Daomu Biji: The Mystic Nine
Book 2: Chapter 7

A type of armor similar to chain mail (1) was put on Qi Tiezui’s body, except that grenades had been attached all over it.

The night was getting darker, and the forest was full of the sounds of night owls and all kinds of insects.

It was even more humid at night, so almost everyone was completely wet. But there were hardly any mosquitoes since the Zhang family was around.

Qi Tiezui watched Zhang Xiaoyu fiddle with the armor and said, “What do you think? Does Fo Ye have something against me personally?”

“Fo Ye must have done this for a reason. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have rashly put you in danger. He must be very confident that this will work.”

“If he’s that confident, can we just discard the grenades? There are still more than a dozen ears of corn in my bag. How about you replace the grenades with corn?”

“Fo Ye says that if you’re dragged away by the monster, it’ll probably be very difficult to save you, so you should just pull the grenade pins. That way, you’ll be considered to have made great contributions to the eighty-two villages.”

“Now I understand where Fo Ye’s confidence comes from,” Qi Tiezui said.

“Fo Ye says that you’ve done the calculations yourself, so you should be able to face your fate calmly,” Zhang Xiaoyu said. “That’s why you’ll pull the grenade pins yourself.”

“I’ll never pull them. I’m going to scream for help until my last breath. I’m going to scream bloody murder so that Zhang Qishan will feel guilty for the rest of his life.”

“Don’t worry, Ba Ye. We’ll feel guilty about it.”

Zhang Xiaoyu finished preparing Qi Tiezui properly before giving him a wind lantern. It was specially made so that it could hang high above Qi Tiezui’s head from a stick that was inserted into the armor. That way, Qi Tiezui wouldn’t be invisible once he walked far away from them.

As all of the others hid in the darkness, Qi Tiezui suddenly couldn’t see anyone. It was as if he was the only person in the forest.

“They’ll feel guilty. They’ll feel guilty. Guilty, my ass!” Qi Tiezui took a moment to calm himself down before he decided to risk it all. Indeed, just as Zhang Qishan had said, Qi Tiezui was very confident in his calculations.

As a result, he walked into the forest with a swagger while singing, “Zhang Da Fo Ye treats people’s lives like dirt. He is heartless. I hold a steel whip in my hand and hit him with it… I can’t defeat him.”

Qi Tiezui was singing Shaoxing opera (2), so he sang it with a heavy southern accent. He was betting that Zhang Qishan couldn’t understand the Shaoxing dialect since he was from the north.

After walking around for an hour, nothing happened. But as he walked around in circles over and over again, he started to feel a little scared since there was no movement behind him at all. He suddenly began to wonder if he was lost, which meant that there wasn’t a group of people behind him with a bunch of machine guns.

“Fo Ye, can you say ‘beep’ to let me know that you’re still around?” Qi Tiezui said to the surrounding bushes.

No one replied.

He walked a few steps and asked again, but there was still no answer. Qi Tiezui began to feel a chill running down his spine. “Fo Ye, don’t mess with me right now. Can’t you just throw a stone to let me know you’re here?”

There was still no reply. Moreover, Qi Tiezui suddenly realized that the sounds of birds and insects all around had disappeared at this time. There weren’t any other sounds in the entire forest besides the slight sound of droplets falling down from where they had condensed on the tree trunks.

“God damn it, don’t tell me that thing is around me right now,” Qi Tiezui said as he immediately touched a grenade pin and pulled out his pistol.

At this time, Qi Tiezui suddenly heard the sound of a baby crying coming from behind him. He immediately turned his head and realized that the sound was coming from the bushes six or seven steps behind him.

Qi Tiezui breathed a sigh of relief before tensing up again. The child cried, indicating that Zhang Qishan was six or seven steps away from him. But if the child cried, didn’t it mean that Zhang Qishan’s location had been exposed?

The sound of the child’s crying was getting louder and louder, and Qi Tiezui was a little unsure of what to do. Then, he heard the child’s crying start to approach him little by little.

Qi Tiezui suddenly felt that something was off. Was Zhang Xiaoyu crawling towards him with the child on his back? But why didn’t he hear any movements in the bushes?

While he was thinking this, there suddenly came another sound of a baby crying on his left.

Qi Tiezui was extremely surprised. How come there are two babies? It was already outrageous for them to bring a child into this dense forest, so why was there another baby here? Were there two children?

Did the baby come out of the ground?

If there was only one baby crying, Qi Tiezui wouldn’t be able to tell who was who. But with the two babies crying at the same time, Qi Tiezui immediately realized that the baby on his left was the one they had brought with them from the village, because that child always cried half-heartedly.

But what was crawling towards him? The sound of that baby crying was almost right in front of him, so he raised his gun and got ready for a monster to come out of the darkness.

At this time, however, the sound of that baby rushing towards him suddenly disappeared, leaving only the sound of the crying child on Zhang Xiaoyu’s back. Moreover, the sound of him crying was getting farther and farther away, as if Zhang Xiaoyu was carrying the child away from him.

Qi Tiezui was holding his gun and sweating profusely when he suddenly saw a person’s shadow practically stand up right next to him. He was startled, but immediately realized that it was Zhang Qishan.

Zhang Qishan took a leap, rushed into the darkness in front of him, and hit something in one fell swoop.

Fo Ye has always been by my side to protect me, Qi Tiezui thought to himself, suddenly realizing that Zhang Qishan had never been more than three steps away from him. He felt warm in his heart. That was what he meant when he said that he was very confident this would work. But I’ve been letting out a lot of smelly farts just now. Does this mean that Fo Ye….

At this time, Qi Tiezui suddenly heard the sound of a baby shrieking in front of him and all the movements disappeared.

Zhang Qishan walked out of the darkness with a strange spherical object in his hand, and Qi Tiezui knew at a glance that it was the head of something.

“What did you eat last night?” Zhang Qishan asked him.

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TN Notes:

(1) Chain mail (often just mail or sometimes chainmail) is a type of armor consisting of small metal rings linked together in a pattern to form a mesh. Wiki link here.

(2) Yue opera, also known as Shaoxing opera, is the second most popular Chinese opera genre. Only Peking opera is more popular nationwide. Wiki link here.

****

Tiffany’s Notes: Farts… lol. That’s it. I’m easily amused.