Daomu Biji: The Southern Archives

Mo Yungao looked to where the young man was looking. Shiwan Mountain and several other mountains next to it rose up behind the big mountain.

A glimmer of hope suddenly surged up and he clutched the gunshot wound on his shoulder. “If you carry me on your back, I’ll show you the way.”

The people in the village here were simple and honest. Although this man seemed to come from the north, it should be possible to deceive him since he was young.

As long as Mo Yungao left this battlefield and threw away his military uniform, he should be able to survive.

The young man ignored him and focused on sorting out his equipment instead. He had a wound on his left hand that he wrapped with a bandage he had taken from a corpse. “It’s not too late for you to leave,” he said before continuing to move forward.

As the young man left, Mo Yungao’s hope slowly turned into despair. He sneered when he saw that the young man was walking toward a crevice in the mountain where they had been ambushed by bandits before.

“If you were a good person, you should’ve saved me. Now you deserve to die.” He started laughing as he grabbed a grenade. There was a chance it could save him from being tortured after he was captured. He knew the bandits would skin him alive and hang his body at the entrance of the village to scare the villagers.

He waited on the hillside until dark, and by the time dawn came, only a wild boar had come to gnaw on the corpses.

No bandits came to clean up the battlefield.

Mo Yungao was somewhat surprised. Once he noticed that his wound had stopped bleeding, he got up. His energy was somewhat restored, so he busied himself taking dry food and water from the corpses. He took off his military uniform and planned to run for his life.

But Mo Yungao was a bit different from ordinary people. He took a few steps to leave the mountain, but suddenly thought about why the bandits didn’t come down the mountain.

It was obvious that he and his soldiers had all been defeated. In the past, the bandits would never show mercy when they ambushed the soldiers who were trying to capture them.

He thought of the young man.

That kid who was unwilling to save him was probably dead.

As he kept walking, he inadvertently started to turn back and head towards the crevice in the mountain. He wanted to see what was going on.

The sun had just come out, the sky was incredibly blue, and Mo Yun could clearly remember how crisp the air was that day.

As he walked into the crevice and his surroundings became very dark, the blue sky stretched out endlessly overhead. The scenery was truly wonderful.

Not long ago, the blue sky here had been blocked by rifles. The bandits had been stationed at the top of the mountain and were shooting down into the crevice. Mo Yungao and his men could only rely on the protruding rocks as cover. They raised their heads to shoot at the targets overhead, but it was very difficult to take aim.

Afterwards, the bandits dropped grenades on them. They couldn’t hold out anymore and had no choice but to flee.

Now the crevice was eerily quiet.

The more he walked forward, the quieter it became. When he finally reached the other end of the crevice about three hours later, he saw all the bandits’ corpses lying in a radial shape right at the exit. It looked as if they had suddenly fallen to the ground and died after rushing out of the gap.

What was even more bizarre was that there were flies all over the corpses in a much greater quantity than those on his own soldiers’ corpses.

He looked closely and found that most of the bodies were highly decomposed. It didn’t seem like they had just died.

He was a little surprised, but suddenly realized that he had slept for a few days.

He didn’t see the young man’s body.

The locals knew that the other side of the crevice was controlled by bandits, so no one knew what was on the other side except for the women who had been abducted into the mountain. And now him.

As Mo Yungao continued to walk forward, he smelled a terrible stench. After taking a few more steps, he saw that there was a village behind the crevice. It was practically covered in flies and there were corpses everywhere.

The bandit village behind the crevice was completely rotten.

More flies had gathered in the village, and there were maggots and corpse fluid everywhere.

Mo Yungao didn’t know what was going on, but he walked towards the back of the village anyways. There he saw most of the bandits’ bodies piled up in a big pit with flies swarming over them like clouds.

As he approached slowly, the flies kept hitting his face.

He suddenly found something among the flies that wasn’t a fly. But just as he was about to take a look at it, someone unexpectedly grabbed the back of his neck and lifted him directly onto a nearby tree.

That person carried him like a sack all the way to the highest branch. He took a look and saw that it was the young man he had met before.

“What happened here?” Mo Yungao raised his head and asked him. “Did you kill them all?”

The young man looked at the pile of corpses below and said, “Stop talking. That thing is coming out soon.”

As soon as he finished speaking, Mo Yungao saw something amidst the pile of corpses move.

The train shook, and Mo Yungao woke up. He opened his eyes and looked at the panel overhead.

After a long time, he eventually sat up. “Where are we?” he asked.

The guard outside immediately opened the door and replied, “We’ve just passed Changsha. While the train was stopped, Zhang Qishan asked some people to bring you gifts.”

“Don’t bother showing me useless gifts like food and drink,” Mo Yungao said. “Has Zhang Qishan set off?”

“I heard that he won’t set off for two or three days,” the guard said. “He didn’t send food. He said that it’s something the commander has been dreaming of.” The guard lowered his voice, “It’s a woman surnamed Zhang.”

Mo Yungao paused before slowly putting on his military uniform and following the guard out.

This was a special train that Mo Yungao had reserved. It normally had ten cars in the station, and they would rent the engine car before they got on the train from Guangzhou. At that time, Zhang Zuolin’s (1) special train had twenty-eight cars, so Mo Yungao’s pomp was that of a relatively small local warlord.

Even so, Mo Yungao’s office and bedroom were still quite spacious, and his guards and entourage had rooms on both sides of his room.

When Mo Yungao came to his office, he saw Zhang Haiqi tied up on his sofa.

He didn’t approach her immediately, but took Zhang Qishan's note that the guard handed him.

“This person came to my house and asked me to help her find evidence of your misconduct in Beihai. We’re colleagues, so I don’t want to disturb you. I’ll let you handle it. In addition, this woman has a Qilin tattoo on her body that will appear when her body temperature rises. I heard that you’ve been looking for someone like this for a long time. Now you can get what you want.”

Mo Yungao sat in his office chair and asked the guards to close both the front and rear doors.

As he stared out the window, the guard asked him, “Commander, what do you think?”

“Zhang Qishan seems polite on the surface, but he’s actually been investigating me. Why would he kindly send someone from the Zhang family to me? Was he afraid that I’d suspect he’s from the Zhang family, so he did this to clear up any suspicion?” Mo Yungao didn't care. What he had been looking for was never simple power or something like it.

He looked at Zhang Haiqi, took out a report from his desk drawer, and then flipped through it. “You’re from the South Sea Archives, right?”

There was a needle placed among the report’s pages, which he set aside as he took out a small bottle from another drawer that held a ladybug.

****

TN Notes:

(1) Zhang Zuolin was an influential Chinese bandit, soldier, and warlord during the Warlord Era in China. Wiki link here