It Starts With A Mountain

Chapter 22: Path of Riches, War to Fuel War

It was a white horse, fully saddled. There wasn’t a single stray hair on it. Its figure was practically straight line from head to tail. For those bandits, none of them have ever seen such a handsome horse in all their years.

Gao Feibao’s jaw practically hit the ground. That white horse was the one that he had tried and failed to take from before. He never imagined that the Toad Bandits would auction it off, and it was bought for… A stone of beans.

As a note, a normal mule would sell for a good five or six silver. A normal horse costs over 10 silvers, and a horse capable of being used as a warhorse starts at something around 20, 30 silvers. A horse like the handsome white horse before him could sell for at least 50, 60 taels of silver.

A lot of people were practically drooling at the sight of it. In their minds, they can forcibly take it, worst comes to worst!

“What, want to try for some black on black? In that case, you got to ask if my saber will allow it!” Little White Wolf gave everyone a cold glare before pulling out a piece of paper from her clothes, “It says I can get 20% off. Is this true?”

“We keep our words, so it’s naturally usable.” Huang Sanyuan smile, “Qin Man, return Boss White 20 pounds of it.”

In this world, a stone is roughly 100 pounds. Actually, in undeveloped places like the Blackbull Mountains, everyone is still used to trade by material bartering. Actual food is much more stable a currency than actual coinage here.

Thus, the white horse’s value is far beyond merely 80 pounds of beans. Heck, that much likely won’t even be enough to buy a saddle. Little White Wolf seriously lucked out on this deal, so she didn’t tarry. Instead, she leaped right onto the horse and declared, “Sisters, we’re leaving.”

Before she left, she tossed Chang Dalei a wink from afar and said, “Thanks.”

Cheng Dalei’s mind shook. He couldn’t take his eyes off Little White Wolf’s retreating figure. All the white, he was muttering to himself, “So white!”

With Little White Wolf’s example, all the bandits’ urges to buy were inflamed.

“Heizi, where’s my advertisement!”

“Cough… I seemed to have used it as toilet paper.”

“Damn you! How could you!”

“You seemed to have used it too though.”

“Eighter, give me that advertisement back.”

“What are you talking about, yours. I’m obviously the one who stole it.”

“Us brothers are as one. When we manage to buy one, we can all take turns riding it…”

All of them were seriously poor people. They’re already used to hard times. In their views, 20% is a lot of food. Even if for a lot of them, they can’t even calculate just what 20% is.

Under this kind of situation, the second horse was auctioned off at a very high price. However, the second horse is still very strong, so after calculating it out, the product was worth the price.

Actually, this was all set up purposefully by Cheng Dalei’s plans. Start with auctioning off a few good horses, get everyone excited and eager. As for the injured or skinny horses, they’re all placed in the middle.

Seeing that everything is going according to his plans, Cheng Dalei pulled back and instead asked Xu Shenji for information on Little White Wolf.

According to Xu Shenji, before Little White Wolf became a bandit, she used to from a martial arts family. She learned a good set of skills from since she was little, specializing in twin sabers. Back then, she was originally arranged a marriage, but her betrothed had died. Then, she ended up getting married to his shrine. Thus, Little White Wolf ended up being treated as an inauspicious person, and everyone whispered that she brought death to her husband. Thus, she ended up being treated very badly in her husband’s family’s home. On a certain night, her father-in-law had tried to crawl into her bed and she instead stabbed him to death. Thus, she then escaped to Apricot Flower Peak and became a bandit.

“You mean then that all the bandits of Apricot Flower Peak are women?” Cheng Dalei keenly caught a certain detail.

“All the bandits of Apricot Flower Peak basically had similar experiences as Little White Wolf. Some were widows whose husbands have died, and some were thrown away by their husband’s family.”

“Oy, why didn’t you tell me such important information before.” Cheng Dalei spoke angrily. He never knew that there was somewhere so amazing on the Blackbull Mountains. Thus, Cheng Dalei firmly decided to improve his relations with Apricot Flower Peak. Maybe even declare bonds of brotherhood and mutually aid each other.

