***
She Wenjie: “…………”
She Wenjie: “…………?”
Wu Guanyue’s statement was simply too difficult to understand. She Wenjie actually froze on the spot, his brain completely crashing.
“You called me a donkey?! How dare you call Young Master She a donkey?!!”
She Wenjie only latched onto the one part he understood and immediately began shouting and cursing at the top of his lungs.
Wu Guanyue: “…………”
Wenren Ying: “…………”
Had this guy drunk so much that he’d actually pickled his brain?
Wu Guanyue and Wenren Ying exchanged a glance, and both saw the same helplessness in each other’s eyes.
Sigh… What an idiot.
But there was nothing they could do about that. After all, wasn’t there a saying in the job market? If you only paid enough for a banana, you could only hire a monkey. Did you really expect to recruit a graduate from a top university?
Besides, Wu Guanyue had never planned to pay She Wenjie in the first place.
They had to find a way to make him understand the situation and settle down.
Wu Guanyue thought for a moment, then suddenly pulled a whip from her sleeve and began brandishing it with great authority!
“Swish! Crack! Swish-crack!”
“You! Go to the back courtyard and start turning the mill right now! You’re not allowed to sleep until you’ve ground ten sacks of flour! Do you hear me?”
She Wenjie: “…………”
She Wenjie: “………………”
She Wenjie’s brain crashed again…
Fortunately, this time he finally understood. It wasn’t his imagination—the woman really did intend to use him as a donkey!
Ah! Ah! Outrageous! Ah! Ah!
She Wenjie flew into a rage. “How dare you! You insolent commoner, I’ll have you—ah!”
Before he could finish, Wenren Ying kicked him away.
He really did kick him away. Wenren Ying had long since found this brat unpleasant to look at. If She Wenjie hadn’t possessed such an impressive family name, perhaps Wenren Ying would have given in to one of his urges and used him to test his blade by now.
With a “Daaamn—!” She Wenjie went flying and landed heavily in the inn’s back courtyard.
Wenren Ying hadn’t held back in the slightest. That kick struck She Wenjie squarely in the chest, leaving his vision blackened and his internal organs twisted into knots. He nearly vomited up his bile.
What the hell?! He hadn’t even done anything today! Why were they treating him like this?!
She Wenjie was both shocked and furious, his entire face contorted with pain.
Actually, a wastrel like She Wenjie might have been useless at everything else, but he knew perfectly well whom he could provoke and whom he couldn’t. Against ordinary citizens, he threw his weight around without restraint; when faced with someone of higher status, he became meek and obsequious.
After suffering a loss at the inn last time, he had been unwilling to accept that he had been bested by a few lowly peasants. He had gone to his elder brother, Master Chongxu, hoping to persuade him to pit Bai Yunsheng against Wu Guanyue. But Master Chongxu had warned him not to cause trouble for no reason.
Even so, She Wenjie had used the last bit of judgment he possessed and gone to see Bai Yunsheng himself. As it happened, Bai Yunsheng had been bored at the time and was looking for some way to make Chu Yingfeng uncomfortable…
That was how everything that followed came about.
What followed was that Bai Yunsheng no longer dared provoke Wu Guanyue either… The next day, She Wenjie had secretly gone to see Bai Yunsheng, only to be viciously berated by the latter, who was in a foul mood. He had left with his tail between his legs.
From then on, She Wenjie understood one thing: Wu Guanyue was someone he absolutely could not afford to provoke. So he always kept away from Qihua Road… Though, to be fair, his precious feet had never wanted to tread a street inhabited by lowly peasants anyway.
But who could have imagined that even without provoking her, this woman would set her sights on him?!
In an instant, anger and humiliation surged through She Wenjie together. His fury caused a vicious gleam to blaze in his eyes as he glared hatefully at the approaching couple and shouted:
“I! I haven’t even provoked you! Why are you doing this to me?!”
So… so spineless…!
