Chapter 950: Gold Ingots

News of selecting the Lord of Jade City through a kung fu competition finally went public. Though it hadn’t been a secret for a long time, it still aroused animated discussions among the residents of Jade City. They argued about the pros and cons again and again. The wise ones made one prophecy after another, which became the cause of a series of bets.

As the news spread, the name of the Central Plainsman, Pang Jing, became known to a lot of people. Given all that he had done during the past few days, Jade City gave him a nickname that could be interpreted in multiple ways – Commander-In-Chief of Wind. Interpreted in a favorable light, this nickname suggested that he always did things quickly, and that he was energetic. The other meaning was that the Central Plains had sent a lunatic here to pacify the Western Regions.

Pang Jing indeed disliked doing things by the book. He might receive an important person in a haughty manner, and he also might go to the most remote alley to meet with a nobody who nobody had ever heard of. He might even go to the Four Noble Truths Temple on a whim at night, wait outside the outer gate until daybreak, and then return to the city before the amazed monks could arrive at the gate to welcome him.

Unexpectedly, after hearing that his nickname was “the Commander-In-Chief of Wind,” Pang Jing liked it very much and offered a brand-new interpretation. “I’m a wind, a strong wind, a wild wind, and I’ll change every place I arrive at.”

Upon hearing this remark, the experienced merchants immediately became vigilant and started hiding their wealth, transferring it to their family. But overall, the residents of Jade City, who were fond of enjoying their life to the fullest, still liked this enthusiastic Central Plainsman. It was a pity that Pang Jing was not very interested in women, good wine, or gambling, which made a lot of people who wanted to fawn on him feel like there was nothing that they could do.

More and more intelligence reports piled onto Gu Shenwei’s desk, and gradually, they all lost their meaning. The kind of person that the Commander-In-Chief of Wind really was was becoming vague due to his bizarre, contradictory deeds.

Zhong Heng, who had just been appointed to the position of Commandant of the Department of Guards, was also a liaison. He had thought that this would be an easy task, but unexpectedly, Pang Jing valued him very much and summoned him on an almost daily basis. He even jokingly suggested that Zhong Heng should stay in the Governor’s mansion to do office work.

Zhong Heng had no choice but to resign from the post of the Commandant of the Department of Guards so that he could concentrate on dealing with the Commander-In-Chief of Wind lest anything go wrong during the preparations for the kung fu competition.

Gu Shenwei decided to have Long Fanyun become the new Commandant of the Department of Guards.

Both surprised and nervous about this, Long Fanyun came to the Dragon King and expressed his own opinions. Though he was now paralyzed, he still retained all of the qualities of a Big Snow Mountain swordsman, so he didn’t say any grateful words and instead directly stated his concerns. “I’ve never tried any cases before, and I have no idea about how one should mediate disputes. There are even a lot of words that I don’t know the meanings of. How am I supposed to convince the residents?”

“Red Bat will help you with the reading. As for trying the cases, just do whatever you think is right and just. There’s no need to satisfy everybody. You’re the chieftain of Canopy Peak, so just regard southern Jade City as another Canopy Peak with a slightly larger population.”

Southern Jade City was not the Big Snow Mountain. The personalities of the residents here were entirely different from that of the residents living in mountainous areas. Though they all preferred to settle disputes with violence, things were different in a trial. Everybody would indignantly express their own arguments, and then even immortals would have difficulties deciding which side was telling the truth.

Long Fanyun accepted the appointment and took office. On the first day, he was totally confused and disoriented by a couple of cases. He didn’t even manage to figure out the most basic of facts. None of those cases were decided. Taking the undecided cases left by Zhong Heng into account, there were over thirty cases waiting for a decision in total.

After pondering it over for a full night, Long Fanyun thought of an idea.

The residents of Jade City were snobbish. In this city, because of mutual mistrust, there were very few disputes that concerned money. In most cases, the people who came to the Department of Guards to seek mediation were fights, usually because one side had taken one more saber blow than the other side, and thus they demanded that the latter pay the price.

