t worried. His Majesty isn’t worried. So why should we be?”

“But…”

“Don’t worry. I’m glad you think this way. Even if I weren’t considering your father’s position, I’d still do my best to preserve a young man like you for Great Qian. I’ll shelter you for a while, keep you safe and sound, then push you upward. That way, Great Qian might still have a little hope left in the future.”

“This subordinate thanks you for your guidance, Lieutenant!”

“No need, no need. It’s what I should…”

“Bang!”

A figure suddenly burst out of the woods beside them.

A terrifying killing intent crashed toward them like a wave of boiling oil!

Chu Fengjiu’s heart jolted.

The hand resting on Ding Xiang’s shoulder instantly exerted force.

He shoved the completely unprepared Ding Xiang straight toward the black shadow while he himself kicked off the ground and rapidly retreated!

The final two words of his unfinished sentence still drifted lightly through the air:

“…be doing.”

(End of Chapter)