At the entrance to Yama Canyon, flames blazed so brightly that the night looked like day.
Three thousand fierce bandits, armed with broadswords and spears, surrounded the glittering golden carriage.
The air reeked of sweat and murderous intent.
Blinded by the glare of the spotlights, the bandits rubbed their watering eyes and glared viciously at the carriage.
They sucked in great lungfuls of air, staring at it as though it were a delicious slab of meat.
Three thousand gleaming steel blades reflected a bone-chilling glint in the night wind.
Any ordinary person surrounded by such a force would probably have wet themselves in terror and dropped to their knees to beg for mercy.
Yet inside the ostentatious carriage, the silence was almost unnatural.
There were no screams or pleas.
Not even the sound of panicked breathing.
Inside the carriage.
Su Zhen sat cross-legged on a soft cushion, without so much as lifting his eyelids.
Leisurely, he reached out and casually lifted the expensive curtain embroidered with golden-thread peonies.
The night wind, carrying dust kicked up by the bandits as they ran, blew into the carriage.
Su Zhen frowned. With an irritated look, he raised a hand and fanned it in front of his nose.
“Cough, cough! Cough, cough, cough!”
Su Zhen’s face was full of displeasure.
He lowered his head and glanced at the heavy, luxurious sable coat he was wearing.
A thin layer of dust had settled on the glossy, silky fur.
Su Zhen patted the coat tenderly, his expression darkening.
His gaze swept past the three thousand steel blades and coldly surveyed the surrounding bandits.
His tone was reproachful and disdainful.
“In this godforsaken backwater, where did so many blind savages come from?”
“You keep running around and kicking up all this dust. You’re choking me to death!”
“Do you have any idea how much this sable coat cost?”
“If you get it dirty and the stains won’t come out, even selling every last one of you peasants wouldn’t be enough to cover the loss!”
Su Zhen’s outburst sounded exactly like the unreasonable ranting of an ordinary nouveau riche.
In the tense standoff, it was both grating and utterly absurd.
All three thousand bandits froze as one.
The Chief was so stunned by Su Zhen’s words that he failed to recover for quite some time.
He had run rampant for years, robbing no fewer than eighty merchant caravans.
Whenever people saw them, they either cried for their mothers or fell to their knees and begged for mercy.
Yet this old madman in a sable coat was on the verge of death and still worrying about dust on his clothes?
The muscles in the Chief’s cheeks twitched violently.
He had actually been ignored—and even insulted!
The dignity of the First Bandit of Great Yan had been trampled mercilessly!
“Old bastard! Are you fucking blind?” the Chief roared.
He thrust forward the nine-ringed saber in his hand, a weapon weighing nearly a hundred pounds.
The metal rings clashed together with a harsh, rattling sound.
“Take a good look, you old fool! This is Yama Canyon!”
“I’m the Chief of Yama Stronghold! Behind me stand three thousand brothers who kill without blinking!”
Spittle flew from the Chief’s mouth as he shouted his credentials at the top of his lungs.
“Our Yama Stronghold makes its living by killing and looting!”
“The wronged souls who have died beneath this blade number at least eight hundred, if not a thousand!”
“And you dare worry about that worthless coat in front of me?”
“Believe it or not, I’ll skin you alive right now and turn your hide into foot mats for my brothers!”
Faced with the Chief’s furious roar and threats, the father and daughter inside the carriage remained completely unmoved.
Su Yaoyao sat cross-legged beside her father, hugging a large piece of half-eaten braised beef.
Through a gap in the carriage window, her clear, innocent eyes rolled around as she inspected the three thousand bandits outside.
In a moment no one noticed, a blue light flashed deep within her pupils.
The mini bio-scanner activated!
In Su Yaoyao’s field of vision, rows of green data panels instantly appeared.
[Number of targets: 3,000.]
[Physical assessment: Well-developed muscles, robust physiques, no major illnesses. Suitable for high-intensity manual labor.]