But he had no choice. When you were beneath someone else’s roof, you had to bow your head…
He shouted angrily, desperately seeking an answer to his question.
Yet Wu Guanyue merely gave him a strange look, as though he had asked something particularly absurd and laughable.
“Listen to you. When you bully people, do you ever care whether they’ve provoked you?”
The Little Shopkeeper Wu considerately put a donkey harness over She Wenjie and tied the other end to the millstone. Cheerfully, she said, “All right, get started!”
She Wenjie’s eyes widened in disbelief. He was so furious that his entire body trembled!
“You—you’ll regret this! The She clan of Meishan will never let you get away with it!”
“Crack!”
Wenren Ying couldn’t be bothered to listen to his nonsense. He casually picked up the whip Wu Guanyue had tossed aside and brought it down hard against the millstone. The crack of it splitting the air exploded beside She Wenjie’s ears, making his body jolt as though the whip had landed squarely on him.
“If you’re told to turn the mill, then turn the mill. Why do you have so much to say?”
When the swordsman said this, the lazy smile on his face had not even faded.
…But that only made him look even more frightening.
Terrified, She Wenjie didn’t dare say another word. He could only swallow his humiliation and begin turning the mill.
Wenren Ying gave the useless good-for-nothing a contemptuous snort.
Then he turned around and saw the strange expression on Wu Guanyue’s face.
Ah… Brother Ying…
He was so S…
She didn’t want to let her thoughts run wild, but that smile of his really had looked exceptionally dangerous… And when the whip came down, the muscles in his arm had strained so hard that they filled out his sleeve…
Mmm…
Wu Guanyue’s eyes drifted involuntarily toward the hand gripping the whip. No one knew what she had imagined, but her body gave the faintest shiver, and her twin ponytails swayed.
Wenren Ying immediately noticed that something was wrong with her and dropped the whip without a second thought.
—She must have been frightened by him, right?
Wielding a sword and wielding a whip were, after all, two entirely different things. The former was merely a weapon, while the latter carried the implication of cruel abuse.
Over the years, in his pursuit of the blood-poison demonic cultivators, Wenren Ying had been ruthless more than once. Once, in order to force a demonic cultivator’s husband to reveal the location of his demonic cultivator wife, he had subjected the man to inhuman torture…
In the end, the wife had come looking for him to rescue her husband. Wenren Ying had been more than happy to oblige, and dealt with the murderous pair—husband and wife, both of them refining blood for their cultivation—together.
So he was not, in fact, some innocent and kind-hearted man.
When Master Chongxu revealed everything without holding anything back, Wenren Ying naturally could not hide the truth either. Faced with Little Yue’s relentless questioning, he had no choice but to tell her a little about his past, though he had glossed over it and made light of the details.
After hearing him out, the Little Shopkeeper Yue had revealed an expression that Wenren Ying found impossible to describe.
It had looked like admiration… and also like pity.
That expression had been so… so peculiar that Wenren Ying had actually felt his heart swell. A strange mixture of delight and inferiority had intertwined, transforming into tiny currents of electricity that traveled from his heart all the way to his fingertips, making his fingers curl involuntarily.
“Brother Ying… You’ve suffered so much all these years…”
Little Yue spoke with a hint of sadness.
This was going way too far...
Wenren Ying abruptly turned his head away, refusing to look at the Little Shopkeeper Yue beside him. He forced himself to recite the Calm Heart Formula twice before finally settling down.
But... he wasn’t as unaffected as Little Yue thought. At the very least, he didn’t particularly want to expose such a cruel side of himself in front of her.
Wenren Ying tossed the whip aside and opened his mouth, trying to find a topic that would divert her attention.
“What kind of whip is that? It doesn’t look like something you’d use to drive a donkey.”
...The moment he finished speaking, Wenren Ying regretted it.
