Chapter 81: The Young Master Wants to Kill Someone Right Now!

Old Wu, who was steadily reaping the lives of the horse bandits, seemed to hear someone calling his name, yet wondered if he had merely misheard.

After all, at that moment Fang Xu was already walking toward the few young women standing not far away, which only made Old Wu more certain he must have imagined it.

As Fang Xu looked at the girls before him, ragged and wretched, scarcely seeming human at all, he could naturally see the excitement and agitation in their eyes.

Their bodies were covered in wounds; on some of them, so many injuries overlapped that one could no longer tell how many times they had been hurt.

“Do you hate these bandits very much?” Fang Xu asked the girls with a faint smile.

At the sight of his smile, bright as sunlight, the girls all lowered their heads one by one, as though they did not dare meet his eyes.

They all knew that they were already sullied beyond measure, yet they had still clung to life until now.

What they had endured it for was only the chance for revenge. But they did not know how long they had waited; some had even come to feel that the whole world had forgotten them.

Day and night they had suffered those inhuman torments, and some of the more fragile girls had already chosen death, hanging lifeless against the walls like corpses.

But now, at last, they had seen where their hope lay. Even as they watched the slaughter before them, thick with the stench of blood, they could not help but burst into tears.

They were not crying from fear, but from joy, because this was the scene they had longed to see at every waking moment.

“I wonder if these might help you a little?” Fang Xu said, picking up several daggers and other weapons that had fallen to the ground and handing them to the girls.

Fang Xu understood that if hatred were avenged with killing, then killing would go on without end.

But he did not think himself a saint, nor did he wish to force others to become saints. He only believed that a grudge should be repaid, and a wrong answered in kind.

The girls took the daggers from his hand without a moment’s hesitation and joined the ranks of those harvesting the bandits’ lives.

Yet they were not like Old Wu and the others. With a madness in them, the girls drove their daggers again and again into the lower bellies of the bandits lying helpless on the ground.

Even Fang Xu, Old Wu, and the rest were left speechless at the sight, though they could understand why.

When Fang Xu saw the morbid smiles spread across the girls’ faces, he thought that for them, perhaps this was the best remedy left in the world.

No one knew how long the killing went on. Even Old Wu and the others felt that the Embroidered Spring Blades in their hands had gone dull.

Their arms were nearly too exhausted to lift, yet the girls still kept stabbing at the lower bodies of the dead bandits.

“Th-thank you... thank you... thank you...” After an unknown length of time, the girls slowly stood, smiling as they spoke to Fang Xu.

Fang Xu could see now that the smiles on their faces were the truest smiles they had shown.

And yet, for some reason, amid this scene that ought to have been filled with the return of life, he felt as though something was steadily slipping away.

“Old Wu! Damn it, stop them!” Fang Xu suddenly understood and roared at Old Wu, who stood closest to the girls.

Before Old Wu could react, vivid flowers blossomed from the girls’ throats, brighter than any before, while smiles still lingered at the corners of their mouths.

What Fang Xu had sensed a moment ago was that the girls had already resolved to die. But he had realized it too late, and by the time Old Wu came to himself—

it had already happened.

No one present had expected such a turn.

“Damn it! Why? Why did it have to be this way?” Fang Xu strode forward and asked the dying girls, unable to understand why they had chosen this.

But when he looked at the smiles on their faces, the fury on his own slowly faded.

“Why did it end like this...?” Fang Xu stretched out a trembling hand and gently closed their still-open eyes.

As he did so, he could not stop repeating the question.

“Young Master, are you all right?” Old Wu had already wiped the blood from his face. Standing beside Fang Xu as he crouched before the girls, he asked softly.

“Old Wu, do you think I did the right thing?” Fang Xu murmured, head lowered.

“Young Master did nothing wrong. These girls had likely planned to do this long ago,” Old Wu said. He understood well enough what Fang Xu was asking, and as he looked at the girls lying before them, he could not help speaking those words.

How could Fang Xu not know that?

He understood that the only reason these girls had endured until now, the only reason they had borne such inhuman torment, was to take revenge on the bandits.

But once their revenge was complete, what awaited them was only death.

In their own eyes, their bodies had long since been defiled beyond redemption, and they had already lost the courage to go on living.

So death was their best path, perhaps their only path.

Perhaps, in their own hearts, death was also their finest release.

“Change these girls into clean clothes. Later, bring them down the mountain,” Fang Xu said weakly as he rose to his feet, head bowed, without looking at Old Wu and Gu Bei beside him.

“And cut off the heads of these bandits. Put them on carts and take them down later as well.”

With that, Fang Xu turned as if to leave.

Old Wu and Gu Bei exchanged a glance, then could not help asking whether anything was wrong with him.

“Old Wu, Old Gu, don’t worry. Your young master is still fine. It’s just that my heart feels wretched right now.” Fang Xu spoke through clenched teeth, and Old Wu and Gu Bei could both sense the killing intent radiating from him.

“Right now, I want to kill.”

Fang Xu could not help but throw back his head and roar at the star-filled sky.

Hearing his cry, Old Wu, Gu Bei, and the others all straightened where they stood, for they all knew how real those words were.

Perhaps only in this way could Fang Xu vent the bitterness and fury in his heart.

For what he said was indeed the truth. Looking at the bodies of those girls before him, Fang Xu felt an unbearable weight pressing in his chest, so suffocating that even he did not understand why.

Perhaps it was helplessness.

The helplessness of being powerless.