Mo Yungao looked in the direction the young man was gazing at, behind that mountain, which connected to the Wanshan Mountain Range. There were mountains behind mountains, mountains within mountains, and more mountains below. Suddenly, a sense of hope surged within him. Covering the gunshot wound on his shoulder, he said, “Then you carry me, and I’ll help you find the way.”

The local customs were simple and honest. Although the young man seemed to be from the north and was still quite young, he should be easy to deceive. As long as he could leave the battlefield, he could throw away his military uniform and should be able to survive.

The young man ignored him, continuing to sort out his belongings in front of him. His left hand was injured, wrapped with a bandage taken from a corpse. He said, “You can still leave now,” and continued to move forward.

As the young man walked away, Mo Yungao’s hope slowly turned into despair. He let out a cold laugh because the path the young man took led to a crevice in the mountain, where they had been ambushed, with bandits lying in wait inside. “The Bodhisattva of the road should save people; otherwise, just go back to heaven,” he chuckled.

He grabbed a grenade, which could spare him from the torment of being captured. The bandits would skin him alive and hang his skin at the town entrance to instill fear in the locals.

He waited on the hillside until dark, then until dawn, only to be met with wild boars gnawing on corpses. No bandits came to clean up the battlefield.

Mo Yungao was somewhat surprised; his wound had stopped bleeding on its own. He managed to get up, feeling a bit better, and scavenged some food and water from the bodies. He took off his military uniform and intended to flee for his life.

However, Mo Yungao was somewhat different from ordinary people. After walking a few steps out of the mountain, he suddenly wondered why the bandits had not come out of the mountain. They had clearly been completely defeated. In the past, when they had been ambushed during bandit suppression, the bandits would show no mercy.

He thought of the young man. That little devil who refused to save him was probably dead by now.

As he walked, an inexplicable impulse made him turn back, heading toward the crevice in the mountain. He wanted to see what had happened.

The sun had just risen, and Mo Yungao vividly remembered that day’s refreshing air and the unusually blue sky. He entered the crevice, and the surroundings became very dark, with all the blue sky pouring down from above. It was a strange sight.

Not long ago, where the blue sky was, there were Hanyang-made rifles; the bandits were shooting in from the outside of the mountain crevice, relying only on the protruding rocks for cover, aiming at targets above them with no experience in ballistics.

Then the bandits threw down their homemade grenades, and they were overwhelmed, forced to flee.

Now, the crevice was eerily quiet. He continued to walk forward, and it grew quieter. After about three hours, he unexpectedly walked out of the other side of the crevice.

What he saw was a radiating pattern of bandit corpses, all dead at the exit, as if they had rushed out of the crevice and suddenly collapsed, dying.

Even more bizarrely, there were flies all over the bodies, far more than on the soldiers’ corpses.

As he looked closely, he realized that most of the bodies were highly decomposed, not resembling those that had just died.

He was somewhat shocked and suddenly realized how many days he had actually slept.

He did not see the young man’s corpse, but the locals all knew that the other side of the gap was controlled by bandits. Except for the women who had been captured and taken into the mountains, no one had ever seen what lay on the other side of the gap, and now he had come in.

Mo Yungao continued walking deeper and soon caught a whiff of a terrible stench. After taking a few more steps, he saw a village behind the gap, almost shrouded in flies. Corpses were everywhere.

The entire bandit stronghold behind the gap was rotten. He noticed that at the back of the village, there were even more flies gathering, and the ground was covered with maggots and putrid water.

Mo Yungao didn’t know what had happened. He walked towards the back of the village and saw that most of the bandits’ bodies were piled up in a large pit behind the village. The flies swarmed like clouds.

He slowly approached, and the flies kept hitting his face. Suddenly, he noticed something among the flies that wasn’t a fly. Just as he was about to swat one to take a closer look, someone suddenly grabbed him by the back of his neck and lifted him up into a nearby tree.

That person, like lifting a sack, instantly climbed to a high branch. Mo Yungao looked up and saw it was the young man from before.

“What happened here?” Mo Yungao asked, looking up at him. “You killed them all.”

The young man gazed down at the pile of corpses and said, “Don’t talk. That thing is about to come out.”

As soon as he finished speaking, Mo Yungao saw the pile of corpses shift slightly.

The train jolted, and Mo Yungao woke up.

He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of the train car. After a long while, he sat up.

“Where are we?” he asked, and the guard outside immediately opened the door to respond: “We just passed Changsha. When we stopped, Zhang Qishan had someone bring gifts.”

“Don’t show me those useless food and drink,” Mo Yungao said. “Has Zhang Qishan set off?”

“I heard he’ll leave in two or three days. What was sent isn’t food; Zhang Qishan said it’s something you’ve been dreaming of,” the guard said, lowering his voice. “It’s a woman with the last name Zhang.”

Mo Yungao paused for a moment, slowly put on his military uniform, and followed the guard out.

This train was a special one that Mo Yungao had chartered. Usually, there were ten carriages kept in the garage, and before boarding in Guangzhou, he rented a locomotive. At that time, Zhang Zuolin’s special train had twenty-eight carriages, so Mo Yungao’s display was somewhat modest for a regional warlord.

Even so, Mo Yungao’s office and bedroom were still quite spacious, with the rooms for guards and attendants spread out on either side.

When Mo Yungao arrived at his office, he saw Zhang Haiqi bound tightly and sitting on his sofa.

Mo Yungao did not approach immediately. The guard handed him a note. It was a message from Zhang Qishan.

“This person came to my residence to discuss collaborating in finding evidence of your reckless governance in Beihai. As we are colleagues, I do not wish to interfere; it is up to you to handle it. Additionally, this woman is tattooed with a qilin. When her blood is heated, it will reveal itself. I’ve heard that you, Mo Xianbei, have been searching for it for a long time, and now your wish can be fulfilled.”

Mo Yungao sat down in his office chair and had the guard close both the front and back doors, then he looked out the window.

The guard asked, “Sir, what do you think?”

“Zhang Qishan appears to be polite on the surface, but he has been investigating me all along. Would he really be so kind as to send Zhang’s family to me? Is he afraid I might suspect he is one of them, thus trying to clear his name?” Mo Yunxiao was unfazed; what he wanted was never just simple power or anything else. He looked at Zhang Haiqi and suddenly took out a report from the drawer, flipping through it: “You are from the Nanyang Archive, aren’t you?” A needle was tucked inside the report. He pulled out a small bottle from another drawer, which contained a ladybug.