Towards Jiankang 2

Inside this, hastily made bunker which was held together by boulders that hadn't been moved, plus some wood brought into there to reinforce some specific places, the life was boring.

There was quite literally nothing else to do than bodyweight practises in silence, it was something, but that was only for two or three hours a day, so there was still a lot of time to kill.

Xiao Fan mostly spends this time with the two women talking inside their room.

That in mind, everything was fine for him.

For the most part, until the two women of his had come up with a plan to counter the sleeping conditions set upon them.

The two women, still not liking the idea of sharing the bed, had together hatched a plan where Xiao Fan spent double time in sleep or as the body pillow.

It went as told.

When the other was awake, Xiao Fan would take a nap with the other, and then when she woke up the other one would take her turn sleeping with Xiao Fan.

This, in turn, was causing Xiao Fan to become irritated around the third day when this was happening, he was quite literally being kept by the two of them as body pillows.

Due to being treated like this, he had begun to think about how to get them to accept the fact of sleeping with him in the same bed.

However, in the end, he came up only with the conclusion from before.

He would need to conquer Qian Ki.

Before anything like this could even be done, and going over it, again and again, made this notion only stronger, plus, whenever would he try to do something that would lead to the same conclusion would the two of them get mad at him.

Then again, the plan of getting Qian Ki's virginity here had a snowball's chance in hell to succeed.

Even the slightest noise could be heard by the other people who could hear even a worm intruding to their shelter through the mud.

So, for now, Xiao Fan could only comply with their request.

And so it might have been the fourth or fifth day that Xiao Fan with his sleeping schedule didn't even have the idea on how many days had transpired.

Not taking it anymore he went to ask Zheng Chao.

When going to him, his inquiry of leaving the shelter was met with a positive response from Zheng Chao, who likewise was becoming sick of hibernating in here.

Zheng Chao had spent months in these type of shelter before this in training.

But all of those shelters were better prepared for something like this, so even he was getting bored, going slightly mental.

The Liang Dynasty used this as a trump card given to those troops deemed truly loyal and had an excellent track record and the men given it themselves liked this tactic.

They liked it so much that they had begun to practice how to make them and stay in them without going mental, but unlike this time they had had much more time than a few hours to build this shelter.

Nothing goes as planned.

The troubles were added in by the few men he had picked from the elites to stay with them here were also becoming restless.

And one was going paranoid, saying he heard people marching a top of them constantly, and that doom was nearing every day.

All of these things considered the group decided to start thinking about leaving this shelter, and this would, of course, start by probing the area.

The first thing they did was making the distance between the ground and them small as possible and start hearing this as if someone was marching above them.

Doing so, Xiao Fan and others all took a small turn to see if anyone could locate any noise, yet everyone only heard one bird singing above ground.

The first step now completed, it was now time for the most dangerous action of their resurfacing. In which one of the elites would peek his head out of a hole they would make into the surface.

This time Xiao Fan and everyone watched the man standing in the shelter so that his head couldn't be seen. This took the elite a minute before he ducked his head back into the shelter, telling everyone the good news.

¨Well, if they knew, exactly when I would pop out my head, there still might be someone, but I guarantee that it is safe¨ The elite reported.

To which Zheng Chao nodded and then begun to move the dirt that had been acting as their roof so that they could have a small hole from to jump out onto the surface.

Everything they needed in their backpacks, the team of ten or so cultivators after jumping out from the shelter made their way into the tree line as fast as possible, only stopping to cover their hole.

After ten or so minutes of running into the woods, the elites dispersed to scout more around them while Zheng Chao and Xiao Fan's entourage gathered to talk about it.

¨Thank you Zheng Chao, without you we might be already all dead¨ Xiao Fan spoke humbly to the man who had saved their life.

¨Save those thanks when you get your rank of a noble. Only then I can do something useful with those thanks¨ He laughed in a weirdly serious tone.

'Seems that even in death people think about favours' Xiao Fan noted, putting this information into this head that he would need to do something for Zheng Chao when the time came.

¨Sure, but what about now? I don't think that with this group it will not take to long reach the Liang Dynasty?¨ Xiao Fan changed the subject.

¨It will still take a quite a lot of time before we get into there and they might have already noticed that the real target has fleed their net¨

¨Also now that we are only a small group of people, the locals will become much more attentive towards us. I only saved enough manpower that we should be able to hold a bandit group or two¨ Zheng Chao lectured.

