“Click.”
The door latch lost its support and dropped limply onto the hardwood floor.
Then came an earth-shaking “BANG!”
The two finely carved wooden doors were brutally kicked open from outside. The hinges let out a mournful screech under the strain.
Wood splinters flew through the air. The cold wind outside, carrying a murderous aura so thick it seemed almost tangible, rushed in and instantly filled Room One of the Heaven-Class Wing.
Pale moonlight poured through the open doorway, stretching the figures outside into long, distorted shadows. They looked like terrifying demons crawling out of hell.
The landlady led the way, crossing the threshold with a sway of her slender, serpentine waist.
By day, her face had been caked in heavy makeup and plastered with obsequious smiles. Now, under the moonlight, it appeared twisted and horrifying, her eyes gleaming with greed.
Behind her, more than a dozen burly men with bulging muscles filed into the room.
Every one of them had a face covered in coarse flesh and a vicious gaze. Their bodies radiated the murderous aura of men who had lived by the blade and treated human lives as worthless.
They held butcher knives and nine-ring broadswords polished to a freezing gleam. Moving swiftly, they spread out and surrounded the entire room so tightly that not even a fly could escape.
The air filled with a nauseating stench of blood.
The landlady folded her arms and looked down arrogantly at the father and daughter sprawled on the floor.
She watched Qian Duoduo, a wealthy merchant, clutching his beloved daughter while his entire body shook like a sieve.
Unable to suppress her excitement any longer, she threw back her head and let out a shrill, ear-piercing cackle like a night owl.
“Hahahaha! Weren’t you quite the big shot on the street this afternoon?”
“Didn’t you say you had more money than you knew what to do with, and that if you weren’t satisfied with your room, you’d tear down my century-old establishment?”
“And now? Why are you lying there like a boneless dead dog, too frightened to even fart?”
As she mocked him without restraint, the landlady stepped forward and viciously prodded the expensive sable coat covering Su Zhen with the tip of her foot.
“Dressed like such an important man, carrying so much gold and silver, yet you don’t even understand the most basic dangers of the martial world.”
“I truly have no idea how two fat sheep with nothing but lard in their brains managed to survive this long with all their limbs intact.”
The Scar-Faced Attendant beside her joined in with an openly malicious laugh.
“Boss, why waste your breath on people who are about to be reborn? I’ve had my eye on that old man’s sable coat. I’ll strip it off him and use it to get through the winter!”
“That little girl’s gold chain and rings are mine. Gold that thick has to be worth at least several hundred taels. It’ll be enough for the brothers to enjoy themselves for months!”
Faced with the reckless threats of these desperadoes, Su Zhen brought out the finest acting skills of his entire life.
He clutched the “unconscious” Su Yaoyao tightly to his chest. His teeth chattered together with a distinct clacking sound, as though he had truly been scared witless.
Su Zhen played the part of a cowardly, spineless rich man afraid of death to perfection, even making the muscles on his face twitch in perfect coordination.
He scrambled backward toward the corner, his voice taking on a convincingly tearful note.
“You heroes, please spare us! Great lady, kind sirs, please spare our lives!”
“I’ll give you all my money! The golden carriage outside, the gold ingots in the luggage—take every last bit of it!”
“Please, show mercy and let a lowly father and daughter like us keep our miserable lives!”
“I have an eighty-year-old mother bedridden at home, and a daughter still crying out for food! I really can’t die!”
His tearful, utterly undignified begging greatly satisfied the landlady’s perverse vanity and desire for control.
She snorted coldly, her eyes full of contempt, as though she were looking at two talking ants.
“Now you know how to beg? Too late!”
“Once you enter my Dragon Gate Inn and drink my tea, don’t even dream of walking out alive.”
“I want all your money! And today, I’ll be taking your lives as well!”
“Only dead men keep their mouths shut. That way, they can’t run to the authorities and report us, causing trouble!”
The instant the landlady finished speaking, the hired thugs behind her raised their great blades one after another. Their faces were filled with murderous intent as they prepared to rush forward and hack the father and daughter to pieces.
At this critical moment, with danger lurking everywhere—
In Su Zhen’s arms, Su Yaoyao had kept her eyes tightly shut, looking as though she had already passed out from the poison.
But inside her mind, an uncontrollable cry of excitement suddenly rang out.
Her deafening inner voice exploded inside Tyrant Dad’s head:
[Whoa! Whoa! That hairpin on the landlady’s head!]
[Red agate set in gold wire, and the craftsmanship is so exquisite! It’s a top-grade imperial gift! If we resell it on the black market, it’ll fetch at least three thousand taels of silver!]
Su Zhen had been trembling on the floor a moment earlier, but when he heard the words “three thousand taels,” his body stiffened slightly.
Yet his daughter’s inner voice did not stop. It grew even more impassioned.
With her eyes comfortably closed, she used the miniature interstellar scanner in her portable space to conduct a sweeping, all-angle scan of the guest room.
[Oh my gosh! This isn’t a black shop—it’s practically a treasure vault, a land of unimaginable fortune!]
[Third floor tile down on Tyrant Dad’s left! It definitely sounds hollow when tapped!]
[The scanner’s cross-sectional view shows a huge hidden compartment underneath! And it’s packed with neatly stacked gold bricks! Shiny, golden gold bricks!]
Su Zhen’s heart skipped a beat, and his breathing stopped for an instant.
