Chapter 52: The Inn

Kicking open the door to the innkeeper's room, Wang Jingyuan strode inside. Seeing the innkeeper fast asleep on the bed, he gave him a sharp slap across the face: "Stop sleeping like a dead dog, get up and party!"

Just moments ago, the innkeeper's name tag had been lingering around the inn's lobby. Yet the very second he heard footsteps, he had bolted straight back to his room. And to top it all off, he was supposedly sleeping soundly right after someone had just kicked his door in—who was he trying to fool?

Caught red-handed, the innkeeper kept his eyes tightly shut and said nervously, "Hero, I truly saw nothing at all. All the silver is right there in the counter; please just take it and be on your way."

Wang Jingyuan patted the innkeeper's chubby cheek. "Open your eyes."

"I won't! What good will it do me to look at your face? I just remembered, I have some extra silver buried in the jar of daughter-red rice wine beneath the counter." The innkeeper displayed a tenacious will to survive.

"If you don't open your eyes, I'll hack you to pieces."

Hearing this, the innkeeper opened his eyes with a tearful expression. However, upon seeing that Wang Jingyuan's face was wrapped tightly in black cloth, leaving only his eyes exposed, he let out an immediate sigh of relief.

Wang Jingyuan yanked him up from the bed by the collar. "Go on, wake up the waiter and the chef."

The innkeeper hurriedly cupped his fists in salute to Wang Jingyuan. "Hero, those two lads are good kids. Wait, I remember now—I have even more silver buried under the chicken coop! According to the rules of the underworld, that silver should be more than enough to buy the lives of all three of us. Have mercy, Hero! Have mercy!"

Wang Jingyuan tapped the innkeeper's cheek with the flat of his sword. "You called me a hero, didn't you? Do you take me for the kind of petty thief who kills for money?"

The innkeeper looked Wang Jingyuan up and down, taking in his pitch-black night attire and the black cloth wrapping that revealed only his eyes, before shaking his head with a solemn expression. "The Hero is imposing, heroic, and extraordinary; you look nothing like that sort of person."

"Then why aren't you moving?"

With a miserable expression, the innkeeper dragged his feet, taking three hesitant steps for every one forward as he made his way toward the room shared by the waiter and the chef. When he woke them up, the two men spotted the figure in black standing behind the innkeeper and instantly opened their mouths to cry out, only for the innkeeper to clamp his hands firmly over their mouths.

Urged on by the innkeeper, the two quickly dressed and stood obediently in the room.

Wang Jingyuan looked over the three of them and asked casually, "How's business at this inn?"

The innkeeper shook his head. "We only get customers once every ten or twenty days, but I built this place myself and don't have to pay rent, so we manage to scrape by."

Wang Jingyuan pulled two silver notes from his tunic and laid them out before the innkeeper. "Is two hundred taels enough to buy your inn?"

Although he had no idea what Wang Jingyuan was plotting, preserving his life took precedence over everything else in this situation. The innkeeper nodded repeatedly. "Enough, more than enough."

Wang Jingyuan glanced around, confirming there were no other living souls in the inn besides the three men before him, and cut straight to the point. "I'll give you the time it takes for an incense stick to burn to pack up your valuables, and then I'm going to burn this place down."

The innkeeper scrambled up and bolted out the room instantly, and the two attendants, recovering from their shock, scrambled after him. Since Wang Jingyuan didn't actually have any incense on hand, he simply guessed at the time.

When he poured lamp oil across the lobby floor and walked outside to set it ablaze, he discovered the innkeeper and the two attendants standing outside with large bundles strapped to their backs, staring blankly at the flames slowly consuming the building.

Wang Jingyuan found it amusing. "Why haven't you three run off?"

With a complicated expression, the innkeeper cupped his fists toward Wang Jingyuan. "After all, we've spent quite a few years here. We wanted to catch one last glimpse of it."

Wang Jingyuan nodded. "I wouldn't have guessed you were so sentimental about this inn."

The innkeeper offered a sheepish smile. "Well, the main thing is that it's the middle of the night, and with the fire here, we can use it for warmth until dawn. If we set off blindly into the dark now, not only can we not see the path, but we're also likely to run into wild beasts. We figured we'd wait until daylight before leaving."

Wang Jingyuan glanced sideways at the waiter's bundle, patted the innkeeper on the shoulder, and vanished into the night.

True to his word, the innkeeper and his men stayed by the side of the blazing inn for warmth until the first light of dawn. As the fire began to dwindle, the innkeeper gathered some of the still-burning embers into a pile.

He pulled a small bronze kettle from his bundle, poured water into it from a waterskin, tossed in a handful of tea leaves, and slowly began to brew tea. Before long, the chef and the waiter, who had been scouting the surrounding area after daybreak, returned.

"Innkeeper, that man has indeed left."

The innkeeper nodded. "Take it out."

The waiter unstrapped a cage from his bundle, inside of which was a carrier pigeon. The innkeeper instructed, "Report everything that happened here to the Centurion, and make sure to note that the man appears to have discovered our identities."

Acknowledge the order, the waiter scribbled a brief summary of the previous night's events onto a slip of paper, tucked it into the bamboo tube on the pigeon's leg, and released it into the sky.

Only after watching the waiter complete the task did the innkeeper stand up. He strode over and dealt each of them a sharp smack on the forehead, his tone dripping with exasperation. "Let you sleep! Just let you sleep! You've grown far too comfortable with easy days and completely lost your vigilance?!

If it weren't for the man the Centurion warned us about, the two of you probably wouldn't have woken up until you reached the gates of the City of the Wronged Dead. If your fathers hadn't saved my life back then, I would have chased you two fools back to the garrison ages ago!"

The chef rubbed the back of his head awkwardly. "Sorry about that, Uncle Li."

"What are you supposed to call me while on duty?!"

"My apologies, Commander."

*Slap!* The chef received another smack.

"We're out in the field now, you're supposed to call me Innkeeper!"

The waiter stepped in to rescue the chef. "Innkeeper, what should we do next?"

The innkeeper picked up the teapot and set it aside to cool, then pulled a flatbread from his bundle and toasted it over the remaining embers. "Eat first. Once we're done eating, we'll find another strategic route and open a new inn."

Having completely wiped out the Qingcheng Sect, Wang Jingyuan was in high spirits and temporarily abandoned his plan to eradicate the Songfeng Monastery on Mount Qingcheng. Besides, since the heavyweights were all dead, there were only a couple of kittens left inside anyway.

Even if he left them alone, the Qingcheng Sect would likely cease to exist on its own. If they managed to pull themselves together and slowly recover—well, if Wang Jingyuan hadn't left by then, wouldn't he just have another opportunity to farm some easy experience?

With his business concluded, Wang Jingyuan prepared to head straight back to Mount Hua. Unlike Yue Lingshan, when Wang Jingyuan travelled, he traveled with purpose, completely ignoring sightseeing along the way.

Furthermore, in Wang Jingyuan's view, there was nothing particularly entertaining to see anyway. While people in his previous world often complained about tourist sites being overly commercialized, without that commercialization, travel was genuinely inconvenient.

Along the way, Wang Jingyuan passed numerous sights that would later become world-famous, but he bypassed every single one, cursing the lack of a fast-travel system as he found the journey dreadfully monotonous.

His daily routine consisted of riding a horse; when the mount grew tired, he would dismount and use his lightness skill to carry the horse along with him—which he rationalized as part of his martial arts training. Riding day and night, he finally made his way back to Mount Hua.

To his surprise, right outside the gates of Huayin City, he ran into an acquaintance.