Gu Shenwei knew that his actions would be opposed by Zhong Heng and Fang Wenshi.
Sending spies to the Central Plains was a reasonable move. However, the Dragon King’s motive was not about bulling others, but revenge.
He had promised the Military Counsellor that he would pursue hegemony with all his heart, and up until this day, he had fulfilled his promise. Meeting the disciples of the Shangguan family, he maintained a calm exterior. Even if he was accompanied by the Supreme King’s son, he could not hurt him.
However, deep in his heart, his hatred still existed. It was not something that he could simply remove if he wanted to.
Hatred was like a banyan tree. The seed had been planted in Gu Shenwei’s body. He nurtured that little thing with everything inside him. In a short time, the tree had grown to the sky, entangling him with many drooping air roots and strangling its enthusiastic host.
Gu Shenwei did not resist. He let himself be swallowed up by hatred, because he drew from its strength. He needed that after his family was massacred.
Practising “Death Scripture” entwined him with his hatred. Perhaps only Maid Lotus could understand Gu Shenwei’s state.
Gu Shenwei never really gave up on revenge. As he got older, he felt that there must have been some kind of catch about his family’s destruction. Golden Roc Fort must have been hired to do the killings by someone else. The employer must have come from the Central Plain, the greatest suspect being Wei Song.
However, one thing befuddled him: The Gu and Wei family had almost intermarried. Even if Wei Song had abandoned the Gu family and lost some power, he could have easily just withdrawn from the family. Why did he have to kill people?
He wanted to know why.
Wei Song was in the Western Region, but Gu Shenwei did not feel as urgent as before. One day, he would interrogate the enemy personally. Right now, he wanted to start from the Central Plain to understand the truth of the falling out between the Gu and Wei families.
So, he needed to send someone to the Central Plain.
This person had to be sufficiently loyal and trustworthy. More importantly, he needed to be able to endure the loneliness of being far away from home and not reveal his identity because of homesickness.
Gu Shenwei had been secretly observing, and knew that the swordsmen of the Great Snowmountain were all loyal. However, they were simple-minded with a distinctive personality. They could not accomplish the task of gathering information. Other people were even more unsuitable. The Xu Shi siblings could not endure loneliness. Zhong Heng and the others would only oppose the Dragon King’s actions.
Lin Xiaoshan was the perfect candidate. He had lived in Jade City and knew the ways of life there. His loyalty to the Dragon King had already been severely tested. The only problem lie in whether he would be content to vanish into the Western regions and end all contact with everyone, including Lao Hong, a blacksmith who was like a father to him.
His love of Jiang solved the last problem.
Gu Shenwei once asked Lin Xiaoshan if Lao Hong and Jiang were ever in danger at the same time, who would he save first. Lin Xiaoshan chose Jiang, because he said Jiang needed more help.
From then on, Gu Shenwei forged a new plan.
The first problem was how to persuade Jiang.
Jiang liked Lin Xiaoshan. However, the will of the tribe had too much of an effect on her. Refusing to marry the Dragon King was unthinkable. Only Gu Shenwei could trick her.
“I need you to disappear. This is very important to me and the entire army. You probably also know that the residents of the Xiaoyao Lake and Five countries are strongly guarded against the Great Snowmountain. You are the focal point of the dispute. Without you, there would be no conflict,” said Gu Shenwei to Jiang.
Much of this was true, so Jiang agreed. She was not stupid — she knew how important the Dragon King’s grace was to her. Making her vanish did not require a complicated plan. She knelt down, hoping to repay the king one day.
“Look towards Lin Xiaoshan. This will be my reward,” said Gu Shenwei.
The second question was how to make Jiang vanish without a trace.
More than a year ago, Gu Shenwei was returning to Jade City when he met an opponent. When he was caught, he swallowed poison. The effect was considerable. Maid Lotus had scoffed at the medicine, claiming that New Moon Hall had a better substitute.
Maid Lotus went to summon the disciples from the same clan in Jade City. She left behind a large amounts of pills, including the substitute.
Jiang followed the Dragon King’s orders and swallowed the medicine at midnight. She quietly “died”, and fresh blood flowed out of the corner of her mouth. She looked like she had been killed by some heavy-handed means.
The danger still existed.
No one knew how the shocked the assassin who had gone to kill Jiang was. The person that he wanted to kill was already dead. He must have checked carefully and been convinced, because normally he would have even stabbed the person again. In that case, Jiang would have really died.
The assassin was eager to escape, so did not attack a second time. When he died under the sword of the Dragon King, no one knew that Jiang had actually been “dead” for more than an hour.
To Lin Xiaoshan, Gu Shenwei did not reveal a single word. One, he was afraid of leaving behind any tracks. Secondly, he was scared that Jiang really had died, which would only irritate Lin Xiaoshan.
The specially-made pills of New Moon Hall lived up to their name. Jiang faked death for three days. Even the slave girl who dressed her up in the undertaker’s clothes did not discover the truth.
When she was placed into the coffin, Gu Shenwei switched the corpse for a beam of wood that night. Jiang, who finally awakened, changed into men’s clothes and accompanied the Dragon King as one of the guard troops of the savages.
This was the stage when it was easiest to make mistakes, but Jiang completed her task perfectly. She was a girl of the Great Snowmountain. She was not coquettish, like most women, and played the part of a man well.
The most important thing was that no one doubted Jiang’s murder, so naturally, no one looked for any clues.
