Chapter 38: The Girl in the Mountain
“Miss? Are you alright?”
Lu Yunxi approached tentatively. The girl’s clothes were somewhat torn, and her skin was marred by numerous cuts and scrapes. She looked thoroughly disheveled, yet it was still obvious that she possessed a striking, exceptionally beautiful face.
Finding a helpless, beautiful young woman tied up deep inside a mountain cavern was clearly a bad sign.
The girl’s brow furrowed as she slowly fluttered her eyes open. The moment her gaze locked onto Yunxi, she flinched in terror, shrinking back against the stone wall. Her voice was as soft and clear as a nightingale. “Who… who are you?”
“I’m just a local herbalist gathering resources in the mountains. I was passing by when I noticed you bound to the floor,” Yunxi explained, softening her tone to offer a gentle, reassuring smile. “What happened to you, Miss? Why are you up here entirely alone? Would you like me to untie these ropes for you?”
The girl’s frown deepened as if she were desperately trying to piece together a fragmented memory. Suddenly, her face drained of all color, and she shook her head frantically. “No! You need to leave this place immediately! I used to live in the valley at the foot of the massif. One afternoon, while I was gathering firewood on the slopes, a band of vicious bandits ambushed me and dragged me up to their den!”
“Bandits?” Yunxi raised an eyebrow. She had trekked through these specific ridges countless times and had never crossed paths with a single highwayman. Forget about organized criminals—in a wilderness heavily saturated with wild wolves, bears, and panthers, it was a rare miracle to spot any human footprint at all!
“Yes! Their den is deep within this very cavern, but they sleep like dead men until late afternoon every day! Look at the shadows—it’s already past midday. You must flee down the mountain before they stir!”
“How about I cut you loose and we make our descent together?” Yunxi suggested. It appeared this bandit faction was remarkably bold to establish their base of operations in such a dangerous territory. Now that a civilian hostage was in the equation, engaging them in a direct confrontation inside a cramped cave would be incredibly inconvenient.
However, before the girl could reply, a sudden movement echoed from the depths of the cavern. A roar of boisterous laughter, like rolling thunder, erupted from the dark tunnels.
“Hahaha! Don’t bother heading down the mountain, little girl! Why don’t you stay right here and keep us company?” Along with the booming voice, heavy, thudding footsteps vibrated through the stone floor.
“Second Brother, look at that! Another little maiden just delivered herself right to our doorstep. Make sure you leave her to me later!”
“Hold on, if he takes that one, what do I get?! Let’s bind this new wench up first, then march down to the lowlands to raid a few more households! Otherwise, a single prize won’t be enough to satisfy the three of us brothers!”
The unseen men immediately began bartering over her presence as if they were dividing slabs of pork at a butcher’s stall, causing Yunxi’s brow to furrow in deep disgust.
She mentally tallied the remaining stock in her quiver and let out a silent breath of relief. Only three of them. Still, if a chaotic brawl broke out inside the cave, she wouldn’t be able to guarantee the safety of the bound girl beside her.
As the burly shapes of the bandits finally materialized from the shadows, Yunxi made a split-second decision. She executed a swift backstep, darting out of the cavern entrance and down the mountain path. She threw a mocking, sidelong glance over her shoulder at the pursuing trio. “Capture me? With just the three of you hiding out in the ridges like rats? The fact that you don’t even dare to show your faces in the lowlands proves you’re nothing but a bunch of weaklings!”
Watching the three bandits charge after her with ferocious, bloodthirsty expressions, a serene smile returned to her face. She let out a sigh of relief. It seemed she no longer had to worry about the hostage getting caught in the crossfire.
Once Yunxi successfully lured the trio a safe distance away into a wide, open clearing, she stopped running. With a fluid flick of her wrist, she manifested her bow and arrows from her spatial inventory.
In a single, seamless motion, she loosed a volley of three arrows simultaneously. The projectiles whistled through the air, finding their targets with absolute precision as each arrow embedded itself into a different man’s thigh. The Lu Family Archery Technique truly was a remarkable discipline; now that her proficiency had reached the intermediate threshold, executing a triple-shot was second nature. It was almost poetic that there happened to be exactly three bandits to test it on.
“Ah! You miserable bitch, you’re dead meat!” the bandit captain roared. Staring down at the shaft protruding from his thigh, his eyes turned bloodshot with rage.
Bellowing like a wounded beast, he clamped his calloused hands around the exposed wood, gritted his teeth, and forcefully ripped the arrow out of his leg, flinging the blood-slicked projectile back at her.
Lu Yunxi: …
This display simply confirmed her theory: a lack of baseline education truly was a tragedy. If these highwaymen possessed even a shred of common medical knowledge, they wouldn’t commit such monumental acts of stupidity.
Witnessing their captain’s actions, the remaining two criminals followed suit, eagerly grabbing the shafts in their thighs to yank them free.
Yunxi watched them with a look of profound pity, offering a gentle, well-meaning piece of advice: “If I were you, I really wouldn’t pull those out.”
“Hah! Who do you think you are, telling us what to do?!” the second bandit sneered provocatively. He wrenched the arrow from his flesh with a grotesque squelch, hurling it toward her feet. “Look at that, I pulled it out! What are you going to do about it, huh?!”
The third bandit was equally swift in tearing his own wound open.
Yunxi’s expression turned deeply subtle as she observed the trio, looking at them the way a mother looks at a completely undisciplined, foolish child. Without even shifting her stance, she effortlessly tilted her body, letting the discarded arrows drop harmlessly into the grass.