But this news was shocking to Xiao Fan.

¨Zheng Chao, what do you mean by the locals giving us trouble? You are a Body Strengthening realm peak cultivator while the others are also in the Body Strengthening realm. How can a group of bandits get us?¨

¨Of course they are so strong. Or why do you think that the Dynasties haven't come to grab the land here?¨

¨Altough you might see that someone like Zou Zexi is a minor character in the grand scheme of things and you are right about it. However, the dynasties don't have the manpower or the reason to invade the lands.

The cost of making a move against someone like Zou Zexi isn't worth the troubles it would create. Furthermore, if one dynasty sends an army to conquer these parts, the barbarians in the Far North would most likely have an easy time to run past the defensive line¨ He explained things to Xiao Fan again.

Zheng Chao didn't mind telling things to Xiao Fan.

He saw doing so as securing support from him when he finally got him into the capital, and at that point, Xiao Fan with a higher rank than him could be helpful for his agenda.

¨So the Tribes and Host of people inhabiting the Far North are strong enough to annoy the two dynasties?¨ Xiao Fan was getting the gist of it.

¨Yeah. Sure, they might not be the biggest threat ever, but the lines of fortifications holding them back are things that the two dynasties hold onto dearly. Losing that line would create so many troubles that these bandits here would only be some trivial troubles.

Xiao Fan getting a small lecture about how things were going in the dynasties was already wanting to get into the Royal Academy or whatever it was named to mingle with some people who would give more of this information to him.

Meanwhile, Zheng Chao was beginning to find Xiao Fan a little interesting as it would seem that the man about to become an Independent Viscount through alchemy wasn't only interested in alchemy.

For no person, who only held alchemy in his heart would take note of the workings of the palace or the different factions inside of it, and that was only talking about Xiao Fan himself.

As while Xiao Fan only seemed interested in the gist of it, the two women accompanying him were obviously just hungry for power and fame.

But this to Zheng Chao wasn't bad at all as.

He a lowly Baron got to influence the whole thinking process of an Independent Viscount alone, with the bonus of his only advisors.

Zheng Chao was taking even small pleasure in corrupting the man to think like a loyal citizen of the Liang Dynasty would think.

He wouldn't want him to become like those usual Independent Sovereigns who ran around the state, not caring for the general going of things until there was something to gain.

In his mind.

Xiao Fan would be like the typical Nobles, not an Independent Noble, and he in his teachings had been teaching him accordingly, as it had all begun in the first meeting and continued in the shelter.

Xiao Fan, Du Lan, and Qian Ki.

Not wholly knowing as young people that trusting one person's opinions wasn't such a good idea were sucking in anything that Zheng Chao was feeding them.

Then taking everything as the official thought line of the Dynasty rather than the faction that was supporting the current Empress.

Zheng Chao was in this for himself like everyone else.

And so he got to speak them his views for some time until the men loyal to him and his ideology came back.

They reported that the premier was clear of anyone and that there was no way that the enemy would know anything about their current location.

Hearing so, they didn't stand around long.

They got up and started travelling in the forest next to the road, going towards the Liang Dynasty where they should already be.

.....

Meanwhile, at the side of, Han Bai, who had chased the caravan for four days before dismantling it completely, had in his mind achieving victory.

But he had called the victory too soon.

Xiao Fan nor anyone else important hadn't been located in the survivors, nor had they died during the running war they had engaged in the last days.

That they had made sure of.

Realising what was going on sent Han Bai into a small rage where he crushed a few of the prisoners into a mush before asking the surviving members of the retinue where Xiao Fan was.

Despite his best efforts to intimidate them, and again to his disappointment, however, the man who was an elite member, only said what they had realised.

The enemy had duped them.

The enemy they had been facing the last days had anyhow shown way too little resistance against them, so the only possibility was that Zhang Chao had pulled off a trick, right in front of them.

However, all wasn't lost.

And so Han Bai after calming down did the reasonable thing and ordered his troops to start looking around for any clues while, he, himself leads a small contingent to visit local bandits.

The area they might be in was now huge.

But if they got a good number of bandit groups who knew these areas to help them in exchange for money, everything could be still salvaged, and Han Bai was confident in his new plan.

....

A few days later, the Liang Dynasty's border guards would also get a message of something fishy going on.

The representative hadn't come back with their troops, and so they would start their own actions to get to the bottom of this.