Radiant Blade of the Wilderness

Chapter 301: A Secret Meeting

Hearing there was news of the Returning Abyss Order, Ding Songyan didn’t change expression. He answered Twelfth Madam Luo’s move with a piece before asking, in an ordinary tone, "How much silver?"

"Three hundred taels," Shi Wuyan answered in a low voice.

Cheaper than the Ge Heng job, so nobody had been hurt and no extra costs had come up... While Twelfth Madam Luo was thinking long, Ding Songyan took a stack of banknotes from his robe, counted out three hundred-tael notes for Chef Shi, and said politely, "Sorry to trouble you guys."

As for looking for Returning Abyss Order members now, he no longer needed to refine the external aperture. He only wanted to follow the clues and find out exactly how the Returning Abyss Order, the Accumulated Evil Way, and the Shamanism Order planned to exploit the consort selection.

Shi Wuyan, holding the banknotes, saw that Ding Songyan hadn’t opened the slip to confirm the information right away and was still focused on the board. He couldn’t help asking, "Not going to look?"

"No rush." Ding Songyan smiled slightly. "We’ve worked together many times. You’re a gold-standard brand with me."

Shi Wuyan said nothing more, glanced at the slip, and turned toward the shop.

Ding Songyan continued the game, unruffled.

Though his Go ability couldn’t be elevated several levels directly with Manifesting the Way and its Virtue helping, both his calculation and his understanding of games from his previous life had improved greatly. The longer he played, the stronger he got, and his own style of brawling and stirring things up became more and more distinct. Twelfth Madam Luo ground her silver teeth from time to time, with a real urge to reenact the story of the Great Han’s Go Sage.

When they counted at the end, she had lost by half a point.

Seeing Twelfth Madam silent, Ding Songyan said with a quiet laugh, "I finally beat the heavens by half a point."

Although he had been using Manifesting the Way and its Virtue, he had been losing the past few days, though his skill had visibly kept improving.

"Aren’t you something," Twelfth Madam Luo replied in a dialect from who knew where, faintly gritting her teeth.

Ding Songyan explained with a smile, "A Heaven-Man is also the heavens. Beating you by half a point is beating the heavens by half a point."

Twelfth Madam Luo was amused for a moment, then a bit annoyed.

"No more. No more games for the next few days!"

So that Ding Songyan wouldn’t mock her for being a sore loser, she added, "I need to review them carefully, digest what I’ve gained these past days, and let it settle.

"Besides, a game between us takes at least more than an hour, and you have so many things to do on the road of martial arts. An occasional game is fine, but playing every day wastes too much time. That’s how the ’Go Monk’ Huien went from a favored genius to an ordinary monk."

Your help and guidance these past days is worth coming to play Go with you every day... Ding Songyan smiled and said, "My senior sister taught me that for the way of the cultured and the martial, tension and ease should alternate. Staying immersed in martial arts all the time isn’t necessarily good. A game a day to change my brain’s focus, plus a few words from you, Twelfth Madam, lets me step outside and examine my own martial arts, and I gain more."

"Change my brain’s focus... I notice you often have strange descriptions," Twelfth Madam Luo muttered a couple of times, then said, "Let’s play again after a while. Playing Go all the time isn’t good either."

Ding Songyan took the opening and asked, "Come to think of it, I rarely see you practice martial arts, Twelfth Madam. Just loosening up in the morning."

"At my level, the martial arts I’ve mastered have fully become part of me. Unless I’m trying to improve or perfect them, I don’t need to practice daily. Once every few days is enough. Mostly I train my heart." Twelfth Madam Luo smiled. "Playing Go is training my heart too. I’ve actually gained a bit these past few days, while you mainly just got a lot better at Go."

After helping Twelfth Madam tidy the board and tea table, Ding Songyan seemed to remember the slip only then and unfolded it before his eyes.

"At the Han Family Inn outside Dingyuan Gate, at least one Returning Abyss Order member has been showing up."

......

Dingyuan Gate was one of the gates in the south of the Flame Capital. The Han Family Inn lay outside the city, a large carriage-and-horse inn covering a huge area, with row upon row of carriages parked and animals boarded.

The surroundings were crude, mostly shared bunks and only a few private rooms, but the low prices made it a favorite of drivers, peddlers, and caravan hands.

Because of the heavy traffic and the mix of all types, a small market had formed around the Han Family Inn, with several rows of freestanding houses, their doors half open, mostly occupied by independent prostitutes.

Ding Songyan had changed into a brown short coarse jacket, with only a headscarf holding up his hair, and carried a perfectly ordinary refined-steel longsword as he slowly walked into the Han Family Inn.

In the main hall stood dozens of tables, with people eating, drinking, gambling, smoking water pipes, picking at their feet and hunting lice while chatting, and flirting with girls. It was noisy and lively.

Since it was winter, the doors and windows were shut tight and all sorts of smells mingled. Ding Songyan nearly stepped back out the moment he caught the whiff when he walked in.

He steadied himself, glanced around casually, and found that there were few martial artists with abnormal traits here.

"Sir, staying or eating?" A waiter with a white cloth over his shoulder came over.

It was nearly the evening rush.

Ding Songyan, who had asked Twelfth Madam Luo to help him with a simple disguise and a change of name and reality, nodded.

"Eating."

He didn’t rush to look for the Returning Abyss Order member. First he wanted to get familiar with the surroundings and see if any danger was lurking.

