The poor wretch was struck completely dumb.
Up to now, in the poor wretch's eyes, this bumpkin, crude as he was, hadn't seemed like a bad sort — that was how it looked, anyway. Xia Ya Leiming had a highly deceptive face; when he smiled in particular there was a good measure of mountain-folk simplicity in it, and even his eyes, whenever he wasn't angry, looked utterly harmless.
Crude, maybe, but he ought to be an honest, decent fellow. And besides, the bumpkin had saved his life twice.
But the poor wretch had most likely never heard the saying: barren hills and wicked waters breed knaves!
Don't imagine all country folk are simple and honest. In fact, most of them have a peasant's brand of cunning.
And Xia Ya was from the Wildfire Plain; he'd been running wild since he was a boy in a godforsaken hole like Wildfire Town, a place of thieves and whores.
Just look at the sort of people there are in Wildfire Town: bandits, thieves, swindlers, wanted men, prostitutes, pimps, smugglers...
Fifty gold coins — even in Wildfire Town, that counted as a huge sum!
A lousy black-rye loaf cost about one copper coin. Ordinary bread cost three coppers.
And the bread that three coppers bought was enough to feed a man for two days.
In imperial currency, a hundred coppers made one silver coin, and ten silver coins made one gold coin.
One silver coin was enough for two months of food for an ordinary person.
Fifty gold coins? If it were only for buying bread, that was enough to feed Xia Ya for twenty years!!
A sum like that was enough to make a man risk his neck.
Xia Ya Leiming even knew that in Wildfire Town, the black-market rate for hiring a killer to murder someone was only one gold coin.
Hire mercenaries as bodyguards, and fifty gold coins would get you a whole squad of fully armed, hardened professional mercenaries to protect you for a year!
And what was more...
Xia Ya Leiming put on a deliberately nasty smile and watched the poor wretch's pale face. "Besides, I'd say there's more than fifty gold coins in that pouch of yours, isn't there?"
There were indeed more — eighty-some, near enough.
Xia Ya Leiming bent and squatted down utterly at ease, put the gold coins back into the pouch handful by handful, hefted it a couple of times; it was heavy. He laughed. "No wonder I thought you were so heavy yesterday — you were carrying all this money on you."
Without the slightest compunction he stuffed the pouch into the front of his coat, his expression calm, not a trace of embarrassment.
He had no reason to be embarrassed.
By Xia Ya Leiming's understanding of things, he was entirely in the right.
Anyone who traveled the Wildfire Plain — merchant, adventurer or demon hunter... anyone at all — followed one rule.
If your life was in danger out in the wilds, and at that moment someone saved your life, then the person who saved you had the right to take any of your belongings.
Because if they hadn't saved you, you'd have died, and that would have been the end of it.
This didn't count as preying on their own kind... killing you, now that would count.
The Wildfire Plain doesn't deal in tender feelings; what it goes by is the naked law of the jungle, where the strong prey on the weak.
To those adventurers used to walking in danger, meeting a man in a bad way — if he still had goods on him, not killing him was mercy enough; and if they were willing to lend a hand and save him, then taking every last thing he owned already counted as rare kindness.
Among the hard-hearted sort, finishing the job with a blade was nothing unusual.
Ordinarily, if you ran into other adventurers in normal circumstances, preying on their own kind happened often enough too.
Only once the poor wretch was just about frightened out of his wits did Xia Ya Leiming burst out laughing.
The money he was definitely taking. But that "dig a hole and bury him" business had only been to scare the fellow. Who told him to be so ignorant of the rules? He'd been carrying all that money, and Xia Ya had saved his life twice, and the man hadn't even offered up a thank-you gift for his savior? That was just too damn clueless.
"Relax, I'm just teasing you." Xia Ya Leiming reached out and patted the poor wretch twice on the cheek. Probably scared witless, the poor wretch forgot to dodge and let the bumpkin's coarse hand pat his tender little cheek, hearing the other man's utterly mocking tone: "I was only scaring you. The money's mine, but I'm not going to kill you."
"You..." The poor wretch came slightly back to himself and looked at Xia Ya fearfully. He wanted to get angry, but then he suddenly recalled how this fellow had just slain a fierce bloodthirsty mad wolf, the savage, ferocious air he had shown then, and he couldn't help worrying. "You — what are you going to do to me..."
"Don't you 'you' me." Xia Ya looked at him with contempt. "I really don't get how someone like you ends up on the Wildfire Plain. Don't you know the first thing about the rules? Your money belongs to me now!"
With that, he explained the rule in a few words, then added, "Not killing you already shows I'm merciful. With a hard-hearted one, you'd have lost your money and maybe been sold to the dwarves as a slave on top of it."
