As the leader of the team, Gu Shenwei now was faced with an embarrassing dilemma. The more he knew, the harder it was for him to make a decision. He worried that they would fall into the unknown enemies' trap if they continued to travel forward. Meanwhile, he was not sure that it was safe for them to retreat.
He did not know where the enemies were. In the meantime, he was afraid that they might have already been prepared for all the actions he might take.
Under such circumstances, making a choice was like gambling. One could never know the result when he threw the dice. If he were lucky, he would win and be widely regarded as a hero.
As the leader of the former Tattooed Arm Gang, Gu Shenwei had made many decisions back in East Castle during the gang wars. However, at that time, it had been easy for him to predict his enemies' actions since they were all trained by the same academies and tended to use similar techniques and tactics. Now, his enemies were complete strangers so he could not be so sure about his judgment.
"Should we go forward or turn back?"
Gu Shenwei felt anxious but still managed to keep a straight face. He could not tell his concerns to too many people in case his uneasy feeling disturbed the machetemen. He summoned Dao San and asked him several questions. The next morning, he made a plan.
As they were already a third of the way now, if they continued to travel on this road, in 4 or 5 days, they would be able to meet an outpost of the Iron Mountain Gang.
Given that, Gu Shenwei decided to continue to travel in this way, but he did not want to wait passively for another attack to arrive.
He chose three brown-belt assassins and five machetemen to form a spearhead group with himself. They would travel to the front to explore the way. After that, he asked Shangguan Ru to lead all the rest machetemen to protect the team. He also appointed Maid Lotus and Shangguan Yushi to assist Master Ru.
In fact, Shangguan Ru preferred to join the spearhead group, but she was also quite pleased to lead more than 20 machetemen.
What Gu Shenwei planned to do was not just exploring the way. He ordered the members of the spearhead group to ride as fast as they could and paid no attention to the situation along the way at all. Once, the machetemen noticed something unusual on the roadside, but he just asked them to neglect it and keep on going forward.
They traveled like this for two days and a night. During this period of time, they only took a few breaks to drink and eat and feed their horses. The machetemen were exhausted. They were surprised that the teenagers still looked alright.
For the brown-belt assassins, this was not a big deal. They had similar experiences during their gang wars. Back then, once they had closed their eyes to sleep, they would have been killed. All of them had once stayed awake for days without eating or drinking anything.
Finally, they saw a camp again. There were six dead roving bandits in the field. Gu Shenwei was pretty sure that they were not machetemen hired by Meng Mingshi.
The six corpses were arranged in a circle. They all lay on their backs with their soles toward an extinguished fire in the center. The blood spouting out from their chests and stomachs dyed the soil red. Seen from a distance, they appeared like a big blooming six-petal flower.
It seemed that the murderer had assassinated them without meeting any resistance, and this murder had cut every dead man's chest and stomach open again.
Seeing the dead bodies, the five machetemen turned pale and looked at their chief nervously.
Their young chief, who had seen countless dead bodies and murder scenes, was not disturbed by the dreadful scene at all. He despised the murder's act very much.
In his view, it was meaningless to create such wounds on dead bodies unless the murderer wanted to hide some clues in the corpses.
He got off his horse to carefully examine the bodies. He found a sharp piece of stone inside the stomach of a corpse. He was pretty sure that the murderer must have used this thing to cut the dead bandits' chests and stomachs, but he could not figure out what the murder tried to hide. After all, there were many kinds of kung fu in this world, which he had never seen.
The spearhead group left a mark in this camp to inform the team behind them that they had come to this place. After that, they continued to gallop forward.
Gu Shenwei had no idea how the murderer had killed the bandits, but he knew for sure that they did not die very long ago. That meant, now they were not very far away from their enemies.
On the second night of the spearhead group's journey, they saw a campfire again.
Gu Shenwei ordered the five machetemen to hide in the thick grass nearby with all their horses. He took the three brown-belt assassins to check the situation.
He discovered that even Liuhua was more reliable than Meng Mingshi's machetemen. He would instead ask them to hide and wait than assign them an important task.
The four brown-belt assassins made a detour around the camp to make sure that there was nobody else hiding around it. After that, they moved toward the campfire slowly, and then they stopped and disappeared in the grass about 20 steps away from the fire.
Gu Shenwei was disappointed since the people in the camp were apparently not the unknown enemies they were searching for.
Eight shabbily clothed men were sitting around the campfire quietly with their heads down. They all leaned their upper bodies against their unsheathed machetes. Every now and then, one of them would throw a piece of wood to the fire. They looked tired and dejected, like a group of hopeless ghosts.
Apparently, they were a group of poor and hungry roving bandits, who could only eat chunks of meat and drink bowls of wine in their dreams.
Gu Shenwei guessed that they might have already surpassed their enemies.
He prayed that the unknown enemies would not take this chance to attack the team behind them.
On second thought, he reckoned that the enemies who had carried out a series of carefully-planned assassinations probably would not attack the team so hastily.
Gu Shenwei began to assign tasks to the brown-belt assassins, which was an easy job. They had received the same training and could quickly understand Slave Huan's orders.
Gu Shenwei sent Liuhua to deliver his orders to the machetemen.