The next morning, Long Fanyun summoned all of his swordsmen and Hu Shining’s sabersmen, and then said to those litigants, “Come here. Fight with my men. I’ll decide in the winner’s favor. The other side must apologize and pay the indemnity.”

This was a new and simple method of deciding cases. Parties of a couple of cases looked at each other and would immediately feel that it was unnecessary to do this. As the saying went, “Out of blows, friendship grows.” They would rather find a place to drink than fight with the Dragon King’s men, so they all turned around and left. The topic of their argument switched from their original disagreement to which tavern might still be open at this moment.

There were also some who remained unconvinced and were willing to have their cases decided via a fight. There were only four kung fu competitions, and then the rest of those people left. Afterwards, the four sabersmen who lost sat in a tavern like friends, hands on their bruised eyes, telling their curious listeners, “Actually it was not that we couldn’t defeat them. At that time, I thought carefully and realized that – what can I get even if I win? It’s not worth it to win the case at the cost of offending the Dragon King. Thus, I might as well let this go for the sake of the Dragon King. It’s not like there’s really any deep hatred between us.”

As a result, the number of cases accepted by the Department of Guards in southern Jade City decreased quickly while the business of the taverns became much better than before.

But it was impossible to turn Jade City into a place free of murder overnight. Impulsive sabersmen still whipped out their weapons to settle disputes out of force of habit. Though Golden Roc Castle no longer provided killers for hire, and the Essence Pavilion had also closed shop, a lot of people were still eager to join this profession. And there had even been several open fights between factions that stemmed from people trying to prove that they were more suitable to be killers.

Hu Shining never expected that the killers he had worked so hard to train would one day bear the title “Warriors of the Department of Guards,” and that their duties would switch from killing to stopping killing. But he didn’t take a dislike to this kind of change. Instead, he tacitly cooperated with Long Fanyun. The former was responsible for patrolling streets while the latter did office work in the Department of Guards.

Gu Shenwei had Xu Xiaoyi join them and provide them with intelligence, which enabled Hu Shining to nip a couple of murders in the bud before they happened.

The killer training that those warriors of the Department of Guards received was not in vain at all. To implement the Dragon King’s ban on killing, they killed people almost everyday, sending a clear message to the sabersmen both in and outside of the city: the Dragon King’s ban on killing was not just empty talk, and the Dragon King was by no means a merciful local magistrate.

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At the same time, Long Fanyun recruited a lot of sabersmen and assigned them to the Warriors Battalion, making them a part of the patrol.

After about half a month, the killings in southern Jade City had significantly decreased. Those warriors under Hu Shining’s command even became idle some days. The jurisdiction of the Department of Guards was expanding every day. More and more alleys and businesses became willing to accept the Dragon King’s protection.

At first, only a few people tentatively offered to pay protection money. When Long Fanyun reported this issue to the Dragon King, he got the permission to accept the money. When people flooded into the department, he set a fixed amount of money that people should pay, which was neither too much nor too little – it was just enough to cover the expenses of the Warriors Battalion.

The Kun Society’s territory was not large, so it naturally subjected itself to the jurisdiction of the Department of Guards. The Heavenly Mountain Sect adopted a tolerant attitude towards this and ended up only having a small area of territory at the southwestern part of southern Jade City, but it was a tough patch that attracted a lot of desperadoes.

The Heavenly Mountain Sect also imposed a ban on killing, but they never tried to implement it. In the area under Zhang Ji’s control, though people no longer killed in public, hardly any real restrictions were imposed on killings, which was a big trouble for the Department of Guards. Many sabersmen would flee to that area after killing people. The Warriors had no power to punish them, and neither did they have any methods to do so.

The only thing that Long Fanyun could tell the relatives and friends of the victims was, “Once the murderer enters the jurisdiction of the Department of Guards, I’ll avenge the victim’s death.”

However, this was not a satisfactory response, and so a new occupation emerged – bounty hunters.

Bounty hunters were all sabersmen, and their kung fu skills were good. They despised the meager payment offered by the Department of Guards, but they didn’t dare become killers upon pain of offending the Dragon King. So, they built a business that allowed customers to hire them to sneak into the Heavenly Mountain Sect’s territory and catch their foes. As long as the customers paid the money, they were willing to catch anybody. After catching the targets, they would leave them at the gateway of the Department of Guards and let those warriors punish them in public.