Sure enough, it didn’t take long for the natural laws of biology to take effect. Deprived of the arrows plugging their arteries, the three men rapidly collapsed onto the turf, half-conscious from severe blood loss and physical exhaustion.
She shook her head, letting out a helpless sigh. As she glided past the groaning figures, she adopted a calm, educational tone. “When you’re struck by an arrow in the wilderness, it is always best to leave it in place until you can reach a proper clinic. Yanking it out causes rapid, fatal hemorrhaging, which is vastly more dangerous than the initial impact. Do you understand now?”
The three bandits’ eyes practically bulged out of their sockets, staring at her as if she were a demon. As she stepped over them, they hacked up mouthfuls of dark blood from sheer, suffocating hatred.
Paying no mind to their spitting, Yunxi retraced her steps, her movements light and buoyant as she glided back toward the hidden cave.
“Miss, are you alright? Where are those monsters?” the captive girl gasped, her eyes darting around in frantic anxiety the moment Yunxi reappeared.
“While they were pursuing me down the path, they accidentally stumbled straight into a deep hunting pit. They won’t be climbing out anytime soon, so we are perfectly safe,” Yunxi comforted her, offering a warm smile.
She stepped forward to slice through the thick bonds. The moment the ropes fell away, the girl’s limbs appeared remarkably rigid; she had to rub her wrists and stretch for several minutes before the stiffness began to recede.
With the rescue complete, the duo began their slow trek down the massif. The beautiful girl trailed a few paces behind, her posture meek and cautious.
Suddenly, a sharp whistle cut through the silence. A violent gust of wind whipped past Yunxi’s ear as she instinctively leaped into the air, executing a flawless evasion.
Thunk! A wicked, silver dagger embedded itself deeply into the trunk of a nearby pine tree, right where her throat had been a microsecond before.
Landing gracefully on the dirt path, the pleasant smile never wavered from Yunxi’s face.
The girl froze, her meek facade evaporating in an instant. Her eyes narrowed into dangerous, calculating slits, and her voice stripped away its nightingale tenderness, turning ice-cold. “When exactly did you see through me?”
“Are you the entity responsible for the blight on Mushroom Village?” Yunxi countered. Rather than answering the question, her gaze locked onto the girl’s exquisite, high-grade silk garments—a wardrobe entirely unsuited for a poor villager fetching firewood.
“Oh? So that is the reason you migrated up into these peaks!” The beautiful girl let out a charming, melodic laugh, gently tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Her current aura was a polar opposite to the vulnerable maiden she had portrayed inside the cave. “You are entirely correct—I cast the spell! But now that you know, what do you possibly think a little thing like you can do to stop me?”
“Why would you target our valley? How could the innocent residents of Mushroom Village have possibly provoked your wrath?” Yunxi’s grip tightened around her bow, her amber eyes turning freezing cold.
The girl crossed her arms, a dark, venomous shadow clouding her beautiful features as she let out a disdainful snort. “What business is it of yours?! I simply despise every living soul in that valley, alright?!”
Yunxi raised her bow, locking an arrow into place. “Dispel the curse on our people immediately, or do not blame me for showing no mercy.”
The girl merely raised her eyelids, her lips curling into a haughty, arrogant sneer.
A brief, one-sided thrashing later, the beautiful girl lay crumpled on the grass, entirely defeated.
“You didn’t just target our home—you’ve placed a blight on every single settlement established south of the regional town?” Yunxi muttered, her face a mask of cold disbelief as she methodically packed her hunting gear back into her inventory. “Have you completely lost your mind?”
“Am I the one who is insane?!” the girl shrieked from the dirt, her voice cracking with raw hysteria. “Years ago, my prestigious family took pity on a destitute, starving scholar. He knelt before us, swearing oaths of eternal devotion and promising to take my hand in marriage. My parents poured our entire life savings into funding his studies, financing his path through the imperial examinations. But the exact moment he passed and secured his official rank, he shattered our contract! He looked me in the eye and claimed he already possessed a childhood fiancée residing in a village south of the town, and he couldn’t possibly tarnish his moral reputation by breaking a prehistoric promise! He had the audacity to suggest I enter his household as a lowly, disgraced concubine! Hahaha!”
“If he harbored a prior engagement, why did he hide it from us in the beginning?! If he had simply spoken the truth, I never would have squandered my youth chasing him! But we gave him every single copper our lineage possessed. When my parents fell critically ill, we didn’t even have the funds to procure basic medicine! And what did our glorious scholar do? When I dragged myself to his manor gates just to beg for a loan to save my dying family, he ordered his guards to beat me into the street like a dog!”
The manic light in the girl’s eyes slowly flickered out, replaced by a hollow, dead stare as tears tracked down her soiled cheeks.
She turned her head away, squinting up at the brilliant sunlight piercing the forest canopy, before closing her eyes in absolute despair. “My mother is gone. My father is gone. I am left entirely alone in this wretched world. What point is there in continuing? Just loose an arrow and end it!”
Yunxi looked down at her, her voice quiet but firm. “The scholar’s actions were monstrous. But you cannot possibly blame his innocent fiancée for his betrayal. If you want to exact vengeance, your fury should be directed entirely at the man himself. It was that wretched scholar who chose to accept your family’s wealth and orchestrate the deception, wasn’t it?”