The waiter led Ding Songyan to a small table in the corner and rattled off a string of dish names for him to choose from.

There were few kinds of dishes here and no wooden menu boards on the wall, because many of the customers coming and going here had a poor range of vocabulary.

Ding Songyan ordered two mixed-grain flatbreads, a bowl of wild vegetable porridge soup, and a slab of braised pork, costing him a full fifteen coins.

Soon the food was served, and as he chewed slowly, he scanned the people around him with the corner of his eye and the Chaos Realm.

In about the time it took to drink a cup of tea, he spotted someone suspicious.

The man wore a faded black robe from excessive washing and sat in a corner as well. In front of him were seven or eight slabs of braised pork and nearly twenty mixed-grain flatbreads. With his back to most of the room, he was eating with grunts and slurps.

To find Returning Abyss Order members, start with people who can eat and love to eat... Ding Songyan was over nineteen meters from the man and couldn’t yet sense his physical condition.

He naturally recalled the description of Taotie in the Secret Classic of Mountains and Seas.

Taotie, Glutton, also called the Paoxiao, is shaped like a sheep with a human face, its eyes under its armpits, with tiger teeth and human claws, and a voice like an infant’s. The result of consuming it? Evil is warded and disaster averted, heaven is devoured and earth swallowed, all things dissolve, greed knows no satiation, desire knows no end.

"Shaped like a sheep with a human face" means the physical abnormality is mainly in the body and not the head, and can be hidden by clothing... As long as he doesn’t speak or eat, the tiger teeth won’t easily be noticed... "Wards off evil and averts disaster"... Will the disaster-averting built into the Returning Abyss Order’s martial arts give the target sudden hunches and let him sense danger approaching? Or will actions he takes unconsciously keep him away from trouble? How do I avoid or get around that... Ding Songyan fell into thought.

After finishing the last mouthful of wild vegetable porridge, he got up and walked toward the tables where people were gambling, using that to bring the distance between himself and the target to within nineteen meters.

In an instant, he sensed the tiger teeth tearing at the braised pork, and also detected the sheep’s wool hidden under the black robe and two strange eyes in the armpits.

He really is a Returning Abyss Order member... Why isn’t "wards off evil and averts disaster" working? Isn’t it a passive ability, something every Returning Abyss Order martial art includes? Or did the Returning Abyss Order notice Master Xiaozhang and company’s inquiries and deliberately put out this bait to see who was looking for them? In that case, the one who needs to avert disaster isn’t him but me... Ding Songyan was instantly on guard.

So he didn’t rush to take down the Returning Abyss Order member and instead turned to watch the gamblers.

While chatting animatedly with the idlers who were also watching, he carefully observed his surroundings looking for possible traps.

By the time the Returning Abyss Order member stood up, still wanting more, Ding Songyan still hadn’t found any trace.

No ambush? He casually looked at the Returning Abyss Order member’s face.

He was a middle-aged man who, despite eating so much, was rather gaunt, making his head look big, his eyes slightly bulging, the flesh of his cheeks faintly sagging.

His gaze swept over other tables’ dishes and customers, and he swallowed saliva, not very noticeably, as if wanting to eat them all.

Is the influence of "greed that knows no satiation and desire that knows no end" this strong already? He might even be a Grandmaster... Ding Songyan noticed out of the corner of his eye that the middle-aged man went back upstairs instead of toward the back courtyard.

That meant he stayed in a private room, not the shared bunks.

Ding Songyan went back to watching the game, occasionally offering irresponsible advice. About a quarter of an hour later, the middle-aged man in the black robe came down the stairs and headed out of the main hall.

After waiting over ten breaths, Ding Songyan "reluctantly" left the gambling table and followed the target without drawing attention.

The sky had gone fully dark. Relying on his own stealth ability, he hid in shadows and followed without a sound. At stretches where he might be spotted, he stopped and waited for the man to move far ahead, then used the Five Elements Escape Art to catch up.

The Returning Abyss Order member kept walking farther, leaving the rows of tightly packed houses outside the city gate and turning into a wood of fallen leaves and withered branches.

Passing through the sparse woods, he came to a dried-up pond, warily checked the surroundings, then entered an abandoned house by the pond.

Ding Songyan stopped at the edge of the woods, about 29 meters away, and examined the pond area with the Candle-Star Pupils.

Before long, a cold wind blew past, and a figure also wrapped in a black robe, moving so fast it was almost ghostly, entered the abandoned house.

If Ding Songyan hadn’t kept his Candle-Star Pupils active, he would most likely have missed this person.

In under a quarter of an hour, the latecomer left the house. Ding Songyan saw that he wore a bamboo hat and a face cloth, revealing no identifying features.

After thinking, Ding Songyan decided to give up on the original Returning Abyss Order disciple and track this sneaky person first. After all, the former often hung around the Han Family Inn, so he could be found again later.

He had just made the decision when the black-robed figure in the cloak and face cloth vanished in a flash. Even with Ding Songyan’s strength, he couldn’t keep up.

What an incredible movement technique... Probably one of the best even among Dharma Realm Grandmasters... What was this secret meeting about? Ding Songyan’s eyes narrowed slightly.

He turned his attention back to the abandoned house at the edge of the pond. After confirming again that there was no ambush, he approached quickly in the dark.

The Returning Abyss Order member had just opened the half-closed wooden door when his vision suddenly blurred and he saw a spark of cold light.