Li Miao didn't speak. He looked around, found a tree thick enough for one person to embrace, and raised his hand to swipe it.
Rip—
With a crisp sound, he tore off the entire tree bark and spread it on the ground.
At Yongjie's current pace, it seemed he wouldn't finish before dawn. And it was clearly being done with some specific ritual, so Li Miao found it awkward to offer help.
Li Miao sat down on the bark, leaning against the tree, his arms crossed, and closed his eyes to rest.
The sutras for salvation were quite hypnotic.
He waited until the sun set in the west.
Li Miao opened his eyes and saw that Yongjie had finally dug a large pit capable of holding five corpses.
His fingertips were already worn down to the bone.
Li Miao frowned.
There were healing divine arts in this world that could regenerate flesh and blood, but without exception, they required extremely profound cultivation, at least at the Grandmaster level.
Yongjie was clearly a practitioner of fist and palm techniques. To ruin his hands like this would definitely affect his martial arts, perhaps even causing him to drop to the second-rate.
Yet, with his martial arts, he could have dug this pit in just a few moves.
This didn't seem like piety; rather, it looked like intentional self-harm.
Li Miao stood up and walked over to Yongjie.
“Master, is it almost done?”
“Thank you for waiting, benefactor. It’s almost done.”
Yongjie said, lowering his head, then stood up and walked over to the corpses.
He remained silent for a long time, then his lips moved, but no sound came out.
Yongjie carried the corpses into the bottom of the pit, then knelt beside the excavated mound of earth, scooping up a handful of soil with both hands and scattering it over the headless bodies.
He pressed his palms together, closed his eyes, and began to chant for salvation again.
Li Miao waited for a while. After Yongjie finished chanting, he looked up and smiled at Li Miao.
“I’m truly sorry, the monk is finished.”
Li Miao said, “Master, let me do it for you. If you keep burying it one handful of dirt at a time, you won’t finish by tomorrow morning.”
Yongjie thanked him, saying, “Of course.”
Li Miao raised his palm, true qi surged, and he was about to push the earth into the pit.
Just then, he stopped and turned to look to the side.
“Lao Bu?”
Before he finished speaking, a person emerged from the forest, moving swiftly, and in an instant, stood before Yongjie.
The person first glanced into the pit and sneered, “Hmph, consider yourselves lucky you didn’t fall into my hands!”
The corpses had no heads, but their figures and clothing were still somewhat recognizable. Coupled with the number, it was not surprising that they were recognized.
After speaking, the person first turned to look at Yongjie, frowning.
“How… how familiar?”
Then, his gaze shifted to Li Miao.
This wasn’t to say he couldn’t distinguish priorities; it was simply that Li Miao hadn’t leaked a trace of true qi, nor did he show any signs of practicing martial arts, which was why he was addressed last.
Upon seeing him, the person’s face immediately fell: “Li Miao!?”
“Yo, Lao Bu, have you eaten?”
Li Miao smiled and greeted him.
The person who arrived was Bu Lei, the Lord Commissioner of the Jinyiwei (Imperial Guards) Northern Garrison Division.
He had stumbled upon the “Seven Freaks of Meishan” by chance, killed two of them, and the rest fled. He was too lazy to pursue them.
However, after he finished his task and returned to the local government office to rest, he happened to encounter the waiter from the small restaurant where Li Miao and Yongjie had eaten, who had come to report the incident.
After Yongjie and Li Miao left, the waiter, hearing no more commotion outside, dared to come out and check the situation. He then saw blood and brains all over the ground.
He immediately ran to the nearby city to report to the officials, and while describing the situation, Bu Lei happened to overhear him.
Bu Lei currently had no urgent tasks, so he came to this place, following the bloodstains on the ground, intending to eradicate them root and branch.
As a result, he ran into Li Miao.
He cursed inwardly, then feigned indifference and said, “What are you doing here? Have you finished your Qi-Lu assignment?”
“Does the Commander know you’re here?”
Li Miao, however, did not answer at all. Instead, he looked him up and down and said with a smile, “None of your business.”
“You!”
With a single, dismissive sentence, Li Miao broke through Bu Lei’s defenses, revealing his true nature.
He said exasperatedly, “Don’t forget, technically speaking, you’re still my subordinate!”
“Don’t be so arrogant just because the Commander protects you!”
When Li Miao reattached Liu Baiyun’s severed arm, he mentioned that he had a colleague who was at odds with him, and only after seeing him use this method to torture prisoners did he lose the courage to contend with him.
This person was Bu Lei.
Back then, when the position of Lord Commissioner of the Northern Garrison Division became vacant, Zhu Zai actually wanted Li Miao to take it.
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But Bu Lei, who was also a Chiliarch at the time, also wanted to be the Lord Commissioner.
Li Miao didn't want to be promoted because at the Lord Commissioner level, he would rarely personally handle matters, which was not conducive to the use of his golden finger.
But Bu Lei didn't know that, so he often came to trouble Li Miao.
The rest of the story is irrelevant; in any case, the moment Bu Lei became Lord Commissioner, he immediately abandoned Li Miao’s Chiliarch office. He also usually avoided Li Miao and even moved his own detention room to the furthest point from Li Miao’s.
By now, the two of them hadn’t seen each other for about a year or two.
Bu Lei had thought that Li Miao was getting older, and he himself had established his position as Lord Commissioner, so Li Miao should at least give him some face.
Who would have thought that Li Miao’s first words still carried the same old flavor—he didn’t treat him as a person at all.
“You—”
He hadn't finished speaking when he saw Li Miao raise a hand.
Bu Lei, as if by reflex, swallowed his words back, shrinking his neck.
“Alright, alright, scram.”
Li Miao waved his hand at Bu Lei as if shooing away a fly.
Bu Lei’s face changed from green to red, yet he dared not retort.
He was also a Grandmaster, and his aptitude was top-tier among the Jinyiwei (Imperial Guards); looking across the land, he truly had few opponents.
But he was simply afraid of Li Miao, instinctively afraid, because he had been beaten too many times back then.
Moreover, Li Miao not only beat people but also healed them, then beat them again, and healed them again after beating them.
If others beat you, at most you’d get one beating. If Li Miao beat you, it was like seventeen or eighteen beatings, all condensed into one, making it extremely difficult to endure.
Afterward, not a single injury would be left, so there was no way to find someone to arbitrate.
The fact that Bu Lei could now speak normally to Li Miao was something he had developed after many years as Lord Commissioner.
At present, he dared not curse back, but he was also unwilling to run away in a pathetic manner.
His gaze swept around, then landed on Yongjie again.
Upon seeing this, Bu Lei seemed to remember something, and a hint of triumph appeared on his face.
“You, you don’t return to Shuntian Prefecture, just to associate with such scum!”
“I will report this matter to the Commander!”
With that, Bu Lei quickly plunged into the forest without looking back and fled.
Li Miao shook his head disdainfully: “Tch, telling on me, huh?”
Then he turned to look at Yongjie.
“Master, you have quite a story, even Lao Bu knows you.”
Yongjie pressed his palms together and sighed, “You flatter me, my lord.”
He had heard Bu Lei’s words clearly just now. Bu Lei had some renown in the martial arts world, and combined with words like “Commander,” he naturally already knew that Li Miao was a Jinyiwei (Imperial Guards).