Only Zhong Heng saw through the flaw. He thought that the Dragon King had intentions of assassination. However, he never expected Jiang to fake her death.
Lin Xiaoshan seemed to have lived a lifetime. Even though he was wearing a military uniform, his skin was dark and he grew a long beard, his familiar glance did not change. One only had to pay attention to feel his presence.
He thought he was truly stupid. These days, he passed by this guard troops without any doubts.
He thought he was lucky to be able to see Jiang again in this lifetime, and it was all thanks to the Dragon King.
Gu Shenwei did not give the two the chance to talk to each other. He set off immediately, leading a group of soldiers toward a life-saving spring in the desert. That was the westernmost frontier of Xiaoyao Lake. A group of soldiers was building a watchtower.
The Dragon King was very pleased after inspecting it.
Lin Xiaoshan and Jiang did not stay. They moved forward as scouts and walked the same path as Fang Wenshi. The whole journey took a day. They also went to Norland and from there, turned to the East. They bypassed Biyu city, and headed for the country nearest to the Central Plains — the Loulan Kingdom.
At the Loulan Kingdom, they would first purchase the travel papers to enter the Central Plain. They would then continue to move forward under pseudonyms until they reached the capital of the Central Plain to carry out their assignment from the Dragon King: to collect all information related to the Gu and Wei families.
However, they did not need to send intelligence reports back to the Western Region. Gu Shenwei believed that one day, he would return to the Central Plain.
The two were extremely grateful to the Dragon King, but revealing their emotions would jeopardize plans. If they were to bump into someone like Zhong Heng, they would be recognized immediately. After the two were ordered to leave, Gu Shenwei heaved a sigh of relief.
In the eyes of Lin Xiaoshan and Jiang, the Dragon King had done a good deed. Gu Shenwei did not feel that way, however. He was not used to judging things as “good” or “bad”. After seeing countless plots and betrayals, he believed that “good and bad” and “right and wrong” were illusions. The only real thing in the world is survival, which begets benefits and the transformation of life.
After sending off Lin Xiaoshan and Jiang, Gu Shenwei stayed a night at the life-saving spring, and then returned to the Hui Kingdom the next day.
The situation at the Hui Kingdom had already stabilized. The roving bandits had either been killed or had surrendered. The new border town began taking shape, and the troops started to begin their routine patrols.
News came from the East that everything at Stone Kingdom was stable. After several assassinations there, stabilization began happening on a small scale, with limited outside influence. Shangguan Jianyi gave up on trying to command personally, and fled back to this camp before winter.
Gu Shenwei stayed in the Hui Kingdom for some time in order to supervise the construction of the city.
However, there were too few men. While the outline of the new city had been formed, it was still far from being completed. At the rate of the current speed, there was no possibility of completion before the winter.
Gu Shenwei sent a messenger to the Hui Kingdom, asking for more labour.
It was this incident that triggered doubts on both sides.
The King of the Hui Kingdom sent messengers to express respect towards the Dragon King, but afterwards, he started to complain. From the drought in the spring to the harvest in the autumn, there had been a shortage of labour in the country, all because the young men had been recruited by the Dragon King into the army.
The tone of the messenger was ernest, and he almost begged the Dragon King for mercy.
If he had not already had experience with the An Kingdom, Gu Shenwei could have been cheated.
The An Kingdom had once provided troops to Golden Roc Fort, but Gu Shenwei and Maid Lotus had found a large number of young and mature men in the capital of the An Kingdom.
In the face of combatants who were not willing to fight, both kings and farmers tried their best to avoid their responsibilities.
Gu Shenwei had already sent men to investigate, and had found that there were, indeed, not many men in the villages and towns of the Hui Kingdom. Out of every ten rooms, nine were empty. In the past, they had been invaded by roving bandits, and everyone had hidden in the capital. However, after the roving bandits fled, not many people had left the city to go home.
This saved the trouble of looking all over for people , as they were all concentrated in one place.
The only problem was that Gu Shenwei’s troops were too few. Two teams with five hundred people each were now in the encirclement. The remaining 1,000 men were on their way to construct a new city, and had the task of patrolling the borders. There was simply no way of freeing up men to patrol a heavily guarded capital.
Gu Shenwwei boasted and pretended to gather all his troops and horses to go to the city to talk directly with the King of the Hui Kingdom.
This move worked faster than Gu Shenwei imagined. The second day after he issued the threat, the King of the Hui Kingdom sent five hundred labor men and pled guilty to the Dragon King, promising that he would send men everyday from then on.
The construction of the city accelerated immediately.
When the work was about to end, the captain of the commanders of the Hui Kingdom asked the Dragon King to name the new city.
Because the city was built upon local soil and wicker, Gu Shenwei named the city “Willow City”.
It was early winter when the two teams became responsible for suppressing the bandits. Gu Shenwei had nearly two thousand troops on hand, and thus decided to march towards the capital of the Hui Kingdom. This time, it was not to issue a threat, and no one was informed in advance.
He had not forgotten that the monarch and minister of the Hui Kingdom had previously refused to help soldiers enter the city.
Gu Shenwei was not a vengeful person, but he had to teach the commandant of the Hui Kingdom a lesson: The Dragon King was the real king of Xiaoyao Lake. The kings of the Five Kingdoms could keep the crown on their heads, but to rely on the Dragon King to fight Golden Roc Fort, they had to pay a price.
Mostly, his suspicious character was issuing this threat. He knew that the capital of the Hui Kingdom was hiding lots of secrets from him.