Moving with silent, practiced efficiency, Gu Changsheng and Captain Gu Tie carried out the swap in less than forty-five seconds.
First, Captain Gu Tie ushered the forty freed orphan children—and the dozen bound, gagged buyers—up the wide rear ventilation ramp that led out to the pine forest on the western slope. With eight-year-old Gu Nian walking guard at the rear of the line in his yellow bunny slippers.
Down in the dim back corner of the cavern, Gu Changsheng blew out three of the four wall torches so the area around the iron cage was cast in deep shadow.
Then he picked up the unconscious, two-hundred-pound scarred Slave Boss by the belt. Curled the man’s knees up to his chin inside the small black iron cage where Su Nuannuan had been locked. Draped a thick black oilcloth tarp completely over the bars!
From the outside, the lump curled under the black tarp looked just like a small person huddled in the corner of the cage. The lingering traces of purple corrosion on the bars were still clearly visible.
“Now for the second part of the receipt,” Gu Changsheng murmured with an icy smile.
On the wooden table beside the cage sat an empty clay specimen jar identical to the one Lin Fan was carrying down the ladder. Along with a jar of dried red-backed cave wasps that the Slave Boss used to feed poisonous reptiles.
Gu Changsheng tapped open [Dad’s Care-Package Upgrade Box] in his mind. Spent 50 DP [6,160 -> 6,110 DP balance] to fuse [One Jar of Dried Red-Backed Cave Wasps], [A Drop of Residual Poison-Miasma Slag]. [A Scent-Locking Trigger Array] into a [Rank 1 Perfection: Fused 500-Strong Iron-Sting Hornet Hive]!
With a flick of his finger, Gu Changsheng placed the dormant. Basketball-sized hornet hive right under the black tarp between the unconscious Slave Boss’s knees—programmed to wake up in a berserk frenzy the exact instant it smelled hundred-day fermented skunk-cabbage within three feet!
Holding six-year-old Su Nuannuan fast asleep against his shoulder inside her warm fox-fur cloak, Gu Changsheng stepped silently up the rear ventilation shaft and vanished into the night breeze just. Lin Fan’s boots hit the bottom rung of the main entrance ladder!
Thud.
Lin Fan stepped onto the black sand of the cavern floor, panting heavily inside his dirty hooded cloak while clutching a two-foot clay jar full of rustling, venomous centipedes in his left arm.
Inside the black iron ring on his thumb, Master Yao Chen was still refusing to speak to him after the morning’s latrine-bucket explosion, keeping the ring’s spiritual sense sealed tight.
Because the main cavern was empty and dim—with most of the wall torches extinguished—Lin Fan squinted nervously through the shadows toward the back corner.
“Hello? Slave Boss?” Lin Fan called out in a low, hoarse voice, holding his nose slightly because he thought the faint smell in the air was his own coat.
“Where did all the guards go?
Are they changing shifts?”
Nobody answered—except for a muffled, raspy groan from beneath the black oilcloth tarp covering the corroded iron cage in the back corner!
Seeing the black-draped iron cage sitting right where the market runner had described it—and spotting the unmistakable purple poison-pitting on the bottom iron bars—Lin Fan’s bloodshot eyes lit up with frantic, vicious joy!
“Haha! The Slave Boss must have gone to the back tunnel to drink wine and left the poison brat covered under this black cloth so her mist wouldn’t leak out!”
Lin Fan hurried across the black sand, pulled his last twenty silver taels out of his boot sole, and tossed the coins onto the wooden table without even counting them.
Twenty silver is eighty silver less than the Slave Boss wanted earlier, Lin Fan gloated inwardly. Setting his clay centipede jar down right beside the cage door and unbuckling the broken iron latch that Gu Changsheng had propped loosely in place. Once I shove this six-year-old poison brat into my centipede jar and carry the whole cage out to the hills, who cares if the Slave Boss gets mad later?!
Lin Fan knelt down right in front of the black-draped cage, unscrewed the heavy clay lid off his centipede jar so he could transfer the “little girl” inside. Grabbed both corners of the black oilcloth tarp with a savage, triumphant laugh:.