Winter ended and then spring came. Long Fanyun had been devotedly performing his duties as the Commandant of the Department of Guards, but the preparation for the important kung fu competition, the one that would elect the Lord of Jade City, barely progressed. There were still a lot of remaining details that required further discussion – when and where the kung fu competition was to be held, who would be allowed to participate in it, rules of the competition, and more. Every one of these questions would arouse endless controversies and arguments.

Zhong Heng was doing his best and didn’t let this issue concern the Dragon King. Dugu Xian had returned to the Dragon Army, and Wu Zongheng was in command of the army of the Shule Kingdom. So Gu Shenwei, unexpectedly, found a lot of leisure time and began to intensively research the Death Sutra, integrating his previous findings into it. Old Man Mu and Dog Butcher offered him a lot of help. Chu Nanping and Tie Linglong were the ones who sparred with him to test the moves.

If it weren’t for the accidental death of a bounty hunter, this easy life of Gu Shenwei’s might have lasted until the beginning of the kung fu competition.

The name of the deceased bounty hunter was Wu Xuan. He was something of a celebrity in this new profession. In less than a month, he managed to snatch at least eleven targets from the Heavenly Mountain Sect’s territory. Nobody knew how much money he had been paid, but many people discovered that he’d been spending a lot of nights in Retention Alley, which was something that he couldn’t afford to do in the past.

Naturally, offending people was a part of a bounty hunter’s work, but Wu Xuan’s death had nothing to do with private grudges.

He had died in an unoccupied dwelling located in southern Jade City. His body was discovered three days later by a house-serf who had gone there to do some cleaning work. When he was having difficulties trying to figure out how he should deal with the body, he suddenly noticed that there was an incomplete gold ingot in the victim’s left hand.

News quickly spread. The house-serf hadn’t even melted the gold ingot yet when large numbers of sabersmen from various forces flooded into his house. Terribly scared, the house-serf explained repeatedly, “This small block of gold was all that I found. There was nothing else.”

Wu Xuan’s body had slightly decomposed, but people could still distinctly tell that the fatal wound was in his back. His kung fu had been pretty good, but he hadn’t even found a chance to whip out his saber. It was very obvious that somebody had already searched his body. The house-serf gave an absolute assurance that he didn’t do it, and that if it weren’t for the gleam of gold, that he would never have approached the corpse since it was very smelly.

Experienced observers could tell at first sight that Wu Xuan had been killed by a partner.

Nobody cared about the body. Rather, it was that gold ingot that everybody was interested in. After fighting for a short period, most forces became aware of the overwhelming odds against them and quit the rivalry, leaving the Department of Guards and the Heavenly Mountain Sect as the only two sides still confronting each other. Holding that gold ingot, for the first time, the house-serf found that it was actually so precious.

This dwelling, the owner of which had moved onto another city long ago, happened to be located on the border between the Department of Guards and the Heavenly Mountain Sect, which made it difficult to decide whose turf this dwelling belonged to.

Both sides wanted this gold ingot, not because of its value. Rather, it was because of the incomplete mark on it. There was a distinct right half of the Chinese character “Meng” inscribed on it. On the lower right corner of the ingot was a small Chinese character “Nei,” meaning “inside,” suggesting that the original owner of this gold ingot was the Meng family.

The Meng family was a large merchant family. It was normal for their gold ingots to circulate outside their mansion, but this gold ingot was different. The “inside” character indicated that it was specific to the Meng family, and that it had to be melted first to remove the mark before it was allowed to be used outside of the Meng family.

Thus, this gold ingot was apparently from the stolen money of the Meng family. The enthusiasm it aroused among the people of Jade City was even more intense than what the kung fu competition that would elect the Lord of Jade City aroused.

Gu Shenwei was involuntarily amazed when he heard the news. He was the only one who knew where the Meng family’s money was, and the fact that money had never been spent. How did this gold ingot slip through the net?

News soon came that the Governor of the Western Regions, Pang Jing, had gone to southern Jade City himself and snatched the gold ingot himself.