Soon the eight roving bandits were wakened up by the galloping horses. They hurriedly rushed to the road with machetes in their hands, wanting to rob the travelers. However, they could not stop the horses at all. Nine horses sped past them and nearly knocked one of them down.
The eight men vented their anger and frustration by shouting and brandishing their machetes for a while, and then they returned to sit around the campfire again. They angrily chatted for a moment and then fell silent. As time went by, they fell asleep one by one with nobody keeping watch at night.
According to Gu Shenwei's plan, the five machetemen would keep galloping forward for some time and then return to join the brown-belt assassins before dawn. He intended to confuse the unknown enemies by doing so.
As for the eight roving bandits, he just planned to use them as a decoy to lure the enemies out.
He had a strong feeling that there were perhaps only two to three people slaughtering the roving bandits along the way.
All the brown-belt assassins waited in their positions patiently. They saw the crescent moon gradually rise up high in the sky and then slowly set in the west. They knew that the night was about to be over. At this moment, the campfire was about to go out, and all the bandits were sound asleep. They could hear nothing except the bandits' snorting noise and the cries of insects and frogs.
Just before dawn, they finally saw the unknown enemy they were waiting for.
It looked like a dark shadow. They saw it jump up and down all the way to the camp, making absolutely no noise, like a big black bird looking for food in the grass.
If this black bird had not moved directly toward the bandits, the teenagers would have never paid particular attention to it.
The blackbird jumped around the bandits to check and then quickly decided to launch an attack. Its weapon seemed to be a dagger. Every time, the weapon touched a bandit, he would immediately stop snorting.
This looked more like a devil's life-sucking trick than a regular dagger skill.
Nevertheless, the teenagers were still determined to catch the blackbird alive even if it was indeed a monster.
When the blackbird killed all the bandits and was about to cut their chests and stomachs open, Liuhua shot out an arrow from the dense grass.
The blackbird swiftly turned around and used its wide sleeves to catch the arrow.
Before the blackbird realized what had happened, another arrow was flying toward it.
Liuhua the Silencer was the fastest bowman among all the Dragon Year apprentices.
The second arrow he shot nearly hit the blackbird. It was furious and began to jump toward the place where Liuhua hid. This time it jumped side to side to confuse the bowman, which made it look like a clumsy bird.
Liuhua kept shooting, but none of his arrows could hit the blackbird now.
When the blackbird was only ten steps away from Liuhua, Wildhorse suddenly leaped out of the thick grass, striking his saber at the back of the blackbird.
They exchanged only a few moves, and then the blackbird suddenly fell into the grass. Wildhorse immediately jumped on it. Seeing that, Gu Shenwei came out from the other side of the camp. He knew that Snowcamel who had been hiding in the dark had already successfully knocked the blackbird down.
In this action, Liuhua, Wildhorse, and Snowcamel were in charge of catching the mysterious murderer alive, and Gu Shenwei was responsible for killing all the murderer's followers. However, since the murder came here alone, Gu Shenwei had nothing to do during this fight.
When he ran to the three brown-belt assassins, he saw that the blackbird was already tied up with ropes, but it still kept struggling. Wildhorse was holding his saber shaft tightly, with a murderous look on his face. He saw some blood on Wildhorse's shoulder and realized that he was wounded by the blackbird during the fight.
As the day began to dawn, they could see the blackbird clearly now. It was lying face down, with its hands tied behind its back. The brown-belt assassins discovered that there was a steel needle fixed on each of its fingers and came to realize that these things were its weapons.
They surrounded the blackbird. Gu Shenwei drew out his dagger and knelt on the ground to turn it over. He took off its hood and was surprised to find out that it was a woman.
She was around 40 and looked crazy and evil. Her lips were so red as if she had just drunk some blood. She opened her mouth, revealing her white teeth.
No matter it was a monster or a woman, for killers, a captive was just a captive.
Gu Shenwei had been tortured in Heart Cleansing Yard before. He was well aware that fear could make a person tell the truth. He knew that now he had to abuse this woman a little to make her confess.
He turned her around and used his dagger to chop off her thumbs.
The woman buried her head in the soil, wailing.
When he turned her around again, her face was pale and dirty, and her lips were not so red as before.
With the dagger in one hand and the woman's thumbs in the other hand, Gu Shenwei said, "I've enough time to torture you. I can make you live and suffer until our team behind catches up with us."
The woman's face was distorted by pain, but she did not look panicked at all. She seemed even more crazier and had a threatening look in her eyes. She scanned the teenager up and down for a while and said, "Kill me now. I won't tell you anything. We don't want your goods, We just want the person."
Her voice was hoarse. She sounded as if she had not opened her mouth to speak to anyone for a long time.
"Who do you want?"
"Kill me now. You can only outlive me by several days. You'll die very soon, so will all the people in Golden Roc Fort. You're doomed since we're back. We'll take our things back."
The woman seemed so possessed. She laughed wildly as if the things she wanted were right in front of her now.
Gu Shenwei realized that the crazy woman was not afraid of torture. He was pretty sure that he would not be able to get any valuable information out of her.
He held his dagger against her chest and looked into her eyes for the last time, hoping to capture a sign of weakness or hesitation.
However, this woman remained firm and unshakable all the time. A moment later, he thrust the dagger into her heart.
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