“Come out, you little poison rat! Tonight your blood is going to help this Young Master take back everything from Gu Changsheng—!”
WHOOSH!
Lin Fan ripped the black oilcloth tarp off the cage and leaned his face right into the open doorway!
At that exact microsecond—.
One: the unconscious scarred Slave Boss woke up from the pain of his dislocated jaw. Saw a foul-smelling young man in a dirty cloak ripping open his cage with a jar of live centipedes in hand. Thought Lin Fan was the bastard who had just smashed his face with a kitchen wok!
Two: the [Rank 1 Perfection: Fused 500-Strong Iron-Sting Hornet Hive] tucked between the Slave Boss’s knees caught a full, concentrated whiff of the hundred-day fermented skunk-cabbage smell radiating off Lin Fan’s hair and collar!
BZZZZZZZZZZZZ—ROOOOOAAAR!
Before Lin Fan’s eyeballs could register why the “six-year-old little girl” inside the cage had a hairy chest, a scarred face. Arms as thick as tree trunks, five hundred thumb-sized. Red-and-black Rank 1 Iron-Sting Hornets erupted out of the cage like a shotgun blast of living black needles—aimed straight at the source of the skunk-cabbage stench!
“W-WHAT?! WHY ARE THERE FIVE HUNDRED HORNETS IN THE CAGE—AARGH!”
*STING! STING! STING!
STING!*
System-fused Iron-Sting Hornets carried stingers hard enough to pierce Rank 1 martial skin like hot sewing needles!
In less than three seconds, two hundred furious hornets swarmed over Lin Fan’s face, ears, eyelids, lips. Neck, stinging him two hundred times in rapid-fire succession while simultaneously knocking over his open clay jar so fifty venomous centipedes crawled straight up his trouser legs!
“MY EYES! MY LIPS! HELP!
THE CENTIPEDES ARE IN MY PANTS AGAIN!”
And before the blinded, shrieking Lin Fan could even roll away across the sand. The enraged two-hundred-pound Slave Boss burst out of the cramped iron cage, grabbed his bent ten-foot iron rod off the floor. Swung it with all his might across the back of Lin Fan’s skull!
CLANG!
“You wok-swinging, hornet-throwing son of a bitch!” the Slave Boss roared through his dislocated jaw. Whacking Lin Fan across the ribs and backside five times in a row while also getting stung by fifty stray hornets himself!
“Lock me in my own cage with a hornet hive, will you?!
Die!”
“It wasn’t me! I just got here—owww! My nose!
Master, save me!”
With his head swollen to twice its normal size like a giant purple pumpkin, both eyes puffed shut to tiny slits, his lips looking like two grilled sausages. Venomous centipedes biting his knees inside his trousers, Lin Fan scrambled wildly up the wooden entrance ladder on bleeding hands and knees!
Five hundred Iron-Sting Hornets chased him all the way up the shaft. Stinging his backside at every rung until he burst out of the rock crack at the top of the hill and tumbled headfirst down the snowy slope like a runaway boulder!
[ DING! CHOSEN ONE AMBUSHED BY 500 IRON-STING HORNETS! ]
* Target : Lin Fan (Frost-Pine Town Chosen One)
* Damage Taken : 200+ Iron-Sting Hornet stings to the face +.
bitten by own centipedes + beaten with iron rod!
* Luck Halo Drop : 58% -> 46% (-12% CRACKED BELOW 50%!)
* Plunder Bonus : +200 DP! (Current Balance: 6,310 DP)
* Nuannuan Stats : Darkening Meter 40% -> 38% (-2% DROP!)
* Daily DP Income : +8,500 DP/day -> +9,500 DP/day!
Crash—thud!
At the bottom of the snowy trail, Lin Fan’s swollen purple pumpkin-head slammed straight into the iron-shod boots of a tall, skeletal man wearing a dark-green robe embroidered with five black scorpions!
Behind that skeletal man stood eighty cold-eyed martial artists carrying curved steel sabers and twenty large leather poison-bellows on their backs!