“All the bandits of the Blackbull Mountains know about the situation with Apricot Flower Peak though. Why does boss not know…” Xu Shenji said, “And it’s not like there weren’t people on the Blackbull Mountains who wanted to try their hands at the women of Apricot Flower Peak. However, they’re all extremely guarded against all men, so I advise the boss to not think about that. Even if you tried anything, it will all be pointless anyways.”

“Unacceptable. I won’t accept it. You’re all doing this on purpose.”

Just then, Gao Feibao suddenly yelled out loudly. Cheng Dalei turned his head to look and saw a blind horse standing next to Gao Feibao. He had a blind horse from the start, and now he has another one. One left, one right. They make quite a pair.

“What’s going on?” Cheng Dalei walked up to ask. He doesn’t really want to offend the Flying Tiger Bandits too much either. Since he knew it was a blind horse, then why didn’t Huang Sanyuan stop Gao Feibao.

“I tried my best to stop him, but he just continued raising the price like mad.” Huang Sanyuan had no words.

“No, this doesn’t count. You’re selling a blind horse to me on purpose.” Gao Feibao declared.

Gao Feibao had kind of broke, mentally speaking. A moment ago, when Huang Sanyuan tried to stop him, he was certain that this was a good horse and that the Toad Bandits wanted to keep from selling it, so he furiously increased the bid like mad. Back then, he was quite proud of himself even, but now…

Cheng Dalei was also rather helpless here. He spread his hands and spoke, “We’ve already properly set the rules beforehand now. Everyone agreed too. Since you think this shouldn’t count, then that’ll have to apply to everyone…”

“No way!”

“A man keeps his words. You can’t just take back what you said just like that.”

“You can only blame yourself for your lack of luck.”

Speaking of, this time, pretty much all the horses that the Toad Bandits auctioned off were all strong and healthy first rate horses. There were only a very few horses that were actually injured, old, or weak among them. Thus, everyone else is generally quite satisfied with the results of this day’s auctions. When they heard Cheng Dalei speak of undoing all the auctions thus far, it’s only natural that no one would agree to that.

The anger of the crowd is hard to deal with. Even though the Flying Tiger Bandits are powerful, they still can’t fight off that many people.

“Give them the food. We’re leaving!” Gao Feihu gave Cheng Dalei a cold glare.

Since Gao Feihu had already said that, Gao Feibao naturally didn’t dare to say anything more. He just grumpily pulled out a piece of paper from his clothes, “Remember, give me 20% off.”

After they watched as the Flying Tiger Bandits left, Huang Sanyuan grinned before continuing, “Let’s continue now everyone.”

Anyways, the auction continued on under an amicable attitude where both the host and guests had a good time. For each group, some bought one horse, and some had bought two. They didn’t all pay using food either. Weapons, armor, gold and treasures, all of them were accepted. Huang Sanyuan is quite experienced and knowledgeable after all, so he could generally give a decent estimate of how much food something is worth with just a look.

In the end, every horse was sold with an average price of about eight stones. In reality, this was still far below market price though. In other words, if these bandits really did have the money to buy horses at market price, then they wouldn’t have even needed to come to the Toad Bandits to buy horses.

By night, all the horses were sold off. Taking a full inventory of this day’s gains, they’ve sold a total of 76 horses. All in all, they’ve gained a total of about 500 stones of food, along with weapons and other things mixed in.

A stone is equal to 100 pounds, so 500 stones means 50,000 pounds of food. For the current Toad Bandits, this is basically an unimaginably huge number. It can be said that the Toad Bandits have never seen so much food. At this point, the food warehouse was already completely stuffed, with every inch full of wheat, beans, black beans, millet, great millet, etc…

Huang Sanyuan and Ling Shaoyu are rather more worldly, but Xu Shenji, Xu Linger, and Qin Man couldn’t help but be stunned at this sight. They felt like they were in a dream.

Cheng Dalei also had a realization. Battle is indeed the fastest route to riches. If one were to try to farm for these 50,000 pounds of food, then who knows how long it would end up taking.

Cheng Dalei also remembered that he still had a lottery draw chance. It was a system reward from beating Han Xuanzhi. It’s just that he’s been having an unlucky streak lately, so he didn’t dare trying to use it for some time.

Today looked like a good one, with a clear sky full of stars. Thus, Cheng Dalei decided to make his draw.