What?
An entire hidden compartment filled with gold bricks?!
He cast a sidelong glance at the unremarkable floor tile to his left.
[There’s more! The thickest wall up there!]
[All the bricks inside the wall have been hollowed out, creating hidden compartments!]
[The gaps are stuffed full of ingots of government silver! Judging by the markings and official standards engraved on them, they all bear the seal of the Great Yan government. There must be at least a hundred thousand taels!]
A hundred thousand taels of official silver?!
Tyrant Dad’s breathing immediately grew labored. He even forgot to keep pretending to tremble.
Of course, a hundred thousand taels of silver was hardly enough to compare with the fortune of a top-ranking corrupt official in the Great Yuan Empire—not in the eyes of this father-and-daughter pair who valued money above all else.
But this was the territory of Great Yan, someone else’s land!
Taking hidden government silver from another country was no different from picking money up off the street. Not only did it leave them with no psychological burden whatsoever, it even came with an inexplicable thrill.
The whole point was to enjoy a little cross-border, zero-cost shopping spree.
The god of free loot had taken flight!
The small spark of survival instinct he had deliberately adopted for his performance vanished the moment he heard this nonstop broadcast of riches.
An overwhelming frenzy and longing for the wealth being offered freely all around him seized control of his mind.
The eyes Su Zhen had deliberately made terrified now glowed with the ghostly green light of a starving wolf.
Slowly, he lifted his head. His gaze passed over the bandits holding murderous blades and locked onto the wall concealing the official silver.
The look in his eyes was even more passionate and obsessed than the one he had worn years ago when he ascended the throne and gazed upon the Imperial Seal.
Greedy. Frenzied.
“Official silver… gold bricks… I’m going to make a fortune…”
Su Zhen muttered the words in a dazed, almost manic voice as his body uncontrollably twisted around on the floor.
He roughly shoved aside one of the bandit underlings blocking his path, then scrambled forward on all fours, lunging toward the third paving stone from the left.
With the enemy closing in and more than a dozen broad blades hanging over his head, ready to come crashing down at any moment, this notorious living King of Hell from the Great Abyss Kingdom ignored everything around him and threw himself onto the filthy wooden floor.
He stretched out his impeccably groomed fingers and began forcefully prying at the cracks between the paving stones, bit by bit.
He was so focused, so utterly devoted to the task, that it looked as though flipping up this one paving stone would allow him to ascend instantly and become an immortal.
The sight left all the bandits in the room, who had been preparing to rob and murder him, completely dumbfounded.
The Scar-Faced Attendant stood frozen, cleaver raised in his hands. He glanced at Su Zhen on the floor, then turned to look at the proprietress, his face filled with confusion.
“Boss… did this old bastard scare himself senseless?”
“He’s about to die, but instead of dodging the blades, he’s clawing at our floorboards. Is he trying to dig a hole and bury himself?”
The proprietress was equally baffled by Su Zhen’s bizarre, completely unpredictable behavior.
But when she followed his movements and took a closer look, she realized that the paving stone he was desperately prying at was the very one concealing the gold bricks.
The color drained from the proprietress’s heavily made-up face, leaving it deathly pale.
Her heart clenched. The intense panic of a guilty thief surged through her at once.
How did this old fellow know where the secret compartment was?!
That was her entire fortune, accumulated over all the years she had run this murderous inn and robbed and killed her victims. Not even the attendants closest to her knew about it!
Rage, fear, and the fury of having her most vulnerable secret exposed twisted the proprietress’s expression into something demonic.
She had assumed that this nouveau riche had been driven mad by the shock and was blindly groping around in a desperate stroke of luck.
But no matter what, the secret beneath this paving stone absolutely could not be discovered by an outsider—least of all by her greedy underlings!
“Madman! You old fool, you’ve scared yourself witless! Go to hell!”
Burning with fury, the proprietress snatched the heavy butcher’s cleaver from the stunned Scar-Faced Attendant.
“You dare claw at my floor? I’ll chop off both your hands right now and send you straight to the eighteenth level of hell!”
Gripping the cleaver with both hands, the proprietress took a heavy step forward.
She raised the thick butcher’s cleaver high over her head. Its razor-sharp edge gleamed with a bloodthirsty chill in the cold moonlight.
She aimed at the back of Su Zhen’s neck as he lay facedown on the floor, completely absorbed in prying at the crack with his back to her, and brought the blade down with all her strength.
“Die!”
The wind howled. The blade cut through the air with murderous force, carrying her absolute determination to kill.
That razor-sharp edge was just about to strike the Tyrant Dad’s neck.
At that very moment—when victory seemed certain and everyone believed the outcome had already been decided—
Su Yaoyao, who had lain motionless on the wooden floor like a lump of mud, helpless in the hands of others, suddenly opened her tightly shut eyes.
Her clear, bright eyes held not the slightest trace of the fear or panic an ordinary child would feel in the face of death.
Instead, they glittered with the playful insight of someone who saw through everything, along with the sly, foxlike glimmer of mischief.
Su Yaoyao raised her little face slightly and looked at the blade above her head. The corners of her mouth slowly curved into a mocking, icy smile.
From within her oversized sleeve, she extended a chubby little hand adorned with rings set with green gemstones.
She gave a light snap of her fingers at the frozen air.
Welcome to the Ultimate Deluxe Gift Package.