Looking at the data, Su Yaoyao’s face bloomed into the radiant smile of a black-hearted foreman who had just found a group of fresh-faced newcomers entering the workforce.
She rapidly began calculating in her head.
Her clear, excited thoughts exploded inside Tyrant Dad’s mind:
[What a sight!]
[Three thousand able-bodied workers in their prime! Are they really bandits? They’re clearly an undeveloped gold mine!]
[These men spend every day running through the mountains, so their stamina must be excellent!]
[Let me do the math. An able-bodied laborer can carry an average of five hundred bricks a day on a construction site.]
[Three thousand people would move one and a half million bricks in a single day!]
[If we put them all to work building city walls, digging canals, and clearing land for farming...]
[All we’d have to provide is two meals of steamed buns a day. We wouldn’t even need to pay them!]
The more Su Yaoyao calculated, the more excited she became. Her eyes shone.
[How much silver would we save each day if we converted that into labor costs?]
[This is a fortune dropped straight from heaven—a top-quality asset that’s guaranteed to make a profit!]
[We’re rich! We’re rich! This performance bonus delivered right to our doorstep is as good as secured!]
Inside the carriage, Su Zhen had been preparing to circulate his true qi in secret and shatter all three thousand bandits where they stood.
But after hearing his daughter’s astonishing calculations, his hand paused.
Three thousand free laborers?
They could move one and a half million bricks a day?
No wages—just two meals of steamed buns?
A grand blueprint for infrastructure began to take shape in Su Zhen’s mind.
The murderous intent in his eyes, which had regarded the bandits as nothing more than dead men, underwent a complete transformation.
In an instant, his killing intent vanished without a trace.
In its place was a fervent gaze, the look of a man staring at priceless treasures and a money tree.
Su Zhen flung open the heavy curtain and leaped down from the carriage.
With his hands clasped behind his back, he swaggered toward the three thousand blades.
He ignored the sword tips that were almost poking him in the nose.
Su Zhen strolled back and forth before the bandit formation like an experienced slave trader.
He approached a young bandit in the front row and reached out to pat his thick arm.
“Hmm, not bad. Nice, solid muscles. You look like a fine candidate for hard labor.”
The young bandit stared blankly as Su Zhen patted him. He was so stunned that he even forgot to thrust his blade forward.
Su Zhen then walked over to another bandit, who stood there gaping in bewilderment.
Like a man inspecting livestock, he leaned closer and examined the bandit’s mouth.
“Tsk, tsk. Good teeth, too. Not a single cavity. You’ll have no trouble chewing steamed buns.”
As Su Zhen continued his inspection, he nodded with deep satisfaction.
The gloom on his face had vanished completely, replaced by a benevolent smile.
He was extremely satisfied.
The quality of this batch of free labor was astonishingly high!
Killing them all would be a terrible waste!
They had to be captured alive and hauled back to Great Yuan to perform hard labor!
The Chief stood at the very front, watching as this old madman not only showed no fear of death, but even entered his formation and touched, inspected, and criticized his men!
That look in his eyes was exactly like someone choosing cabbages at a market stall!
The Chief’s dignity—and the authority of Yama Stronghold—had been trampled beneath the feet of this father and daughter like a filthy rag.
Rage surged straight to the crown of his head.
He felt as though his lungs were about to burst.
“Enough!!!”
The Chief let out a bestial roar, his eyes bloodshot.
He gripped the heavy nine-ringed saber with both hands and raised it high above his head.
With boundless fury—
Clang!
The blade came crashing down with a deafening boom.
He slammed the Nine-Ringed Broadsword against the hard stone ground, sending sparks flying in every direction.
A powerful surge of true qi burst through the blade, forcing the surrounding bandits to stagger back half a step.
The Chief pointed at Su Zhen and let out a brazen laugh that shook the mountain forest.
“I’m the nominal disciple of the Great Yan Empire’s Grandmaster—swords and spears can’t touch me! Old man, kneel down and kowtow, then leave this little beauty behind to be my wife. Do that, and I’ll let you keep your whole corpse!”