The poor wretch blinked a few times, and then tears rapidly filled his eyes, his expression so aggrieved that he looked ready to burst into loud sobs at any moment.
Xia Ya gave the fellow a look of some annoyance. You're a man — being that ugly is bad enough, do you have to be such a crybaby too? Are all rich people like this?
Luckily it never occurred to him to use a word like "sissy," because by Xia Ya's standards even women were far tougher than this poor wretch.
"You... you, how can you be like this? I..." The poor wretch's mouth puckered in grievance. "I thought you were a good man..."
Xia Ya paid him no mind; he turned and sat back down to rest, leaving the fellow to shed his own tears.
The poor wretch sobbed quietly for a while, then finally discovered, helplessly, that there wasn't a shred of pity in this fellow. And then it struck him — the bumpkin still thought he was a man, and an ugly one at that.
"Hey!"
After crying for a good while, the poor wretch called out.
But Xia Ya ignored him; he was already standing beside the giant wolf's carcass with his axe, sizing it up for a moment, and then he set to work.
He opened the wolf's belly with ease, cutting a line along the midline of its abdomen, and only when he reached the hindquarters did he carefully angle the cuts away to either side...
His movements were swift; the tough wolf carcass was like soft bean curd under his axe. Xia Ya soon had the carcass broken down, and a whole wolf hide was peeled away, flesh still clinging to it.
Then he swung the axe and easily broke down the rest of the carcass. The giant wolf's bones were extremely hard, but under Xia Ya's axe he always found the weakest point at the joints with uncanny skill, and soon the wolf's skeleton was dismembered, most of the bones even kept intact.
In the middle of that bloody scene, Xia Ya swung his axe swiftly yet with the lightness of lifting a feather; under his swings the axe even gave off a strange, cruel beauty. Every chop wasted not a scrap of strength, every chop landed on the cleverest possible spot — in his hands the axe was like a sculptor's chisel!
His every movement looked as though it had been tempered a thousand times over before reaching that kind of effortless freedom.
It was plainly a bloody scene, and yet by the end even the poor wretch was staring, dumbstruck!
When this fellow broke down a wolf, he was not like a butcher at all — more like a master sculptor!
Because the bundle couldn't hold everything, Xia Ya had to reluctantly abandon most of the carcass.
He rolled the flayed hide up and packed it away, along with several of the wolf's intact hind-leg bones, and pulled out all the wolf's teeth and stowed them too.
Finally he cut a few chunks of meat from the wolf's legs. There was one extra gain: this was a male wolf, and Xia Ya hesitated a moment before swinging the axe and cutting off the thing beneath the wolf's hindquarters, right at the root.
He'd heard merchants in Wildfire Town bought such things, to take home and steep in liquor.
In the end he was injured, after all; Xia Ya Leiming panted a while before turning his head to glance at the poor wretch. "All right, if you've cried enough, get ready — we're moving out."
The poor wretch at once fixed Xia Ya Leiming with a grieved, frightened look. "You — where are you taking me?"
"Where?" Xia Ya snorted on purpose, then laughed. "Back to Wildfire Town."
"...Huh?" The poor wretch's eyes went wide, and he stared at Xia Ya as if he couldn't believe it.
"Hmph, don't look at me like that. I'm not being softhearted."
Xia Ya put the axe away scornfully.
"It's true I refused to go back before. But now the situation's different."
He patted the bulging pouch inside his coat.
"With this much money, I figure I'd better make a trip back to Wildfire Town first. With money like this I can buy better gear. As a demon hunter, I need better weapons and armor.
Before, I didn't have the means — I could only grit my teeth and come out here and gamble with my life.
Now that I have money, naturally I'll arm myself properly first, so that I have some ability to protect myself even against a formidable magic beast — my life wasn't picked up for free, and when I can treasure it, of course I will."
"But you..." The poor wretch brightened with surprise. "Then you mean you can send me home now?"
Xia Ya Leiming smiled and was about to speak when his ear twitched — carried on the wind, from far off, came some strange sounds, faint and indistinct.
Xia Ya's expression turned serious at once. With his wealth of experience in the wild, he recognized it immediately as the rustle of someone walking and snapping twigs underfoot. And from the sound of it, there was certainly more than one person.
Xia Ya's face changed at once! He ran over in a flash, scooped the poor wretch up in his arms, clapped a hand over his mouth, and, bent low and taking short quick steps, darted into the woods nearby.
"If you don't want to die, shut up and don't make a sound! Someone's coming!!"
The poor wretch, lifted up in the bumpkin's arms, was mortified and furious; hearing that someone was coming, he was about to argue, but Xia Ya was already speaking in a low, cold voice. "Don't do anything stupid. On the Wildfire Plain, a lot of the time, running into people is a lot more dangerous than running into magic beasts!"