Damn it, what was he saying...? Although the whip did indeed look a little too exquisite, and its strands were loose, which made its force rather diffuse and meant it couldn’t cause much harm to a person...
For some reason, Little Yue’s expression turned rather peculiar after hearing that.
“Um... um... I bought it at a shop.”
Wenren Ying: “...A shop?”
Wu Guanyue: “Mm-hmm! These things can be used on him too!”
As she spoke, the Little Shopkeeper Wu kept a stern expression as she pulled a candle, a coil of wire, an X-shaped frame, and a bundle of binding rope from her sleeve one after another.
Wenren Ying: “............”
She Wenjie: “............”
She Wenjie’s eyes widened in horror. Under the Little Shopkeeper Wu’s tyrannical authority, he sped up his efforts to turn the millstone.
Wenren Ying, meanwhile, instinctively sensed that something was off...
Although She Wenjie certainly deserved whatever came to him, why had Little Yue’s face turned slightly red when she took those things out? And why had she glanced at him several times, pretending not to?
Wu Guanyue: o(*////-////*)q
A suspicious blush colored Wu Guanyue’s face. With her hands clasped behind her back, she left the rear courtyard.
Watching her adorable retreating figure, Wenren Ying couldn’t help smiling. Then he suddenly turned back and reminded She Wenjie with a grin, “Don’t let me catch you trying to escape.”
He immediately turned around again and called out, “Hey! Little Shopkeeper Yue!”
Then he chased after Wu Guanyue toward the front of the inn, leaving She Wenjie alone in the rear courtyard to turn the millstone.
Amid his anger and humiliation, She Wenjie distinctly felt something extremely strange...
That feeling seemed to be...
Had he become a plaything for this shameless couple?
She Wenjie: “............”
She Wenjie: “....................”
She Wenjie practically wanted to roar!
***
Naturally, She Wenjie still tried to escape that day.
The result was easy enough to describe: he didn’t even make it out the door before Wenren Ying grabbed him by the hair and dragged him back, giving him a sound beating in the process...
After that, She Wenjie began a slave’s life of missing nine meals over three days while being forced to turn the millstone.
Every day before dawn, Wenren Ying would kick him awake and chain him to the stone mill. He wasn’t allowed to use his spiritual power. Every time he did, he received a beating. He wasn’t allowed to eat until he finished his work—and even if he did finish, whether he got to eat or not depended entirely on Wu Guanyue’s mood.
After three days, She Wenjie’s eyes had gone vacant and his steps had become unsteady. He could barely even speak.
Big Brother... Big Brother... Help me! Somebody help me!! Your little brother has disappeared! I’ve disappeared!!!
She Wenjie cried out desperately for help in his heart.
But his own brother had personally sold him off. Just imagining how She Wenjie must be suffering at the inn had Master Chongxu sleeping so happily these past few days that he could hardly sleep at all. Ha ha.
Besides, no one else was coming to rescue him.
A wastrel like She Wenjie was always frequenting brothels and spending nights with women. It was perfectly normal for him not to return home for several days. He didn’t have any true friends around him, either. His moods were unpredictable, and the other young masters who often accompanied him didn’t actually like waiting on him all that much.
He did possess a communication artifact, but Wenren Ying had confiscated it on the very first day.
As a result, She Wenjie had been missing for three or four days, and not a single person had noticed!
But that was all right. The Little Shopkeeper Wu had already made preparations!
That day, the Little Shopkeeper Wu tossed his communication artifact onto the ground in front of him.
“Come on. Call all your good friends here for a little gathering.”
The group of wastrel young masters familiar with She Wenjie were all disciples of the various immortal sects and aristocratic clans of Mount Mei. If they all caught sight of the Blood Demon Ancestor, wouldn’t that give her plenty of witnesses?
And when they came and saw She Wenjie being used as a draft animal, they would definitely be terrified out of their minds—
Wouldn’t that make her intimidation points shoot right up?~~
Perfect plan!
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