Chapter 290: This LifeTwo years lat

Chapter 290: This Life

Two years later, Meng Hao was thirty-five years old. It had been nine years since he left home. However, during that entire time, he had only lived in two places, the river and the forest.

This year, he ran into a gang of bandits.

Bandits are generally killers, but they didn’t kill Meng Hao. Perhaps it was because of his worn scholar’s robe, or the scholar’s pack that he wore on his back. He certainly looked down on his fortune. The bandit leader was a beautiful, seductive woman. She asked him a single question.

“Can you keep financial records?”

Meng Hao shook his head. However, they took him anyway. They led him to their mountain fort, which was really a stockaded village where more than a thousand people lived. Most of them were the family members of the bandits, including quite a few children.

It was arranged for Meng Hao to become a teacher, which mostly involved instructing the children how to read. He didn’t have to teach anything very complicated. They just needed to be able to read bank notes and understand basic messages, things that any good bandit should be able to do.

This was a requirement laid upon all the bandits by the beautiful bandit Chieftess.

Time trickled by. Meng Hao adapted himself, and quickly felt at home. He taught reading, and looked up at the sky. It was almost like life in Eastern Emergence County. Sometimes he thought of Master, or of his father, and how he hadn’t gone back to sweep his grave for a very long time.

People died every month in the mountain fort. During a three year period, the camp moved locations twice. In the fourth year, the army came. The mountain fort faced overwhelming numbers; at a critical moment of life and death, Meng Hao unhesitatingly proposed using poison.

At the moment, a north wind was blowing, and the army was located to the south.

Meng Hao wasn’t sure why exactly he had thought of using poison. It was just that, in the past few years, he seemed to have an abundance of knowledge in his head. The poison… was of course concocted by Meng Hao.

As the poison powder drifted south with the wind, Meng Hao closed his eyes. A long time later, he heard shouts of rejoicing. It had been a massacre. The mountain village had won.

Meng Hao was thirty-nine years old. That night, during the third watch, something like burning fire burrowed under the covers with him. It was the bandit Chieftess. During the day she was a conservative woman, but right now she was like a beautiful spirit.

Overnight, Meng Hao’s life changed. He was no longer a teacher, but instead, a so-called military adviser. He had never experienced such a life before. It was fresh and exciting. Soon he was forty years old. He was past the prime of life when the blood boiled. And yet all of this was… addicting.

Killing. Plundering. For three years, no blood physically stained Meng Hao’s hands. However, with his assistance, the number of lives taken by the bandits increased by tenfold.

That winter, Meng Hao finally got fed up with it all. He had not chosen this life, and he wanted to leave. But by now, the mountain fort had grown very large. When he brought up leaving, the beautiful Chieftess refused to allow it.

But Meng Hao… persisted, and left the mountain fort anyway. Therefore, they tried to chase him down and kill him.

They chased him for a year before finally giving up. In the end, Meng Hao wasn’t killed. Exhausted, he turned, and there, one hundred or so paces behind him, was the Chieftess. She sat atop a horse, staring at him, a big black bow in her hand. She was older, but still beautiful, and within her eyes was a torn expression.

The wind blew past the two of them. Meng Hao shouldered the same scholar’s pack he’d taken with him when he left his hometown, turned around, and walked off into the distance.

No arrow was loosed from the bow.

That year, Meng Hao was forty-three years of age.

Eventually, he caught sight of a Daoist temple located on top of a mountain.

It was autumn, and the leaves rustled as they drifted down onto the green limestone of the temple. The sky was overcast, and occasionally the soft rumbling of thunder could be heard. Rain was coming.

Meng Hao took up residence in the Daoist temple. He watched the Daoists practice their religious cultivation, observed them live their daily lives, and enjoyed a kind of peace he had never experienced before.

He had the unshakeable feeling that his hands were stained dark with blood that just wouldn’t wash off. Perhaps in this place he could discover a way to cleanse it.

Two years later, Meng Hao was forty-five years old. He let out a soft sigh.

“It turns out there’s no way to cleanse it. In that case, I’ll just have to live with it.” Shaking his head, he bid farewell to the Daoist temple, and strode out once again into the world.

Eventually, he reached the capital city. After he had been living there for a year, a bloody war broke o