It was Poison-Hand Wu—a genuine Rank 2 Mid Martial (Meridian-Clearing Stage) poison cultivator and the outer-hall master of the notorious Five-Venom Scorpion Gang. Who had come to the Black-Sand Slave Market tonight to collect his monthly silver tribute and inspect the “Innate Poison Girl” before shipping her to his sect headquarters!
“Who is this purple-headed pig rolling down our slave-market hill?!” Poison-Hand Wu snarled, pressing the venomous blade of his saber against Lin Fan’s sausage-swollen throat.
“M-Master Wu! Don’t kill me!” Lin Fan lisped desperately through his giant swollen lips, pointing a trembling finger back toward Frost-Pine Town.
“Gu Changsheng of the Frost-Pine Gu Clan just raided your Black-Sand Slave Market, freed all forty slaves, and kidnapped the six-year-old Innate Poison Girl into the Gu Clan Mansion!
If you come with me right now, we can pump your sect’s Corpse-Rot Poison Smoke over his wall at midnight and take both the Poison Girl and his ten-thousand-silver pharmacy vault!”
Poison-Hand Wu narrowed his cold, sunken eyes, keeping the venomous edge of his curved steel saber pressed against Lin Fan’s swollen neck. Two Scorpion Gang scouts ran up the hill and came rushing back down thirty seconds later.
“Hall Master Wu! The purple-headed kid isn’t lying!” the lead scout reported breathlessly.
“All twelve cages in the cavern are broken open, the forty slave kids and the buyers are gone, the Slave Boss is running around in circles getting stung by cave hornets.
The iron cage that held the Innate Poison Girl was ripped right off its hinges!”
Hearing that the priceless six-year-old girl with the [Innate Ten-Thousand-Poison Body] had been taken right under his nose, Poison-Hand Wu’s skeletal face twisted into a mask of murderous rage!
Crack!
A wisp of dark-green Rank 2 Mid scorpion-venom qi leaked from Poison-Hand Wu’s fingernails, melting the snow around his boots into sizzling black mud.
“For two whole years my Five-Venom Scorpion Gang searched the northern border counties for a child born with an Innate Poison Body to serve. Our Sect Master’s living poison-cauldron!” Poison-Hand Wu snarled, kicking a frozen rock into powder.
“And some country-town clan head dares snatch her away half an hour before my arrival?!”
Down on his knees in the snow, Lin Fan endured the burning pain of two hundred hornet stings and fifty centipede bites, clutching Poison-Hand Wu’s boot with both swollen hands.
“Hall Mathter Wu, I know every inch of the Gu Clan Manthion!” Lin Fan lisped with venomous hatred burning in his tiny slit-eyes. “Gu Changtheng only has one Rank 2 Early guard captain and a Rank 2 Early alchemitht!
None of them cultivate poithon resistanceth!
You brought eighty elite killers and twenty bronze drums of Grade-Two Corpth-Rot Poithon Thmoke tonight! If we surround the main courtyard at midnight and pump all twenty drums of poithon thmoke over the wall at once. Gu Changtheng and his whole family will melt into puddles of green water.
They eat supper—and the Poithon Girl’s body will absorb the smoke and ripen for you!”
Poison-Hand Wu looked down at the purple-pumpkin-headed young man groveling at his boots, then glanced back at the eighty Scorpion Gang killers carrying twenty full bronze drums of [Grade-2 Corpse-Rot Poison Smoke].
“Not only will I get the Innate Poison Girl back,” Poison-Hand Wu hissed with a cruel, greedy grin. “I’ll also loot the Gu Clan’s treasury and their new Grade-A Pharmacy on Central Street to make up for my lost slave-market tribute! Lead the way to the Gu Clan Mansion, pumpkin-head—if you’re telling the truth, I’ll give you Gu Changsheng’s skull to use as a chamber pot!”
“Thank you, Hall Mathter Wu! This way!”
Limping at the head of the eighty Five-Venom Scorpion Gang killers through the dark pine woods toward Frost-Pine Town. Lin Fan touched his swollen, hornet-stung cheeks and laughed silently like a madman in the snow:.
Laugh while you can, Gu Changsheng! You gave me hornets in a jar—so at midnight tonight, I’m giving your whole house twenty drums of Corpse-Rot Poison Smoke!